The Liberty Exchange: In conversation with Professor Bruce Pardy, host Jonathan Fortier examines the erosion of key libertarian principles through the lens of the pandemic experience. Prof. Pardy credits the one upside of Covid-19 as the moment when the coercive role of the administrative state finally revealed itself. That rupture marked a turning point for the freedom movement as the government and elite organizations imposed unprecedented restrictions on civil liberties, with mainstream professionals largely supporting these measures. The trucker protests in Canada brought these issues to widespread attention, showing ordinary citizens resisting government overreach—a public vote of no confidence the government found threatening to its legitimacy. A strong voice throughout the trucker protests in Ottawa, Prof. Pardy reveals a number of takeaways from that time, including the clarity pandemic restrictions offered up. It was no longer possible to ignore the expansion of the administrative state and its invisible coercion through regulations, subsidies and various means to limit meaningful choices for the individual. The overarching problem lies not just in bad policies, argues Prof. Pardy, but in the power of authorities to make such policies in the first place. [For more on this, see Canada’s Constitutional Mistake: How the Rule of Law Gave Way to the Managerial State].
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