Friday, February 11, 2022

A Brave New World Without Rights: Ending Mandates Does Not Strip Government of the Ability to Do This Again

 https://www.juliusruechel.com/2022/02/a-brave-new-world-without-rights.html

The ongoing Truckers for Freedom convoy in Ottawa has triggered a shockwave that is reaching all around the world. Even as our authoritarian federal regime continues to double down on measures and threatens to use brute force tactics against peaceful protesters, many provinces are nervously beginning to lay out a timeline for ending mandates.

But there is something important missing from the conversation surrounding the end of mandates. If the mandates are simply dropped today without calling out the underlying legal and ethical fallacy that was used to justify them, government overreach will have become normalized. We will be left without the legal protections to stop them from doing this to us again after the truckers go home. All it will take to put us back in a cage is for the government to point at the next wave, the next virus variant, or the next non-Covid emergency. We will have normalized that our rights, our freedoms, our bodily autonomy, and even access to our lives are conditional privileges, subject to opinion polls and technocratic impulses, and that they can be withdrawn again at any time, “for our safety.”