Of course, the tyranny training wheels were the covid restrictions and mandates, along with showers of cash disbursements to shore up dependence. Andrea Widburg explains the process in her American Thinker article Canada really is turning into a police state before our eyes.Excerpts in italics with my bolds.
One of the hallmarks of liberty is a reliable legal system. In totalitarian countries, one of the ways you control people is to keep them perpetually off-balance. The law and its application are utterly unpredictable. People become paralyzed and dare not do anything that might offend the regime, lest they get destroyed.
And that’s what we’re seeing in Canada, where the newly dictatorial government is making no pretense of abiding by the rule of law.
A very specific aspect of the rule of law is that new laws are not applied retroactively. In a free country, one with a safe, reliable legal system, if it was legal for you to buy a croissant on Monday, the fact that the law changed on Tuesday to make croissants illegal does not mean that the police can come and arrest you for that Monday croissant. In a police state, of course, the police can arrest you at any time for anything, including engaging in conduct that was legal when you engaged in it.
With that in mind, I give you a series of tweets from Mark Strahl, a Canadian Member of Parliament (so we must assume, for now, that he’s telling the truth):
Briane is a single mom from Chilliwack working a minimum wage job. She gave $50 to the convoy when it was 100% legal. She hasn’t participated in any other way. Her bank account has now been frozen. This is who Justin Trudeau is actually targeting with his Emergencies Act orders.
Every Canadian should be offended by this serious retroactive punishment. Briane herself went public and posted, whether jokingly or not, that “The Libz are all outside my house.” She seems cheerful enough in tone but that sounds unpleasant.
Tellingly, one person implied that Briane deserved to be punished for conduct that was not criminal at the time she acted because some members of the group she supported intimidated (without physical violence) a reporter from an outlet relentlessly hostile to the truckers.
Think about that: This person believes that, because a random crowd that got angry at a reporter who works for an outlet that has been demonizing them, Briane should be financially destroyed. That’s neither justice nor the rule of law. That’s sheer, tyrannical viciousness.
[ Meanwhile independent reporters were assaulted by police to keep them from recording their activities]
Rebel News reporter Alexa Lavoie was struck and injured by police while covering the ongoing Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa. pic.twitter.com/Z2ZhqWdLTa
And keep in mind that this new attitude on the part of the truckers—and attitude that still hasn’t turned to violence—began only after Trudeau, who first demonized and “otherized” them, began to use the vast power of the state to destroy them.
David Suissa, writing at the Jewish Journal, made a telling point about the moment when Canada went from a free country, that allowed people to express their views and petition their government, to a totalitarian country. (Hat tip: Instapundit)
On February 24, 2020, a former judge of the Supreme Court of India, Justice Deepak Gupta, delivered a lecture to the Bar arguing that “the right to dissent is the most important right granted by the Constitution.”
Gupta took the ancient idea of challenging authority and gave it dignity: “To question, to challenge, to verify, to ask for accountability from the government is the right of every citizen under the constitution,” he said. “These rights should never be taken away otherwise we will become an unquestioning moribund society, which will not be able to develop any further.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would have done well to study Gupta’s address. When he responded to truckers protesting vaccine mandates by saying they had “unacceptable views,” he was undermining the fundamental right to dissent. He was saying, in essence: You have no right to think this way.
George Orwell would have recognized Trudeau’s statement. According to Justin “Big Brother” Trudeau, the truckers and their supporters had engaged in “crimethink” or “thoughtcrimes.” In other words, as Orwell explained, they were thinking about bad things such as liberty and equality.
The moment the government defines thoughtcrimes and then uses the power of the state to destroy those who engage in them, you have entered the world of tyranny.
Comment
Questions remain. Will Liberal parliamentarians rein in their egomaniac, or are they as lost as the US Democrats? Will Canadian jurists defend the rule of law, or will they aid and abet the government as is the case with January 6 protesters in the US?
There is a petition asking the Governor General to dissolve the government for violating the Canadian Constitution. Another petition calls on Canadian Parliamentarians to revoke the use of The Emergencies Act. Will anyone dare sign them lest their finances be seized?
For the 32nd Saturday in a row, Parisians took to the streets to demand the end of COVID restrictions & vaccine passports. Except, this time, the police joined the protesters. A French commentator has said that the police were not so much joining in as they were drifting along with a peaceful crowd to ensure that the protest remained orderly. Most police forces in the West (including America and Canada) would do well to follow this model—ensuring peace while allowing the people to exercise their inherent right to confront their governments.
Comment:
The police response to protesters in Quebec City has been respectful of peoples’ rights both to protest and also for others to go on with their lives during the protests.
Justin Trudeau’s confrontation with the Canadian truckers may be the single most significant event of the Covid pandemic – not because of its eventual outcome, whatever that may be, but because of what it symbolises. It captures, in perfect microcosm, the tensions between the competing imperatives of the age:
♦ freedom versus security; ♦ the rule of law versus flexible ‘responsive’ governance; ♦ the priorities of the workers versus those of the Zooming bourgeoisie; ♦ the need for real-world human interaction and belonging versus the promises of splendid online isolation; ♦ the experiences of the common man, who knows where it hurts, versus those of the professional expert class, who know nothing that cannot be expressed as a formula.
More than all of that, though, it gives us a lens through which to view a much deeper, much older conflict of much larger scope – one which underlies not just the struggles of the Covid age, but of modernity itself. On the one hand, the state, which seeks to make all of society transparent to its power. On the other, alternative sources of authority – the family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, and the human individual herself.
For centuries, the state has waged a quiet war against those competitors,
and bent them to its will.
It has done this not through conspiracy or deliberate strategy but merely through the single-minded pursuit, across generation after generation of political leaders, of one goal: legitimacy. Governments and other state organs derive their legitimacy, and therefore their positions of rulership, from convincing the population that they are necessary.
They do this by suggesting that without their intervention, things will go badly;
left to their own devices, ordinary people will suffer.
The family, the church, the community, the firm, the farm, the human individual – these are inadequate to the task of securing human well-being. That task, only the state is equipped to achieve, for only the state can keep the population educated, healthy, safe, prosperous and satisfied. Since this is the case, only the state is fit to deploy power – and only those who govern the state are fit to rule.
The logic of this argument is writ large, of course, in the Covid response across the developed world. What will keep us ‘safe?’ Certainly not traditional sources of succour, such as the church or the family. Certainly not individual people, who cannot be trusted to behave responsibly or assess risks for themselves.
