Canada tramples on free speech

 

     By Reginald Johnson

        Commentary

   A stanza in the Canadian national anthem, ‘O, Canada’ goes like this:

‘From far and wide,

 ‘O, Canada! we stand on guard for thee!’

 ‘God keep our land glorious and free!’

‘O, Canada, we stand on guard for thee!’

  Unfortunately, based on events of the last few weeks, the word ‘free’ in that song may not apply anymore. And ‘glorious’ may not apply either.

 The Canadian government disgraced itself in brutally cracking down on a group of truckers, known as the ‘Freedom Convoy,’ who were protesting long-running vaccine mandates. The government acted more like a dictatorship run by Augusto Pinochet rather than a democracy that accommodates the expression of different points of view.

 Driving in from different parts of the country, the truckers had taken their rigs into Ottawa, the capital of Canada, blocked streets and blared their horns. Some other truckers for a time blocked the Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor, Ontario, with Detroit, Michigan.

   No question, these protests were annoying and clearly interrupted daily life and regular business in Canada. But there was no significant violence during this period --- nobody burned down buildings, nobody robbed stores and nobody assaulted police.  As with any large protest group, some people behaved poorly and authorities made some arrests for alleged hate crimes, though few specifics have emerged.

  By and large, the demonstrators were peaceful and respectful. By blocking roads and bridges, the truckers were engaged in civil disobedience, a cherished tradition in democracies.

   But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau laced into the truckers, calling them hateful and violent. Instead of meeting with the group and trying to understand their grievances, Trudeau and local officials ordered the police to break up the protest, and break it up they did --- violently.

  Swinging batons, the police smashed the windows on trucks where truckers were refusing to leave. Another protester was thrown on the ground, and a video showed an officer kneeing the person repeatedly. Police rode horses into a crowd of people and a woman singing “Peace, Love and Freedom” was knocked to the ground and trampled.

   But the worst aspect of the government’s crackdown on the truckers was the move to essentially freeze their bank accounts. Trudeau, invoking Canada’s never-used “Emergencies Act,” had his government order a freeze on millions of dollars raised on social media accounts.

  This was an incredible attack on people’s rights of free speech and the right to protest. It has a fascistic ring to it --- a government attacking peoples’ finances simply because they don’t like their views or their acts of civil disobedience.

Parliament building, Ottawa, Canada. The government of Canada recently ordered a brutal crackdown on truckers protesting vaccine mandates, denying them free speech rights. 

 The Supreme Court of Canada approved the bank freeze in what Georgetown University Professor of Law Jonathan Turley called “a major blow to free speech and associational rights in Canada.”

  The Canadian Civil Liberties Association criticized Trudeau, saying the government’s use of emergency powers infringes on the basic rights of the truckers guaranteed to Canadians under the nation’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Amnesty International also criticized the Canadian government for its actions.

  It has been disturbing that members of the liberal-left and liberal media in the United States --- who years ago would have decried a government viciously cracking down on protesters --- seem to be supporting Trudeau’s martial-law tactics.

  CNN correspondent Paula Newton, for instance, said the truckers’ act of civil disobedience was nothing less than a “threat to democracy. An insurrection, sedition.”

  Turley said,  “Blocking streets, occupying buildings and shutting down bridges have long been tactics of protesters. Yet what constitutes a protest or an insurrection often seems to depend on the cause involved. When rioters caused billions of dollars of damages, burned police stations and occupied sections of American cities in the summer of 2020, for example, few in the media declared them to be terrorists or a threat to democracy.”

  The fundraising site, GofundMe, which previously helped in the funding of the Black Lives Matter protesters, froze more than $10 million raised for Canadian truckers to prevent it from being used to support them, Turley said.

  The attorney added, “The freezing of funds supporting the truckers laid bare the anti-free-speech trend sweeping the world, including in the US. There is no principled basis for cutting off the ability of citizens to support other citizens in a campaign of civil disobedience.”

