What Should a Cop in Canada Do about the Convoy?

by Mary W Maxwell, PhD, LLB

A week ago, the truckers' descended upon Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The truckers are demanding an end to Covid mandates and are heavily supported by citizens. On the one hand you can say that they are doing nothing wrong, as the right to present a petition to Parliament is enshrined in Canada's Charter of Rights which is part of the 1982 Constitution. On the other hand, it may be claimed that the truckers are harming society by tying up the roadways and also slowing delivery of goods in all ten provinces.

This article is about the police in Canada. I argue that they should support the people and not their own bosses. If you want to accuse me of inciting a mutiny, well...let's see. This is Part 2 of my series of articles reviewing the 2016 book Eutopia by Philip Allott, a law professor, philosopher, and former British diplomat.

The word eutopia is from Greek "eu" for good, and "topia" for place -- a good place. Philip Allott, the author of Eutopia, thinks we ought to use our natural talent, our humanness, to create good, happy places.

Three Issues in Ottawa

The simplest issue for the truckers is that they are required to do 14 days quarantine in Canada if they come across the border from US unvaccinated. I don't see how the government could refuse their request to drop this foolish rule. Vaccines, as agreed by experts, are not about transmissibility. And anyway, the current Pfizer vax is not a vaccine; it is gene therapy.

Really makes you wonder what goes on in any parliament, doesn't it?

A second issue is the broader mandates involving lockdowns, face masks, and vaccinations. Judging from the signs being carried along the roadside, people are treating this convoy episode as a general protest of restrictions. Many signs say "No vax, please."

A third issue is the sheer affrontery of the government. Of course, this is being discussed in many countries at the moment. What gives a president or a Congress the right to override all the legal rights people have accumulated just because there is a so-called emergency? And we now know that this "emergency" was carefully planned; that's well documented.

A Policeperson's Dilemma

What should police do about the convoy in Ottawa? I believe they have been trained to arrest people who are breaking the law. I doubt that, during their 26 weeks at "RMCP Boot Camp," the cadets discuss "What's a cop to do if people have a reasonable request, but fulfilling it is against some picky little (or picky big) statute. Is there wiggle room for a cop?"

Similarly, in the armed forces, the training is to "obey, obey, obey," which admittedly is necessary in battle. Yet when a soldier wants to carry out that other famous rule "Don't obey illegal orders," he has no support. You can be sure they don't drum such rules into him at Boot Camp.

You may recall the lawsuit filed against Obama by US Army Captain Nathan Michael Smith in 2016. He felt that the war against ISIS was unconstitutional. He asked how could he instruct his troops (in Kuwait) to participate in this illegal war? A female federal judge in the District of Columbia dismissed his case as it involved a "political question." He appealed but the court waited till he was out of the service before ruling -- they were then able to declare the question moot.

The point I am making is that cops and soldiers are in a bad position. While many RCMPs at the scene of the convoy may wish to refrain from attacking the truckers, they are in a dilemma. They need to find a way out of that.

The Veterans' Tent City in Washington in 1932

In the US, the First Amendment in the Bill of Rights protects "the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

During the Depression, more than 15,000 veterans of the Great War marched on Washington in 1932, to ask for their bonuses to be paid early. They had been paid half of it at the end of the war in 1918 and were to get the other half in 1945. Owing to unemployment (caused by what I think was the deliberately-caused Depression) -- they were demanding that Congress change the rule and pay them now.

The veterans, known as The Bonus Army, erected tents in two locations, one across from the White House and one further away. Unlike the truckers' convoy, these men were not really dislocating anyone. So how and why did the group get broken up?

President Herbert Hoover ordered Gen Douglas McArthur to do the dirty: to break down the tents and kick the men out. I am not sure why the police did not have this role; in the US, the army is not supposed to be used on domestic soil (unless foreigners invade).