No – it is only the state, first with its lockdowns, then with its social distancing, its mask mandates, its vaccine programs, and lately its vaccine mandates and ‘passports.’ It is only the state’s power that saves and secures. And since only the state can save, it is the only legitimate source of authority – along, of course, with its leaders.
The state portraying itself as saviour in this fashion is patently false and absurd given what has taken place over the past two years.
But as false and absurd as it is, it remains the subtext behind all of Covid policy. Justin Trudeau must derive his legitimacy from somewhere to maintain power. And he senses – political animal that he is – that he can derive it from displaying the Canadian state (with himself at the helm, of course) as the only thing standing between the Canadian public and suffering and death.
It is the state, remember – in this case with its vaccine mandates – that saves and secures. Without it, the reasoning goes, the population would suffer and die as Covid ran riot. The political logic is inescapable. For a man like Trudeau, without principle except that he alone is fit to govern, there is only one path to follow. Insist that it is the state that saves and secures, and that anything that stands in its way – truckers beware – must therefore be crushed beneath its heel.
The truckers, for their part, represent everything that the state despises.
They have a social and political power that is independent from it, and hence form one of the alternative sources of power which it hates and fears. This power derives not from some institution which the truckers dominate, but simply from their status amongst what I will refer to as the yeomanry classes – almost the last bastion of self-sufficiency and independence in a modern society such as Canada.
In a developed economy, most of the professional classes – doctors, academics, teachers, civil servants and the like – derive their incomes and status entirely or partially, directly or indirectly, from the existence of the state. If they are not civil servants, their status is built on regulatory apparatus which only the state can build and enforce. This is also, of course, true of the underclass, who are often almost totally reliant on the state for the meeting of their needs. The members of these classes pose no threat to the state’s legitimacy, because, simply put, they need it. It, as a consequence, is perfectly happy to tolerate their existence – and, indeed, it wishes all of society were that way inclined.
A population entirely reliant on the state is one which will never question the necessity of the growth of its power and hence its capacity to buttress its own legitimacy.
But in the middle are those people, the modern yeomanry, who derive their incomes from private sources, as sole traders, owners of small businesses, or employees of SMEs. Independent-minded, seeing self-sufficiency as a virtue, and relying on themselves and their relationships with others rather than the state, these modern yeomen represent a natural barrier to its authority. Simply put, they do not need it. They earn their money through the use of a particular skill which others value and hence pay for on the open market.
Whether or not the state exists is immaterial to their success – and, indeed, it very frequently stands in their way. These are the type of people who, seeing a problem, tend to want to find a solution for themselves. And they are precisely the kind of people who want to make up their own minds about whether to take a vaccine, and to assess health-related risks in general.
The modern state has waged incessant and covert war against the yeomanry in particular.
At every step, it seeks to regulate their business affairs, restrict their liberty, and confiscate their prosperity. There is always a purportedly ‘good’ reason for this. But it contributes to an incessant whittling away of their independence and strength. It is no accident that they are described in British parlance as the ‘squeezed middle’ – squashed as they are between the welfare-reliant underclass on the one hand, and the white-collar professionals who draw their wealth, directly or indirectly, from the state on the other.
It is also no accident that these modern yeomen have gradually seen their political representation diminish over the course of the last 100 years, in whichever developed society one cares to name; the politicians they would elect would be mostly interested in getting the state out of the way, and modern politicians’ incentives all incline in the opposite direction. Their interest is in the inexorable growth of state power, because that is from where their legitimacy derives.
Justin Trudeau’s contempt for the truckers is therefore genuine and profound.
He sees in them not an obstacle to Covid policy or a potential threat to public health. Not even he could possibly be so stupid as to think it matters whether or not these people take their vaccines. No: he identifies in them a barrier to forces in which his political future is entwined – an ever-increasing scope and scale for governmental authority, and the opportunities to buttress his own legitimacy that would follow from it.
And his contempt for them is outweighed, of course, by his fear. Because he surely recognises that his authority is wafer-thin. Legitimacy cuts both ways. If he fails to suppress the truckers’ revolt, the entire edifice on which his authority rests – as the helmsman of the Canadian state and its purported capacity to protect the population from harm – will come tumbling down.
This conflict is therefore not about Covid – it’s existential. Does it matter if the truckers win or lose? No. What matters is what their efforts have revealed to us about the relationship between the state and society in 2022.
Governments across the globe have taken extreme measures over the past two years to combat COVID-19. The rationale is always the same: This is an emergency. But do governments understand the implications of this claim? A perpetual state of crisis cannot be a stable basis for civil government. Politicians who continually appeal to this justification may soon find they have unleashed forces beyond their control.
It is hard to live in a state of emergency for two years or more, especially when it affects everything from the air in front of your face to your ability to travel. Throughout the pandemic, many have repeated Milton Friedman’s quip that “there is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.” They were warning that the “exceptional circumstances” justifying emergency measures might prove enduring. Unfortunately, this warning has become our reality. Governments that were quick to impose restrictions have been reticent to rescind them, and many measures may not be rescinded at all. Leaders have learned that they can mandate masks, confine citizens to their homes, and limit public life to those who have had a certain medical procedure. Once leaders taste such powers, it is tempting to cling to them.
And even where some restrictions are loosening, governments are not relinquishing the right to impose such restrictions.
This month, Scotland is set to renew the Coronavirus Act, which granted the Scottish government emergency powers earlier in the pandemic. If this happens, by the time the powers expire, the government will have had emergency powers for two and half years. Never mind that in 2020, the rate of age-adjusted all-cause mortality in Scotland was lower than in 2009. In Scotland, as in many other countries, vaccine passports, mask mandates, school closures, and lockdowns appear to have become part of the magistrates’ governing repertoire—ready to be implemented again the moment the opportunity arises.
In an interview for Le Monde in March 2020, Italian political philosopher Giorgio Agamben said, “The epidemic has made clear that the state of exception to which our governments have actually accustomed us for quite some time, has become the normal condition. . . . A society that exists in a perennial state of emergency cannot be free.” Agamben had written previously about the concept of “the state of exception” in reference to the “war on terror” and the way that the threat of terrorism served to justify the suspension of civil liberties for a certain group of people. For Agamben, the novel coronavirus was simply a fresh occasion for a similar approach. Leaders used the threat of impending death and catastrophe to give the government extraordinary powers in order to defeat the enemy.
Nearly two years after Agamben spoke to Le Monde, we remain in this state of exception. It is easy to be pessimistic about the future. However, in the foreword to Where Are We Now? (2021), a collection of pandemic reflections, Agamben strikes a different note.
