Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition. In fact it did that twice in 50 years.
And only twenty people getting their rights completely stripped because they bothered the federal government workers in Ottawa is good enough according to you?
Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
Please don't cross into the flamewar style on HN. This comment is only dipping a toe in that direction, but still—it's the opposite direction to what we're trying for here.
Are you talking about the militant separatists who had already committed mailbombings and escalated to assasinating a government official and kidnapping a foreign diplomat on Canadian soil in 1970?
It’s also important to note that afterwards Quebec separatism continued to be a legitimate political movement without a terrorist wing, with parties represented in federal and provincial governments.
The Patriot act doesn't even come close to emergency powers. And the Patriot act would've been insanely worse if the US had the equivalent of our non withstanding clause.
So no, it hasn't been doing the same. Bush and his cronies sure would've wanted to go further though, I agree.
Also, another difference is that the Patriot act has been very controversial in the years since. Whereas the same hasn't been true in Canada for the usage of emergency power. And no one seems to care that we see more and more laws passed with the non-withstanding clause either.
> Crazy how only Canada has used emergency powers to curtail opposition.
As opposed to using it to curtail support? It was used against occupiers and there is no Charter right to that (2011 ONSC 6862; 2024 ONSC 3755).
> We basically have 0 rights rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.
There are multiple cases where governments (with majorities) have passed legislation that was successfully challenged under the Charter.
Further, the Emergencies Act was written post-Charter, with it in mind:
> AND WHEREAS the Governor in Council, in taking such special temporary measures, would be subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Bill of Rights and must have regard to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, particularly with respect to those fundamental rights that are not to be limited or abridged even in a national emergency;
> * But I hope you realize that it doesn't show anything. A federal or even provincial government can absolutely pass any law, with a simple majority, that doesn't respect the charter simply by invoking the non withstanding clause.*
And the use of the withstanding clause has to be re-up every five years, as that is the maximum time before a new election is held so that The People™ can decide if they want to continue with it:
> (3) A declaration made under subsection (1) shall cease to have effect five years after it comes into force or on such earlier date as may be specified in the declaration.
> Can you show me a single piece of legislation that used that clause and that was still overturned?
The point of the clause was so that The People™, through their duly elected representatives, would have the final say in matters of government and not judges (who are potentially answerable to no one). Whether it should be judges that have the final say (like in the US) or legislators (like in the UK) is up for debate: in Canada it was decided to split the difference.
> But the point remains that the constitution is absolutely horrible for minorities.
Tell that to gay people who got to get married because of it—even though there is nothing about the topic in the Charter. This was before it was probably fully accepted socially, and I doubt any politician wanted to make the move.
See also perhaps abortion under the Morgentaler decision in the 1980s, when society was much more conservative.
You can probably say the same thing about euthanasia (which the SCC disallowed in 1993 (Rodriguez, [1993] 3 SCR 519) and then insisted upon more recently, which gave us the euphemistically named MAID).
Those are unrelated to the charter, and all of those have been allowed without using the non withstanding clause. As you said yourself, nothing in the charter says that gay people can't marry.
I genuinely can't think of a single time where the clause was used to add rights instead of removing them so I'm not sure what your argument is.
Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
If your point is that the constitution allows for flexibility then sure yes, but that's more due to the "living constitution" framework that the SCC uses than the conditions itself.
All three cases were decided on Charter grounds. Morgentaler tried challenging abortion pre-Charter and lost.
> Almost everything you mentioned isn't really related to the constitution. In fact, any province could use the non withstanding clause tomorrow to make gay marriage illegal again, even if the SCC allowed it. So if anything,that shows how useless the charter is.
The Canadian Constitution and the rights there-in is not absolutist:
> 1 The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
"In 1971, official date of the birth of topos theory, unfortunately the dream team at
Dalhousie was dispersed. What happened, that made you go to Denmark ?
Some members of the team, including myself, became active against the Vietnam
war and later against the War Measures Act proclaimed by Trudeau.
That Act,similar in many ways to the Patriot Act 35 years later in the US, suspended civil liberties under the pretext of a terrorist danger.
