Did you hear that someone was killed by a mounted policeman as the “freedom convoy” was cleared out from downtown Ottawa this weekend? If so, that probably says a lot about your media diet, because it’s BS.
A woman at the heart of a widely spread and false report of a trampling death amid the police operation to clear "Freedom Convoy" protesters from Ottawa streets Friday is very much alive, and Ottawa police say it's an example of the misinformation that has been spread throughout the three-week demonstration.
Police with Toronto's mounted unit moved through crowds Friday near the Chateau Laurier hotel in downtown Ottawa in an attempt to separate protesters from a line of police officers who were slowly advancing. As this happened, videos on social media showed two people falling to the ground as mounted officers rode through.
The incident is now under investigation by the Ontario Special Investigations Unit.
A short time after it happened, a tweet by a Fox News contributor with more than one million followers claimed a woman involved in the incident died in hospital.
This, however, is untrue. Family members said the woman involved suffered a broken clavicle. The false reports of her death were even joked about in an Instagram video, as a voice asks the woman "are you alive?" and she smiles.
"She is alive presently resting in a good bed snoring," the video caption says.
Said Fox News contributor appears to have been Sara Carter. This twitter thread shows how she spread this lie on Twitter, deflected and doubled down when the Ottawa Police and others refuted the claim, added some “clarifications” that muddied the waters further, and finally deleted the tweet after it had been retweeted over 15,000 times:
I second this part of the thread, which explains what a person should do when they’ve tweeted something that turned out to be untrue. (Although, if you think it’s only Fox News contributors and right-wing commentators that leave up blatantly false tweets even after acknowledging the truth, you really don’t spend much time on social media. Which is a good thing, actually. But still might leave you with a misleading impression of how media works in 2022.)
The other sad part is even if Sara Carter had immediately deleted her original tweet and apologized for her mistake, the retraction would have gotten only a fraction of the retweets and responses as the inflammatory original. People want to believe the worst about their enemies, and I don’t know if it’s possible to fix that.
Speaking of the “freedom convoy,” the past few weeks have felt kind of like a lower-stakes Canadian version of aftermath the post-9/11 era, though this time it’s the left that has been so traumatized that it’s demanding a crackdown by the state. In particular, this kind of thing has some serious “if you’re not a terrorist you have nothing to fear from the PATRIOT Act so quit your whining” energy.
While Mason and many of his Canadian media colleagues lick footwear, I’m with The Line (an excellent Substack newsletter, not to be confused with an anti-vaxxer kook group with the same name) on this:
As the protest in Ottawa winds down, your Line editors are beginning to ask themselves, perhaps too optimistically: what happens after the emergency is over?
The Liberal government has arrogated to itself enormous powers through the Emergencies Act: the most notable among them, the ability to freeze assets of protest participants without any kind of prior judicial approval or warrant. It's not entirely clear to us what would constitute an offence that the government would consider serious enough to justify using this power.
If someone gave $500 to the protest movement three weeks ago, would that merit freezing a bank account? Is the number $5,000? Or $50,000? Would this act apply to independent media livestreaming the protests?
Complicating matters, on Wednesday, Justice Minister David Lametti gave an interview with CTV's host Evan Soloman. Solomon asked whether ordinary people who donated to the trucker convoy should be worried about the provisions in the Emergencies Act. Lametti responded:
"If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars, and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried," said Lametti.
Excuse us, but … wtf?
Threatening people who are donating cash to anything that can be construed as a "pro-Trump" movement suggests that attempts to freeze assets aren't directed toward criminal behaviour, but are rather politically motivated.
We asked Lametti's office for response to his "pro-Trump" comments and this was his response:
“We always ask our police forces as well as our prosecutors to act reasonably, where they're going to work with the banks to ensure that they act reasonably. Obviously there are going to be judgment calls that will be made and serious contributors will be treated more seriously. But, as always, we're going to leave it to law enforcement to work with the banks, as they already do in other areas that already exist. Such as in anti-terrorism financing and in other areas through FINTRAC.”
