Military options against political protesters have a long history in the US (those are just a few examples).

@tim And all of them were used in riots. Which the Canadians were clearly not doing.

Canada did get dinged for that. As was the US. "However, in line with global trends, both countries did worse in the “citizens control” and “personal freedom” indicators, owing in part to the introduction of coronavirus-related restrictions." I guess your point is that Canada should been dinged much more (in 2021).

I haven't looked at the subscores, but overall, Canada did drop more than the US from 2020 to 2021: US 7.92 -> 7.85 = 0.07 points drop. Canada 9.24 -> 8.87 = 0.37 points drop.

And unless I'm mistaken, Trudeau invoked that act in Feb 2022, so I'm not sure how the 2021 score (or earlier) is supposed to reflect that.

Upvoting. I disagree with the idea that Canada's democracy went down the drain with the Emergency Act (though maybe some other legal framework to achieve the same ends of dispersing protesters, the same way, might have been chosen). But calling the US a flawed democracy based on blindly following some numerical metrics seems rather harsh and unjustified. Many other Western democracies occasionally stumble around - forming governments: Belgium, Germany, difficulty implementing reforms: France, blindly applying a 2% difference referendum to torpedo its economy: Brexit. Schadenfreude ahoy.

Another funny example of how flawed these rankings are is that the US is lower than New Zealand in free speech ratings despite the latter having a "Chief Censor" bureaucrat: politics.stackexchange.com/questions/39963/…

@Rekesoft The point he's making is that NZ has a government official for that. They could charge you with a crime and fine you or have you arrested for your speech (potentially even political speech). That's a vast difference from, say, Facebook suspending your account.

A question about the US not the the place for your anti-Canadian rant.

@DJClayworth Hmm? This isn't "anti-Canadian". The index says that Canada is somehow a better democracy than the US. I'm pointing out a pretty obvious place where that doesn't hold true. Again, the numbers are arbitrary, not objective.

You're talking about one incident which most Canadians agree didn't restrict anyone's freedom much. If you were doing anything other than ranting you would be doing an overview of the differences between US and Canadian democracies, not just talking about one thing that upset you.

I often think that metrics like this are less about examining details to create a metric, and more about the authors wanting a metric, and massaging details to meet the desired result. See also: metrics around "happiness", by country, where arbitrary things are weighted arbitrarily and most likely just yields the results the authors wanted to begin with.

@Rekesoft While I'd certainly agree that some of the censorship actions of social media companies are not good for public discourse (either in the U.S. or elsewhere,) hopefully we can all agree that there's a vast gulf between being banned from Twitter for saying something unpopular vs. being fined or imprisoned for it. Government censorship in the U.S., while not entirely non-existent, is among the lowest even of the most open societies in the world and press is free to say virtually whatever it wants (which it very routinely does on all sides.) They even can (and do) publish classified info.

The federal Canadian government did far more than disperse the protestors- they went after them and anyone who possibly supported them and shut down their lives- a tyranny worthy of the CCP.

@Machavity Are you sure about that? What constitutes "free speech" and what doesn't? In many european countries, such as Spain, hate speech is a crime you can be fined or imprisoned for, but you could walk through a mall nude and while private security could be upset about it, there's no laws against that. In the US that would be public indecency and you will be forever marked as a "sexual offender" for life. The fact that in the US you're allowed to be a bigoted racist, but not to be in topless as a woman on the beach doesn't make the US "freer". Just different kind of censure.

@Rekesoft What is the connection between allowed clothes (or there absence) with freedom of speech?

@Rekesoft For the US, at least, "free speech" has been pretty well defined by the Supreme Court, since we have it explicitly as a Constitutional right. What speech can be restricted is very limited and narrowly defined. Making "hate speech" a crime is always dangerous because it allows the government to define what that means. Without Constitutional protections, nothing stops the Spanish legislature from casually declaring that it's hate speech to say bad things about the Spanish legislature.

@user2617804 No, they applied our laws that prohibit one from aiding and abetting illegal activity.