A Brave New World Without Rights
Dropping Mandates Does Not Strip Government of the Ability to Do This Again
(Quick link to the full article on my website)
The Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.
But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”
In March of 2020, in violation of the principles embedded in our constitutions, governments around the world convinced citizens to give their leaders and public institutions the authority to overrule individual rights in order to "flatten the curve.” That impulse went unchallenged under the false assumption that…
Click here to continue reading this article on my website.
thank you, Julius. as a (former) constitutional lawyer here in the US, this is exactly what I have been trying to explain to people since this fiasco began. "rights" are not "rights" if they can be dishonored by the government. there can be intelligent debate about where exactly the line exists between your rights and my rights, if they conflict, but the burden of persuasion in that case MUST always fall on the party wishing to impinge on those rights and NOT on the party whose rights are being impinged upon.
Making power real! Thanks for your expositions.