I'm sure the rationale for why it's apparently Charter-compliant leans heavily on Section 1, but the courts have been far too generous in deferring to Parliament on use of Section 1 as a justification for "minor" infringements.
It has also never been invoked before, and hence has not withstood the scrutiny of a Charter challenge yet. It may not, in fact, be Charter-compliant.
Nothing is sacred or revered, to the extent that religion is being replaced by diy mysticism, ideology, politics, or Great Causes, be it climate or BLM or MAGA.
In my mind, the solution is cultural. We need shared values and deep understanding of the principles that govern our countries. We need good faith debate and review of outdated laws, revision or excision of bad ideas - racial language, weird moral errata, and finally a sufficiently detailed and rigorous regulation of novel technology that older concepts fail to account for.
Social media, adtech, and search engines aren't common carriers, but legislation shouldn't try to shoehorn regulation of platforms and communities into pre-internet legal paradigms. It's way past time for regulation and legislation of digital liberties.
The 2nd amendment in the US didn't account for nuclear weapons. The war on drugs and the current global legal system around drugs didn't account for human nature and civil liberty. Section 230 and phone companies and cable TV aren't concepts that map properly to the modern internet, and we'll probably see radical changes at an increasing rate. Nailing down basic things like digital privacy rights, penalizing surveillance, rewarding innovation and fixing patents and copyright are crucial, but apparently it doesn't test well, so nobody is fundraising for that platform.
Canada is not bad, but things can break down rapidly. Trudeau will fail on the side of authoritarian control, so any actual damage resulting from that should be fodder for debate on refining the system and protection from abuse. And if no damage is done, recognizing and reinforcing the fail-safe structures in government is probably necessary.
What a wild straw man argument. On the one hand, I generally agree with you. On the other hand, I am fairly confident I wouldn't trust anyone to decide for me what limits there are on "revision or excision of bad ideas".
So much of what you argue for relies on trust- trust that we are all working towards a common goal, primarily. However, there really doesn't seem to be a clear path forward when both sides assume the other side is arguing in bad faith.
I'm not aware of any military that deploys a precision marksman without a spotter. That makes a precision rifle a two-soldier job. .50 caliber machine gun? two, maybe three boots? Squads will have members with DMRs or LMGs but they aren't suitable for the same task -- they just extend the capabilities of the squad.
Extend that to thinks like fighter jets, nukes, comms, etc. etc. and the actual threat of any of those is drastically reduced outside the crazy people do crazy things category of events, and even then, you're going to need a big group of crazy people.
The replacement and actual threat already exists and was popularized in the Middle East in the 70s and arrived here in the 90s but it isn't sensational but I'm not confident I wouldn't end up on yet-another-watch-list by saying it explicitly. So, yay, freedom.
This is the mainstream prescription since there has been bellyaching about the woes of the age (i.e. forever, or provably, since the invention of writing).
One idea that I think is more interesting is Machievelli's - he pointed out that the Roman state was at its most dynamic and powerful when it was locked in permanent internal contradiction: between the landless and landed.
One can easily carry the analogy along. The 60's, in its time, was seen as a moment of social disintegration and civilizational collapse. In retrospect however, we can see that an america that had not had the 60's would be a scary, oppressive place, a perpetual 1955 of the human soul.
Populism is democracy. That's what anti-populists hate about it: the idea that a simple majority can get its way.
Wrong. A democracy, at least a functioning and legitimate one, is not judged by enacting the will of the majority, but by protecting the rights of the minority.
Allowing everyone else to participate and weigh the totality of needs and wants is what makes democracy different.
Same misconception about what armed and regulated militia is. Its' Federal commanded state national guard units not individuals.
The principles don't have to be mine, and they don't need to be political, even. It's even possible with something silly... "America has the best fucking apples on the planet, and we're goddamn proud of that. Everything we strive and suffer for is for the best goddamn apple pie in human history, and if you wanna take that, you can pry it from our cold dead hands. "
Right now, we're socially fractured in every way possible to fracture under the threshold of combat, and even that is failing in some places.
We better figure out what it means to be American before there's no point to it, or before it fails so badly that continuing as an American means fatally corrupting any principles or ideals we claim to hold.
There are ideas for seasteads and crypto-nations that I find compelling, but I'm not a utopian. I think the Constitution is something admirable and the ideals are structurally important for any notion of liberty going forward in history. I hope that America finds its way back to some sort of cohesion but I don't see any paths toward anything resembling unity.
That feels accurate. The next question then becomes, how will that play and/or be exploited in the USA, it's neighbor.
Let's, for a moment, presume there are entities within the USA that would welcome the opportunity. Now back to Canada...how much outside (i.e., USA based) influence is being exerted on the situation in Canada to tilt things towards the authoritarian?
This isn't a conspiracy theory. It's a simple extrapolation of history. Let's not be naive.
I think this feels "new" to Americans because it's on our border, and because Canada looks more like the US and is assumed to be more stable and less prone to authoritarian emergency measures than e.g. Venezuela or Argentina. But similarly extreme and extra-judicial banking controls have been implemented by other governments in the hemisphere when authoritarian left-wing parties in power feel threatened by right-wing populist movements they believe are at least partly sponsored by America.
