this post was submitted on 18 Oct 2022
8 points (61.8% liked)
Memes
45636 readers
1673 users here now
Rules:
- Be civil and nice.
- Try not to excessively repost, as a rule of thumb, wait at least 2 months to do it if you have to.
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nope, sorry. Dead wrong, hyperbolic statement. Nobody in Canada is being arrested for holding up a piece of paper on the street with a political message, regardless of their ethnicity. Yes, indigenous people are treated unfairly by the police, in some cases even murdered by the police. But this is a completely different topic than that of political freedom.
Regarding the starlight tours, this is utterly unrelated to the freedom of speech issue. Yes, police have abused indigenous people in the past and in some cases are still doing so in the present but we acknowledge this as a society all the way to the top offices of the country. We have a judicial system which is attempts to correct this and even compensate for biases such as the Gladue Report etc.
By any reasonable definition, Canada is much more politically free than Russia/Belarus. A reasonable bar to say that Canada enjoys political freedom is not "no injustice ever occurs on in Canada" or "police never abuse anyone in Canada" or "the state has never violated freedom of speech/expression even once". If we are going to have the bar that high, then literally no society ever in history, or probably in the future, can adhere to this definition of freedom of speech so the phrase becomes useless and your criticism of Canadian society becomes meaningless because no society in the real universe can ever live up to your ideal.
A more reasonable definition would be something like "almost everyone, almost all the time, enjoys basically unlimited ability to express their political opinions without being subjected to persecution from the state" and we undoubtedly have that in Canada, and more so than in just about any other country. No police officer is going to do anything to any indigenous person for just holding up a protest sign in downtown Vancouver or Winnipeg or Toronto.
This is not at all true in Russia. People are arrested for as little as holding up a blank piece of paper, let alone an actually dissenting opinion!
That's a false statement. Harassment of Indigenous people is fundamentally political in nature. Canada illegally occupied unceded land that belongs to these people, and it violates their sovereignty. This is a political issue.
If you're white.
You set up a false narrative that ignores actual political activity of Indigenous people that they get arrested and even murdered for.
I'll also remind you what Canadian government did when the trucker protest blocked the bridge to US. Whatever we might say about this protest, it definitely was peaceful and citizens were expressing their views in a democratic fashion. The government invoked emergency powers to disperse this protest. Interestingly, this protest was allowed to go on right up to the point where it started affecting business interests.
What exactly are you even saying here? Are you saying that non-white people don't have more political freedom / freedom of speech than a non-white person in Russia? I have never seen anyone, not even a person of colour, taken away by police immediately as soon as they so much as hold up a piece of blank paper.
Okay I know you don't want to admit that you used hyperbole and I know that you probably like really love Russia and Belarus and don't like Canada and you disagree with our whole society and everything but you really are not staying focused on what we're talking about. Your claim is that Western countries like USA and Canada bestow less freedom to their populations and are more authoritarian than Russia and Belarus. This is just plain false. That isn't to say that all political activity, broadly defined, is permitted. Virtually anything and everything could come under the banner of political activity, and so obviously there are going to be limitations on it. In Canada that tends to be when your political activity infringes on the rights of others in society. Yes, we live in a Capitalist society so that includes people's property right. Protesters in Canada are only removed from the situation by the police when they do things like physically block people or projects or disrupt infrastructure.
You know perfectly well that that kind of political activity is not tolerated in virtually any society, least of all Russia and Belarus.
I'm saying that, as the numerous articles I linked earlier explain, Indigenous people in Canada suffer incredible amounts of abuse and political repression. The fact that you continue to deny this clearly shows that you're not interested in comparing actual freedoms people have in Canada or whether the laws are applied equally.
No, that's just the straw man you keep using. What I said was that western regimes are themselves often culpable of the same crimes they accuse their designated enemies of. I've even linked an entire book documenting such repressions in US in another comment in the same thread.
Oh you mean when a protest is an actual protest as opposed to a parade.
Another straw man.