In Defence of the Emergencies Act: Why We Must Put a Stake Through the Heart of the Insurrection Bubble-Wrapped as a Protest (while keeping the EA on a short leash)

The Emergencies Act: Time to Bring in its Never-Before-Used Powers?

Last week, on Feb. 14, the federal government introduced a motion to invoke the Emergencies Act to quell the, then three-week long occupation of Ottawa as well as other blockades set up in Emerson, Manitoba, Coutts, Alberta and the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario. As required by the law, Parliament has sat non-stop since (except last Friday) to debate this never-before-used legislation, a law created in 1988 by the then Conservative government of Brian Mulroney. Parliament will vote tonight (February 21, 2022) to determine whether the use of the Emergencies Act is justified and legitimate.

Before the government invoked this extra-ordinary law, discussion was already raging as to whether or not calling on the biggest hammer in the government’s toolkit to deal with threats to national security, the rule of law and public order was justified. A colleague in the Norman Patterson School of Public Affairs (NPSIA) at Carleton University, and a former national security advisor to the Department of Justice, Leah West, questioned whether the high bar for deploying the act had been met. As Professor West stated, the government “must believe the protests rise to the level of a national emergency”. In her view, that high bar had not been met.

While national security law is outside my wheelhouse of expertise, my work over the last three decades on telecommunications, the Internet, communication regulation, privacy, media and democracy, within Canada and internationally, regularly bumps up against such issues. My work as a communications and media scholar, also at Carleton University, as also forever focused on questions about communications, society & democracy. As such, I want to weigh in with a few thoughts of my own in the hope that I have something worthwhile to contribute to the debate.

Here’s the bottom line: While I disagree with Professor West’s provisional conclusions, I do agree that we must be very vigilant that this precedent setting use of the Emergencies Act remains limited in time, targeted in terms of geography, subject to Parliamentary review & snuggled tightly within the confines of the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms.

The big new tools that allow the government to follow the money backing the occupation and to bring crowd-funding services such as GoFundMe and GiveSendGo under the purview of FINTRACK—a part of the financial regulation tools that have been in place for some time—must be given especially close and ongoing scrutiny, as others with expertise in such matters, such as another Carleton colleague from NPSIA, Stephanie Carvin, and others such as Jess Marin Davin, have said (also see Davis, Convoy Finance, Emergencies Act edition).

These commentators have also stressed that, as part of this scrutiny, it will also be essential to closely watch to make sure the use of these tools remain consistent with federal privacy legislation such as the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) and the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. In this respect, the government should be consulting closely with the Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) to ensure that the privacy & data protection implications of PIPEDA are met.

On this point, it is important to bear in mind that the government already faces a big credibility problem given the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) controversial commercial deal with Telus, the third largest telecoms and mobile wireless operator in Canada, to use Canadians bulk mobile data as part of the public health measures now in place and that many people have grown increasingly impatient with. The government’s decision to play fast-and-loose with such rules has already received a strong rebuke from the head of the OPC, Daniel Therrien. As Therrien has stated, rather than the government (PHAC) consulting with his office, as required by PIPEDA, his office was only informed.

This attempt to do an end-run around the guardrails in place to govern the use of mobile data in the context of public health measures serves as a self-inflicted wound. It also triggered a hastily convened Parliamentary review by the Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics (ETHI) Committee. Serious scholars and observers of Internet surveillance and privacy and data protection issues in Canada, such as Chris Parsons from Citizens Lab at the University of Toronto, Teresa Scassa, Canada research Chair in Information Law and Policy at the University of Ottawa Law School and former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Ann Cavoukian have been highly critical of this short-circuiting of properly informing the public and playing fast-and-loose with the already weak privacy and data protection framework that we do have in Canada. At the very least, this experience shows exactly what the government must NOT do if it hopes to maintain people’s trust in, and the legitimacy of, the extraordinary tools the Emergencies Act will allow it to use.

