The Federal Court’s judgment, which invalidated the use of the Emergency Measures Act at the time of the Ottawa truckers’ revolt, forces us to return to the pandemic.
• Read also: “Freedom convoy”: the Emergency Measures Act was “illegal”, rules the Federal Court
For many, it dates back a century or two: is it really necessary to return to it?
I understand this reaction: the trauma of repeated confinements has been such that many people simply prefer not to think about what happened from 2020 to 2022.
Freedoms
And yet, we must come back to it, and come back to it seriously, because this unprecedented historical ordeal has revealed to what extent our societies are much more manipulable, malleable and docile than we might have believed, to what extent, too, they can easily consent to the suspension of their freedoms, as long as they are told that the emergency requires it.
Let’s look back on events for a moment: almost everyone agrees that our governments did what they could in the first six months.
The surprise was total, the improvisation was there. Was it a new plague?
I am not one of those who blame our governments for first relying on strong measures, as we seemed on the verge of cataclysm.
But the months passed and we got to know the beast better.
We could then have taken more targeted, better directed measures. We made the opposite choice: the system pushed for ever more confinement.
Every little piece of society still open had to be closed. We then went from confinement to “confinism”, with curfews, health passports and so on.
I would add, and this is probably the most serious episode, that we have collectively fallen into a disturbing call to denounce our neighbors. It was the triumph of the dog-killers.
As for those who criticized the measures, they were given an infamous label: conspiracy theorists! I’m not saying that there weren’t real conspiracists among the most resolute opponents of health measures. I say that it was enough to criticize government measures to be called a conspiracy theorist.
One thing is certain, a confined society, driven to madness, could one day only explode.
It happened with the truckers’ convoy.
Once again, there were certainly hotheads among them.
But we also found many people brutally expressing their fed up with health authoritarianism.
The Canadian government then believed it had the right to freeze their bank account. This is called political persecution of dissidents. “Progressive” governments are clearly good at this.
Authoritarianism
They believe themselves to be enlightened by Good, and therefore believe that everything is permitted. They are oblivious to their own tendency to trample on the freedoms of their citizens.
I note that the thing is not exclusive to Canada: in Europe, it is also the “center-left” (but also the center-right which it has placed under supervision) which is falling into authoritarianism.
Our time is more and more foreign to freedoms.