Threatens to seize trucks, cancel insurance of participants, force crowd funding sites to register and regulate them under “anti-terrorist” provisions, regulate cryptocurrency transactions.
This, of course, entirely “temporary” and for the “duration of the crisis”.
The talking point they repeat like Chatty Cathy is “illegal blockade”.
As of today, Canadian banks, payment processors, and other financial institutions can freeze personal and business accounts without a court order or other government directive, on suspicion only, and are shielded from civil liability as long as the action was taken in “good faith”.
Anybody who still has funds in a Canadian bank as of the close of business today is a poor steward of their assets.
Apparently this is aimed in part (maybe the biggest part) to compel those who had previously refused to help the government, such as the wrecker drivers and companies. You cannot simply say “:No.”
You may not be able to say, “We’d like to help, but all our drivers are out with Covid,” as the government can now “borrow” the vehicles. Worse, they can damage them while borrowed, and suspend your insurance, meaning you have to pay to get it fixed yourself. The government has sovereign immunity, and has the right to suspend your insurance - which gets the insurance company off the hook, For that matter, if you put all your vehicles under major overhauls so they cannot be driven, the government could probably drag them off anyway.
In an interesting coincidence, Trudeau’s comments in support of an Indian farmer strike came during a speech about a Sikh holiday. Sikhs make up a disproportionate fraction of Canadian truckers.
So are they threatening to freeze assets while at the same time preventing people from pulling their money out? Good lord!! When is it our turn to tar and feather these despots? (And to be clear, I am not interested in tar and feathers, but another means of getting one’s point across to despots.)
I infuriate conservative’s by saying Bush was one of the worst presidents in the last 100 years. The Patriot Act is a disgrace and every voter should have a minimum hurdle for their vote that the candidate opposes the Patriot Act.
It is stupidity to fall for the sales pitch that it is required to fight terrorism. We all may get to pay the price for that stupidity.
We can’t fight “terrorism” – only terrorists. And if the Political Class idea of fighting terrorists is to send them to sunny Cuba to a place so horrible that they gain weight & get a sun-tan before being flown back to their preferred destination – then maybe that Political Class does not have the stomach to fight terrorists.