What accounts for the strength of the current transformation is also . . . its weakness. . . . For decades now, institutional powers have been suffering a gradual loss of legitimacy. These powers could mitigate this loss only through the constant evocation of states of emergency. . . . For how long . . . can the present state of exception be prolonged? Agamben’s question is a good one.
A state of emergency is unstable by definition.
The current protests against vaccine mandates in Canada reveal that government authority and legitimacy are more fragile than we ordinarily suppose. For in emergencies, it is not only governments who respond. The Canadians who are protesting vaccine restrictions also appeal to extraordinary circumstances to justify their actions. After Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau complained that the protesters “are trying to blockade our economy, our democracy, and our fellow citizens’ daily lives,” the Babylon Bee published an apt headline: “Trudeau Demands Protesters Stop Shutting Down City So That He Can Shut Down City.” Governments who claim that circumstances require extraordinary measures may find that their citizens also take extraordinary measures.
Governments cannot have it both ways: Ordinary times carry with them ordinary constitutional constraints on government action and ordinary obligations to obey and comply. If governments appeal to a permanent state of exception to elude the former, it will find that more and more people consider themselves free of the latter.
That is why, for the sake of constitutional order and legitimacy,
government claims for extraordinary powers must cease.
Now that the deadliest phase of the pandemic has passed, the real emergency, at this point, is the permanent appeal to emergency. The urgent need is for governments to abandon urgency and return to the slow, steady business of governance. Good jurisprudence and government depend on a return to precedented times. As it is, too many governments are paying the mortgage on their extraordinary powers with the capital of their legitimacy. If they persist for much longer, some may begin to find that both have been spent.
Graham Shearer is a doctoral student at Union Theological College in Belfast and a fellow of the Chalmers Institute.
Trudeau’s orders, aimed in part at cutting off funds to protesters, have a wider scope than previously reported – which is “forcing portfolio managers and securities firms to take a harder look at who they are doing business with,” according to Bloomberg.
The new rules make demands of a broad list of entities — including banks, investment firms, credit unions, loan companies, securities dealers, fundraising platforms, insurance companies and fraternal benefit societies. They must determine whether they’re in “possession or control of property” of a person who’s attending an illegal protest or providing supplies to demonstrators, according to orders published by the government late Tuesday night.
If they find such a person in their customer list, they must freeze their accounts and report it to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police or Canada’s intelligence service, the regulations say. Any suspicious transactions must also be reported to the country’s anti-money-laundering agency, known as Fintrac. -Bloomberg
Ottawa police are handing out this leaflet:
Trudeau took the knee beside BLM protesters, and cried and apologized for century-old abuses against Aboriginals. But hard working, patriotic, ordinary Canadians have no place on his victims list. The jackboots are coming, but clever Trudeau will impose the suffering in cyberspace, and no one will notice, except those whose opinion was objectionable to him.
Vinay Prasad writes at the Tablet How the CDC Abandoned Science. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and some added images. H\T Raymond
Mass youth hospitalizations, COVID-induced diabetes, and other myths from the brave new world of science as political propaganda
The agency guiding America’s pandemic policy is the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, which sets widely adopted policies on masking, vaccination, distancing, and other mitigation efforts to slow the spread of COVID and ensure the virus is less morbid when it leads to infection. The CDC is, in part, a scientific agency—they use facts and principles of science to guide policy—but they are also fundamentally a political agency: The director is appointed by the president of the United States, and the CDC’s guidance often balances public health and welfare with other priorities of the executive branch.
Throughout this pandemic, the CDC has been a poor steward of that balance, pushing a series of scientific results that are severely deficient.
This research is plagued with classic errors and biases, and does not support the press-released conclusions that often follow. In all cases, the papers are uniquely timed to further political goals and objectives; as such, these papers appear more as propaganda than as science. The CDC’s use of this technique has severely damaged their reputation and helped lead to a growing divide in trust in science by political party. Science now risks entering a death spiral in which it will increasingly fragment into subsidiary verticals of political parties. As a society, we cannot afford to allow this to occur. Impartial, honest appraisal is needed now more than ever, but it is unclear how we can achieve it.
Masking Propaganda
In November 2020, a CDC study sought to prove that mask mandates slowed the spread of the coronavirus. The study found that counties in Kansas which implemented mask mandates saw COVID case rates start to fall (light blue below), while counties that did not saw rates continue to climb (dark blue):
The data scientist Youyang Gu immediately noted that locales with more rapid rise would be more likely to implement a mandate, and thus one would expect cases to fall more in such locations independent of masking, as people’s behavior naturally changes when risk escalates. Gu zoomed out on the same data and considered a longer horizon, and the results were enlightening: It appeared as if all counties did the same whether they masked or not:
The CDC had merely shown a tiny favorable section, depicted in the red circle above, but the subsequent pandemic waves dwarf their results. In short, the CDC’s study was not capable of proving anything and was highly misleading, but it served the policy goal of encouraging cloth mask mandates.
Child Vaccination Propaganda
Masking is not the only matter in which the CDC’s stated policy goal has coincided with very poor-quality science that was, coincidentally, published in their own journal. Consider the case of vaccination for kids between the ages of 5 and 11. COVID vaccination in this age group has stalled, which runs counter to the CDC’s goal of maximum vaccination. Interestingly, vaccinating kids between 5 and 11 is disputed globally; Sweden recently elected not to vaccinate healthy kids in this age group, and some public health experts believe that it would be preferable for kids to gain immunity from natural exposure instead. Stalling U.S. uptake therefore reflects a legitimate and open scientific debate, regardless of whether the CDC’s policy goal would like to consider it closed.
Enter the CDC’s new study. Widely covered in news outlets, the January 2022 study claims that kids below the age of 18 who get diagnosed with COVID are 2.5 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes. “These findings underscore the importance of COVID-19 prevention among all age groups,” the authors write, “including vaccination for all eligible children and adolescents.” But a closer examination of the study again reveals problems.
First, it does not adjust for body mass index. Higher BMI is a risk factor for COVID, prompting hospitalization and diabetes, and yet the CDC analysis does not adjust for weight at all.
Second, the absolute risks the study finds are incredibly low. Even if the authors’ finding is true, it demonstrates an increase in diabetes of up to 6 in 10,000 COVID survivors.
Third, the CDC’s analysis uses billing record diagnoses as a surrogate for COVID cases, but many kids had and recovered from COVID without seeking medical care. Without a true denominator that conveys the actual number of COVID cases, the entire analysis might be artifact.
