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.

Let Me Put it To You Plainly

Progressives and others on the “left” generally do not understand the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest. On the one hand they think that somebody who hands out a tract about the evil of murdering the unborn to a woman headed to an abortion clinic or who stands on the sidewalk across from it holding a placard with a pro-life message is doing something horrible that should be against the law. On the other hand they think that when a gang of environmentalist activists who claim to speak for aboriginal people blockades a railroad, preventing it from conducting its daily business of shuttling people and transporting goods across the country, and costing Canadian businesses multiple millions of dollars a day, that they are within their rights and may even consider it a noble and laudable act.

Since lefties have such difficulties with grasping this simple concept, I will explain it to them plainly.

Let us imagine that you are mad about some public issue and want to make your opinion known. You make up a sign expressing your point of view, go to the people who you want to hear it, and march up and down on the sidewalk in front of their building holding the sign up for everyone to read. Or, if a sign just won’t cut it, you write a pamphlet, have several copies printed, and start handing them out.

Note what you have not done. You have not gotten in anyone’s way. You have not used force to prevent other people from going somewhere or doing something.

Your protest, therefore, is a legitimate one. It does not matter whether your opinion is one that the vast majority of people would heartily agree with or one that the vast majority of people would find repugnant. You have made your position known without forcibly interfering with other people’s rights to go about their daily business.

Suppose, however, that you were to take a different approach. Let us say, for example, that the local university is hosting a speaker whose political views you disagree with. When the university refuses to listen to your demands that the lecture be cancelled you form a posse of like-minded individuals and go to the auditorium where the event is scheduled to occur and block all the entrances preventing speaker and audience alike from getting in.

In this instance you have not just made your opinion known, but you have forcibly interfered with the freedom of others to share and hear views different from yours. Your protest, in this case, is not a legitimate one. This has nothing to do with the content of your views, or the matter of whether they are right or wrong. It is because you are interfering with the rights and freedoms of other people.

Having made the basic difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate protest clear, let us consider one more scenario.

In the previous example of an illegitimate protest, you had interfered with the rights and freedoms of others but at least those others were people holding to the views you were protesting against. Suppose that you were upset that Project X was taking place somewhere in the country and in order to protest this you went somewhere else and erected an illegal barricade that interfered with the movement and daily business of millions of people regardless of whether or not they had anything to do with Project X.

Is it not obvious that by doing so you have exited the sphere of mere illegitimate protest and entered that of unlawful aggression against the civil order itself?

The duty of Her Majesty’s government in such an instance is clear. Unfortunately, since the First Minister of that government is still Captain Airhead, the Canadian electorate having proven itself foolish enough last fall to give him a totally undeserved second term, we are not likely to see that duty done any time soon. As the events of this past week have demonstrated, even beneath his fancy new beard, Captain Airhead is still Captain Airhead.

Should, however, Captain Airhead experience a miraculous epiphany, enduing him with a newfound sense of obligation towards the constitution, laws, and common good of our country, here is what he would do.

He would call a press conference immediately. He would address the “protesters” who have blocked the railroad, informing them that their action is one of unlawful aggression against the Dominion of Canada, its constitution, government, laws, civil order in general, economy and people. He would give them twenty four hours to cease and desist this aggression, remove their blockades from the railroad, and to surrender themselves to the police. He would then inform them that the police have been instructed that immediately at the end of that twenty four hour grace period they are to move in and remove any remaining barrier from the railroad and that the Canadian Armed Forces have been put on notice and are standing by to back up the police using whatever force is necessary to accomplish this end.

Yeah, I’m not holding my breath waiting for that to happen either.

The above arguments are, as stated, independent of any question of whether or not the protesters are right or wrong. Nevertheless, it is a fairly obvious observation that the illegitimate forms of protest are more likely to prove tempting to those whose cause rests upon a weak foundation. In the case of those currently blocking the railroad, you have environmentalist activists opposed to the pipeline project in British Columbia. They purport to be speaking on behalf of the Wet’suwet’en aboriginal tribe, but that tribe’s leaders have, in fact, approved the pipeline project, as have the other tribes in the area in question. This tribe has both elected and hereditary chiefs and the protesters claim that the latter are the legitimate chiefs for whom they speak, but even then only a minority of the hereditary chiefs have opposed the pipeline and it would appear that some shenanigans went down with regards to the hereditary titles apart from which this minority would have been even smaller. At any rate, contrary to the impression one would get from the CBC, the protesters are not all aboriginals, many appear to be of white European descent, and some have only recently come to Canada. As is often the case with environmentalist “protest” movements that speak entirely in neo-Marxist jargon, it is likely that the only people these protesters truly speak for are the American petroleum companies who benefit from environmentalist protests against Canadian pipelines because these pipelines, if constructed, would allow our major oil-producing provinces, both landlocked, to access world markets and no longer be dependent upon the American market.

Even if none of that were case and this was a sincere protest movement, however, its actions are intolerable and the government’s duty remains clear. It is the duty of all lawfully constituted civil authority to use lawful force to combat those who use unlawful force to wage anarchical war against order and civilization. Again, the government’s duty is clear. If only the Prime Minister cared.