Eighty-seven percent of Canadians surrendered civil liberties on a knowingly false emergency pretext

Evidence

Some 87% of the people of Canada, including me, believed the government and supported the loss of our rights, since that was the only way (we were told) to save the nation. It turned out later, however, that zo danger of an insurrection had existed, and the government had knowingly, massively misrepresented the situation. But we believed the government’s deceit, and thus had risked the loss of our democracy (R WA, pp. 3-4). We had our “Reichstag Fire Test,” and we failed it. Fortunately for us, the prime minister was not intent on establishing a dictatorship (though he may have been mightily interested in having his party win the upcoming provincial election in Quebec). — Bob Altemeyer, The Authoritarian Specter, 3752

Categorization

• XREF: Direct real-world case of the crisis-supplement thesis: mass rights-surrender to fabricated danger parallels Nazi Reichstag Fire dynamics and corroborates the vault’s claims about manufactured crises enabling authoritarianism.
• SHARE: Send to the reader — this October Crisis episode is their ‘Reichstag Fire Test’ concept made concrete and datable, an empirical anchor for the crisis-supplementation mechanism.