As the former dean of Harvard Medical School Jeffrey Flier told The New York Times, “The CDC erred in taking a preliminary and potentially erroneous association and tweeting it to specifically create alarm in parents.” Some might view it as a mistake, but after observing these matters for almost two years, I believe it was the entire point of the study: Alarm might boost flagging vaccine uptake in kids. (Already, a better study out of the United Kingdom finds no causal link between COVID and diabetes in kids.)
Teenager Vaccination Propaganda
Manufacturing alarm at the very moment an age or other demographic cohort is targeted for vaccination has become a pattern for the CDC. On May 10, 2021, the FDA granted Emergency Use Authorization for the 12- to 15-year-old cohort to receive the Pfizer vaccine. On June 11, the CDC published a study in MMWR claiming to demonstrate rising hospitalization among this age group; widespread media coverage of the study quickly followed. But the absolute rates for this age group were, in reality, amazingly low: Less than 1.5 per 100,000, which was lower than they had been in the previous December. Meanwhile, a safety signal was being investigated—myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle—which was more common after the second dose, and reported to be as frequent as 1 in 3,000-6,000, according to the Israeli Ministry of Health. Other countries became reluctant to push two doses within the standard 21- to 28-day timeline for these ages. By July, the U.K. had decided against pushing vaccines for this cohort, a decision that was walked back only slowly.
The CDC was undeterred, and in recent weeks the agency’s director has started to push for more doses at these ages. Against the advice of an FDA advisory committee, Rochelle Walensky has moved forward with recommending boosters for 12- to 15-year-olds. This view differs from WHO guidance and that of other countries, including Canada, which is not authorizing boosters for healthy adolescents aged 12-17. But when it comes to vaccination, the CDC has a single policy: All Americans should get three doses, regardless of age or medical conditions.
This is not science as such, but science as political propaganda.
Natural Immunity Unmentionable
If that sounds like an exaggeration, consider a final example: the CDC’s near-total dismissal of natural immunity. Many other countries consider recovery from prior infection as a vaccination equivalent or better, an assumption that makes both medical and intuitive sense, but the CDC has steadfastly maintained that everyone needs the same number of vaccinations whether they have recovered from a COVID infection or not. This view is countered by data showing that vaccinating people who have recovered from COVID results in more severe adverse events than vaccinating people who have not had COVID.
In order to bolster the claim that people who have recovered from COVID benefit from vaccination as much as those who never had it, the CDC published a fatally flawed Kentucky-based analysis. The August 2021 study compared people who had contracted COVID twice against those who had it just once, and concluded that those who had it once were more likely to have had vaccination. But the study could have easily missed people who had two documented cases of COVID but might have had severe underlying medical conditions—such as immunosuppression—that predisposed them to multiple bouts of infection in a short period. In addition, people who had COVID once and then got vaccinated might not have sought further testing, believing themselves invulnerable to the virus. The study did not adequately address these biases.
Months later, the CDC published a stronger, cohort study showing clearly that natural immunity was more robust than vaccine-induced immunity in preventing future COVID hospitalizations, and moreover, that people who survived infection were massively protected whether vaccinated or not.
Conclusion: Political Capture of CDC
So why does the supposedly impartial CDC push weak or flawed studies to support the administration’s pandemic policy goals? The cynical answer is that the agency is not in fact impartial (and thus not sufficiently scientific), but captured by the country’s national political system. That answer has become harder to avoid. This is a precarious situation, as it undermines trust in federal agencies and naturally leads to a trust vacuum, in which Americans feel forced to cast about in a confused search for alternative sources of information.
Once that trust is broken, it’s not easily regained. One way out would be to reduce the CDC’s role in deciding policy, even during a pandemic. Expecting the executive agency tasked with conducting the science itself to also help formulate national policy—which must balance both scientific and political concerns and preferences—has proven a failure, because the temptation to produce flawed or misleading analysis is simply too great. In order to firewall policymaking from science, perhaps scientific agency directors shouldn’t be political appointees at all.
Ultimately, science is not a political sport. It is a method to ascertain truth in a chaotic, uncertain universe.
Science itself is transcendent, and will outlast our current challenges no matter what we choose to believe. But the more it becomes subordinate to politics—the more it becomes a slogan rather than a method of discovery and understanding—the more impoverished we all become. The next decade will be critical as we face an increasingly existential question: Is science autonomous and sacred, or a branch of politics? I hope we choose wisely, but I fear the die is already cast.
Vinay Prasad is a hematologist-oncologist, associate professor of epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, and author of Malignant: How Bad Policy and Bad Evidence Harm People with Cancer.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Monday announcement invoking the Emergencies Act to break a weeks-long protest in Ottawa has only served to inspire more resistance, one protest organizer told The Daily Wire.
The Freedom Convoy, a loose coalition of truckers protesting vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions, rolled into Ottawa in late January and has camped downtown since. The protesters have congested parts of the city around Canada’s seat of government on Parliament Hill while demanding a loosening of COVID-19 restrictions.
So far, Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers, instead employing increasingly hard-nosed political and legal tactics to try and break the protest.
David Paisley says he has been protesting for weeks now and, as a street captain, helps organize protesters and direct those who wish to support the cause with funds, goods, or services. Paisley told The Daily Wire that Trudeau’s announcement, which made headlines across major news organizations in the U.S. and Canada, went off barely noticed by the protesters on the ground.
“No one really cares about any new announcement. I mean the police have been breaking the law long before any emergency power. They were taking our fuel away. They were arresting people for purely having jerry cans or having empty tanks of fuel,” he said. “They’ve already been doing these ‘emergency powers’ and all it does is make people dig their heels in more,” Paisley added.
“The irony … is that these very powers and threats are why we are here.”
Trudeau announced in a press conference Monday afternoon that he was authorizing the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act, a law passed in the late 1980s to take the place of the War Measures Act. The act strengthens Canadian law enforcements’ ability to fine and imprison violators and ensures the operation of “essential services” such as towing rigs, Trudeau said during his press conference. It also empowers banks and financial institutions to freeze the accounts of any person or business suspected of being involved with an “illegal blockade.”
Paisley said that the protest would continue despite frozen bank accounts or impounded trucks until every protester is cuffed and thrown in prison.
“[The Trudeau government] underestimated the determination and the intelligence of those here, and so everyone still here on the ground, they’re basically willing to give their lives for this – peacefully of course,” Paisley said.
“They’re prepared to drain every last dollar, even from frozen bank accounts,” he added later.
