I am somewhat baffled by the protests that have been talking place in the city center in Ottawa and the bridge to Detroit in Windsor Ontario where truckers and people in RVs and have been blocking streets for weeks now. The police finally moved in to clear the Windsor-Detroit bridge which opened today and it looks like they are beginning to clear the Ottawa streets too. Meanwhile prime minister Justin Trudeau has invoked emergency powers to be used of necessary.
So who are these protestors? Some of them are protesting the covid-19 restrictions that are still in place but others seem to be anti-vaxxers whom one would think would be a fairly insignificant presence since Canada has one of the highest covid-19 vaccination rates in the world, around 90%. But it seems like these people are similar to the anti-vaxxers in the US, very loud and angry though small in numbers and consist of the usual suspects that we find here.
The people were a mix of evangelical Christians, anti-mask mums, vaccine sceptics and local residents who are tired of lockdowns and vaccine passports.
The Freedom Convoy, as it’s been called, began as a protest against a mandate requiring truckers who cross the US-Canada border to be vaccinated against Covid.
But the group is not united by any one occupation – rather, they share a distrust of vaccines, a concern for government overreach and a general dislike of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
…Unlike the Windsor crowd, which was limited to one major road, the Ottawa protest has essentially taken over the centre of a major city, with thousands of people flooding the streets with Canadian flags.
While many of the demonstrators have been peaceful, residents have told the BBC they have been shouted at for wearing masks, and had trouble getting to and from work.
Some of the complaints given by the protestors seem bizarre, as if they are grasping at anything to justify their complaints about the pandemic mitigation measures.
“This is not an anti-vax movement; this is a freedom movement. It’s for choice,” said Justin Smith, who was enjoying Beavertails – a Canadian pastry – with his wife Brandy Lawrence on the sidelines of the protests on Saturday evening. Both were wearing Canadian flags as capes.
“This nation is through and through my heart, I love Canada like you wouldn’t believe,” said Mr Smith.
They say they hate what mandates have done to their family, including their five children aged six to 16.
“I want my kids to go into a store and see a smile on someone’s face. That’s the saddest thing,” said Ms Lawrence.
Really? The saddest thing is that their children cannot see total strangers in a store smiling? They must live a very privileged life if that is what really upsets them.
While their numbers are small, like the right-wingers in the US, they are very vocal but Zack Beauchamp says that we should not be misled about their strength by the loudness.
But it’s important to understand the broader context in Canada. News coverage of the convoy, especially from sympathetic anchors on Fox News, may lead Americans to believe that Canada is in the midst of a far-right popular uprising. In reality, the mainstream consensus in Canada about Covid-19, and the nation’s institutions in general, is holding. The so-called trucker movement is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated.
They are angry because they have lost.
…The protests have had notable international reach, becoming a cause célèbre for anti-restriction conservatives in the US and Europe. Sixty-three percent of the donations to the truckers’ now-removed GoFundMe came from the United States; the American right reportedly played an important role in getting the protest off the ground. It’s also now inspiring actions elsewhere: An American convoy is scheduled to depart from California on March 4, with Washington as its ultimate destination. A similar French effort is already on its way to Paris, with police vowing to bar its entry to the capital.
Yet the fact that so much of the so-called trucker movement’s support seems to be coming from abroad is telling.
The reality is that a combination of factors, ranging from the structure of the Canadian political system to widespread acceptance of liberal cultural values, have made its government especially resistant to far-right radicalism. On issues ranging from Covid-19 to immigration to abortion, the mainstream consensus has held.
The freedom convoy’s willingness to disrupt life in Canada’s capital is less a sign of an incipient popular uprising than the lashing out of a minority that has little influence at the ballot box.
It is interesting that so much of politics in the US, and now possibly in Canada, is driven by those who are loudest and angriest. It takes anger to to get you out of your home and into the streets to demonstrate. Thus the people who are not angry, even if they are the overwhelming majority, tend to be passive, ceding the media stage to those who seek confrontations to get attention.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/feb/15/this-is-why-some-people-dont-want-to-get-the-covid-vaccine
Hacked convoy data shows more than half of donations came from U.S.
“But it’s important to understand the broader context in Canada. News coverage of the convoy, especially from sympathetic anchors on Fox News, may lead Americans to believe that Canada is in the midst of a far-right popular uprising. In reality, the mainstream consensus in Canada about Covid-19, and the nation’s institutions in general, is holding. The so-called trucker movement is on the fringe, including among Canadian truckers — some 90 percent of whom are vaccinated.”
There is an old saying about journalism, “‘Dog bites man’, that’s not news. But, ‘Man bites dog’, that’s news!”
I hate that saying. That is telling journalists to not try to describe the reality we live in, but rather to tittilate us with weird episodes that, while they do happen in a world with 8 billion people jostling into each other, we individuals will probably never encounter in our actual lives. And the sole reason to do this inherently disingenuous kind of reporting is presumably in order to sell more news media. Never mind that this practice leaves a dangerously false inpression of the world in the minds of their customers. As long as the benjamins keep rolling in, these ‘journalists’ have done their duty.
Fuck that!
Not the brightest bulbs on the tree, are they?