What is happening is not a protest

With the above in mind, here are my views: First, what had been taking place in Ottawa, Coutts, Emerson and Windsor for three weeks was not a lawful protest but, at is core, and in terms of its conception and management of its execution, an insurrection-wrapped-in-the-trappings of legitimate protest. These are not words to be use lightly. They are, however, justified given that the leadership of these demonstrations and their initial manifesto have openly called for the overthrow of the government of Canada and democracy (since rescinded). As journalists such as Justin Ling have chronicled in this context and over the years, this has been the aim of these events in the insurrectionists’ own words since the outset of the Ottawa Occupation on January 28, 2022.

Ling and others have been tracking extremist groups like the Proud Boys long before they became the far-right Canada First after the government put the Proud Boys on the list of banned terrorist groups in Canada in 2021. The movement whose presence has been on full display in Ottawa since Day 1 is led by far-right extremist who have been active for years and especially since the 2019 Yellow Jackets protests in Canada (ISD, 2021). At a minimum, these groups are anti-state and, after that, the consist of a long list of horribles: racists, neo-Nazis, anti-Muslim, homophobes and others who, far from working within the boundaries of democracy, seek to subvert democracy.

Well-known figures at the core of the unrest are include : James Bauder, Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Benjamin Dichter, Patrick King. They are opponents of democracy not its champions (Hames, 2019). Canada Unity, another prominent group running the chaos, is led by ex-national intelligence analyst Tom Quiggin, an ex-member of the RCMP and National Emergency Response Team, Daniel Bulford and ex-Canadian military members such as Tom Marazzo . Their skill-sets would seem to pose a grave threat.

Researchers with Antihate.ca have done excellent work for several years chronicling these individuals and the groups they lead, including daily updates since the occupations began.

The movement organizers have money as well as material & ideological support flowing in from across Canada as well as from the US and, far less so, internationally (see here). To be clear: over half of the money has come from within Canada but the vast bulk after than is from the US, followed in a distant second by the UK, a handful of other EU countries, Australia and New Zealand (Cardoso, Globe & Mail).

The big tech billionaire class is also behind the occupation of Ottawa and the demonstrations elsewhere in Canada. This is the case, for example, from Peter Thiel, a co-founder of PayPal and Palantir, as well as part of former President Trump’s inner circle of advisors. Thiel was also a member of Facebook’s board of directors until stepping down earlier this month (Feiner & Levy, 2022). As Thiel emphatically told readers of publication put out by the U.S.-based libertarian think tank, Cato, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” In Thiel’s view, it is time to get rid of democracy in order to promote the widest realization of individual freedoms.

Elon Musk, founder of Tesla and who also owns and operates the Starlink, the low earth orbiting constellation of satellites that now provides Internet access service to rural and remote areas around the world, including in Canada, hols views that mirror those of Thiel. Musk has been especially vocal in the present context, cheering on the insurrection as if it is merely a benign “Freedom Convoy” and protest. He has also helped to bankroll the unrest (Fortune, 2022).

The Trump connections to this insurrection-occupation-protest are also unmistakeable. Donald Trump Jr. has weighed in many times to give his full-throated support of the demonstrations while condemning the Liberal Government as undemocratic. He has called Canada a “banana republic”, despite overwhelming evidence that it is a strong democracy and typically ranks higher than the United States on various “democracy indices”. Trump Jr. has also shouted from the rooftop the false information that Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro (see here and here).

Hangers on and former minions of the Trump Administration like Seb Gorka have also piled on (see here, here, here). The hacked GiveSendGo spreadsheet is chok-a-blok full of references to Trump, Trump 2024, January 6, 2022, the false stolen election campaign that brought Biden into office, and on and on.

GiveSendGo List of Donors: Trump Fans Support “Freedom Convoy”

The core group behind this insurrection has bubble wrapped their mission in a disparate array of groups and people with a grab bag of grievances, including about public health measures, for which there can be legitimate basis for lawful protest. There should be a very wide berth for the latter, and there has been, both before the imposition of the Emergencies Act and now. That said, there should be no accommodation for those who openly call for the overthrow of the Government of Canada and the imposition of a provisional junta made up of representatives of the seditionists’ choosing.

It cannot be underscored enough that this is not a protest conceived of and carried out by truckers who have picked up supporters along the way. It has been unfortunate that a great deal media coverage has framed things as being sparked by many people’s legitimate concerns about the ongoing use of public health measures in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. This has helped to install and reinforce a frame and discursive agenda for how we think about what has been taking place that is highly misleading.

