Canada Isn't The US

Toronto is less than a hundred miles from Buffalo, but I couldn't help but notice a contrast. Over the US holiday, photos and videos of Toronto police arresting restaurant owner Adam Skelly for trying to reopen his barbeque vent viral. Commentators saw at least eight units and ten officers on the scene, which was little short of a SWAT deployment. Skelly was unarmed and faced charges like operating a business without a license.

A week ago in Buffalo, three sheriff's deputies and a health inspector entered a gym to try to disperse members who were holding a meeting. It sounds as if the members had had some type of legal advice, as they shouted at the deputies that they were in effect conducting a warrantless search, and under the US Fourth Amendment, they were trespassing on private property. After some shilly-shallying and scolding from the health inspector, they were prevailed upon to leave the building and then the parking lot.

Nobody was cuffed and hauled away to jail like Skelly.

Skelly's public statements in the days prior to his arrest indicate this was an event he planned and staged for the express purpose of becoming a martyr. This is exactly why in general, US police agencies have avoided this type of confrontation, and many sheriffs and police chiefs have explicitly said they do not enforce health orders. I'm puzzled that Toronto authorities allowed themselves to be put into the situation of creating both a martyr and a leadership figure, when equivalent attempts to do this sort of thing in the US created folk heroes like Karl Manke, the Owosso, MI barber, and Shelly Luther, the Dallas salon owner.

(For that matter, although an internal review, a review by another police agency, and yet another review at the provincial level, of the May 4 violent takedown of the Lethbridge, AB Star Wars trooper were promised, I've found no reference to any such review being published or even conducted in the nearly seven months since that happened. Canada, I fear, isn't the US.)

Although the Los Angeles County health department just tightened its latest restrictions to prohibit any gatherings of people who aren't members of the same household, it explicitly excepted both protests and church services, which it said are "constitutionally protected rights". The addition of church as an express exception is completely new, and it reflects a well-founded fear of an active citizenry, as well as the newly rediscovered role of the US Supreme Court.

I don't believe I would be happy living in Canada.