joshlemer

lol you Russian invasion defending mother fuckers

Canada illegally occupied unceded land that belongs to these people
Yes, and these people are not prevented in any way from expressing that view, and advocating for change on the issue.

if you're white.

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.

You set up a false narrative that ignores actual political activity of Indigenous people that they get arrested and even murdered for.

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.

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!

But this is not the same thing. This is people demonstrating by physically disrupting projects. We can agree or disagree about the validity of their movement, like I myself don't want us to build more pipelines, but clearly there's a difference. These people using more than just speech and persuasion to try and achieve their political ends, they are directly trying to intervene physically. Nobody in Canada is being arrested or even stopped from expressing their political outlook, talking to media, or trying to persuade people to join their cause. In fact, levels of government often actually help in these expressions by for instance allowing a protest/march to partially shut down streets for the duration of a demonstrations in major cities like Vancouver and Toronto. Major parties run and even win representation, running on anti-pipeline platforms.

But that freedom of speech and freedom of opinion and of the press does not extend to the point of taking matters into ones own hands. And if you tried to pull off something like this in Russia by physically blocking the construction of a natural gas pipeline I have a feeling that the police would be a lot less tolerant than the RCMP.

It's just a plain true fact that in Canada we have orders of magnitude more political freedom than in Belarus and Russia.

western countries that claim to have more freedoms while doing same things as the states they decry as being authoritarian

Sorry, but people in the states and Canada just aren't being jailed for their political opinions. There's nothing even remotely like https://youtu.be/TbzV1it1YPY or https://twitter.com/nikorepi/status/1503096676575236098 happening in North America...