So long Canada, Canuckstan replaced ye
The 'Emergencies Act' passed 185-151. The communist NDP voted with the Liberals
Leading up to the vote, there were signs the government had decided to make it a confidence vote, meaning that if it failed, the minority Liberal government could have fallen, which would have triggered an election.
Trudeau had not officially designated the vote as such, but he opened the door to that interpretation by likening the decision to that on the throne speech, which lays out the government's agenda.
"I can't imagine that anyone who votes 'no' tonight is doing anything other than indicating that they don't trust the government to make incredibly momentous and important decisions at a very difficult time," he said at a news conference. (MSN)
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Agamben cuts to the chase
The will and the necessity
The question of whether governments are consciously using the pandemic to declare a state of exception that strengthens their powers beyond all limits or whether they have no choice but the emergency is misplaced. What happens today, as in any decisive historical crisis, is that the two things are both true: the use of the state of exception as a stratagem and the impossibility of governing otherwise than through it coincide. The sovereign, while acting in an absolutely arbitrary way, is at the same time forced to make an incessant decision on the exception that ultimately defines its nature. The epoch we are living in is, that is, the one in which the illegitimacy of the powers that govern the earth appears in full light: since they have lost any possibility of configuring themselves in a recognizable symbolic order, they are obliged to suspend the law and the constitutional principles that might define it.
In this sense, the state of exception becomes the normal state and whoever governs cannot under any circumstances govern otherwise. It is perhaps possible that the state of exception is formally revoked: but a government of national salvation such as the one that is taking shape, in which all opposition ceases, is the perfect continuation of the state of exception. Our diagnosis of a definitive decline in the age of bourgeois democracies is in any case confirmed. It remains to be seen how long the suspension of politics and the emergence as a paradigm of government can last without taking on a form other than the medical terror on which they have been based so far.
February 12, 2021
Giorgio Agamben