Governments have to have emergency powers. That’s one of the reasons we have governments. When something crazy happens, the government is best suited to address it.
But there has to be review, and the emergencies need to end.
There’s been a bad trend over the last few decades of unchecked government power. The Patriot Act was certainly part of this. The 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force is another example. It went on and on. The President could just bomb people on relatively slim pretexts.
Various government actions in response to the pandemic took this to a new level. Some governments acted responsibly, but some were making crazy rules with no review or oversight. Remember when Governor Whitmer banned stores from selling garden seeds?
How many of these emergency laws have been repealed? What kind of precedents have been set? Who is reviewing all of this?
Our northern neighbors have been heading in a bad direction for some time, and it seems Trudeau wants to accelerate the decline. He’s invoking emergency powers to interfere with protesting truckers’ bank accounts.
I don’t know if that is or isn’t as outrageous as it sounds, but it would be nice to believe somebody was keeping Trudeau honest. Maybe the legislature could step in. Maybe a court could ensure the truckers’ rights aren’t being violated.
But that’s not the way it’s been going. It seems as if we’ve been on a world-wide slide towards autocracy, with a mostly complicit media playing along.