What Respect for Freedom Does Not Look Like

 On Tuesday,  the 17th of November, Manitoba Premier Brian Pallister and the Mayor of the city of Winnipeg, Brian Bowman, both held press conferences.   In the course of their remarks both men stated that they respected what they called our democratic freedoms.   They each specifically mentioned the right to protest.   These statements of respect rang rather hollow, however, for they were contradicted by the overall tone and substance of their message.

Both men made reference to a protest that had taken place in Steinbach, a city about three-quarters to an hour's drive southeast of Winnipeg in what some call the province's "Bible belt", on Saturday the 14th of November.   The CBC, its supposedly private competitors such as CTV and Global, and the Winnipeg newspapers described the protest, as they generally do all protests of its type, as an "anti-mask" rally.   While not entirely inaccurate this is a misleading designation that trivializes the cause of the protesters by focusing on one small part, and that which would seem the least significant to most people, of what it is they find objectionable in the province's public health orders.   For it is those orders they are protesting and the way those orders treat our fundamental rights and freedoms as if they either do not exist or do not matter.

Take our basic freedoms of association, assembly, speech and religion.   These have been recognized as basic freedoms backed by prescription in the Common Law tradition of law and justice since before there was a Dominion of Canada.   That tradition, I remind you, together with our constitution of Westminster Parliament under royal monarchy, comprises the very foundation of our civil order.   They are also all specified as "fundamental freedoms" in the second section of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.   Whatever the shortcomings of that document may be, and I have identified several over the years, designating these freedoms as fundamental is not one of them.

When public health orders state that we cannot meet in groups larger than five, that we must stand six feet apart from others at all times, and that we should limit our social contact to members of our immediate household -which on Thursday the 19th of November was changed from a should to a must - they clearly treat our "fundamental freedom" of association as being either non-existent or of no importance.   Eliminating the freedom altogether, as this aspect of the public health orders does, hardly constitutes a "reasonable" limitation, the only kind for which either the Common Law tradition or the Charter allow.

Public health orders that shut down all religious services, order all churches, synagogues and other faith communities to close and not meet together, and which effectively cancel important religious festivals, clearly do not respect our "fundamental freedom" of religion.   To drive home the significance of this allow me to elaborate on this point with an illustration.

Suppose that Brent Roussin, the province's chief health mandarin, had issued an order which singled out synagogues ordering them and only them to close.   Suppose that at the same time he cancelled Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Hanukkah, Purim and Passover, much as the Netanyahu government in the State of Israel actually did this year to the understandable outrage and fury of Orthodox Jews.   Suppose that he forbade the practice of Judaism as contrary to public health, banned circumcision, required all Jewish businesses to close and ordered all Jews to stay in their own homes.   Suppose he were to set up a snitch line, or "tip-line" as he would call it, and encouraged people to rat out any Jewish friends and neighbours who stepped slightly out of line, and hired a private police force to enforce all of these rules.

Does this hypothetical situation remind you of anything?

Who among us would fail to recognize in the above scenario the spitting image of the Third Reich's infamous anti-Semitic regime, sans the more violent and lethal aspects?

Yet the only change that needs to be made to translate this into Roussin's actual public health orders as they presently stand is to eliminate the specificity with regards to Jews and apply it to all faiths and religions alike.

Does this make it any better?

Think carefully about your answer.   To answer yes is to take the position that what was wrong with Hitler's treatment of the Jews was not that he persecuted them but that he singled them out and treated them differently from others rather thanpersecute everybody equally.   

Does that sound morally and intellectually defensible to you?

Sadly, there are a great many people who would recognize such a viewpoint as foolish and indefensible when stated as plainly as that, who nevertheless behave as if they actually thought that way. 

Clearly there is a lot more wrong with the public health orders than the mere fact that they require everybody to make fools of themselves by wearing diapers over their noses and mouths whenever they are in public.

This brings us to the fundamental freedoms of assembly and speech.   Freedom of assembly is similar to freedom of association, although the former implies a sense of organized purpose in meeting together that the latter does not.   The freedom of assembly, it should be stated, is freedom of peaceful assembly.    Organizing for rioting and other violent and criminal purposes is not protected by this freedom.   That having been said, what Pallister and Bowman meant by freedom to protest incorporates both freedom of assembly and freedom of speech.  It is the freedom to meet together to express mutual disagreement with and opposition to some government policy or action or, in some cases, the actions and policies of some non-government organization or group.

What could possibly be a more important expression of the freedom to protest and the freedoms of assembly and speech incorporated into it than to use it to protest the very actions of the government that treat these freedoms as well as the freedoms of association and religion as non-existent, irrelevant, and inconsequential?

Yet it is precisely protests of this sort which have Pallister and Bowman so livid.   Pallister attempted to square his condemnation of these specific protests with his professed respect of the freedom to protest by a) saying that the issue was the way in which the protest was conducted, i.e., "disrespectful", "unsafe" etc., and b) pointing to his defence of the right of earlier protesters who had protested outside his own home.  Presumably, with regards to the latter, he was thinking of those who decorated his yard as a cemetery for Halloween, erecting an effigy of him as the Grim Reaper, and blaming him for the deaths of everyone who had recently died of the bat flu because of his earlier efforts to re-open the economy.   This hardly seems more "respectful" than the Steinbach protest, and it is worth noting that however insulting to the premier the Halloween protesters were, they were not protesting against any expression of his governmental authority, but rather demanding that he flex his muscle more.   Could it be that the real issue is that Pallister is okay with the freedom to protest so long as the protest does not challenge or question the way he has exercised his authority?