Gen McArthur had two later-famous subordinates for the task, Dwight Eisenhower (1890-1969) and George Patton (1885-1945). Eisenhower disapproved of the army attacking veterans, but he nevertheless obeyed. So here's my point: cops and soldiers do not have an alternative basis for action. Could Ike have said "No, I won't do it?" In his day, maybe not, but today the cops in Canada can say -- because the truckers have huge public support -- "We will not do it."

The Eutopian View of the Canadian Convoy

Philip Allott has not preached about the convoy, or even about the right to protest. Below, I'll do his preaching for him. I mean I'll refer to the ideas in his book's Part Two, "Human Power," which runs from page 79 to page 170 of Eutopia.

When Allott looks around him, he sees the world in its present mess and thinks "It doesn't have to be this way." Oh? Why not? Because the human being, and human society, possess the power to make it better (indeed to make it eutopian!). Such power is not found in a legal document but is simply natural to our species, he says -- and I agree.

The four ingredients of the human power to make a better world are: Memory, Imagination, Knowledge, and Emotion -- think of the acronym MIKE. But before talking about MIKE, I will chat about the restrictions and mandates which gave rise to the Canadian convoy.

Strictly Maxwell's Interpretation of Covid Restrictions, for Bruno

Let's say there's a cop in Ottawa, named Bruno, who is wondering what he will do if he is ordered to attack the truckers. Will he be like Eisenhower and do it? Before Bruno joined the RCMPs he had quite a bit of education and likes to read. Also, his 20-year-old son feeds him a lot of conspiracy theory. So he knows both sides of the mandate story.

Bruno knows that some people think the disease of Covid is fatal and that being within 6 feet of another person is dangerous. Hence, he is sympathetic to the idea of quarantining any unvaccinated trucker who has recently been in the US, where restrictions are lax. He also thinks it is reasonable -- in general -- to place hardship on individuals for the sake of the common good. This is not a world of every man for himself -- we are a community.

(Note: I label this section "strictly Maxwell's interpretation" to clarify that although this series is about Allott's book Eutopia, I am not deriving my discussion of the Covid restrictions from Allott. I am deriving it from the work that has been done at GumshoeNews, particularly by its editor Dee McLachlan, which in turn relied on many researchers and commentators since 2020.)

Bruno has read the following statements on the Internet:

1. The test for Covid, known as PCR, does not accurately establish a diagnosis.

2. The new vaccine does not even claim to affect transmissibility.

3. In fact it is not a vaccine. It is officially recognized as gene therapy.

4. More than 99% of people who get the disease recover from it.

5. Some countries, such Denmark, have tossed out the restrictions.

Bruno also knows that the Covid restrictions have had bad consequences:

6. Mask-wearing is harmful during athletic sports, or outdoor exercising.

7. Mask-wearing stops children from picking up on facial expressions.

8. The "no-large-gathering" rule has spoiled weddings, funerals, graduations.

9. "Hospital crisis" makes people stay away from needed medical procedures.

10. Lockdown of small businesses has meant financial loss to owners and to tax.

But worse for Bruno, emotionally, is what his son calls "the Covid hoax":

11. There was always an easy cure, Ivermectin, but it was banned at pharmacies.

12. Hospitals were paid a bonus for every person they put on a ventilator.

13. Doctors were paid to list Covid as "cause of death" on death certificates.

14. Children were given Covid vaccines without parental consent.

15. Doctors who spoke against the vax were censored and/or disciplined.

16. A pandemic was planned-for at a Hopkins meeting in 2019, before Covid existed.

17. World Economic Forum says the pandemic helps the Great Reset of economy.

18. The CDC owns the patents for some vaccines, creating a conflict of interest.

19. Legislators have been eagerly violating their own constitutional rules.

20. Mass media don't interview truckers or show photos of the public support.

How Bruno Can Get a Boost from Philip Allott's book, Eutopia

In Part 1 of this series, I explained that Philip Allott, as a philosopher, has examined human history and the human being and finds that we have powers that can get us to overcome problems. The main powers are: memory (we can look back at where we came from and how we got here), imagination (we can picture the future being different from the present), knowledge (we are not cavemen, we have libraries of how-do-do-things), and emotion (including the necessary drive to get a job done).