While the insurrectionists are being supported by the far right, Trump supporters and Christian fundamentalists in the United States, the support from rightwing Conservatives in the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) has been stunning.

Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative Party of Canada’s MP for Carleton, an area just outside of Ottawa, has taken the insurrection-wrapped-in-the-trappings-of-a-protest as opportunity to announce his candidacy for leadership of his party. In a video release one week into the #OttawaSiege that did not hide its opportunistic endorsement of what was already far beyond a legal protest.

Another CPC MP, Candace Bergen has also used the occasion to grandstand for both the demonstrators and her party’s base. She did so during question period in Parliament, for instance, when she hinged a call to demonstrators to “take down the barricades” and “stop disruptive action” while calling on the federal government for an “end to [all public health] mandates. In other words, Conservative Party MP Bergen called on the federal government—a government just re-elected last year explicitly on issues tied to the pandemic-related public health measures—to concede to the demonstrators’ demand in return for an end to the chaos that had been consuming Ottawa and tormenting its citizens for two weeks by the time she made her call.

The second last Conservative Party leader before the ouster of its most recent leader, Andrew Sheer, also gave the the occupation a thumbs up as the siege of Ottawa entered its second week. Sheer’s symbolic support was the Canadian equivalent to U.S. Senator and Trump loyalist Josh Hawley’s famous fist pump to those engaged in the January 6, 2021 uprising against the U.S. Congress and galvanized by the outgoing president’s fraudulent claims that the 2020 US election had been stolen. Yet, here were top members of the Conservative Party in Canada cheerleading on similar forces on the doorsteps of the Parliament of Canada for three weeks by the time that Sheer was endorsing them.

Another former Conservative Party leader, Stockwell Day, was also out rallying the mob tend days into the unrest & extremist minority uprising. Previous members of the CPC who have been recently banished from the party for their rightwing extremist views, such as Maxime Bernier (who has since founded the right wing People’s Party of Canada) and Lanark County MPP Randy Hillier, have also been out in force lending succour to the demonstrators.

Rachel Curran, ex policy director for former Conservative Prime Minister Steven Harper, and now a top Facebook executive in Canada, has also given her blessing to the fun times down at Parliament Hill.

At the provincial levels, the patterns are similar. Doug Ford’s Conservative government in Ontario, for example, was slow to authorize additional policing resources for Ottawa Police and deceptive about the quantum of support when he finally did give it. Instead of promptly and fully meeting calls for 1,800 more police officers from Ottawa Police Chief Sloly and Ottawa City Mayor, the Ford Government engaged in “misleading by design” wordsmithing, as my colleague Josh Greenberg put it, to give the impression that it was doing just that. In fact, the Ford Government offered less than a tenth of that amount but, added up over twelve days, 150 officers per day did amount to 1,800 “officer days” just not the 1,800 officers were needed for a s long as it would take to quell the insurrection.

At the provincial levels, the patterns are similar. Doug Ford’s Conservative government in Ontario, for example, was slow to authorize additional policing resources for Ottawa Police and deceptive about the quantum of support when he finally did give it. Instead of promptly and fully meeting calls for 1,800 more police officers from Ottawa Police Chief Sloly and Ottawa City Mayor, the Ford Government engaged in “misleading by design” wordsmithing, as my colleague Josh Greenberg put it, to give the impression that it was doing just that. In fact, the Ford Government offered less than a tenth of that amount but, added up over twelve days, 150 officers per day did amount to 1,800 “officer days” just not the 1,800 officers were needed for a s long as it would take to quell the insurrection.

That said, Premier Ford is now on board with the Emergencies Act but only just, it seems. In a sidebar to this already tragic story, Chief Sloly, Ottawa’s first black police chief, unexpectedly resigned last week midway through the events.

Two weeks into these events, I also quickly scanned area Ontario MPPs to see where they have stood with respect to the demonstrations and broke them into three groups: 1. those who have condemned the on Ottawa Occupation and blockades of the Ambassador Bridge; 2. those who have gently scolded the demonstrators; 3. and those who have said nothing or openly condoned them. As of February 10, no members of Premier Ford’s government jad explicitly condemned the occupations (see the results here).

