So far, your chief strategy in confronting the spreading, increasingly disruptive, and increasingly illegal protests has been to show weakness. It’s not working. Well, it’s not working to limit the scope and impact of the demonstrations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nobody wants this to go to the point of violence, but the window is rapidly closing to resolve this via nonviolent means. The time for various levels of government to get serious about cooperating is now<\/em>. We need to see things like business licenses getting pulled for those who disrupt trade and traffic, and cumulative fines starting to really<\/em> add up (with special measures for expedited and aggressive collection). If we don’t, things will get to the point where such actions basically cease to matter anymore. Then the only options will be violence or total capitulation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Make no mistake, they have a right to demonstrate, no matter how wrong I believe them to be. That’s a basic freedom in any open society. What they don’t<\/em> have the right to do is to unilaterally call the shots for everyone else.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Let’s do a little math here. The most recent Canadian federal election<\/a> was under a year ago. The general politics of the protests are right up the alley of People’s Party, so let’s assume that all their voters are behind them. That’s about 5% of the electorate. The Conservatives polled 34%, but not all of them back the protests. Just listen to Ontario Premier Doug Ford<\/a>, a pretty conservative Conservative, to prove that point. But let’s be generous and assume \u2154 of them do. That’s \u2154 of 34% or 23%. Add the earlier 5% to that and you have 28%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Where is the “freedom” in letting 28% call the shots and telling the other 72% (who support COVID-19 policies distinctly more organized and interventionist than the 28%) to go lump it? That is what the policy of continuing to show nothing but weakness will get us.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" So far, your chief strategy in confronting the spreading, increasingly disruptive, and increasingly illegal protests has been to show weakness. It’s not working. Well, it’s not working to limit the scope and impact of the demonstrations. Nobody wants this to go to the point of violence, but the window is rapidly closing to resolve this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5470","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5470"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5473,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5470\/revisions\/5473"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5470"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5470"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blackcap.name\/blog\/new\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5470"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}