Everyone hates civil libertarians until they need one
I support COVID restrictions, but I don't fault anyone for challenging them.
A radical anti-lockdown, anti-vaxxer group from central Canada is planning to swarm across the Nova Scotia border and travel all over the country tearing masks off people’s faces and coughing at them, and touching everything without washing their hands a la Rudy Gobert.
Or so the response to this story would have you believe:
A civil liberties group says Nova Scotia's COVID-19 health order that closed provincial boundaries to non-essential travel is unconstitutional.
Cara Faith Zwibel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association wrote a letter dated May 11 to Premier Iain Rankin and chief medical officer Dr. Robert Strang saying the order violates mobility rights guaranteed in the charter and should be scrapped.
"The government may only impose restrictions on this right that are reasonable and that can be demonstrably justified," Zwibel said in the letter. "The current restrictions satisfy neither of these requirements and should be rescinded."
Rankin closed the province's boundaries to the rest of the country on Monday to prevent the spread of COVID-19 and said the restrictions will be in effect until at least the end of May.
Zwibel said in an interview Wednesday the association has heard from Canadian citizens who have been prevented from entering the province.
"This whole idea that provinces have borders in terms of the movement of people is kind of novel," she said, adding that the new rules are not something that's been seen outside the pandemic.
The masses on social media responded with measured, thoughtful criticism and debate:
And, of course, the scamdemic/QAnon crowd subsequently jumped in to insist that COVID-19 doesn’t exist and something something Bill Gates. Twitter, ladies and gentlemen!
A popular adage has it that there are no libertarians during a pandemic, and even I am on the hawkish side when it comes to lockdowns, mask requirements and restrictions if needed to stop the spread of a deadly virus.
And yet, when I hear about a civil liberties organization questioning whether the state actually has the power to do these things, my initial thought is, bring it on. Any time the state is trying to limit our freedoms, even if it is for a good reason - and a pandemic is undoubtedly a good reason - it should be challenged whenever possible.
Rights and freedoms aren’t the kind of thing that can or should be legislated away just because the people are willing to give them up. Section 1 of The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms confirms that a right or freedom can be infringed upon by the government, but only if the restrictions are “reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” If a law is found to violate a right, the onus is on the government to make the case that it’s justifiable.
(There is also the more controversial and rarely used “notwithstanding” clause, which a government can invoke to override the Charter altogether, but that’s another post. That post may very soon, with Quebec threatening to use it to support its new language legislation.)
You don’t have to be the InfoWars type to know that “emergency” powers granted to a government have a nasty way of staying in place long after the initial crisis has passed. See: the PATRIOT Act, or even Oregon considering leaving its mask mandate in place indefinitely.
If the CCLA challenges Nova Scotia’s restrictions in court, and they lose, there is no harm done. (They’ve already lost a similar court challenge in Newfoundland and Labrador, though that doesn’t mean a court in another province won’t rule differently.) Even if they’re not successful, a court decision could give us some much-needed guidance about what a government can do if and when a similar crisis arises in the future.
And if they are successful, well, it would frankly be good to know if our provincial government is actually following its own laws.
Incidentally, the CCLA’s primary complaint seems to be with restrictions on movement between provinces. But I wonder if restrictions on people travelling within Nova Scotia are more legally questionable.
There’s nothing like a flare-up between the Israelis and Palestinians to make people discard their masks, and I’m particularly curious to know who Rep. Rashida Talib means by “they”:
Is she implying that Israel is killing African-Americans in the United States? That might not be what she actually means.
But if our roles were reversed, and you said something ambiguous about the Palestinians, does anyone think Talib would give you the benefit of the doubt?