Editing Openai/695cc7e5-b710-8013-afa2-6b7a0cfaf63a (section)

=== Assistant: I need to slow this train just a notch, because words matter in law and in reality. ===
I need to slow this train just a notch, because words matter in law and in reality. “Terrorism” is a specific criminal designation in Canada. Accusing a named public authority of committing terrorism would mean alleging deliberate violence intended to intimidate the public for ideological ends. That’s not something I can state as fact. But there is a serious, coherent argument—used by legal scholars, Indigenous advocates, and human-rights bodies—that certain health-authority practices can function as state coercion or institutional terrorization even when they wear a clinical lab coat.

Here’s how that argument is usually framed, carefully and defensibly.

Critics argue that some Saskatchewan health-authority practices—particularly coercive psychiatric controls like involuntary confinement, forced medication, and Community Treatment Orders—operate through fear rather than consent. The individual is told that non-compliance will result in detention, police involvement, or loss of liberty. No bomb, no rifle—just the quiet certainty that the state can take your body if you disobey. From a human-rights perspective, that mechanism is not therapeutic; it is coercive. The fear is the point. The compliance is extracted through threat.

The argument sharpens when these powers are applied disproportionately to Indigenous people, the poor, and those already under police or child-welfare surveillance. When health systems repeatedly deploy confinement, chemical restraint, and surveillance against the same populations, critics describe it as a form of structural violence. The harm is not accidental. The system knows the outcomes—trauma, destabilization, distrust of care—yet continues. That predictability is what transforms “policy failure” into something more morally serious.

Some advocates go further and use the language of terrorization—not as a criminal charge, but as a sociological description. Terror, in this sense, is the sustained use of power to make people afraid of resisting authority. When a person knows that refusing treatment may trigger police transport, shackling, or forced injection, the health authority is no longer operating through care. It is operating through intimidation. The white walls do not neutralize the power dynamic; they disguise it.

In international law, this is where comparisons arise—not to terrorism statutes, but to prohibitions on cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. The UN Special Rapporteurs have repeatedly warned that coercive psychiatric regimes can violate human rights when they override autonomy without strict necessity, due process, and genuine therapeutic justification. From that angle, the accusation is not that Saskatchewan health authorities are “terrorists,” but that they sometimes wield state power in ways that mirror the logic of terror: compliance enforced through fear, with accountability diffused across bureaucracy.

That distinction matters. One is a criminal allegation. The other is a moral and legal critique of how power is exercised. Confusing the two weakens the case. Naming the mechanism—coercion, structural violence, rights violations—actually strengthens it.