A week ago, a convoy of protesters rumbled into the nation’s capital in protest of vaccine and quarantine mandates for truckers who were crossing into Canada.
The protest, which began in British Columbia, made its way through Ontario late last week and reached Ottawa over the weekend. The “Freedom Convoy” expanded into Toronto and Vancouver on Feb. 5, in support of the protest in Ottawa.
What many claimed to be a peaceful protest turned into something else.
I say this because “peaceful” doesn’t necessarily mean an absence of violence. There were few reported physical altercations, but there was intimidation of journalists, business owners, and shelter groups.
Counter-protesters have now begun to show themselves in response. Video surfaced online of Ottawa residents blocking a residential street and making sure a truck in the convoy couldn’t pass. As well, a group protested outside an Ottawa police station to urge them to act to remove the protestors. Several criminal investigations are now underway in Ottawa.
Law enforcement has shown its willingness to intervene quickly — and with authority — in a Black Lives Matter or Indigenous protest, but curiously, not the “Freedom Convoy.”
The protest may have started out as a call to end vaccine and quarantine mandates for truckers, but it devolved into something more grotesque.
In Canada, more than 90 per cent of truckers have been vaccinated against COVID-19 and wouldn’t be affected by the cross-border vaccine mandate the country implemented, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau told reporters last week.
What supporters of the “Freedom Convoy” argue is a vaccine mandate would continue to disrupt already exacerbated supply chain issues and continue to drive inflation.
Pierre Poilievre, the Conservative finance critic and latest candidate for the federal Conservative party, called the vaccination and quarantine mandates a “vaccine vendetta against our hard-working truckers” that would drive inflation upwards and result in “empty shelves” at stores across the country.
Poilievre’s points are political hyperbole, it’s meant to stoke fear.
But the protests became twisted and warped into anti-vaxx and anti-mandate campaigns fuelled by conspiracy.
The protest outright denies fact and science. We’ve somehow returned to the Dark Ages when people believed the sun revolved around the Earth and if you walked to one end of the planet, you’d fall off.
Claiming the science has been wrong is reckless.
Unless you’re a scientist, doctor, or expert in viruses and vaccines, conducting, contributing, or able to understand clinical research into COVID-19, you have no authority to say, “the science has been wrong.”
But now, the protest has found itself supported by the likes of white supremacists and neo-Nazis. I understand that people of colour are in support of these protests as well, but how can anyone stand idly by as people carrying Canadian flags defaced with Swastikas and the battle flag of the Army of Northern Virginia to Parliament Hill?
They don’t understand the gravity of the symbols they carry. The so-called Confederate flag is a symbol of slavery and hatred, one that pushes the language of Jim Crow.
Jim Crow meant that a Black man in the United States was considered three-fifths of a man.
And yet they stand by it?
Swastikas represent one of the purest forms of hatred. Six million Jews were systematically slaughtered at the hands of the Nazis. Just last week, hundreds of pages were left at people’s doorsteps in more than six states south of the border, falsely claiming Jews were responsible for COVID-19.
The appropriation of Indigenous rites by protestors was at the least insulting.
The reality is, what they’re fighting for, what they aim to remove, is the only thing keeping us safe.
Our healthcare system is strained.
It would be worse if our vaccination rates were lower and more people shared this ideology. Public health measures have been in place to help reduce the strain the virus has put on our healthcare system; it was never a “miracle cure-all.”
Since the beginning of the pandemic, vaccination has been pushed to help reduce the severity of the impact on hospitalizations, ICU admissions and death. The vaccine was never purported to be a 100 per cent effective tool to prevent you from getting sick.
What happened to protecting others and being selfless in the face of great adversity?
It seems that sentiment among this group has disappeared.
What confounds me is this movement seems to believe that people who are pro-vaccine are somehow in favour of lockdowns, vaccine passports and masks forever.
That’s certainly not the case.
I enjoy these things no more than any of the rest of the country does, but I accept the reality that it’s necessary short-term pain for long-term vitality.
These protests stopped being about the rights of truckers in Canada a long time ago. It’s something much more sinister, much more insidious, and something no Canadian should be proud to be a part of.
Protests are important in any democracy. But this stopped being a protest.
If you threaten to dissolve the government, this smacks of the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. When you threaten the Prime Minister, it’s no longer a protest of policy. When you park and then urinate on the Memorial of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, you spit in the face of people who fought for our freedom, for the ability to live the lives we do now.
Their behaviour should echo throughout our country as a warning. Canadians should want nothing to do with Nazism, racism or conspiracy. By not choosing to denounce it, you become guilty by association.
That’s not something Canadians should be proud of.