(The alleged danger at the time was a Quebec group later revealed to be infiltrated by the RCMP, the Canadian secret police.)
Twelve communist bookstores in Quebec (unrelated to the terrorists) were burned down by police;
several political activists from various groups
across Canada were incarcerated in mental hospitals, etc. etc.
I publicly opposed the consolidation of this fascist law, both in the university senate and in public demonstrations.
The administration of the university declared me guilty of “disruption of academic activities”.
Rumors began to be circulated, for example, that my categorical arrow diagrams were actually plans for attacking the administration building.
Amazingly there is someone living very close to the airport where they found the body of the Deputy Premier of Quebec (Pierre Laporte) in 1970 that flies the flags of allegiance to the successors of the terrorists (i.e. the MNLQ following from the FLQ) from a pole in his yard for everyone on the highway to see.
For some people all this stuff is very much part of their reason for being, but the FLQ took being obnoxious to make a point to staggering new levels. Just the titles of their books alone are astonishing, and impossible to quote here without causing justified offence.
yeah what people dont always understand (not saying you dont) is that FLQ supporters see themselves as basically being occupied by Anglo Canadians. Until the 60's there was entrenched discrimination in Montreal against catholics and french-speakers. The city even used to have two hockey teams, one for Anglos and one for Francos.
Ehh, I think a surprising amount of the Quebecois’ problems were self-inflicted by letting the Catholic Church run people’s lives, and the Quiet Revolution helped a lot. Like, it wasn’t the anglos bullying people’s grandmothers into having an eighth child after a rough pregnancy, the local priest would take a few minutes during mass to call her out in front of he whole community.
I don't have a horse in this race, but I would have found it useful if you wrote what exactly you find terrifying. It's often in this kind of discussions that someone says "Things said here are X", but there are things said on both sides and I literally cannot tell even which side the speaker is on.
It’s also so very weird that both sides of this issue are likely nodding their head agreeing with you. I couldn’t get a good inference on which side of the comments you meant, personal opinion and assumptions notwithstanding.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - CS Lewis.
Symbolic actions like painting "BLM" on a street are cute and all, but that doesn't mean they supported the protests. In fact, the cities such as New York and Chicago had some of the most violent suppression of protests by their police forces, despite loudly claiming to support BLM. Actions ultimately speak louder than words.
> At least 200 cities in the U.S. had imposed curfews by early June 2020, while more than 30 states and Washington, D.C., activated over 96,000 National Guard and State Guard service members.[33][34][35][36] The deployment constituted the largest military operation other than war in U.S. history.[37]
Yes, I know since I was part of the protests back then. But there's an incredibly big difference between cracking down on a protest and invoking emergency powers.
In America, we didn’t need emergency powers to shoot BLM protesters. Or Civil Rights protesters, or the unarmed veterans of the Bonus Army, or union members — historically it’s fine to shoot protesters.
Conservatives are just snowflakes because it happened to their guys just one time.
Okay, so if I show you an example of a protest with people that weren't masking or social distancing, you'd be in favor of using emergency powers against protestors that were protesting for racial justice?
What glib nonsense. We had authoritarian right wing protesters -- who don't believe in democracy -- trying to topple our elected government. Imposing their will on the people in Ottawa for weeks, threatening violence and disturbing the peace.
i.e. Not constitutionally responsible to the people.
Words have meaning, as do actions, sir, and you're choose to ignore both because of your partisan blind spots.
> There was no "peaceful" presentation of grievance. There was weeks of civil disobedience and actual acts of violence.
Partisans love to play this game, where they judge a large group of people by the worst possible interpretation of the actions of a tiny subset of them.
For a protest which some estimates say peaked at ~18,000, this was the resulting set of "violent" charges:
"12 charges of assaulting a peace officer; six charges of assault; three charges of assault or intimidation with a weapon; five charges of possessing a weapon dangerous to public peace; two charges of carrying a concealed weapon; one charge of possessing a restricted firearm; and four charges of uttering threats of death or bodily harm." [0]
Obviously this is not acceptable, but the idea that the protesters as a group were "authoritarians" because 0.01% of them got violent is hysterical nonsense.
