To always obey the laws without questioning their validity would be blind servility. There are occasions when our conscience challenges us and tells us: that’s enough, I cannot, in my soul and conscience, obey this law since I would thus be breaking a principle of justice superior to written laws.
Protesting is not civil disobedience. The law allows it. On the other hand, the law does not allow paralyzing a city center, businesses, a bridge, entire sections of society for two weeks, calling 911 unnecessarily to harm the police, etc. Is this kind of disobedience civil or criminal?
Civil disobedience was theorized by Henry David Thoreau, who refused to pay taxes to his slave government. The idea was then taken up by Gandhi (to remove the British salt monopoly) and Martin Luther King (to defy segregationist laws). We can give as more recent examples the Quebec students who refused, in 2012, to reveal their itinerary before certain demonstrations. They defied law 78, later abandoned.
The thinkers of civil disobedience defended certain principles: not to use violence; disturbing, of course, going after material sometimes. But they never advocated attacking individuals directly. In Ottawa, the inhabitants of the downtown area live a living hell. They are exhausted, sometimes reviled. They have lost all quality of life. Yet they are not responsible for current policies. Former supporters of the protesters’ cause now want them to go. The means of intervention of the demonstrators are brutal: facing an 18-wheeler is not easy.
They also wonder about the effectiveness of their action: does it cause more harm than good? If the means used to practice disobedience lead to more injustice, then the game is not worth the candle. In the case that concerns us, there are businesses and factories closed, job losses, foodstuffs that will perish in trucks, citizens who feel threatened, children who do not go to school and who live in poor conditions.
Civil disobedience involves directly attacking the source of the “evil”. However, it is not the federal government in Ottawa that decides on health measures from one end of the country to the other. Moreover, even if Canada were to abandon the compulsory vaccination for truckers wishing to cross the American border, the United States would still have to be convinced to do the same. Above all, it is not the inhabitants of downtown Ottawa who are responsible for their “problems”. They are innocent hostages.
Proponents of civil disobedience are prepared to face the consequences of their actions. When they have to be arrested and imprisoned, they oppose it with words, but not with violence, which they reject. They resign themselves to it, like Thoreau, Gandhi and Luther King in their time. It is out of respect for their cause that they act peacefully.
So if the truckers in Ottawa and elsewhere want to show us that their cause and their means are noble and not delinquent, in other words that their disobedience is truly civil and not criminal, they should aim better at their target, not cause more harm than the property sought and peacefully accept their arrest if necessary. They shouldn’t go after just any law either, only those they think are unjust, otherwise they show no respect to society. Short of that, their disobedience tends more towards criminality than towards the pursuit of justice.