  You get the feeling that most liberals and people on the left dismiss the truckers as a bunch of uneducated, white working-class racists who are probably admirers of Donald Trump. So in their view, these people are not worthy of being granted traditional rights of free speech and if they get slapped around by the police, then so be it.

  This, of course, is totally wrong. People have the right to free speech and the right to protest even if a majority of other people in the society don’t like what they’re saying. The right of free speech and the right of association cannot be selective.

  There is a concern that what happened in Canada to the Freedom Convoy could be a preview of coming attractions in the United States.

  The people in the United States have to be ever vigilant in protecting our core rights set forth in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution. We cannot allow what happened in Canada to happen here.

  

 

 

No Time for Political Posturing

Commentary

                                       

By Reginald Johnson

       

    BRIDGEPORT ---- It was about 12 hours after the horrific act of violence on Thursday morning, in which nine people were shot, one fatally, at the Trumbull Gardens low-income housing project.

   I had heard about the shooting after I got up on Thursday, and was watching Channel 12 for updates. I saw Mayor Bill Finch at the scene expressing his sympathy for the victims and their families and talking about what steps he was taking to curb crime.  Police Chief Joseph Gaudett was also on hand to give a statement, and housing officials gave comments as well.

   This is all entirely understandable that the chief elected official of the city, his police chief and other key officials would show up on the scene after such a terrible incident had occurred.

   This is one of the worst cases of violence in Bridgeport in a while, and the mayor in particular had to reassure people about what was happening to stop further violence. I thought Finch was good, although he went on a bit too long about the value of one of the the violence prevention programs he set up, the “Street-Safe” program whereby older men, some reformed convicts, work with young men in the neighborhood, counsel them, and steer them away from crime. I thought, if this program is so good, it sure as heck didn’t work in this case.

The Trumbull Gardens housing project in Bridgeport. One person was killed and eight people wounded in a mass shooting last week outside one of the buildings.

   But what really threw me off was what I saw when I decided to ride up to Trumbull Gardens a couple of hours later and take a look around.

  Driving down Trumbull Avenue through the center the complex, I saw a crowd with TV cameras all around. There was a guy in the middle, white shirt and tie, waving his hands and talking as if he was holding a press conference. Then I felt sick to my stomach. It was Joe Ganim, former mayor Bridgeport.

   This is the same Joe Ganim who about 15 years ago was engaging in a variety of corrupt schemes, making deals with friendly developers at the expense of people in the neighborhoods, tearing down acres of affordable housing and running a very secretive administration throughout.

   Fortunately, the feds were onto Ganim’s antics, he was nailed for his crimes, and went to prison. Served a good long term, I think about eight years.

  Now, a la Buddy Cianci down in Providence, Ganim wants to make a comeback. He’s running for mayor again. A disbarred lawyer, he tried to get his law license back after leaving prison, and was most appropriately turned down. (The idea of a lawyer turned felon being given his license back after serving time is truly absurd).

 But now lots of years have gone by, and I suppose Ganim is counting on the people of Bridgeport forgetting his bad deeds, and remembering some of the successes --- including the construction of the baseball stadium and the arena -- and also on a certain amount of anti-Finch sentiment out there.

  Ganim certainly has a right to run. He has paid for his crimes, and by all accounts, serving time in prison is a miserable experience. I’m not questioning his right to run or to have a decent livelihood. But I am questioning whether he has changed.

  I didn’t like what I saw yesterday. It seemed like classic Ganim, while the cameras are rolling, you make a splash. The mayor of the city had just been there, the crime was still only 12 hours old, and all the press was there.

   It wasn’t as if Ganim said, ‘after this has settled down, maybe in a couple of days, I’ll come out and talk to people about possible ideas for combating crime.’ I would have respected that. The problem is, there would have been no cameras.

  Ganim told the Connecticut Post he knew some of the victims, and wanted to set up a vigil that day. Really. Two hours after the mayor was there.

  There were vigils at St. Vincent’s Hospital and Bridgeport Hospital, and I don’t have a problem with Ganim attending them.

  But for candidate Ganim to set up a vigil at Trumbull Gardens not long after his rival the mayor had been there --- only 12 hours after a terrible tragedy --- struck me as not sincere, politically expedient and inappropriate.