Charges were low because the police refused to do their job. This is stated on record.
(Also... Partisan hardly describes me. I've never voted Liberal in my life and have been opposed to this PM since day one. Ask any of my annoyed coworkers and friends.)
So only "bougie federal workers" live in Ottawa? And not being able to sleep for days on end is just "getting annoyed"
That's... amazing. Thanks for clearing that up for me.
And you're accusing me of convoluted scenarios.
This is deep down nested in replies of replies, so unlikely to be seen but...We have plenty of members of HN from Ottawa. Tell me, Ottawa people, what do you think of this?
And yes, they should have been arrested. Too bad the police refused to do their job.
Your account has been breaking the site guidelines badly in this thread. Would you please stop? Regardless of how wrong someone else is or you feel they are, It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.
dang, it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating.
I see a lot of deep flame bait in this thread. A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own for partisan and ideological purposes. Context here is important given news in recent weeks, with Trudeau's name on the lips of people like Trump, Musk, etc.
I have a "karma" of almost 20,000 and have been on hackernews for a very long time at this point. I'm sure my passion is showing through, but it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out.
There are some issues which trigger emotional response. I usually don't get into the back and forth response, but this is a seriously frustrating thread and I think if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic (we have people driving around with bumper stickers reading "F* Trudeau" and this whole topic is tied in with COVID, vaccines, etc. etc.) will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic.
I'm sorry I couldn't respond to this sooner! I got started on a reply and then ended up on a flight with no wifi.
> it would help if you would clarify which guideline I'm violating
I know, and I wish I had the cycles to clarify this in every case; it's just not possible. If you look at the first paragraph of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42629499, I wrote a longer explanation about this for a different user who was asking the same thing (albeit rather less politely).
As a quick answer though, comments like these broke the site guidelines by using inflammatory rhetoric, cross-examination, calling names, snark, and crossing into personal attack:
Me too, so I spent hours moderating it and posted 20 or so requests to people to stop, as well as a general admonition at the top of the thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42616355.
> A lot of it by people of another country, making claims about my own
Such perceptions aren't reliable. Internet readers tend to back-fit such perceptions to their assumptions about who would be holding a given position and why; but these assumptions are frequently contradicted by the data. Since the perceptions mostly add to one's feelings of aggravation, it's best to remember that one doesn't actually know these things (e.g. who is posting from where) and suspend them.
Unfortunately we can't publish the data without violating people's privacy, but many comments opposing your views were posted from Canadian IP addresses and many comments supporting your views were posting from IP addresses outside Canada. Not a perfect indicator, but it's clear that this argument breaks down on ideological lines, not national lines.
> it feels odd given my citizenship and past here, to single me out
You were in no way being singled out, and certainly not given your citizenship! If you look through my other posts in this thread (not that I recommend it), you'll see how many other admonishments I posted. We're as careful as we know how to be to moderate HN based on the site guidelines, not people's views, let alone their nationality, background, or anything like that.
There were tons of other users breaking the site guidelines in this thread, but it wasn't possible to get to them all. Unfortunately people tend to jump to the conclusion, when they see a bad post going unmoderated, that the mods must secretly agree with it. Nothing could be further from true; most likely we just didn't see it.
> There are some issues which trigger emotional response.
Indeed there are. The question then becomes how well we each can regulate our emotional responses. Commenters here are asked to do that regardless of how wrong others are or one feels they are. If you (<-- I don't mean you personally, of course, but all of us) can't do that without remaining respectful to others, it's best to wait until your activation has settled to the point when you can. That's not easy, of course, but it's doable. Your more recent comments in this thread, for example, have been fine.
> if you're not ready for the level of passionate vitriol this topic will unleash, it's best to lock or flag this whole topic
We do that much of the time but I don't believe it's either possible or desirable to do it all the time. For this community to fulfill its mandate, we need occasional cases of difficult and divisive topics getting frontpage discussion, and community members need to develop the maturity and self-regulation to be able to do it respectfully, remaining curious, even in the presence of others who are not doing that at all. Longstanding members have the most responsibility to do this.