Earlier this year Pallister and Bowman - and Roussin for that matter - all expressed their support for another kind of protest.   The contrast between that protest and the Steinbach one puts the lie to Pallister and Bowman's claims that the manner in which the latter protest was conducted was the issue.   This protest took place on the grounds of the provincial legislature in early June.   At the time, the province was still in the early stages of the re-opening from the first lockdown.   The protest in question involved thousands of people, much larger, sad to say, than any protest we have seen in this province against the trampling over our basic freedoms and rights, and social distancing and all the other petty rules, regulations and restrictions the rest of us were expected to follow were completely disregarded.   By the standards by which Roussin, Pallister and Bowman deem the Steinbach rally to have been "unsafe", this earlier protest was the most unsafe event that took place in Manitoba all year.   It did not, of course, result in a spike in cases, hospitalizations, and deaths, despite being the very model of what the bat flu alarmists call a super-spreader, which totally debunks the supposed justification for returning us to lockdown now.   The event, by the way, was a racist event, an anti-white hate rally, thinly disguised, as anti-white hate rallies always are, as a protest against the very thing, racism that it epitomized.   At the time, protests of this sort were occurring all across the Western world, organized by the same anti-white hate groups, with a hardcore, far left, cultural Maoist ideology.   These protests, although called "peaceful" by the lying media, even when the very pictures they were broadcasting or publishing clearly contradicted that adjectival description, had a tendency to erupt into violent rioting, looting, assaults and vandalism.   In other words, precisely the sort of thing that is not protected by the freedom of peaceful assembly.   Pallister, Roussin, and Bowman offered not a word of criticism or condemnation., which is hardly surprising in Bowman's case as he has been publicly in bed with the anti-white hate movement, or anti-racist movement as he in his self-delusion likes to think of it, for years.   They reserved their harsh words for those whose much smaller rallies stood up for the constitutional and prescriptive civil rights and basic freedoms of all Manitobans, regardless of race, colour or creed.

The real issue here is Pallister, Bowman, and Roussin have all been deceived by what they thought was their success earlier this year.   Back in March, Pallister and Roussin ordered the province into lockdown before the virus had any significant presence here.   The lockdown they imposed was harsh and severe but it seemingly worked because we did not see community transmission, a rapid spike in cases, hospitalizations that came anywhere close to overloading the system, or more than a handful of deaths.  The strategy "worked" then because it caught the virus before it could spread in the community, but, despite the delusions of some to the contrary, the province could not be kept in lockdown indefinitely until a vaccine or some miracle cure could be found.   The lockdown was causing all sorts of problems of its own, far worse than the virus, which has proven to be, as some including this writer knew back in March, far less lethal than the media then was and is hyping it to be.   The province had to re-open, it did re-open, and eventually, the virus began to spread through the community.   The lockdown to the extent that it could be said to have worked, worked only to delay the inevitable.   Once those numbers started climbing, Roussin began imposing restrictions.   What "worked" when the virus had not yet begun to spread in the province but was limited only to a few who had contracted it out-of-province, proved incapable of containing the spread of the virus.    Roussin, however, rather than admit that this strategy was not working, kept adding more restrictions and then more restrictions, until finally we arrived at the point where we are in a worse lockdown than in the spring and the harshest lockdown in the Dominion.   This has been a double failure on the part of Roussin and the government.   Not only is the targeted restrictions-enhanced restrictions-total shutdown strategy failing to contain the virus, Roussin by insisting upon this strategy, which even the World Health Organization that originally recommended it has since largely repudiated, has failed to admit the failure of the strategy and pursue other options.   This failure is further compounded and enhanced by the fact that if the earlier lockdown accomplished anything worthwhile, it was to buy us time to strengthen the hospital system so it could withstand the pressure of the large number of cases when the virus predictably began to spread, and to learn from the example of the personal care home crises in Upper and Lower Canada in April and May by making sure none of what went wrong there happened in our nursing homes here, neither of which, obviously, was done.    This colossal failure falls entirely into Roussin's lap and that of the government that continues to back him as he blames his own failure on ordinary Manitobans for wanting to salvage their small businesses and restaurants , to worship their God in accordance with His commandments and their consciences, and to be friends, family and neighbours to one another once again in a real way, and not in the grotesque mockery of the social distancing propaganda of "we are all in this together".

Pallister, unfortunately, has consistently supported Roussin in his scapegoating of ordinary Manitobans for his failures, and he has done so by bullying, hectoring, badgering, berating and threatening us.   The primary purpose of his speech last Tuesday, was to announce the new measures the province was taking to enforce the public health orders, as if the problem with the orders was a lack of enforcement rather than the fact that they don't work and do a whole lot of unnecessary harm.   |Apart from enhancing the powers of every by-law enforcement officer in the province, from meter maids to game wardens, he announced that the province was wasting a million dollars on a contract with a private security firm to help enforce the public health orders.   Why spend a million dollars on hospital beds, PPE, and hiring more nurses, when you can use it to establish a Gestapo or Stasi instead, turning the province into a police state.   Pallister told us that he needed us all to be on "Team Manitoba" which, in this context, sounded suspiciously like "dissent will not be tolerated", especially since he also advertised his snitch line and encouraged us to rat each other out, just as if he were running the kind of totalitarian government that turns the entire territory it governs into one big prison.

All of this is a giant leap from this country's traditional ordered freedom into something that is growing more and more like Communism.   No wonder people are protesting.