The Right To Resist Governmental Abuses Of Power Versus The Will To Actually Resist It
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The Right To Resist Governmental Abuses Of Power Versus The Will To Actually Resist It
In 1774, faced with increasingly defiant colonies, Great Britain passed a series of punitive laws which, along with the Quebec Act would become known as the Intolerable Acts or Coercive Acts. The acts consisted of the Boston Port Act, the Massachusetts Government Act, the Administration of Justice Act, and the Quartering Act.
This last act “sought to create a more effective method of housing British troops” by allowing them to be billeted on the private property of colonists. This act, along with the other 4 were direct causes of the American Revolution and, given recent developments, ought to be of particular interest to Canadians.
It is well known that housing prices have been skyrocketing in Canada for years and the country is not building enough to keep up with population growth.
This issue is being exacerbated by the government’s insistence that immigration levels remain at historically high levels.
The obvious solution to this problem, aside from building more homes faster, is to reduce immigration levels. However, Canada’s new Immigration Minister, Marc Miller, has already made it clear that despite concerns raised by economists that immigration targets are too high he has no plans to lower them in the near future. This is tantamount to saying that “we know we’ve caused a problem, but we have no intention of fixing it.”
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Faced with the bullheaded incompetence of the Federal government, the provinces, and municipalities appear to have been left to their own devices. In the last week two politicians, faced with a rising number of immigrants and a shortage of housing have turned their attention to the private property of citizens as a means of solving the problem.
In Toronto, Mayor Olivia Chow, faced with a crisis that has refugees sleeping in the streets, has devised “a program to encourage residents to offer available rental units at or below market rate.” Meanwhile, Nova Scotia Housing Minister John Lohr is looking to partner with Happipad, a free online home-sharing platform to leverage the “130,000 vacant bedrooms across Nova Scotia” to address the housing crisis.
These efforts are, for the time being, voluntary and one is tempted to view them as harmless if not creative approaches to leverage the good-hearted nature of the citizenry to solve a difficult problem. This would be a mistake.
When we see authoritarian governments rise around the world, we are tempted to think “it can never happen here,” however given the recent authoritarian moves by the Canadian government, this threat should be taken seriously.
If politicians are thinking about ways to convince citizens to volunteer the use of their spare rooms, you can be certain that some of them are already thinking of ways to make citizens give up their spare rooms. Private property is a cornerstone of a free society and any attempt to infringe on it must be viewed in the harshest of terms and resisted at the outset- lest it be viewed as permissible.
The cause of the American Revolution is more complicated than many people think. It is not as simple as the “no taxation without representation” slogan that many of us grew up hearing. Nor was it limited to a conflict between the colonists and the British. It was, however, unquestionably a battle for the rights of citizens and the primacy of the individual over the government.
The Revolution was a long time ago though and time has seen the power of governments grow at the expense of individual rights. Often while citizens stood meekly by. Every crisis presents governments with an opportunity to erode our freedoms, and the housing crisis is no exception.
How citizens use their property is a fundamental right of a free and democratic society and any efforts by the government to erode that freedom must be resisted with all and any means available.
We may soon be faced with a difficult question and how we answer it may have life-altering ramifications for Canadian society. That question is not “do citizens have the right to resist government abuses of power,” but instead, “do Canadians have the will to resist?”
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The Right To Resist Governmental Abuses Of Power Versus The Will To Actually Resist It
Unfettered immigration is clearly the policy of the global elites. I have yet to see a convincing argument that explains why. What exactly is the goal? Cheap labor? Erosion of the nation-state? The first seems too narrow, the last too broad. What is incontrovertible is that those at the top of western societies want it to continue. Both their messaging and efforts on the ground confirm this. But why? What do they really hope to achieve?
I was watching a video accompanying an excerpt from one of Thomas Sowell's books on slavery. He wrote that countries historically captured one another's members as slaves. It was the rise of strong nation-states that helped stomp out the practice. It was a fascinating observation (one of many from him.) The preoccupation of all the West in bringing in large swaths of people is intended to replace the nation-state with the bureaucratic state. When chaos is achieved, most people will beg to be put into a 15-minute city. Two years ago, an architecture newsletter highlighted a prize-winning plan for a self-sustaining apartment building where the occupants would 'work on the garden.' Such gardens would be essential for the food shortages. That it captured a prize told me many of the conspiracy theories were true.