It would be so much easier and less stressful not to take on that challenge, but then HN would be less than it might be, and it's our job to try to help it fulfill its potential.
Seriously? Do you know what the emergency powers entails? The Patriot act is not even remotely close. Like, not even 1% close. It's equivalent to martial law. It's such a weird whataboutism since it's not even close. It's a very Canadian response though, to assume that we are still better than those Americans even though it's objectively so much worse.
And okay, yeah that just proves my point. Since I'm not conservative, and I realize that the conservatives aren't any better for stuff like that. I absolutely would expect the conservatives to abuse federal power, but I expected better from the liberals. I volunteered for Trudeau's campaign twice, and met him when I got my citizenship when he was a local MP. That's why i was so disappointed.
It is funny to see this almost telegraphed response to my point (what about the us, what about the conservatives). Like sure, yes, no party in Canada would be better than this. But that's the entire point, and that's abhorrent.
Would you please stop perpetuating this flamewar? I asked you upthread not to go in that direction, and instead you've gone full bore in that direction. Not cool.
(I don't care what side of the argument people are on—I care who is breaking the site guidelines and making HN a more hellish place.)
Maybe it's because other countries are too soft (talking from the perspective of a French who saw suburbs in fire because some people did not want to stop when the police told them so).
The guy likely to take over is going to use non-emergency powers to curtail the rights of trans people.
The sanctioned individuals were involved with blocking an international border. They had the stated intention of causing mischief and preventing leaving or entering Canada. They were blockading their own economy; they deserved what they got. You don't disrupt life and economy just because you've been asked to help keep a virus from spreading and get to get away with it.
And now we'll curtail the rights of people who absolutely do NOT deserve it.
The lurch to the right is deeply inspired by attitudes like this. We even have the Premier of Alberta claiming that unvaccinated people are "the most discriminated against group in history", which, whatever "side" of the vaccination "debate" you fall on, you know is an unbelievably stupid thing to say.
Please, help prevent a drastic lurch to the right by at least reading the lede of an article as well as the headline.
As I'm just a lowly computer technician, no I do not get to choose who gets rights. That is typically the domain of judges, lawmakers, and more fundamentally the founders of nations.
Preventing goods from crossing an international border is called a blockade. In most jurisdictions, this is regarded as a crime and is generally done to harm an economy. Crimes are often punished. Some aren't (like wage theft, not since 1955), but a lot are.
Interfering with a country's ability to trade with another country, as well as publicly threatening to kill law enforcement officers, is quite a serious offence.
I am not certain left-leaning government should not punish crimes, as it's generally seen as a good idea to ensure that activity that disrupts life or liberty of others doesn't happen, and judiciary measures are a part of that. I guess we COULD try an idea in which people are trusted not to do harm, that could be an interesting experiment.
That's absolutely not what a blockade is. Again, by your logic, everyone that was part of the Oka Crisis should've been treated as a foreign enemy or a traitor, and prosecuted as such. I mean, they were armed and wanted indépendance. Yet that's not how it works when you are talking about Canadian citizens.
The exact same logic can also be used to prosecute the people who protested the pipelines in British Columbia. They were literally blocking the construction of a pipeline that was being built literally for international trade.
It's just an insanely dangerous logic, one that can be very conveniently used only against people who usually disagree with you politically.
Like your entire comment reads as a huge far right power fantasy.
Oh and by the way, judges can't do anything w.r.t emergency powers. That's what's so dangerous about them. They remove almost every check and balances.
I guess you're right. A blockade, by definition, is to "render [something] unsuitable for passage". They often have the impact of disallowing goods, people, aid etc from crossing a border (especially when a blockader says "I am blockading to prevent the passage of goods"), but I take your point.
In the UK recently, protesters who blocked major roads to make a point about fossil fuels were imprisoned due to the fact that they were disrupting infrastructure. One elderly protestor has even had to be put back in prison because a medical issue prevented her from being able to wear an ankle tag.
Blocking infrastructure IS generally something that gets punished. But again sometimes it isn't. Quite recently, a protest in London (UK) lead to major roads being blocked with tractors and other agricultural equipment. These protestors have not been charged.
