Frankly it feels to me like you and I aren't going to have many reference points in common. We're unlikely to share ideological / philosophical presuppositions and I gave up arguing with right-libertarians years ago. Ok but here comes my rant.

FWIW, I'm not in my mind a "progressive", I don't believe in progress. I'm not a "liberal" of any kind. I'm a socialist. And so I don't speak for liberals or what they might do.

And so re: guns I'm personally not in favour of firearms regulation the way the liberals have gone about it. I also grew up and live rural. So my perspective, again, isn't urban-liberal-gun-control.

Also the left-wing social democratic party here, the NDP, historically always had a much more moderate gun control policy than the Liberals, and I've supported that. Though this has shifted in the last decade.

But I also see the gun debate in the US as preposterous. Frankly the 2nd amendment as interpreted by the right in the US looks like idiocy to me and likely has its origins in the need/desire to suppress slave revolts, and reflects the US's explicitly slave-holding racist history.

In any case, you also sound like you're repeating things as facts you've found in right-libertarian forums. You're declaring things as trends or policies or tendencies which are at best situational related to things that happened during COVID. Or you have a thing about the way people talk about trans stuff, I dunno. And you're presenting this stuff from a certain rights-fundamentalist POV which I wouldn't agree with.

For one, I haven't seen any shift in Canada on "punishing speech" on "controversial" topics. I am aware that people like Jordan Peterson have spread misinformation on this topic, claiming persecution when there usually isn't any. It's also not worth my time to get down into the weeds with people like that to try to disprove every single of their claims.

But western democracies outside of the US have tended to interpret the concept of freedom of speech in a different manner than the US, and I think it's naive to expect a country with a British parliamentarian tradition to frame things like the US has.

"Freedom-oriented" is pretty coded, frankly. I don't recognize libertarians as "freedom oriented" -- I see them as market fundamentalists who will take the hard boot of corporate authority as legitimate while gutting shared governance. And they're also ridiculously naive -- I don't see a hard line between state and private ... they're one in the same authoritarian structure and the capitalist "free" market creates the repressive state to support itself, so imagining one without the other is incoherent and irrational. It's not "freedom oriented" at all.

We live in a commonwealth. In a shared society. And in that society if people park on my street for three weeks hitting their horn day and night, threatening people with assault, blocking ambulances and firetrucks... I want governance to intervene to fix this.

What do you expect to happen?

If people arrive in your capital city trying to overthrow a democratically elected government? That being their stated aim, and they refuse to leave til said government is "gone"... And then you see that they are receiving funding from foreign governments, corporations, and extremist organizations. You're still going to call them protesters? You still think freezing accounts is an unreasonable move? Did you object to the freezing of accounts of ISIS sympathisers and the like during the "war on terror"?

Nevermind that these people, what they experienced, is a fraction of the repression that left wing protesters got after a single evening of protest during the G20 in Toronto years ago. Because in Ottawa, the "convoy" protesters -- led by far right radicals -- had the sympathy of the police.

Look, as someone who comes from the radical left I can tell you now... the US government is far more draconian in suppression of protest and dissent than the Canadian state ever has been. It has a history of repression far more drastic going back since before the cold war.

It's just that so-called "freedom oriented" people aren't used to feeling the blunt edge of that. Because their politics fundamentally conforms to the authoritarian structure of actually-existing capitalism.

I will end this by pointing out that it's a cliche about Canada, for 150 years, that our motto is "Peace, Order, and Good Government" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace%2C_order%2C_and_good_gov...). Which differs starkly from how US has framed rights, historically around e.g. "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness", etc. This is just the commonwealth tradition.

There's nothing new about this outlook, which conservatives and liberals in Canada shared for decades. In fact, it has historically been Liberals who chipped away at the stricter and more uptight interpretations of this motto. So, no I don't actually see a degradation in the rights structure of Canadian democracy. Just more of the same.