The truckers in Ottawa have received wave after wave of support in the form of cash funds, food, fuel, letters, and even a free laundry service by two ladies who walk Paisley’s street every day collecting clothes. The trucker said he received word on Monday from two men who wanted to deliver hundreds of liters of extra diesel fuel for the convoy.
“You come and sit in the driver’s seat for a few hours and you’ll be able to fill up your wallet again. It’s incredible. People are just handing you fifties, hundreds, packs of hundreds. A friend of mine received a Bible and when he opened it up it had 500 cash inside the bible,” Paisley said.
“The more the government tries to stomp this out, the more and more it causes people to rise up and say ‘this is wrong, and I side with these truckers,’” he said. “These steps from the government have simply hardened the determination of the great men and women down here, so I’m not really concerned at all.
We’ll have lots of new friends when we all get tossed in prison together.”
Footnote
BREAKING: Trudeau regime now using terrorism laws to go after crypto and crowdfunding pic.twitter.com/Fj8ge0Pyzy
The Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo has been hacked and temporarily disabled after it facilitated the raising of nearly $9 million for the convoy of Canadian truckers who have been protesting vaccine mandates.
The Delaware-based organization, which hosted a crowdfunding effort for the Canadian truckers after crowdfunding site GoFundMe took down their initial fundraiser at the urging of the Canadian government, was disabled Sunday night. Visitors were redirected to the domain GiveSendGone[.]wtf.
The site had raised over $8.7 million in one week after the GoFundMe effort was taken down.
The [hacker’s] statement alleged that those who had contributed to the fundraiser were the same ones who had “helped fund the January 6 insurrection in the U.S.” and had “helped fund an insurrection in Ottawa.”
GiveSendGo’s list of donors, approximately 92,000 of them, was also leaked and shared online.
The site stated on Feb. 10 in response to previous Canadian court efforts to halt the funds that the Canadian government “has absolutely ZERO jurisdiction over how we manage our funds here” and that all the donations “flow directly to the recipients of those campaigns, not least of which is The Freedom Convoy campaign.”
Thomas Harrington advises not to be misled by officials apparently lifting some covid restrictions. The behavior is insincere posturing, offering a temporary reprieve in order to retain emergency powers against citizens’ freedoms. His article at The Brownstone is The Limited Hangout of the Mandaters. Excerpts in italics with my bolds and added images.
Yesterday, a number of important Democratic governors lifted mask mandates in their states. Almost to a one, they cited the changes wrought by the fast moving and relatively mild omicron variant of the SARS-CV2 virus as the prime reason for the change.
What none of them did was admit what “the Science” has shown for at least two decades, and has been clear through the last two years to anyone doing a modicum of independent research on the subject: masks have never been shown to fundamentally alter the spread of respiratory viruses within the general population.
What they did say almost to a one, like their counterparts in Great Britain, Denmark and other countries now dismantling previous Covid restrictions, was that the return to normality was greatly facilitated by the uptake of vaccines in the populations they currently govern.
Nearly a half century ago, a man named Ron Ziegler held the position now occupied by Jen Psaki. Like all presidential spokespeople before and since he was a serial dissembler.
But back then there were still a few journalists at the presidential court and beyond willing to do their jobs. And when one day in the midst of the Watergate scandal he used the passive voice construction “mistakes were made” in an attempt to explain away obvious breaches of honesty and ethics committed quite actively by the Nixon Administration, he was roundly mocked by the press corps.
Sadly, however, as I have argued elsewhere, this type of non-apology apology, which caused a scandal then, has become ubiquitous across our social landscape. And that’s a shame.
Why?
Because real apologies and expressions of accountability are important. Without them, neither the apologizer nor the aggrieved party ever experiences what the ancient Greeks considered a cardinal element in human development and human relations: catharsis.
This is especially so in the case of government entities. Without admissions of guilt, the assumptions and premises undergirding failed policies remain intact, lying fallow until such time as the government entity in question feels it opportune to deploy them again in the service of another misguided crusade.
This is what is currently occurring with the Covid hawks who have violated our fundamental rights time and again over the last two years.
These enemies of human dignity and freedom now realize that many of their former supporters among the citizenry feel exhausted, and in many cases, flat out deceived.
At the same time, however, they do not want to permanently relinquish the powerful repressive tools they have acquired during the two-year state of exception.
The answer?
One part of it, already mentioned, is the moderated limited hangout operation now being conducted regarding the use of masks in public. By relaxing these strictureswhile in no way addressing the fundamental fallacies upon which the masking policies were based, they ensure that mask mandates can be brought back when and if they deem it necessary to do so.
The second part, which is far more pernicious and consequential, is the effort to push a proposition that is at best quite tenuous in light of what actual scientific studies are currently revealing about vaccine efficacy: that without widespread injection uptake the virus would have never receded, and we would have thus never have gotten into a position to recover our freedoms.
Note the underlying logic here. We are not getting our freedoms back because they intrinsically belong to us and were unjustly stolen. We are getting them back because an important plurality of us have done what the “experts” and the “authorities” coerced us into doing.
With this approach there is no catharsis or healing, and certainly no acquisition of new wisdom and knowledge. What there is, is a sly reification of the infantilizing and anti-democratic ways of thinking that have predominated in our policy-making class throughout the pandemic.
Though many people, laboring under the mortal fear of being branded with the weaponized term of “conspiracy theorist,” are reluctant to admit it, the central concern of policy-makers throughout the pandemic has not been the health of our communities, but rather gaining enhanced control over where we go and what we put into our bodies.
There is nothing more central to the idea and practice of freedom than bodily autonomy. It is the basal freedom from which all others are derived. Without it—as the history of slavery starkly reminds us—all other liberties are comparatively ornamental.
For this reason, we must vigorously oppose this organized attempt to present the vaccines, which have been delivered to millions under rather severe coercion, as a great, if not the greatest, hero of the pandemic film.
My Comments
Stark examples are playing in Canada’s federal and provincial capitals. The Mayor of Ottawa falsely declares an emergency, and swiftly it becomes illegal to provide food or fuel to mandate protesters and people are arrested and/or fined. The Premier of Quebec announces he will loosen restrictions in coming days, while also tabling legislation to make vaccine passports permanent. The truckers are not fooled, as witnessed by their clarifying demands that these mandates must go away now and forever.
There is a Supreme Court case which must be decided in citizens’ favor: Can a public official, local, provincial or federal rule out constitutional individual opinions, rights and freedoms by simply declaring an emergency?
This is a conditional apology. It falls short of a full apology by suggesting only that something might have happened.
