Lots of different points in that thread but I focus on what I think it boils down to, the perception that a lot of the measures taken by Canada are not being 'p

Lots of different points in that thread but I focus on what I think it boils down to, the perception that a lot of the measures taken by Canada are not being 'procedural' or part of the proper constitutional/democratic system. It helps to go back to Carl Schmitt for this one who pointed out that any government that sustains itself purely on the basis of formalisms (in his view the biggest problem of liberal constitutional democracies) is going to erode because it cannot handle what he called the state of exception. When a country is in crisis, by definition some entity must be able to go 'past the law', because the law only deals with what can be anticipated and is ordinary, and government must be able to deal with existential unknowns. In modern democracies this is martial law, state of emergency, presidential decree and so on. Covid responses overall are an example of this. Most of the measures taken by Western democracies were not 'constitutional' or orderly democratic in any genuine sense. Business loans, eviction protection, vaccination campaigns, mandates, etc. Regardless of which political side any measure appealed to, they were implemented ad hoc, legally justified at best after the fact. So to talk about constitutional systems requires to understand that informal authority is not a threat or even bad in any sense. It's also not surprising to see this kind of criticism from someone in the 'crypto community'. Because the fetishization of contracts is what renders most of these communities ungovernable when something goes wrong.