Canadian judge rules in favor of totalitarianism
Citing the precautionary principle, a Saskatchewan judge ruled against two individuals that sued the government for the province’s outdoor gathering restrictions during the pandemic. The precautionary principle is essentially a ‘better safe than sorry’ metric that is popular amongst activist judges in environmental law. However, use of this tool has slowly seeped out into other fields of the law, most visibly in public health law.
The reasons are obvious. Notably, the precautionary principle is tautologically unscientific. In a nutshell, it can be defined as the government’s ‘responsibility’ to take action to prevent risk to the public — in the absence of evidence — if the government has reason to believe (or political incentives) not taking action has the potential to cause harm. Some may prefer other definitions, you can switch out words like government for industry, et cetera; regardless, this principle is the reason why the climate change crazies and now the public health fanatics will always win in court. They do not have to burden themselves with worrying about the inconvenience of evidence.
At the time in Saskatchewan, I should add, the crowd limit for those outside was as low as 10 people, three times less than the crowd limit inside, and there was plenty of evidence (the public health order last until well into 2021) showing that this virus and all viruses spread more readily inside than outside. The data existed to make a decision based on sound scientific evidence, but the data would have pointed to the public health order being entirely based on public opinion; thus, even if the data exists, the precautionary principle allows those who use it to ignore existing information. In essence, data doesn’t really matter because, in our new world order, law is an art until the art becomes the law
Canadians should not be surprised. Our justice system has been damaged beyond repair for awhile now. While I love the fiction of a just system, we are far from living in one.
For starters, Saskatchewan admitted that they violated these people’s Charter rights, but the judge rules it was a reasonable infringement because
“As long as there was physical distancing at protests, there was nothing hindering the applicants from organizing and participating in multiple outdoor gathers of 10 persons or less, concurrently or consecutively”.
Therein lies the problem as violations of the Charter, that the government agrees these rules were, is what they were protesting. Thus, his point is moot because their form of protest was to exercise their Charter rights.
It is important to note that we are now at the point where people are divided into essentially four camps.
There are still people out there wearing masks in their cars alone. These are trained monkeys, acting out of routine more than fear.
Then there are the people that were skeptics all along, some were guessing most were not. We had ample data, despite government suppression, early on to know who was dying with the virus and who was not. There are decades of mask studies and the economic and social ramifications of lockdowns were clear to anyone who has understood any historical comparable. It was also obvious that the model the “experts” used to train the monkeys were junk science. These people were correct, which is why we are currently using their methods of not locking down and masking up despite, probabilistically, a significant higher chance of dying with the virus in 2022 than in 2020.
Then there is a third group that agrees that the second groups methods are the correct ones, yet they blame the second ground for not overreacting to the pandemic. People in this group are incapable of imagining a world where those in the second group had more information than them, thus, they pretend like they made the rational decision under the assumption that everyone lacked information in 2020. The third group of people are the crazy ones.
Finally, there is a fourth group of people, predominantly amongst conservatives, who chose the easy course. They either did not pay attention, said nothing, or are ashamed of their actions and the actions of others. These are the silent ones.
The problem with the first group is that they were never right, the problem with the second group is they were right too early, the problem with the third group is they right only after getting everything wrong, and the problem with the fourth group is they were right too late.
Now, here’s the thing: the precautionary principle is a double edged sword, at least in theory. Those who were right too early could have (and did) argued that the public health orders would do irreparable harm from the beginning. Thus, citing the precautionary principle, they could have warned the government against acting. The government acted expecting the people that were never right to be right and the judge ruled based on the logic of the people that were right only after getting everything wrong.
The fact that the public health orders were a terrible idea was obvious at the time. As it turns out, society is still counting the deaths due to things like lockdowns. If the harm can go both ways, then the precautionary principle should not be used in a just society. The only time that it should be used is if there is only benefit, but no harm from taking an action. But we do not like in a just society, and that was not the case at any time in the past two and a half years.
There's a cheap quality to the smug sanctimony of the judge's decision. He's just following a script, written in the same mean sprit and with the same intellectual shallowness as all the performative progressivism. It's so desperately mediocre, and such a demonstration of witless groupthink, that it looks like planned malice.
Officials fooling themselves into becoming totalitarians, it would be beautiful if it was some kind of morality play or such, and not reality.
Acting when failure to do so will lead to harm is one thing. Child protective services taking achild from a convicted abuser f.e. Consider the logic: the child is taken because the abuser has been proved to have committed an abusive act (real abuse, not crap like violating pronoun-diktats). So CPS mst act before the next instance of abuse, yes? Therefore, CPS just can't lurk arond surveiling each and every convicted abuser, ready to pounce the moment they do anything untowards. Logistically impossible, and endangering to the child - therefore necessitating pre-emptive action.
Sadly, this isn't just a slippery slope, this is king of the slippery hill.
We have the whole range of nitwits trying to use such things for their own political purpose. From rad-fems aguing the concept of "cis-het families" is the cause of abuse, to Jesus-freak fundies arguing that despite the child being battered it's still best for it to remain in the family (just picking the two most obvious offenders here, not sides). This is just example, the underlying mechanics apply across all large-scale organisations.
And these groups of citizens using their rights and privileges as citizens pull the agency, the politicians and the constituency and the lawmakers and police hither and yon in their application of law and praxis.
And as it's pretty much inevitable that someone, somewhere, choses to weaponise this process to achieve as total control as possible.
Here in Sweden, IQ is about to be criminalised. I mention that just to show that it will get much worse unless you change tack. Consider you neighbours: how did the US throw off british rule?