Canadians Teach Us the Importance of Due Process
Governments are regularly trying to circumvent due process as they go after citizens. Truckers face this threat in Ottawa right now but so do individuals who provide real information.
When thinking of the places we must thank for preserving our liberties, I’ll bet that New York, Massachusetts, and Canada are likely not on the top of your list. They should be. Initially, the United States Constitution simply outlined the structure of government and defined a separation of powers. The wisdom of those checks and balances have stood the test of time. Five states were quick to ratify the document without any specific rights that protected individuals from their government. Thankfully, Massachusetts and New York balked. They feared justice would become an arbitrary weapon wielded one day by a tyrannical government against its citizens.
In 1789, James Madison drafted the Bill of Rights to address these fears. It is not clear if Madison himself shared these concerns. Regardless, a compromise needed to be forged or the USA would never exist. Ten amendments were added to the Constitution that allowed for free speech, freedom of the press, the right to a jury trial, and the right to bear arms, among many others. Buried in the Fifth Amendment was a small but important clause, “No person shall be … deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law.”
Two years of COVID measures have put due process to the test. Vaccine mandates and lockdowns were never voted into law, nor were they properly debated. Governments utilized emergency powers to issue decrees. For a time, the mandates forced citizens to comply. Eventually, as if there is a colossal arm-wrestling match going on, courts and brave citizens have started the pendulum swinging back.
Now people want their voices heard. Truckers in Canada have converged on Ottawa to bring mandates to an end. It would be wrong to think of this in political terms of right versus left. Many on the right see value in how vaccines protect the vulnerable against severe outcomes. Plenty of progressives see mandates as a steppingstone to tyranny. It is more accurate to think of it as a struggle between ruling elites versus the working class. Elites have a way of enlisting technology firms to circumvent due process and do the government’s bidding against citizens.
“Thank you for those donations. We will be using those as we please …”
Throughout the pandemic trucking has been an essential service. Drivers who crossed between the US and Canada hauling goods have been exempted from vaccine passports and mandates. Last month, those exemptions ended. Both the US and Canadian authorities insisted that to cross the border, drivers would need to be fully vaccinated. While most drivers are fully vaccinated, an estimated 26,000 drivers would face losing their jobs if they did not comply.
Canadian drivers have had enough. Omicron variant is proving far less deadly and is rendering vaccines completely ineffective at stopping the spread of the virus. Additionally, drivers argue they posed no threat to the population alone in their cab all day. To drivers, mandates only served as an exercise in government control. A caravan of trucks assembled in western Canada and headed east to their nation’s capital. Known as the Freedom Convoy, they arrived in Ottawa on January 29th, occupying the city center. Popular support resulted in $8 million USD ($10M Canadian) of donations being raised through the GoFundMe platform.
While disruptive to the everyday activities in the city-center, the protests have been peaceful. Don’t take my word for it. You can watch for yourself as hundreds of people are livestreaming from there. Contrast that with the occupation of Seattle city center in the summer of 2020 where four people were shot and many people were assaulted. Unlike Seattle where police abandoned the area, the Ottawa city police regularly roam amongst protesters.
The police, however, are vastly outnumbered so reclaiming city streets has been futile. Instead, the local police chief, the mayor, and even Canada’s Prime Minister have denounced the protests as violent, the protesters as right wing, and the local citizens as under siege. Officials allege lawless behavior. Their crimes: parking violations, excessive horn noise, and citations for “mischief.”
It is hardly “lawless.” The area has the atmosphere of a tailgate party. Kids are playing soccer in the streets and parents are barbecuing. They even had an inflatable bouncy castle for the children. Yet, authorities have had enough. Ottawa police began choking off the money and fuel coming into the area.
Intercepting payments requires warrants, due process, and court injunctions if the police were to intervene themselves. Instead, the police requested GoFundMe to halt funds flowing to protesters. GoFundMe agreed and initially said they would confiscate the $10 million already received and divert it to other causes. Who needs a warrant when a single phone call to a Big Tech CEO is more effective? Back in 2020, GoFundMe took no such actions during the Seattle protests despite deaths and assaults. In fact, they tweeted their support.
In the end, GoFundMe reconsidered when US Senator Ted Cruz threatened to investigate them for fraud. GoFundMe promptly returned the donations to those that gave them. Christian fundraising site GiveSendGo stepped up to collect the funds and remit them to the Freedom Convoy protesters. They have already gotten back up to that $8.0 million in donations in less than a week. According to the protest leaders, one of the most important things they are doing with the funds is hiring lawyers to protect their rights.
When efforts to intercept funding failed, the Ottawa police began confiscating the fuel needed to keep the trucks running. Enforcement is proving ineffective.
The protesters say they will be staying until vaccine and mask mandates are lifted. More and more the evidence shows that neither are working particularly well. Thus, it seems an entirely reasonable topic to raise with one’s elected officials. Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, has refused to speak with the protesters. He has simply vilified them.
Protests and debates on COVID restrictions are very necessary
So why should we care if truckers protest in Canada? First, there is pure self-interest. Supply chains are fragile and grocery store shelves remain surprisingly bare. Trucking plays a key role in our economy. Loosing 26,000 truckers from the economy would be bad for everyone. We are seeing an exodus from law enforcement and teaching as vaccine mandates kick in. We have seen an exodus from our schools as families seek alternatives to public education. Given how fragile supply chains are, losing thousands of truckers could bring retail to a halt.
