I must be dreaming, because today I woke up to find myself in a country resembling a ‘V for Vendetta’ movie..We are reading disturbing stories of citizens being forcibly separated by police officers and placed into federal “isolation centres”. Families are not told where they are being taken. Is this the Canada of 2021? Are we not the envy of much of the world and considered a free country? How did we get here?.Pastor Chris Mathis’s wife was forcibly detained by police and AHS officials on Thursday night at the Calgary airport, put in a white van surrounded by police escorts, and taken to an undisclosed quarantine facility. RCMP and AHS officials outright refused to let Mathis know where his wife had been taken, though they made it clear to him that she would be arrested if she tried to resist. Her crime was that her negative COVID-19 test results were not the same test results that the federal government wanted..The next day, Red Deer mother Rebekah McDonald faced the same ordeal. Upon arriving in Calgary from Arizona, her son was detained, loaded into a van, and taken to an undisclosed location for an indeterminate quarantine period. Again, the reason given was that the COVID-19 test he had passed was not the correct one in the eyes of Canadian authorities..Why such an immediate and authoritarian approach to new air travel regulations? Why do authorities refuse to tell families where their loved ones are being taken? Are not the families of actual criminals granted this courtesy by the authorities?.These quarantine facilities are not the prison camp’s of feverish conspiracy theory dreams; they are mostly hotels without much to do. But people are taken to them forcibly, and sometimes on the dubious grounds that some US states use different tests than Canada’s federal government..While these aren’t dystopian prison camps, why the secrecy when families want to know where they are? Why no due process that is afforded common criminals? Even accused criminals have an appearance before a judge to attain bail..Infection levels are dropping. We are starting to see some easement of local restrictions. Foreign travellers are indeed a potential source of new infections, and some control may be justified. But why can’t citizens be treated with dignity? Why this insane, brutish approach to quarantining?.Rights that can be taken away are not rights. They are government-granted privileges..Trust in government is already at an all-time low. Traumatizing Canadian citizens through the sudden seizure and detention of family members without communication is hardly going to rebuild faith in the state. If people are going to accept state restrictions and vaccinations in order to get the pandemic under control, the state is going to have to treat citizens a hell of a lot better than this. What better way to feed mistrust and conspiracies than to snatch people up and whisk them away in vans?.I traveled through Guatemala and the Soviet Union in the late 1980s. Government squads taking family members away in the night was a very real thing that citizens had to live with. Canada’s citizen-snatching may be less extreme, but should be cause for an immediate backlash against it..We have been enduring the erosion of our rights for nearly a year. Until now though, the state had been using the frog in water method, slowly and incrementally turning up the heat..As we enter February 2021, governments no longer feel the need to slowly turn up the heat. They openly seize our liberties at a boil and tell us that it is all for our own good..The time for accepting their excuses is over. It’s time to end arbitrary detentions. It’s time to end the lockdown. It’s time to put the state-worshiping politicians back in their place, and restore our basic liberties..Cory Morgan is the Podcast Editor and a columnist for the Western Standard
