[JaredMilne]

Many Canadian health-care providers are at the end of their rope. Doctors and nurses are reporting extremely high stress levels and burnout due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The long hours and anxiety caused by the rise of COVID cases would be bad enough on its own, but doctors and nurses have another source of stress. They’re constantly facing mobs of anti-vaccination thugs threatening them at protests — not just outside hospitals, but in some cases even outside the homes of leading public health officials in Nova Scotia and Saskatchewan. In central B.C., there were even reports in September of anti-vaccination protestors barging into schools to threaten students and staff who were getting their shots.

Incidents such as these show why, unfortunately, we need some kind of police and security presence. Several provinces are considering making schools and hospitals "no-go zones" that are off-limits to anti-vaccination protesters. But who will protect the people who use these facilities from protesters’ harassment and threats? Similarly, protesting at peoples’ private homes should be off-limits, but again, someone would need to actually enforce such a ban.

Some will point to actions where police forces have been rightly condemned for shooting and harassing innocent citizens, notably Indigenous people or people of colour. Those incidents deserve all the fury and criticism they have received. But what kind of security or protective force is the alternative? Who is supposed to deal with violent threats such as those posed by some anti-vaccination protesters? Or the insurrectionists who tried to storm the U.S. Congress at the start of the year? Yes, the leaders of the Capitol Police who bungled their response to the insurrectionists deserve to be fired, but it doesn’t change the fact that a response of some kind was warranted.

Police forces in Canada and the U.S. have been widely condemned for their disproportionate response to black or Indigenous protesters while handling white protesters and insurrectionists with kid gloves.

When white army reservist Corey Hurren gate-crashed Rideau Hall while armed to the teeth to threaten Justin Trudeau, some people in the comments sections of news articles hoped the justice system would go easy on him because of everything he has been through.

At the time, I wondered if they would be saying the same thing about any Indigenous person in the same situation. Somehow, I doubt it.

Society needs a protective force, but it’s too often directed at the wrong people and causes. Instead of focusing on marginalized populations whose protests are typically peaceful, police and security forces are better focused on those who are actively harassing health-care workers, school kids, and public officials.


While free assembly is a legal right in Canada, Section 1 of the Charter of Rights limits those rights to reasonable limits to be justified in a free and democratic society.

I’m not a lawyer, but I’m pretty sure stopping people from threatening hospitals, schools, and private homes would all count as reasonable limits.

[DrCaleb]

How did we get from banging pots and pans, to threatening people just doing their jobs?

[xerxes]

We didn’t taser these idiots right away that’s why. I was saying last year already that the anti-vax idiots needed repeated tazerings until they grew a brain and it didn’t happen; now here we are.

[DrCaleb]

xerxes xerxes:

We didn’t taser these idiots right away that’s why. I was saying last year already that the anti-vax idiots needed repeated tazerings until they grew a brain and it didn’t happen; now here we are.

Non-lethal landmine zaps intruders with 50,000 volts

Deploy these around Hospital grounds.

[housewife]

That’s evil Doc I love it!!

[JaredMilne]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

How did we get from banging pots and pans, to threatening people just doing their jobs?

I wish I knew.

I joined a protest group outside my MP's office nearly a decade ago protesting against Harper's omnibus bills and several of the protesters actually did bang pots and pans while the rest of us held signs and/or chanted. Our MP and his staff would have never been in any physical danger, of course-the only risk to them might have been their ears hurting from our loud complaining.

[Thanos]

xerxes xerxes:

We didn’t taser these idiots right away that’s why. I was saying last year already that the anti-vax idiots needed repeated tazerings until they grew a brain and it didn’t happen; now here we are.

Can't speak for the rest of the country. But Alberta was no-enforcement territory from the beginning of the epidemic and the "meh" attitude projected by our provincial government obviously emboldened the idiots and cranks that have flocked here over the last several decades. The UCP government played the "because freedom" card from the get-go with the hate-churches that kept holding crowded services and for months refused to either shut them down or send in the police. That was the start of the trouble for Alberta because it was on the heels of that when we had the illegal rodeo gathering, certain restaurant owners refusing to follow restrictions, and then the terrorist antics of Kevin J. Johnston in Calgary. By then the UCP had no choice but to send the police in because the kid gloves were undermining their authority. But the cat was out of the bag because it wasn't that long ago, just a few weeks, where we had the mass protest outside of the hospitals.

A law that isn't enforced is quite literally not worth the paper it's written on. And certain politicians of a certain strain more than went out of their way to encourage law-breaking simply through their indifference towards enforcement. So no one should really be surprised that medical staff get harassed both at home and at work by the cranks and psychos. Conservative governments pretty much ensured this sort of thing would happen by not doing their job until it was far too late to do any good. This is what playing retard-bingo with libertarian & anarchist drivel always gets you, those who don't give a damn about any laws period running amok.

[CDN_PATRIOT]

DrCaleb DrCaleb:

How did we get from banging pots and pans, to threatening people just doing their jobs?

Lack of punishment/adequate policing and enforcement. Peaceful protesting is one thing, but uttering threats is a clear violation of the law that the police are supposed to be upholding and taking action on.

I've joined a couple of protests in my day, but I never came close to threatening anyone or anything. Did the non-offensive slogan chant here and there, but when the cops came and told everyone to move back and stay to one side, I did.

Everyone in this country has a right to protest and make their voices heard. No one in this country has the right to threaten/intimidate/break laws while doing so.

The police need to go back to enforcing the laws properly, and the courts need to make examples of the jackholes that are doing the threatening and throw the book at them.

-J.

[llama66]

Yeah, I actually agree.