More importantly, citizens need a voice in the direction of health policy, which is no longer set by science but by politics. This week four Democrat-led states (Oregon, Delaware, New Jersey, and Connecticut) announced they are removing or dramatically reducing mask requirements in their state, particularly in schools. The CDC has made no change in guidance, yet for two years these states pointed to the CDC to justify their policies. Why the change? Mid-term elections are coming up.
Virginia is a great example of elections having consequences. Loudoun County famously arrested Scott Smith, a parent, for speaking out at a board meeting. For sure, Mr. Smith was loud, animated, and even belligerent at a board meeting. His backstory is important, though. His daughter was sexually assaulted at school and the board denied that it happened. What father wouldn’t make a raucous?
Outspoken parents in Northern Virginia were instrumental in the recent election of Glenn Youngkin as governor. Yet, when the newly elected Youngkin issued an executive order to make masks the decision of the parents, many school districts in this part of the state fought it. Students are being suspended for showing up to school without masks.
One Democratic State Senator from that area has spoken up. Chap Peterson of Fairfax (70% of the county voted for Biden) wrote a letter to the Fairfax County School Board. In it he urged the board to stand down in opposing parents and the governor over forcibly masking children in schools. In his words,
“To the best of my knowledge, no scientific basis has ever been offered for Forced Masking; rather parents are asked to assume that this policy ‘saves lives.’ After a year, the data on student masking is easily found and it is overwhelming: the forced masking of school children has no correlation with community health.”
I applaud his courage. The tide is turning on this issue, but the resistance remains strong. Free speech and due process have never been more important.
The CDC quietly comes clean but be careful talking about it
Authorities often try to circumvent due process for the greater good. The ends justify the means, as they say. If all else fails, there is one surefire way to circumvent due process. You play the terrorism card. Shortly after Mr. Smith’s arrest last year, the Justice Department sought to label as domestic terrorists those parents who spoke up at school board meetings. They enlisted the National School Boards Association (NSBA), asking them to write the Biden Administration a letter requesting their help. Thankfully, it was exposed for the conspiracy that it was. The leaders of the NSBA eventually issued an apology to its members for ever getting involved and doing the government’s bidding.
The US and Ottawa authorities just can’t get others (NSBA and GoFundMe) to shut things down for them. If you really need something done, you should do it yourself, right? It seems the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) believes that. This Monday, they issued a terrorism advisory bulletin stating that COVID-19 misinformation is one of the biggest terrorist threats to our country right now. According to them, one our nation’s greatest threats, “is widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding … COVID-19.” Are they really saying Joe Rogan, Alex Berenson, Dr. Robert Malone, and Dr. Peter McCullough are terrorists? It sure sounds like it.
These individuals are quick to challenge (with scientific data) the narratives of government authorities. For example, they were the first to raise the issue that mRNA vaccines were associated with an increased risk of myocarditis, particularly after the second dose. Initially, it was conspiracy territory to suggest COVID-19 vaccine might cause harm. Then dozens of countries acknowledged young men were developing heart issues at a surprisingly high rate. It eventually became an acknowledged fact. Last Friday, in a recent CDC meeting researchers said exactly the same thing:
I guess the definition of a terrorist has now been expanded to include people that say something true but six months to a year too early.
Another topic is vaccine effectiveness. These radical individuals were some of the early truth tellers to highlight a waning effectiveness of vaccines stopping the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. The CDC denied this and manipulated the data for a time. Then Omicron destroyed any illusion that vaccines inhibited virus spread for anything longer than a few months. Today, just about everyone knows that the vaccinated get and spread the virus as much or more than the unvaccinated.
That is old news. The current debate is whether mRNA vaccines are doing much good at stopping hospitalizations. Alex Berenson recently claimed that this narrative was falling apart as well. In the face of Omicron vaccines are not keeping the people out of the hospital, he argued. Yet, with symptoms from Omicron being generally mild, vaccine benefits no longer outweigh the risks. This outraged the mainstream.
So, was Berenson wrong? Not according to the latest CDC data released last Friday. With no fanfare or changes in policy, the organization quietly published data showing that with Omicron, vaccinated people in the United States are getting hospitalized at the same rate as unvaccinated people. If the percentage of the population vaccinated and the percentage of vaccinated people in the hospital are similar, it means the vaccines are having no effect. At the time of the study (Dec 21, 2021 through Jan 2, 2022), fully vaccinated people made up 62% of the population and 61% of Omicron-related hospitalizations. Vaccines were beneficial in the past but that may no longer be the case.
Yet, the US government says that purveyors of this kind of information are one of the greatest terrorist threats facing the country right now. Something is horribly wrong with that thinking. I truly do thank God for due process that He gave us so many years ago.
In Conclusion
Due process is not uniquely American. It has been the cornerstone of English society for more than eight centuries. Under the Magna Carta in 1215, English kings abstained from arbitrary justice and submitted themselves to the rule of law. Citizens could not be imprisoned, or their possessions taken, without due process. The accused was entitled to his day in court to defend against the charges. The final determination was not for the government to make but rather for an impartial judge or a jury of their peers to decide. For the last 800 years, this has been one of the defining characteristics of a free society, including Canada.
It is time to thank the thousands of Canadian truck drivers (and the American drivers that are helping them) for speaking out that mandates must end. There is a reasonable chance they will be arrested in the coming days or weeks. Pray for them and give thanks for the liberties of free speech and due process God has given us.
< Please share this article with others. >