I am sorry that you . . .
This is a blame-shifting apology. It is no apology at all. Rather, it puts the onus on you as the problem.
I am sorry but . . .
This excuse-making apology does nothing to heal the wounds caused.
I was just . . .
This is a justifying apology. It seeks to argue that hurtful behavior was okay because it was harmless or for a good cause.
I have already . . .
This deja-vu apology cheapens whatever is said by implying that there is nothing left to apologize for.
I regret . . .
This sidestepping apology equates regret with apologizing. There is no ownership.
I know I . . .
This whitewashing apology is an effort to minimize what happened without owning any hurtful effects on you or others. The whitewash may seem self-effacing but on its own it contains no apology.
You know I . . .
This nothing-to-apologize-for apology tries to talk you out of your feelings or imply that you shouldnt be upset.
I will apologize if . . .
This pay-to-play apology is not a clean, freely offered apology. Rather, you have to pay to get it.
I guess I . . .
This is a phantom apology. It hints at the need for an apology, but never gives one.
X told me to apologize . . .
This is a not-my-apology apology. The person is saying he or she is apologizing only because someone else suggested it. The implication is that it would have never happened otherwise.
Fine! I’m sorry, okay!
This is a bullying apology. Either in words or tone you are given a grudging I’m sorry but it doesn’t feel like an apology. It may even feel like a threat.
Faux apologies such as these 12 seek to avoid responsibility, make excuses, shift blame, downplay what was done, invalidate or confuse the hurt or offended person, or move on prematurely.
A true apology, by contrast, has most or all of the following characteristics:
♦ Is freely offered without conditions or minimizing what was done
♦ Conveys that the person apologizing understands and cares about the hurt persons experience and feelings
♦ Conveys remorse
♦ Offers a commitment to avoid repeating the hurtful behavior
♦ Offers to make amends or provide restitution if appropriate
An authentic apology starts with listening. If you seek to apologize, you first need to hear what happened from the other person’s point of view and how it affected them.
OTTAWA: The Justice Centre today challenged Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson over his accusation that peacefully protesting truckers are “a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property.”
Mayor Watson has not divulged publicly what facts he might rely on to justify his assessment of truckers as posing “a danger of major proportions,” in light of their law-abiding behaviour since arriving in Ottawa more than one week ago.
The definition of “emergency” under the Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act is “a situation or an impending situation that constitutes a danger of major proportions that could result in serious harm to persons or substantial damage to property and that is caused by the forces of nature, a disease or other health risk, an accident or an act whether intentional or otherwise;”
“This is a truly disturbing overreach and misuse of emergency powers,” stated lawyer Nicholas Wansbutter.
According to affidavit evidence filed in the Ontario Superior Court of Justice, the Freedom Convoy has been working closely with the Ottawa Police Service, the RCMP, and the Parliamentary Protective Service. It was one of the Freedom Convoy truckers who reported to police a property damage offence and an assault, committed by individuals not affiliated with the truckers. Convoy leaders have asked all truckers to refrain from honking their horns between 8:00 p.m. and 8:00 a.m.
One of the witnesses in the court action has stated under oath that truckers and their supporters “are feeding the homeless on Wellington Street and filling their backpacks with food. Truckers have taken a whole trailer full of food to the homeless shelter. Truckers are maintaining the cleanliness of city streets, including picking up discarded masks on the ground, centralized garbage collection, shoveling snow at the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue, and decorating and providing security for the War Memorial and Terry Fox statue.”
Another witness, an Ottawa resident, swears that “the truckers I have interacted with have, at all times, been friendly, courteous, humble, considerate and peaceful. I have not observed any aggressive or inappropriate behaviours.” He says the truckers are diverse, including Sikhs, Blacks, Aboriginals and others. He has “observed truckers decorating the tomb of the unknown soldier with flowers and guarding it” and has “not seen any violent or threatening behaviour.” He notes that “the truckers do not honk their horns at night. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the Freedom Convoy during the day.” He asserts: “My ability to park and to travel in downtown Ottawa, or to and from Parliament Hill has not been impeded by the presence of the truckers.”
Another Ottawa resident, who works for Statistics Canada, describes reality on the ground as follows: “The protesters were peaceful and respectful, I saw no violence or harassment. I was not impeded in any way, and could walk about freely and safely. I did not see any hateful symbols, in fact, I saw an abundance of Canada flags and Quebec flags as well as countless signs calling for freedom and the end of Covid related mandates. I did see some anti-Trudeau flags using harsh language. However, I would describe the scene as a peaceful, pro-freedom demonstration. My everyday life has not been disrupted by any noise related to the downtown demonstrations.”
“There is no factual basis to support the Mayor’s declaration of an emergency,” concludes Mr. Wansbutter.
Supporters arrive at Parliament Hill for the Freedom Truck Convoy to protest against Covid-19 vaccine mandates and restrictions in Ottawa, Canada, on January 29, 2022. – Hundreds of truckers drove their giant rigs into the Canadian capital Ottawa on Saturday as part of a self-titled “Freedom Convoy” to protest vaccine mandates required to cross the US border. LARS HAGBERG / AFP/GETTY IMAGES
If the prime minister of a North African or Middle Eastern nation was forced into hiding by a protest occupying his capital city, Dick Cheney and Hillary Clinton would materialize from thin air to call for U.S.-backed regime change.
“Government Loses Popular Support,” newspaper headlines would blare, amid calls for sanctions, State Department-NGO initiatives and the inevitable “nation-building” exercises.
Justin Trudeau can rest easy, however.
No such song and dance routine is in store for America’s northerly neighbor despite thousands of protesting truckers in Ottawa sending the prime minister underground. While imagining intervention in America’s northerly neighbor rightly seems risible, it does bring President George W. Bush’s “soft bigotry of low expectations” to mind. We expect Canadians can handle their own affairs. Those Arab Spring nations of yesteryear obviously needed the Western man’s help, though.
But increasingly, it appears Canadian politicians are not actually demonstrating an ability to manage their own affairs, nor to bring logic or rationality to this scenario, brought about by some of the most restrictive COVID-19 policies in the world.
Nor, until now, has it appeared they cared when anyone raised objections to those policies.
Only when thousands of truckers replete with their 18-wheel freedom-fighting machines descended on Ottawa did the Canadian government begin to acknowledge the existence of dissenters in their midst. This very fact is the political casus belli for the protesters on Parliament Hill. It is also why they shouldn’t leave until some very concrete demands are both met and kept. There should be a prolonged presence of truckers in Canada’s capital.
