[CaptainCrunch]

So I thought I would start something as an experiment. I think its pretty clear that I'm a political junky on a federal level. But I enjoy all kinds of different topics. So I thought maybe, we can have weekly debates, usually from Monday to Friday, because we all want to not think about things like this over the weekend.

So I here's the introduction. There are some rules

1) Keep it civil - I don't want it to devolve to pissing matches with an insult fest, it goes against the civil rules of any debate. If you want to address someones point, maybe think about starting it with the term "I understand what your saying but . . . " or something like that.
2) citations should be required if your bringing up a point that based in facts that you've seen or read. That way we're not pulling out vapor to support our points and forcing people to scramble to google to make sure that your facts are accurate.
3) This is meant to be fun, its not life and death, we're not formulating policy.
4) I'd hope that this is kept non-partisan, if you want to debate a position from the opposite side of your instincts, to be a devils advocate go for it, maybe even state it in your response or post.

5) If this is somewhat popular, and you guys like this, I'll post a new topic every Monday, it could be politics, religion, sports, current events. Whatever.

So this weeks topic is focused around the effects of emergencies on individual human rights and for example the Consitutions of various countries. This topic comes from the current Covid situation. It also is a topic that I've been interested in since reading the Tom Clancy novel where the US is infected by Ebola, and the President orders the shut down of travel to contain the virus and is attacked for trying to take away basic human rights as guaranteed in the US Constitution. The line in the fictional court is that the Constitution is not a suicide pact.

So the question is.

In the event of a national emergency, ie (Virus, terrorist attack excetera), should individual rights be allowed to be suspended for the duration of the emergency. Or do guaranteed human rights over right the ability to respond to an emergency? If individual human rights are suspended what is the role of the supreme court of Canada and the US when dealing with challenges to the emergency measures?


At the end of this topic, I wonder if we should put up a poll to see if we can get a consensus of the result of the debate?


I hope I phrased this properly, and people decide to participate.

Happy debating.