In sharp contrast, all of the rest of the Ottawa region’s MPPs from the Liberal and NDP parties had condemned the siege: Joel Harden, Stephen Blais, Lucill Collard and John Fraser.

Other provincial premiers, such as Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, have also been overly solicitous to demonstrators, slow to move and engaged in political gamesmanship with the Trudeau government based on years of ongoing hatred of both Liberals and Justin Trudeau. Kenney has also flirted with hard right conservatives and Trump supporters, such as Senator Ted Cruz, as the photo of the two together helps to illustrate.

At this juncture, it is important to remember that it is now official Republican Party dogma that the January 6, 2021 assault on Congress in favour of overturning the 2020 election that brought President Biden into office constitutes “legitimate speech”. The point here is that acts of insurrection are within the range of acceptable action for these politicians.

That so many members of the Conservative Party of Canada have, at the very least, being playing footsies with such notions, and in some cases embracing those who would seem bent on overthrowing a democratic government, gives rise to the great concern that a large swathe of the official opposition cannot be relied on to uphold the principles of democracy at a time of crisis. This, in turn, feeds into the very basis upon which invoking the Emergencies Act is premised: the threat to public order, national security, the safety of Canadians and the institutions of democracy itself are real and it is no longer possible to count fully on all political parties to stand firm in favour of democracy.

Indeed, as some grass-roots citizens have documented, somewhere around half of CPC’s sitting MPs have offered open support for demonstrators. When half of the official opposition reveals itself to be sympathetic to the events that have shaken the country for the last three weeks and running, it is reasonable to be worried, as the Trudeau Government is, that the institutions of democracy—in this case, the CPC—might not hold. As a result, stern measures are needed and the Conservative Party of Canada have helped to bring about this extraordinary and undesirable state of affairs.

In light of the above, it looks like extremists in the CPC have, at least temporarily, taken over control of the party. It is now time for the Party’s leadership and members to get back control of of the CPC and for conservatives who still believe in democracy to continue to step up. Fortunately, a few journalists who have long been supportive of the Conservatives, such as Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail, have been stepping up draw clear blue water between conservatives and insurrectionists.

Crisis of the State? The Ottawa City Government and Police Forces Teeter on the Verge of Collapse

At the city level in Ottawa, Mayor Jim Watson was, for the first two weeks, slow to grasp the severity of the situation. He was also obsequious when dealing with occupation of Ottawa by calling for the federal government to negotiate with the leaders of the demonstrations. Later, just after citizens had taken to the streets to defend their neighbourhoods on their on—as in the #BattleofBillingsBridge—the mayor publicly scolded them for doing so. At the same time, Mayor Watson was striking a deal with the leaders of the demonstration that resulted in some of the demonstrators moving their vehicles out of some neighbourhoods into areas more adjacent to Parliament Hill. The deal was facilitated by Premier Ford’s fixers who had connections to some of the leadership behind the conception and execution of the occupation.

People across Ottawa also watched in frustration and feat that the Ottawa Police proved to be either unable or, frighteningly, unwilling to enforce the law (see CBC journalist Harewood commenting on the situation here; also see here and here). The rule-of-law in many respects was not being upheld around Parliament Hill and adjacent areas such as Centretown where I live for three weeks running. This led to very real questions about whether or not Ottawa Police had the resources they need or, worse, whether they might have been compromised?

That last question, in turn, took on a particular salience given that there had been publicized defiance in the ranks of the Ottawa police on account of the then new Chief Sloly’s attempts at modest reforms designed to root out racism in the force and a small but significant continency of officers opposed to the public health mandates, especially the vaccination requirement for essential workers.

Even after police announced on February 7, that they were cracking down on demonstrators bringing fuel to the trucks idling for weeks on end in the occupied zone, night-after-night I took photos of trucks loading their flatbeds full with gas cans destined for downtown (see here). Other demonstrators carried gas cans in the open, with no repercussions and as they pleased. The downtown turned into a rave scene by the third weekend, replete with a professional sound stage and DJ cranking out the tunes.

