The Human Condition: Against tyranny

By DR. DANIEL SCHNEE on February 2, 2022.

I like to think of myself as a rather positive person, save for my views on the likelihood of the Kenney government doing what you might call the right thing. So imagine my shock and surprise when acting Solicitor General Sonya Savage announced Alberta’s planned cessation of traffic court on Feb. 1 was temporarily halted in order to continue consultations with average Albertans.

Myself and others emailed Kenney, signed a petition, and spread the word as best we could, and the result is a wonderful grassroots victory for actual democracy, even if it was to be “only” a small suspension of our Charter rights. The truckers in Ottawa this week see their fight similarly, but on a larger scale.

We can debate the merits of the Ottawa convoy, and the minority protest over their own industry’s adherence to mask and vaccine mandates. But it is certainly good to see them attempting a peaceful exercise of their rights. What I am worried about though is how their resistance to mask and vaccine mandating may be co-opted to further a different agenda by bad faith actors; hungry wolves calling on us to resist the tyranny of our fences, which keep them all at bay.

This is all in opposition to the meaning and spirit of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which lays out the general scope of what we and the government are free to do. Section One of the Charter clearly states that our rights and freedoms are subject only to “such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” This means that the government is actually free to limit our personal freedom, if it is justified, i.e. if it can be shown to be beneficial.

COVID reduction efforts like masks and vaccines are justified because they do not take away our fundamental human rights. In fact, they actually preserve these rights in Section Seven, where it is stated that: “everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

“Except” means the government does have the right to protect my life from others’ “liberty,” i.e. doing whatever they please in a manner that deprives me of safety. If one does not care about others’ life, the government has the authority and indeed the legal responsibility to protect us, based on the very same sentence some use to justify a liberty without personal consequence.

So as much as the truckers are properly exercising their freedom, we must be on guard for those who would use these people as an excuse to wield truly unmandated power themselves. For example, the trucker’s movement is being supported by a group called Canada Unity, which seeks to dissolve the federal government to create an unelected committee tasked with dissolving any and all laws of their choosing. Destroying democracy does not lead to more freedom, just unquestionable domination.

If this kind of democracy-usurping goes forward our parliamentary system is finished, our rights gone. We have temporarily stopped a nascent tyranny from growing within the Alberta legal system. Let’s not let another one to grow out from underneath our masks and trucks.

Dr. Daniel Schnee is an anthropologist who studies Japanese creative culture.

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