OTTAWA – The trucker convoy is alive and well and may be expanding by the weekend. I have been following this massive convoy of trucks from Canada and the United States that have met in the nation’s capitol to show their fierce opposition to mandatory lockdowns, mask mandates and vaccine mandates.
It started with a grievance from truckers who refused to bow to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s dictate that they all had to be vaccinated against COVID-19. It grew into a nationwide protest against two years of increasingly authoritarian government action and rhetoric.
The Ottawa Police Service has refused to confirm the number of trucks participating in the protest, but initially estimated it to be 100,000. The truckers have virtually shut down the city. Wellington Street – the equivalent of Pennsylvania Avenue – is completely blocked by trucks.
Trudeau has refused to meet with the truckers and disparaged the freedom rally convoy Monday as a racist, neo-Nazi parade that resembled more a Nuremberg Rally than a bunch of average Canadians sitting in their trucks flying Canadian flags.
“There have been many, many protests over the past years that I have seen that I’ve been part of … that don’t see the level of hateful rhetoric, of swastikas of abuse towards their fellow citizens … There is not a right to incite violence, to perform acts of violence and to spew hatred.”
Yet Trudeau took a knee at a Black Lives Matter protest on June 6, 2020, an organization that spews hatred for police, incites violence and looting and torches businesses.
Trudeau said he won’t negotiate with truckers because they gave no respect for “science” or “in some cases democratic principles.” He called them “conspiracy theorists” and “folks peddling disinformation” without specifying what conspiracies or disinformation they were disseminating.
Despite the the hundreds of thousands of Canadian flags being flown and no evidence having yet been found of a single Nazi or Confederate flag being found carried by a trucker, Trudeau’s Monday morning news conference focused entirely on “Nazi symbolism” and alleged trucker violence.
Trudeau, who has been diagnosed with his second case of COVID-19, appeared at his news conference on the porch of his official residence without wearing a mask that he has insisted are integral to halting the spread of the disease.
“I know you’re wondering about what hou saw in our capital city this weekend. As my friend Irwin Cotler said on Saturday, ‘Freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democrcadcy but Nazi symbolism, racist imeagery and desecration of war memorials are not. It is an insult to memory and truth.’”
“Hate can never be the answer,” Trudeau continued. “Over the past few days, Canadians were shocked and frankly disgusted by the behavior displayed by some people protesting in our nation’s capital.”
Clearly, Trudeau was describing an alternate universe that he inhabits. He infamously dismissed the convoy as a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians,” Trudeau said.
Increasingly, it appears that Trudeau is the one holding unacceptable views. The police have shown up in riot gear but have merely waved to the protesters and made no attempt to remove them. The military has refused to intervene in the protest and Trudeau isn’t pushing them to do so.
Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson, who previously served as a cabinet minister in a provincial Liberal government, is incensenced that the convoy has not been forcefully removed and has called some Conservative Members of Parliament who showed up to demonstrate solidarity with the truckers “a disgrace” and begging that life return to “normal.” But what is normal for this mayor? Endless booster vaccine shots, endless maskings, rolling lockdowns?
In fact, the Conservative Party has imploded over the protest with the party caucus ejecting Official Opposition Leader Erin O’Toole as party leader because he was essentially a carbon copy of Trudeau on every major policy – especially as far as COVID-19 restrictions were concerned.
All of this could benefit the only real conservative leader in Canada – Peoples Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier. Bernier told Townhall that the rally was about promoting freedom and only someone pushing a political agenda could possibly see it otherwise.
“We want to unite everybody under the freedom umbrella. The end is coming. You are saying that we are promoting disinformation? You did it You did it at the beginning of that pandemic. Now we know the facts, now we know the truth. The facts are Omicron is not dangerous for the big majority of Canadians, It’s like the flu.”
“So let’s reopen the economy, let’s reopen our society: everybody wants to be free in Canada and that was the message of that weekend here in Ottawa and I was here with them. Where were you? You were not there…”
“Look at the polls right now. More people are fed up with that. They want to regain their freedom. So it’s up to you, I know that these truckers today; they want to have a discussion with you. They are asking you to have a meeting with you. They want to discuss. So I hope as a leader you’ll be responsible and you will go and listen to them and meet them.”
Conservative Member of Parliament Pierre Polievre asked the the Liberals during Monday’s Question Period why no one is suggesting that all Liberals are racist just because has repeatedly appeared in black face throughout his life.
A new Angus-Reid poll, released Monday, confirmed exactly what Bernier said. As Omicron proved to be a mild form of COVID-19 and seemingly having peaked, the public is having less and less enthusiasm for rolling lockdowns and endless mask mandates. A majority (54%) now want to lift the restrictions and allow Canadians to exercise their personal choice. That’s up 15% since that question was asked in January.