It was dangerous to walk in certain parts of the city, to go shopping, to wear a mask, to say the kinds of things that I am writing about here. The threats of violence have been very real, including an attempt by arsonists linked to the demonstration setting fire to large apartment building whose residents had voiced their discontent with the demonstrators incessant threatening behaviour, honking, urinating in public, etc. The attempted arson is now being investigated by the Ottawa Police. For an excellent, first hand account by one of the residents of that apartment building, less than two kilometres from my house, see here.

The neighbourhood grocery store at Bank & Somerset, which serves much of Centretown including many immigrants, low wage earners & refugees who have escaped hell elsewhere only to find it in downtown Ottawa had to close. It’s not been safe to go out and buy food. Another grocery store just a few blocks away from that store, the apartment building mentioned in the paragraph above and Parliament Hill also had to shut its doors.

And when the shops were open, you had to do your shopping in the face of maskless marauders who have refused to follow any public health guidance at all. One result of that was that Ottawa’s biggest shopping mall, The Rideau Centre, has had to close for several weeks. Ice cream shops, vintage stores, restaurants, you name it, all have been held hostage and experienced violence at the hands of those who have occupied our city. At the height of the chaos a week or so ago, Ottawa Police told store owners and people they don’t have the resources to protect them. We were literally on our own!

If you still think there has been little danger, and the my story is over wrought, or that such dangers have been far and in-between, there here’s a crowd-source list that chronicles the impact of the siege on daily life; the harassment, threats, assaults, damage to property (public & private), etc. You can find it here. It is one more example of people—citizens, the public—stepping in to do what “the state” has utterly failed to do, i.e. take steps to help protect the public and maintain public order.

Several city councillors have dithered or been slow to grasp the scale of the assault on our city. In particular, several councillors have led the charge for their constituents since day one: Catherine McKenney (Centretown, and my councillor), Shawn Menard, Jeff Leiper, Mathieu Fleury and Caroline Meehan. They have been incredible in their leadership, brave and resolute.

Mercifully, even if they did not take a role as active and assertive as those just mentioned, most of the others on City council were solidly opposed to what was happening. Only a few seemed to be slow to act or sit on the fence. While Mayor Watson was very slow out of the gate, and took steps that many opposed, he finally seemed to seize hold of the magnitude and gravity of the threat late in the day. Here’s a link to what councillors did what according to my scan of the public statements as of February 9.

Finally, on February 11, “Ontario’s Big City Mayors” finally stepped up to condemn the convoy demonstration (see here). Of course, Canada’s biggest business groups also demanded action once the Ambassador Bridge Blockade gnarled cross border trade. The White House called urging Canada to act & offering help at all levels of the US government. Long before that, the biggest union representing 55,000 drivers and 15,000 long haul truckers in Canada, Teamsters Canada, condemned the “Freedom Convoy” in no uncertain terms.

The Assault on Journalism and the Media

While the Conservative Party of Canada, MPs, provincial conservatives & many politicians at the federal, provincial and city level have failed, there has also been a parallel assault on journalists and journalism. The actions and talk of the former is likely aiding and abetting the latter. This assault on one of the pillars of democratic society—and this from me, a long-standing, harsh critic of the media in this country—this provides clear evidence that the insurrection-cum-occupation/demonstration is not here to improve democracy but to subvert it.

It is one thing to criticize the media with the aim of prodding its members to live up to their fabled role in speaking truth to power and performing their democratic functions. It is something else altogether, however, to vilify journalism so as to open a vacuum into which disinformation, delusional conspiracies and propaganda can pour. Examples of this assault on journalism, the media and democracy are as easy to pile up as leaves in autumn (see here, here & here, for example), but a few here will have to do.

The Canadian Association of Journalists and individual journalists have been sounding the alarm on this front throughout the occupation, but with increasing distress and urgency in the last few days before the police regained control of the city over this past weekend. Lucas Meyer had compiled the list below by February 11.

Canadian journalists now have to be very careful walking the streets of Ottawa and some media outlets, like Canada’s largest private media group, CTV, have had to remove corporate branding from their vehicles in order to safely do their jobs.

Fox News has continued to pour fuel on the flames for the last week or so and brought it’s unhinged approach to media agitation to Canada. It has also encouraged similar events in the U.S.