Intent seems to matter. The Coutts and Ottawa guys were blocking infrastructure in protest at being asked to keep a virus under control; the oil protestors in the UK were blocking infrastructure to demonstrate that oil is maybe not great; the agricultural protestors were blockading infrastructure to demonstrate that paying inheritance tax is bad.
Maybe it's not about rights but more about demonstrations that correspond to popularly held positions? I'm not sure. It's something I think about a lot.
I mean don't get me wrong, I absolutely agree that they should have been arrested. I can't think of a single reason why they shouldn't have been. You can't blockade an international border without expecting to be arrested.
The issue wasn't that they were arrested or even charged of anything. The issue is that the government deliberately used the emergency act (which is basically a nuclear bomb) where they could've simply... arrested them. There was no emergency, there was no widespread unrest or any event that was leading to a loss of control. They could've absolutely just arrested everyone, using force if necessary, and moved on. The protestors weren't even armed, they could've just used anti riot police like they always due. As you said yourself, the UK protestors were arrested without using the equivalent of martial law.
So my point isn't that the protestors were innocent, it's that Trudeau's government clearly used the emergency powers act as a way to send a message, and to show that you won't just get arrested but also stripped of your rights completely. Which is to me absolutely abhorrent, and that's coming from someone who actually volunteered for Trudeau's campaign back in 2015 and the election after that one.
I would argue that the unrest was very much widespread. It was just distributed into different forms.
I worked at Chapters for that year, and after we started to require masks in store (we were all getting sick!), I had books thrown at me. That is unrest. What I experienced was NOTHING compared to what grocery store workers went through, nurses, police officers, transit workers... EVERYONE.
Those behaviours were dangerous to society itself; on an individual level, innocent people got hurt for nothing other than simply doing their jobs. On a wider level, had we thrown our hands up and went "okay, you're right. wearing a mask IS the worst oppression anyone has ever faced, Florence Nightingale is a mythical invention by Big Mask, and your individual freedoms are absolutely more important than anything else" and simply let the virus go on unchecked, we might not be posting on a silly orange website now.
I don't know if I completely agree with using the Emergency Powers Act, but it certainly sent a message that said "What we're all going through now is extremely serious. Sit down and let the adults speak."
And I think it worked. Merely arresting the protestors might have just been cutting a head off a hydra.
Maybe.
I don't know. We'll never truly know. It was a weird, lurid time for everyone and nobody knew what the right thing to do was with conviction and certainty. But we must have done something right, because we're still here.
But the incumbents of the day, in every nation, are being blamed. They are being blamed for...letting us continue to live?
It hasn't been a perfect decade. It wasn't under Harper and it won't be under PP, either. Westminster doesn't encourage perfection. Leaders are incentivised to just do enough.
It's going to be a difficult few years for all of us. Well, any of us bring home under $250k anyway.
The protesters at the border could and were arrested without invoking the Emergencies act. The border is under Federal jurisdiction and the laws broken were Federal.
The Emergencies act was invoked to evict the occupiers from Ottawa. They were breaking municipal and provincial laws and on land where the province and city had jurisdiction. The Ottawa city government, the Ottawa police chief and the province were all incompetent and failed to arrest and evict.
Surely there were options like appointing a new police chief which they could have gone to first rather than going straight to emergency powers and suspension of rights?
So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown, the federal government used exceptional powers, usually used in states of wars, overstepped the locally elected governments and used an exceptional law?
A law that strips people of all of their rights, and suspends the charter? Is that supposed to make it better? Like you realize the provincial and municipal governments were also elected democratically? All of this for a local protest, with no deaths, little physical violence, etc.
I mean, it does give credence that the entire thing happened because poor federal workers were affected, but it's still not a good reason.
> So, because the provincial government didn't think that the situation justified a harder crackdown
Because the provincial government loves it when anything bad happens to Ottawa or when the Federal government gets blamed for something that's their own fault.
If it was Toronto that was occupied, the province would have stepped in early, quickly and decisively.
But that's the point of having constitutional limitations on political power and how it is exercised. Unfortunately, it's all to common to hear arguments that the exercise of political power should have no limitations so long as it's approved of by a quantitative majority.
