Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, along with the rest of the liberal media, have denigrated the truckers of the Freedom Convoy. It’s not a band of white supremacists. There is no violence. These are all lies. There’s no looting. There’s no arson. There’s no security issue present that would warrant the government rolling in the tanks. Luckily, the Canadian military has rejected any overtures that they be used to clear these people out. Ontario’s government tried to block the donation stream. It failed. GoFundMe pinched off donations to the truckers; GoSendMe picked up where they left off.
If the elites ventured out and spoke with these people, it would take all of 10 minutes to see that this is a peaceful protest—and maybe there are points aplenty about how Canada’s COVID policy is a disaster. The same goes for the United States. The folks telling these people’s stories can be found on Substack. Rupa Subramanya, a freelance writer, had a lengthy post about the freedom truckers. She spoke to some 100 truckers, maybe more, and found that a) they’re not Nazis, b) they have legitimate reasons to be against the vaccination policy, and c) they’re not going anywhere.
— The Right To Bear Memes (@grandoldmemes) February 11, 2022
Subramanya does a great job weaving through these people. It’s as if we’re walking through the crowd with her while noting that this is a diverse coalition of Canadians who are fighting for their rights. It also highlighted the wealth gap that these Canadians had long felt was just an American problem. They feel the pinch. The see the two separate Canadas playing by different rules (via Substack):
They came from across the country. Vaxxed, unvaxxed, white, black, Chinese, Sikh, Indian, alone or with their wives and kids. They huddled around campfires. They set up pop-up kitchens and tents with block captains doling out coffee and blankets. They honked (and honked and honked). They blasted “We Are the World.” And everywhere you looked, someone was waving the Maple Leaf.
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I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.
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B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me…
Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)
So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.
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Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Co Kudvid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200. “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”
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Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country. Pointing to the gleaming, ritzy condominiums near Parliament, he said he used to deliver the concrete stairs in those buildings. Since the cross-border vaccine mandate kicked in in mid-January, he’s been out of work. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. He refused to give his last name, he said, because he didn’t want the government coming after him, and he wanted to work again.
I heard this over and over from the truckers. And it was not entirely crazy.
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Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. He’d been vaccinated for other things. But he had a hereditary heart condition that, he said, made the Covid vaccine inadvisable—but he couldn’t get a medical exemption. At work, they made him mask up constantly. He felt like he was being publicly shamed. So, he quit.
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Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general. “There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds,” Sim said.
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The protesters feel the mood shifting. On Tuesday, the premier of Saskatchewan, Scott Moe, announced the end of his province’s proof-of-vaccination policy. “It is time for us also to heal the divisions in our communities over vaccination,” he said.
Joël Lightbound, a leading member of Parliament from Quebec and a member of the Liberal Party, Trudeau’s party, slammed the federal government. The government, Lightbound said, had gone “from a more positive approach to one that stigmatizes and divides people.” The truckers say they won’t leave Ottawa until the mandates, the lockdowns—everything—are dropped.
These people are heroes. They sparked an American Freedom Convoy that hopefully gets to Washington DC by March 1. It once again pits normal people against the political class and the elites. COVID is here to stay. It’s endemic. It’s time we start acting like it. It will come and go like flu and cold season. End the vaccine passports. Ditch the mask mandates. Shred the vaccine mandates as well. COVID has a 99-plus percent survival rate, but it’s turned every liberal into an abject monster.
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