Last Friday, just as the police were ramping up their efforts to restore public order to the streets of the nation’s capital, Fox News reporter Sara Carter made the incendiary claim that a woman protestor had been killed at the hands of the police.

Only 18 hours later did Carter issue a garbled correction despite authoritative sources and the Ottawa Police itself having quickly declared her incendiary claim to be false. Indeed, instead of correcting the record, she quickly buried her tweet in a pile of other tweets so as to push the false claim and her retraction further into oblivion. By the time, however, the damage had been done: Carters tweet, backed the undeserved authority of Fox News, was cursing, unchallenged, through the right wing of the Internet and on the streets of Ottawa and elsewhere where sympathetic protests in some cities across Canada emerged (see here and here).

Despite one of its journalists spreading a demonstrably false and incendiary claim, Fox News, as far as I know, has still not issued a correction or any kind of statement on the matter. Meanwhile, the damage to us, to police on the street and to democracy continues from Fox News unabated.

This is part for the course for Fox News. What Fox does is not journalism. To understand the enclosed, right-wing network propaganda system that Fox News serves as a hub and megaphone for, in the US, with overflow and influence in Canada and internationally, the Harvard University’s Yochai Benkler, Robert Faris & Hal Robert’s (2018) book Network Propaganda is essential reading. Here’s how they depict the network propaganda system they meticulously describe and explain (note: Fox News off to the right and its links to others to the right of it but not, generally speaking, anywhere else).

It does not play by the normal rules of journalism and media in a democracy. It does not correct errors. It was openly allied with the Trump Administration, serving as its mouthpiece and as a lapdog rather than as a watchdog and independent member of the fourth estate. It serves as a node and megaphone in an enclosed right wing networked media propaganda system offering lots of channels to media outlets—online and legacy—even further to the right but few links to the centre right, the mainstream middle, progressive left and the “far left”.

It’s partners in the rightwing, network propaganda system consists of outlets like Breitbart, the Daily Caller, Gateway Pundit and beyond, many of which have brought their fevered delusions and attempts to discredit mainstream media and subvert democracy to my doorstep on Twitter.

Benkler et. al. stress that we can and do have a rational public sphere capable of doing the work democracy demands BUT they also reveal just how fragile the conditions for a viable public and democracy are today. According to them, roughly a quarter- to one-third of US adults and the network propaganda system centred on hubs like Fox that constantly draw on and pump out extremist ideas from the far-right fringes into the body politic.

This sizeable slice of the US population and their media have, essentially, checked out when it comes to basic precepts of democracy, i.e.:

• respect for evidence,
• pursuit of understanding,
• correcting errors when identified,
• provding independent, critical knowledge/reporting,
• baseline trust in institutions of democracy, experts, science & fellow citizens still persists, etc.

That big slice of the US population no longer operates in a manner consistent with a culture of democracy. What we have been seeing in Canada and the streets in Canada in these past few weeks—but building up over the past decade or more, while always existing underground—is smaller and still less entrenched and vociferous. As a guestimate based on a rough-and-ready reading of recent public opinion surveys, the proportion of the Canadian population checked out from democracy is probably around half the rate in the U.S.. In other words, there are probably between 10-15% of Canadians who no longer believe in democracy and act accordingly. They are the source of the inarticulate grunts of FREEDOM that we have heard from the occupied streets of Canada’s capital for the past three weeks.

This coverage from Evan Solomon for CTV’s Power and Politics and from Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show captures the drift of things. The people that they spoke to, in a literal sense, seemed to have no words. A discourse of democracy is beyond them. Why this is so is complex, but it is rooted in a half century of the neoliberal conquest of society & neglect of some minimum sense of economic justice, steps to ameliorate wage stagnation & widening income and wealth inequality, quality education for all, an appreciation of ‘the public’ and a generous view of public goods.

Disenfranchised at one end & prioritizing self-aggrandizing accumulations of wealth freedom at the other (ala Thiel’s freedom versus democracy), here we are: a stunted public incapable of self-governance because while they’ve talked for so long–a half century–nobody has listened & helped to translate their dreams into a viable political project and reality.

At the same time, it would be a colossal mistake to believe that everybody who has taken part in, or supported, this insurrection-cum-occupation (pretend protest) is stupid. They are not. I will return to that issue some other time.