It appears to be the only language Trudeau’s government understands.
Were it not for a compliant national media willing to almost exclusively echo the claims of the government, the situation could have already resolved itself with a hasty Trudeau exit from office.
Canada’s broadcasters have focused their attention on the appearance of two flags—one Nazi, one Confederate—at protests over the past week. The culprits remain as elusive as the January 6th pipe bomber, though their presence has allowed the government to paint tens of thousands as extremists, racists or worse.
According to the CBC, “there’s concern that Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as the protest grows, and perhaps even instigating it from the outset.”
[Note: Journalists showed great imagination in making the leap linking the convoy to Putin. No such creativity was applied to finding the identity of a person, the only one in the crowd wearing a mask, only one who waved a swastika. I’ll do the media lackeys’ work for them: It was someone who knew the act served the interests of the leftist media and government, so most likely Antifa or a wannabe.]
Even when acting Conservative Party leader Candice Bergen (no, not that one) tasked the government with offering an olive branch and reaching a resolution to the impasse on Parliament Hill, Trudeau’s stand-in, Chrystia Freeland, pivoted to blanket statements condemning the swastika, as if such condemnation were even necessary in the Canadian parliamentary chamber circa 2022.
Bergen rightly riposted, “That, I’m afraid, is classic gaslighting.”
It’s an appropriate characterization of the Canadian government’s approach thus far. A prime minister in hiding, a national capital in counter-lockdown, and the government’s most critical concern is the freshly unfolded flag of a defunct foreign navy that existed almost 200 years ago and 1600 miles away.
Meanwhile, the provinces of Saskatchewan and Alberta are bucking the national trend, announcing an end to COVID-related restrictions. It’s quick progress for an actual peaceful protest that has yet to cause billions of dollars in damages, injure or kill any cops or seek anything but constitutionally guaranteed liberties.
It is of course a back-handed compliment to right-populism that the antagonistic shrieks are less, “Oh my God, what are they doing?” and more, “Oh my God what might they secretly believe in?” It’s also a sign that there is a long road ahead, as politicians and the media attempt to ascribe ulterior motives to the protesters’ actions.
Like France’s gilets jaunes, Canada’s “freedom convoy” may find itself entrenched against its own establishment for some time, and they might just inspire American counterparts.
Yes, the old communist call of “workers of the world, unite!” may have been successfully appropriated by the political Right. The next line isn’t, “No, not like that!” but, truer to what Marx originally expressed, “You have nothing to lose but your chains.”
The denigration of the Canadian trucker protest convoy exemplifies how freedom is now the biggest villain of the Covid-19 pandemic. A Washington Post cartoonist portrayed the trucker convoy as “fascism” incarnate while another Post column derided the “toxic ‘Freedom Convoy.’” Anyone who resists any government command is apparently now a public enemy.
The trucker protest was spurred by the Canadian government’s sweeping Covid vaccine mandate. Many truckers believe the risks of the vaccine outweighs the benefit and, more importantly, that they have the right to control their own bodies. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared on Monday, “There is no place in our country for threats, violence or hatred.” Except for the hatred Trudeau whips up by denouncing vaccine mandate opponents as “racist” and “misogynistic.” And except for the “threats” and “violence” used by government enforcement agents to compel submission to any pandemic decree issued by Trudeau or other politicians.
Since the start of this pandemic, many people who boasted of their trust in “science and data” also believed that absolute power would keep them safe. According to their scorecard, anyone who objected to government commands was the equivalent of a heretic who must be condemned if not banished from everyplace except the cemetery. North of the border, Quebec epitomizes this intolerance with its new edict prohibiting unvaccinated individuals from shopping at Costco or Walmart.
The same critics who latch onto any obnoxious behavior by a few wayward Canadian truckers (MSNBC denounced them as a “cult”)’ to condemn freedom are also happy to exonerate any American politician who pointlessly destroyed freedom during the pandemic with bizarre edicts. In December 2020, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti banned all unnecessary “travel, including, without limitation, travel on foot, bicycle, scooter, motorcycle, automobile, or public transit.” The mayor (who was caught violating California mask mandates at the NFC championship game) offered no evidence to justify placing four million residents under house arrest. Governor Ralph Northam dictated that all Virginians must stay indoors from midnight until 5 a.m, with a few narrow exceptions. Federal judge William Stickman IV condemned Pennsylvania’s restrictions:
“Broad population-wide lockdowns are such a dramatic inversion of the concept of liberty in a free society as to be nearly presumptively unconstitutional.”
Preventing politicians from obliterating freedom is now the worst form of tyranny. On Thanksgiving Eve 2020, the Supreme Court struck down Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s edict that limited religious gatherings in New York to ten or fewer people while permitting far more leeway for businesses to operate. The Court declared that Cuomo’s rules were “far more restrictive than any Covid-related regulations that have previously come before the Court… and far more severe than has been shown to be required to prevent the spread of the virus.” An American Civil Liberties Union official fretted that “the freedom to worship… does not include a license to harm others or endanger public health.” Harvard law professor Lawrence Tribe and Cornell professor Michael Dorf warned that the Supreme Court was becoming “a place like Gilead — the theocratic and misogynist country in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian ‘The Handmaid’s Tale.’”
Many progressives talk as if America faces a choice between reckless freedom and paternalism – i.e., submission to a benevolent elite. But regardless of Fauci’s boundless conceit, omniscient officials have yet to come to the rescue. Government agencies have blundered catastrophically since the start of the pandemic.
The Centers for Disease Control bollixed America’s initial response by sending out faulty, contaminated test kits to health agencies that failed to detect the rapidly spreading virus. Governors panicked and shut down schools, resulting in vast losses in learning and widening the achievement gap between affluent and low-income students. The vast majority of small businesses were locked down and thousands were bankrupted in a futile effort to prevent an airborne virus from continuing to spread. Placing scores of millions of people under house arrest led to record-breaking fatalities for drug overdoses and a tidal wave of depression and anxiety. New York City’s covid vaccine passport regime failed to prevent the Big Apple from becoming the hottest spot in the nation for the omicron variant.
President Biden portrayed the vaccines as a magic bullet and falsely promised that people who got injected would not get Covid. The C.D.C. stopped counting “breakthrough” cases of Covid among the fully vaccinated, paving the way for a resurgence of the virus that has now infected more than 70 million Americans. Or maybe 200+ million Americans since C.D.C. previously stated that only one in four cases are diagnosed and reported. Whatever. The Food and Drug Administration is seeking to delay fully disclosing Pfizer’s application for its Covid vaccine approval for 75 years. After Biden issued a mandate that forced hospitals to fire healthy unvaccinated nurses, the CDC said it was OK for hospitals to rely on Covid positive nurses to treat patients – one of the biggest absurdities of the pandemic.