A sufficient majority can change the constitution though. It’s impossible to have a mechanism that prevents that. So this is merely a debate of 51% vs. 67% (or whatever).
The amendment process is slow and complex by design. It's not just a one-off supermajority, but rather a supermajority in both houses of Congress (or a special amending convention) followed by a supermajority of states each individually ratifying a proposed amendment. The most recent constitutional amendment took over 200 years to be ratified.
The nature of the process makes it very difficult to misuse constitutional amendments a mechanism for implementing policy to deal with ephemeral controversies or emotion-laden causes. The only time that really happened was with the 18th amendment, and that was a disaster, which ultimately was repealed.
The amendment process has indeed become impractical in the US, and given that "nature abhors vacuum", a different and easier route to bending the constitutional law was found - nominate your people to SCOTUS and let the interpret the Constitution favorably to you.
I would argue that this is a very suboptimal solution to the problem.
My comment was about democracies and their constitutions in general. I’m neither Canadian nor American. Yes, there are significant degrees in how easy or hard it is, but in the end if you have a sufficiently large majority that wants to deprive a minority of their rights, the mere fact of having a democracy by itself doesn’t prevent it.
In fact, democracy in itself might enable that, which is why it's important to have strong boundaries around all political decision-making, whether democratic or otherwise.
I don't know of any western democracy that has something this blatant in their constitution, though I might be wrong:
>A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter. However, the rights to be overridden must be either a "fundamental right" guaranteed by Section 2 (such as freedom of expression, religion, and association), a "legal right" guaranteed by Sections 7–14 (such as rights to liberty and freedom from search and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment) or a Section 15 "equality right".[2] Other rights such as section 6 mobility rights, democratic rights, and language rights are inviolable.
I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have. And this is not theoretical, the non withstanding clause is getting used more and more frequently here in Canada. And remember, since it's just a simple majority in parliament, it's only a matter of getting around 35% of the total votes. So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have. Is that actually common?
> A simple majority vote in any of Canada's 14 jurisdictions may suspend the core rights of the Charter
This is misleading. It also has to be in their juridsiction.
For example, alberta (25 years ago) tried to use the notwthstanding clause to ban gay marriage. It didn't work because it was out of their juridsiction.
> So a government that has 35% the popular vote can just suspend any right we have.
The notwithstanding clause only applies to some parts of the charter not all of it. It also doesn't apply to rights from other parts of the constitution.
It might also be possible for the federal government to disallow particularly egregious rights violation by provinces. I think its still an open question if fed still has power of reservation or disallowance or not.
> I don't think the US or France can just do a simple (parliamentary!) majority vote to override almost every right their citizens have.
What about the WWII Japanese internment camps? That wasn’t even a legislative action, it was Executive order 9066. There’s also the Habeas Corpus Suspension Act during the civil war.
I agree it’s not as blatantly spelled out in the Constitution but the mechanisms exist.
America is specifically designed not to be this and to prevent a tyranny of the majority because original immigrants to the USA were from minority religions where they lived in Europe and had been terrorized plenty.
And that designed failed spectacularly from the beginning. As the post you're replying to points out, slavery is essentially the majority deciding that a minority and their descendants have no rights whatsoever. This state of affairs lasted until the 1860s and even then those rights for the minority were severely curtailed until at least the 1960s.
I wouldn't say it failed spectacularly. The trade-off was well known amongst many even at the founding of america. There would simply be no America if slavery was disallowed from the beginning.
A hospital could still be a net positive for society, even if sometimes people go there and die who otherwise would have lived if they did not go to the hospital.
Was there a majority that was pro-slavery? My understanding was the agreement was that it was a minority that wanted slavery, and that slavery would be kept to that minorities states?
The Puritans were a minority group among the original settlers to the US, among the Dutch, French, Spanish, other British settlers and others. The founders and architects of the Constitution and US government were not Puritans.
Maybe it's just because I'm part of a minority but your entire comment is exactly the issue with Canadian politics. We basically have 0 rights the moment a majority decides that we don't. I guess that's the perks of having an incredibly ineffective constitution.