This is, frankly, not much of an answer. It amounts to "we will be reasonable. Trust us!"
Well, we don't. We don't trust NDP leader Jagmeet Singh to hold this government to account in Parliament. We don't trust the left to clue into the fact that the tactics used against the convoy will be used against their causes in turn. We don't trust conservatives to show more principle or restraint when in power.
Look, no one can accuse The Line of being naive about the protest/occupation/freedom/whatever convoy. Many of the protesters do simply object to vaccine mandates and lockdowns. Some of these people are deluded; many appear to believe in conspiracy theories, and we do think there is evidence of a hard, and potentially militant edge to this movement that most of the protesters themselves seem to be oblivious to.
Further, we do understand the rationale for going after protest-connected assets. We should not allow blockades and unlawful gatherings to become lucrative in and of themselves. As long as organizers and the like are collecting enormous sums of money for continuing their protest, they will have every financial incentive to stick around and even escalate tensions with cops and residents.
But once the protest is over, the rationale for freezing assets ought to disappear. Governments can't just go around blocking access to the bank accounts of activists and political opponents unless those individuals are criminals. And if the government has reasonable grounds to suspect criminal behaviour, then they can do as they've always done and procure a goddamn warrant.
The dominant left-of-center party in Canada this week isn’t the Liberals, nor the NDP, nor the Green Party, which I’m not even sure still exists. It’s the Leopards Eating People's Faces Party, which has historically proven itself adept at drawing support from all over the political spectrum.
Some politicians who supported the War Measures Act in 1970 - admittedly a much more punitive and tyrannical piece of legislation, but in the face of a much more dangerous, lethal crisis than the anti-vaxxer idiots - later regretted it. I suspect the use of the Emergencies Act will go on to be one of these things Liberals and New Democrats would rather not talk about in the coming years.
Getting back to the issue of misinformation and getting things wrong on the internet, a few weeks ago I sneered at the Trudeau government for providing only non-lethal aid to Ukraine in the face of a Russian invasion. I’m happy to report I was wrong. (I am something of an expert in getting things wrong on the internet, you know.)
With right-wing Americans spreading misinformation about anti-vaxxer protests here in Canada, we’ve seen how hard it can be for a relatively small-population country to have a much more powerful neighbour on its doorstep. But it could be worse. Much, much worse.
Have to say that now that more info has come to light about the Emergencies Act and its provisions and how they are being used, I believe this was not only a wrong but also an irresponsible choice on the part of Trudeau and his government. I think the powers granted pertaining to people's personal finances are far too over-reaching for the situation at hand. But hey, I'm a Yank, so why should it matter to me, right? Well...stranger things have happened other than folks on one side of a border looking at what folks on the other side are doing to deal with a few "undesirables" and thinking "Hey, that ain't a half bad idea!" And in this case, I think it's a bit more than half.
Just hard for me to rationalize how lesser legal means could not have been employed to solve a "civil disobedience" problem that had become a much larger and real problem other than a noisy and briefly inconvenient protest. I dare say protesters have their rights to do so, but they don't have the right to inflict harms on others beyond perhaps the most minor and briefest of inconveniences. And it shouldn't take a nuclear legal option to deal with it. The Break In Case Of Emergency glass had to be shattered to send in the Mounties and clear the offenders out? Which is apparently what has begun to happen this weekend? Really?
I know that's an oversimplification, but sometimes things are more simple than they seem. Until political sensibilities and ambitions become involved, of course. But one thing that's really simple is the fact that using a last resort legal mechanism to go beyond dealing with immediate and proximate civil disruptors and relatively low-level actual law breakers and threaten current and future financial contributors to political or political adjacent causes is not only not a good look, it is a despicable and very dangerous practice. Trudeau and his people got it wrong. But, like I said, I'm just a Yank. And one man's law and order is just another's dangerous illiberalism...uh, authoritarianism...well, some kind of ism anyway.
BTW...that small population country / powerful neighbor on its doorstep analogy is sort of thought provoking. Hmm...