Freedom is not a panacea for every challenge in life. But it is far superior to boundless submission to tinhorn dictators who know far less than they claim. Politicians like Trudeau and Biden who fuel mass rage against any group that does not kowtow to officialdom are sowing seeds of hatred that will proliferate long after the pandemic ends.
In the long run, people have more to fear from politicians than from viruses.
Which poll do you think better reflects the mood of Canada? The professional one with a select panel of participants or the reaction of tens of thousands on social media?
As the Freedom Convoy 2022 rolls toward Ottawa, a national poll reveals “only one-in-three Canadian’s fully support allowing unvaccinated truckers to cross the US/Canada border.”
A “national survey,” posted Thursday by Maru Public Opinion, indicates just “28%” are for truckers crossing border “without any difficulty in order to deliver food, goods, and other materials to a variety of Canadian destinations.”
Says Maru: “On the other hand, a full majority (72%) of Canadians believe that the borders should be flat out closed to truckers unless they are either fully vaccinated (36%) or, as an alternative middle-ground between the two extremes of being barred or having unfettered access, they show proof of the results of a negative COVID test taken within the previous 72-hours (36%).”
But unlike with most polls, this time there is something to compare it to. For example, while highly-respected Maru’s survey, put out by the company and not paid for by a sponsor, said it polled 1,500 people across the country, a GoFundMe page posted this month has raised more than $6.2 million from more than 80,000 donors.
And a Freedom Convoy 2022 Facebook page — Convoy to Ottawa 2022 — has more than 700,000 followers. Not exactly a “small fringe” group of people, as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed Wednesday.
Trudeau’s harsh words toward this group, and the scrutiny the media has put it under, outweighs vetting other polls typically get.
Conservative MP Pierre Poilievre dealt with that double standard Thursday as he asked reporters “when was the last time the press gallery went through the social media posts of every single person attending a left-wing protest to find and report every crazy comment made” while saying it’s wrong to “disparage the thousands of hard-working, law-abiding and peaceful truckers, who quite frankly have kept all of you alive.”
Some professional polls may show low support for the convoy, but tens of thousands of Canadians, who put their money where their mouths are, may disagree.
Update Feb. 4:
Canadian truckers protesting COVID-19 rules said they are lawyering up after GoFundMe suspended their fundraising page. The page surpassed its $10 million goal, but GoFundMe pulled the plug as it investigates the effort for potential violations.
“This fundraiser is currently paused and under review to ensure it complies with our terms of service and applicable laws and regulations,” read a notice at the top of the convoy’s GoFundMe page. “Our team is working 24/7 and doing all we can to protect both organizers and donors. Thank you for your patience.”
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a Calgary-based firm, confirmed it is representing the Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa and “has a team of lawyers on the ground providing legal assistance and advice.”
The U.S. press, like the U.S. government, is a corrupt and troubled institution. Corrupt not so much in the sense that it accepts bribes but in a systemic sense. It fails to do what it claims to do, what it should do, and what society expects it to do.
The news media and the government are entwined in a vicious circle of mutual manipulation, mythmaking, and self-interest. Journalists need crises to dramatize news, and government officials need to appear to be responding to crises. Too often, the crises are not really crises but joint fabrications. The two institutions have become so ensnared in a symbiotic web of lies that the news media are unable to tell the public what is true and the government is unable to govern effectively. That is the thesis advanced by Paul H. Weaver, a former political scientist (at Harvard University), journalist (at Fortune magazine), and corporate communications executive (at Ford Motor Company), in his provocative analysis entitled News and the Culture of Lying: How Journalism Really Works.
The news media and the government have created a charade that serves their own interests but misleads the public. Officials oblige the media’s need for drama by fabricating crises and stage-managing their responses, thereby enhancing their own prestige and power. Journalists dutifully report those fabrications. Both parties know the articles are self-aggrandizing manipulations and fail to inform the public about the more complex but boring issues of government policy and activity.
What has emerged, Weaver argues, is a culture of lying. “The culture of lying,” he writes, “is the discourse and behavior of officials seeking to enlist the powers of journalism in support of their goals, and of journalists seeking to co-opt public and private officials into their efforts to find and cover stories of crisis and emergency response. It is the medium through which we Americans conduct most of our public business (and a lot of our private business) these days.” The result, he says, is a distortion of the constitutional role of government into an institution that must continually resolve or appear to resolve crises; it functions in “a new and powerful permanent emergency mode of operation.”
Wary of making decisions based on opinion or belief, the U.S. public has come to rely on facts, data, surveys, and presumably scientific studies. People are increasingly reluctant to believe any assertion that is not supported by statistical research. Yet, Crossen writes, “more and more of the information we use to buy, elect, advise, acquit and heal has been created not to expand our knowledge but to sell a product or advance a cause.”
A growing industry has thus developed to create the research to legitimize policy positions or marketing objectives. Public policy debates now commonly revolve around competing estimates of cost, effectiveness, or risk, rather than around the intrinsic merits of a proposal. Much of the health care debate raged around differing estimates of the numbers of citizens without health coverage and the costs of the various proposals to cover them. When President Bill Clinton promised Congress that he would rely on the forecasts of federal spending and deficits of the Congressional Budget Office rather than on those of the executive branch’s Office of Management and Budget, the representatives and senators cheered; they consider the CBO’s forecasts to be more favorable to Congress’s spending proclivities than those of the more cautious OMB.
Concocted or inaccurate surveys and studies taint our perceptions of what is true, and they distort public policy debates. Crossen concurs with Weaver that the media’s desire for drama encourages the distortion and corruption of public decision making. “The media are willing victims of bad information, and increasingly they are producers of it. They take information from self-interested parties and add to it another layer of self-interest—the desire to sell information.”
A press driven by drama and crises creates a government driven by response to crises. Such an “emergency government can’t govern,” Weaver concludes. “Not only does public support for emergency policies evaporate the minute they’re in place and the crisis passes, but officials acting in the emergency mode can’t make meaningful public policies. According to the classic textbook definition, government is the authoritative allocation of values, and emergency government doesn’t authoritatively allocate values.”
Footnote:
If you read the excerpts or followed the link, you will have realized this knowledge was published in the Harvard Business Review May-June 1995.
Science Matters 