I have personally received a big boost of confidence from Allott's tome, and will now offer some samples, for Bruno's use. I am following the "MIKE" scheme. The numbering reflects the paragraph numbers in Eutopia. The subtitle of that book is "New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World." Trust me, it is a valuable production. These are exact quotes:

Memory

5.7 The human mind is capable of taking power over public power. The human mind is ultimately invincible in the face of public power. Human beings have an unshakable personal purpose to make a good life for themselves and their families.

5.11 From the very earliest accounts of human societies, we are surprised by the diversity of the social solutions....

5.16 The ideological temptation seeks to... prevent the formation and propagation of ideas that are inconsistent with [those] designed by and for the holders of public power, especially political and economic power.

5.20 But the story of the human past suggests that those who dominate the public mind have been capable, again and again, of responding to the people's deeply experienced ideal of the good life.

5.44 Social change occurs ... when changing ideas act as evolutionary or revolutionary society-changing forces. [Allott realizes that social change can also occur malevolently.]

Imagination

6.1 The human being is Homo sapiens in the natural world.... In the world of the imagination the human being is Homo poeta -- creating an external world from inside the human mind.

6.3 Products of the human imagination have a deeper and darker origin. Their deepest roots are in the human capacity to dream.

6.12 We spend much of the dream time in a state of fear.... There are dreams that are pleasant experiences, but there is rarely good humour in a dream, let alone joy.

6.21 The past is no longer subject to our power.... The future, on the other hand, is waiting for us. It is at our mercy, waiting for us to do the best and the worst that we can imagine.

6.26 Politics is a masterwork of the human imagination. It is a waking dream, in which some people are actors and many people are mostly spectators. Its normal mental atmosphere is a suffocating dialectic of almost meaningless abstractions.

6. 33 The best creative artists make human life very much better. [They make] a precious contribution to the difficult human enterprise of existing from day to day.... They are big benefactors to the human societies. They make us proud to be human.

Knowledge

7.15 A strange irony of the new disempowering of the human mind lies in the fact that, over recent centuries, there has been a dramatic increase in the power of the human mind ... in its relationship with the phenomena of the natural world... in the form of the natural sciences.

7.17 The "scientific revolution" in Europe has rightly been seen as a watershed. [We are] able by mere thought to uncover the hidden order of the natural world, in such a way that that order can then be used, ad libitum, to serve human purposes.

7.34 Social and legal philosophers in particular must contribute new thinking to establishing high human and social values capable of being used to determine the public benefit of science, and for applying moral and social accountability to the immense power inherent in scientific knowledge.

7.35 The present century must [strike] a new balance between the human world and the natural world, as our beautiful ... and inspiring home, and not merely our warehouse and our workplace.

7.60 Entropic thinking is thinking without the application of any significant intellectual effort. You think what happens to come into your head without reflection, analysis, judgment, or discrimination. Manipulated thinking is thinking determined by people who exercise power over your thinking... so that you behave as your manipulated consciousness causes you to behave. -- end of quotes from Eutopia.

MIKEs Emotion Will Be Postponed

The fourth part of MIKE (memory, imagination, knowledge, and emotion), is the letter E, for Emotion. Let's postpone it to later in this series of articles. I reckon our Canadian cop, "Bruno," will have got enough from the above quotes to turn him on emotionally in regard to a decision about whether to attack the truckers. That is, a decision on whether to stand up to his employer, and why.

Possibly the freezing weather will soon bring the convoy episode to a close anyway. Or possibly the truckers will become aggressive and court violence from the military. Or possibly Parliament will do what the truckers want. Who knows? For additional guidance, Bruno may take a glance at my article on disobeying illegal orders., as linked below.