I digress. The impact of the network propaganda system cuts across class. As discussed above, a slice of economic and political elites are driving the corrosive behaviour that has brought to where we now stand and democracy teetering on the brink and our streets filled having been filled with menacing threats. For the rest of us who have little desire for the nihilistic fantasies of this anti-democracy group we now face major conflicts and clashes, within our own families and amongst friends and colleagues, as we watch people we thought we knew float off the deep-end (but with memories of how they might have become this way.

For a long time, the goings on in Parliament and key segments of the media in Canada have also jhad a very corrosive impact, as the views of extremists get amplified, broadcast & normalized. This is the game of the far right vying for the soul of the Conservative Party of Canada right now, as well as the editorial pages of the National Post, the Postmedia chain of papers in major cities across the country and Sun Newspaper chain (also owned by Postmedia).

Citizens, Activists, Community Groups, Hackers Begin to Take Matters & Public Order into their Own Hands

As the state collapsed around them, and the assault on the media and routines of daily life continued unabated, and even amped up in the second and third weeks of the occupation, people, citizens and activists began to take matters into their own hand.

I saw that two weeks ago when joining hundreds and maybe more than a 1000 of Ottawans in the counterprotest march down Bank Street from Landsdowne. The next day many of the same people and many others joined a group of women to block a convoy heading from the Occupation’s organizational centre at Conventry Road to Downtown Ottawa. Over the course of the next nine hours, in the great #BattleofBillingsBridge, we blocked their path and forced them, with the aid of the police, to return back to where they came from, one-by-one, and only after they stripped their vehicles of flags and other pro-occupation symbols (see here, here and here).

They were supported by several city councillors and an area MPP, all of whom’s names you’ve been introduced to earlier: Catherine McKkenney, Shawn Menard, Jeff Leiper, Mathieu Fleury and Joel Harden. But it’s been people who have been taking to the streets to get them back under our control and out of the hands of marauding thugs in pick-up trucks. Zexi Li and a team of lawyers led by Paul Champ also emerged as something like town heroes when they by getting an injunction to silence the incessant honking from big rigs throughout the downtown core before the city and province seemed to have lifted a finger.

Resistance and citizens taking matters into their own hands have also been aided by some pretty far out and brave acts by the RamRanchResistance. They hacked the chat rooms and social media services of the demonstrators and filled them with videos and a gay porno music soundtrack that must have drove the demonstrators crazy. Hackers obtained the donors list from GiveSendGo and distributed it to other researchers but within a short of time the list was being widely shared (see here).

Every movement needs its spectacles and theatre. The occupation forces knew that and had their’s. This was our’s even if came a bit late in the day.

So, why did the federal government have to step in and reach for the Emergencies Act? Because, going into the third week of the occupation its own inaction and the complete failure and, indeed, collapse of political and policing authority at the city and provincial levels was a palpable threat to the safety and security of both the citizens of Canada and the state itself.

With citizens, activists and everyday neighbours beginning to step in to fill the void where the state had failed, things were now becoming even more dangerous. Somebody had to act because now conditions were becoming explosive, just as the insurrectionists at the core of this slow motion coup-wrapped-in-a-legit-looking demonstration/protest have wanted all along. It’s part of their nihilistic fantasies.

Stick your head in the sand if you want to, but the above provides an accurate portrait of the reality of living in Ottawa, the capital city of one of the strongest democracies in the world, for three weeks running . . . before the announcement of the Emergencies Act last week and this week’s assertive moves by Ottawa police, backed by the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP), the RCMP and officers brought in from across the country restored some semblance of law and order. In case you haven’t been paying attention for the last decade-and-a-half, democracies have fallen on very hard times and been rolled back in many countries (see The Economist’s annual surveys on the state of democracy, for example). That distemper is now in our streets and it is time to take resolute steps to protect the democracy that we have with an eye to rebuilding a new, stronger and more inclusive democracy in the days, months and years ahead.

Back to the Law, or the Return of the State, the Emergencies Act and Democracy

Now, back to the legal question that I started with. The point underpinning everything to this point is that the threats are very real, not just to the state itself but to us, the citizens of Canada & society. This is why I respectfully disagree with my colleague, Professor West and all others who oppose the invocation of the Emergencies Act at this time.