.1. In the USA, there are now around 200,000 Covid-19 orphans, children whose parents have died from the Covid-19 virus. Their lives will never be easy, especially if they end up in the foster care system.
The unit of transmission of the virus is all too often the family. It’s not that unusual for both parents to get the virus and die. Also, a whole lot of children in the USA are being raised by single parents or grandparents.
I’m sure the same statistical trend is true for Canada.
You haven’t seen sad until you’ve seen your parent(s) get sick and die.
.2. Death is a permanent solution to a temporary problem!!!
If we/they wait a while, this pandemic will end.
Stay alive and healthy now, and you will be here to enjoy a more normal world when this pandemic eventually winds down to its end game. Which might be a few months away, according to some educated predictions, although no will know for sure until we are there.
For many inside the Freedom Convoy, faith fuels the resistance
So Trudeau is doing what his old man did fifty one years ago, invoking the war measures act.
Sure, it’s now called the “emergencies act”, but that’s just a rebranding and a rewrite of the legislation. This Trudeau knows he has to tread much lighter, not round up anyone and everyone and put them in a black bag. Fortunately for him, the “freedumb” clowns are overt, not like the FLQ who committed terrorism in secrecy. For now. But if they do engage in violence, expect crackdowns on everyone’s civil liberties.
If he had sent cops in ten days ago and did to the white supremacists what he did to First Nations people protesting the pipeline, this would already be over. If they weren’t white, this would not have been allowed to drag on so long. The crackdown only came because the blockade affected corporations’ profits.
That’s short-term thinking, Rhiannon. Also faintly disturbing in that you think the head-cracking maneuvers WORK? You do realize that the media is the whole deal here, yes? This way, the government have denied the wannabe terrorists their press martyrdom, denied them their underdog look entirely.
Over here in NZ, the “anti-mandate” protest continues outside parliament into its ninth day. I put “anti-mandate” because it’s about as dissimilar to anti-vax as “intelligent design” is to creationism. This despite vaccination rates over 12 being 99% full, 98% at least partial, in the capital!
Parliament has refused to meet with the protesters, which I’m in two minds about. On the one hand, I don’t want the cretins to be pandered to. But on the other, an MP’s role is all about schmoozing up to people and convincing them, even if reluctantly, to go along with whatever’s necessary, so perhaps they should just do their job.
Police have been beefing up threats to have the protesters’ cars, which are choking the streets, towed, but they’ve been threatening that for days. Ostensibly the reason it still hasn’t happened is that the towies are worried about their safety should they do their job, but it came to light yesterday that the real reason may be that many towies are sympathic to the protests. Oy vey! So while the new plan is to have police accompany towies to “ensure” towing happens smoothly, I’m not holding my breath.
“I want my kids to go into a store and see a smile on someone’s face. That’s the saddest thing,” said Ms Lawrence.
I appreciate this sentiment, I really do, I’d like to see people smiling again too… but it seems to me that the quickest way we can achieve that is to fucking GET EVERYONE VACCINATED!!! The moment the virus can’t spread (well) is the moment we don’t have to worry about it anymore and can take our masks off…
Intransitive @6:
Please explain how the PM can send cops in, and how he supposedly sent them in during the pipeline protests.
Relevant article: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2022/02/canada-trudeau-paralyzed-by-angry-truckers.html
Pullquote:
But that’s not their job. They are elected to enact responsible law, not to convince with intentionally ignorant to stop being ignorant. They may as well piss into the wind for all the good it will do, trying to teach those that don’t accept teaching.
It would appear that the Canadian protest also received funding from some Aussies.
https://amp.abc.net.au/article/100832928
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Xian, of course, because they know freedumb.
Meanwhile, our own freedumb convoy here in Oz included morons waving trunt flags for fuck sake (yes I know that I misspelled the giant orange turd’s name). One of their goals is to stand against vaccination mandates for all of us, even though more than 80% of the population implicitly support vaccinations by getting vaccinated. If only this was a democracy……
Off topic, but I left my last job because the (xian) company owner and his wife were staunch trunt supporters and used to talk about how great he was every day, AT WORK! I pointed out to him long before the 2016 election that trunt is a failed mob boss, a 5-times bankrupt sexual abuser and racist but he was having none of it. ‘trunt will save the world’ he said.
After the inauguration he said to me that he watched the entirety of trunts speech and was amazed by the “fact” that he never once looked at any notes during the whole thing (apparently auto-cues are invisible to xians).
Then in another
conversationlecture he told me he thought the wall along the mexican border was a great thing.I said that maybe Canada should do the same.
“Why?” he asked.
Because of all the guns and drugs that enter Canada from the USA I said (in jest, just to see what he would say).
He looked at me as if I had revealed to him a universal truth and proclaimed “Of course! I would support that!”
I had a new job within two weeks.
Not hugely off topic, just tangential.
They found and arrested people with guns and the intention to use them. I’ve no doubt that’s what finally drove Trudeau to do something.
Holms #12:
Oh right, what they were elected for rather than the demands of the role. Sorry, I forgot. In my defence, by far and away most of the actions that I see them perform are bullshitting the public into thinking that they might do something other than what they inevitably do, and bullshitting their way through difficulties. It’s become so normal to me now that I thought it actually was their job, my mistake.
No worries, no harm done.