  I’m particularly skeptical about Ganim’s intentions, since he did so precious little for low-income neighborhoods like Trumbull Gardens when he was mayor. I know it’s said some black leaders liked him, but I knew some community activists who didn’t like him and felt he didn’t listen to them. As said, he razed hundreds of low-income units to build projects that quite frankly, the public had little say in.

  But now he’s got religion.

 I’ll conclude by saying I am not a great fan of Bill Finch as mayor, although he’s a decent guy in person. I am open about who to like for mayor, and could support an independent or even a Republican.

   But unless Joe Ganim starts making people walk on water, I know that’s one person I won’t cast a ballot for.

 

Demanding Justice for Michael Brown

By Reginald Johnson

   Around the country, people are demanding justice in the Michael Brown case.

  Demonstrations have swept major cities like New York, Los Angeles and Chicago as well as dozens of smaller cities, with thousands expressing anger that a grand jury decided not to indict police officer Darren Wilson for fatally shooting Brown, an unarmed teenager in Ferguson, Missouri last August.

  Hundreds of people are now marching to the Missouri State Capital of Jefferson City to show their concern for what happened to Brown, who was 18 at the time of the shooting.

  Last weekend about 100 people protested in Bridgeport, a city of about 150,000 in Connecticut.

 “Bridgeport could be the next Ferguson,” Rev. Mary McBride Lee told the crowd gathered outside the City Hall Annex, according to the Connecticut Post. “We have to stick together and stand up for what’s right.”

  It’s a good thing that so many people are criticizing the grand jury result in the Michael Brown case, because there’s a lot to be upset about.  The more you look at the facts of the case, it’s hard to understand how the grand jury came to the conclusion that there was no probable cause to indict Wilson.

  There are inconsistencies in the account Wilson gave to the grand jury and some legal experts, including a noted forensic pathologist, say Wilson’s version of how the fatal shooting took place, doesn’t conform with the physical evidence.

  Questions have also been raised about the quality of the local investigation of the Brown shooting and the way St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert McCulloch handled the grand jury.

  A recent piece in Mother Jones magazine analyzed the testimony given by dozens of witnesses to the shooting, and compared that with Wilson’s testimony, and the statement by McCulloch announcing there was no basis for an indictment.  The article identified a number of discrepancies, relating to different accounts about an initial confrontation between Wilson and Brown, how it escalated into a fight, whether Wilson shot at Brown when he and his friend Dorian Johnson ran away, and whether Brown had his hands up when Wilson shot at him, after Brown had stopped running and turned around.

   Two findings are particularly noteworthy from the article, which drew in part from an analysis by PBS News Hour of 500 pages of witness testimony and Wilson’s statements:

·        While Wilson testified he did not shoot at Brown after he fled, a full 16 witnesses said he did. Only four witnesses supported Wilson on this point;

·        Though Wilson told the grand jury he shot Brown only after the teenager turned around with his hands down and began advancing towards the officer, 16 witnesses said Brown had his hands raised after he turned around. Only two witnesses said Brown did not have his hands up.

  In a recent interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, well-known forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht said Wilson’s testimony that Brown had his hands down and was reaching into his waistband, does not comport with the physical evidence. Wecht, the one-time president of the American Academy of Forensic Science, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine and a past consultant on many high profile crime cases, said the location and shape of the wounds sustained by Brown indicate that he could not have had his hands down at the time of the shooting. His hands had to have been raised, Wecht said.

  Wecht also expressed astonishment that a county medical examiner who came to review the Brown shooting scene on the day of the incident failed to take photographs, as required. The official said he couldn’t do so, since his camera was “out of batteries.” The medical examiner also failed to take measurements, another standard step.

   “This is absolutely unacceptable,” said Wecht.

 While no criminal charges will be forthcoming from the local grand jury, there is still the possibility that the federal government could file criminal charges against Officer Wilson. Officials from the Justice Department are conducting a separate investigation of the case.