Participating in these events, for me and others personally, has been dangerous. The treat of serious injury is real and it is chilling. I have not been able to walk my streets freely with the freedom to speak my mind freely and openly, to associate with others, to wear a mask and to move about without fear for close to a month.

I have had death threats and I have had menacing tweets flooding my timeline for weeks. Here’s a sample of some of the most vile and odious (see here as well).

This is not freedom, nor is it normal in a democracy. It is tyranny of an authoritarian kind, as Hannah Arendt would probably say (see Williams, 2017 & Arendt, 1951/2004).

I am not alone. My colleagues report receiving much the same.

I have reported all of these instances of threats to Twitter and then blocked all of the accounts that had been tweeting them at me. My success rate for getting Twitter to find that these tweets violate their terms of service, however, is roughly a third and I have no idea how they have arrived at their decision to take something down or leave it up.

I suppose we might take some cold comfort that Twitter is at least doing something and that most of these accounts appear to be fake, sock puppet accounts run from troll farms in far-away places (see Ben Collins on this point in this context). That there is LIKELY no real person behind most of the threats is helpful, I guess, but barely.

These threats are why the government is actively pursuing Online Harms legislation as we speak (to track the Online Harms Consultation, see here). I vehemently disagree with the tack being taken with respect to online harms, and still do even after all this.

That opposition is based in a lot of things, including that the concept of online harms is too woolly and unbounded, that the imagined role of online content services like Twitter, Youtube and Facebook in being able to execute what’s being asked of them is unlikely and for two other huge reasons: first, because I believe in free speech, as set out in the Charter and, second, because I think the real problem stems from the fact that so much of the rot that we are concerned about starts at the top, especially within the Conservative Party of Canada, while at “the bottom” we have fifty years of pushing the marketization of society and the stripping away of society so that those tearing up our streets have had no place to go. Until we take of all those things, online harms is little more than lipstick on a pig.

As an aside, if you are interested in my views on the Liberal government’s proposals on regulating Internet content services, this post on the Online Streaming Act will give you a flavour of how strongly I stand in favour of free expression rights and remain critical of this government’s proposals with respect to these matters.

Back to the point: people are now having to take matters in their own hands at the risk of very serious bodily harm at the hands of those who had seized control of our lawless streets. The threat is real. Respectfully, while Professor West might still be able to claim that the current state of affairs does not meet the formal legal and technical requirements of the Emergencies Act, I am not sure if she and others opposed to its use have the full scope of the situation in view.

In fact, I wonder if opponents of the use of the Emergencies Act have adopted an overly formalistic view of the technical facts of the law that effectively obscures the reality that law is always a mix of such facts and procedures on the one side and social and political reality and the need to anchor law in legitimating norms, on the other. On this point, I’m channeling Jurgen Habermas’ (1996) Between Facts and Norms, a magisterial treatment of the nature and role of law in liberal capitalist democracies.

However, I also agree that we must be very vigilant that this precedent-setting use of the Emergencies Act created by the Conservative government of Brian Mulroney in 1988 remains limited in time, targeted in terms of geography, subject to Parliamentary review and snuggled tightly within the confines of the Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms. State powers once established and locked in place are very hard to rollback.

That will be our challenge in the days, weeks & maybe months ahead. Now, the goal is to recognize that the uprising was fairly easily quelled once all levels of government got their acts together and there is little doubt that the Emergencies Act hanging in the winds played a vital role in getting the streets clear and some sense of order back. The clear and present danger to my life, my freedoms, our way of life and to Canadian democracy was relatively swiftly pushed back with an absolute minimum of blood shed (as far as I know).

In light of all this, I say pass the Emergencies Act tonight. Then keep it on a very short leash. Bring on the legal challenges now being mounted by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. I am all for that. Critics? Let a thousand critiques bloom. For now, I’m off to the puppy park, glad to see a minimal police state doing what needs to be done so I do not have to live in the tyranny of a bunch of insurrectionists bubble-wrapping their attempts to overthrow democracy and the state in the guise of legit protest.