Catching up on this old story.
So a lot of truckers in Canada got together to protest mandatory covid vaccination in late January. They convoyed across Canada and descended on Ottawa to protest at parliament. Like a lot of anti-vaxxers, they were long on shouting conspiracy theories and very short on data and realism. They ruined the quality of life in the neighborhoods where they lined the streets with their trucks idling and polluting, blowing their horns at high volume, and generally being annoying to the point that murder was conceivable.
Of course they were cheered on by US anti-vaxxers. Their fundraising may have been largely from Americans. But at some point, the government shut down their fundraising and seized the money, if I remember correctly.
This was perhaps the biggest showdown between anti-vaxxers and a national government, so the whole world watched. I hoped it would fail so that US truckers weren't encouraged to pull the same shit here. Eventually, the mild-mannered Canadians got fed up with the US-style raucous rednecks, and clamped down hard. Some police sabotaged extra vehicles, Police surrounded them and managed to get them to disperse. Oh, yeah, Trudeau (the baby prime minister son of a former prime minister) invoked some emergency powers to have the legal tools to arrest scofflaws and throw them in jail. After a bit of grandstanding, he won a vote backing the powers.
So it went from a cause celebre to a fizzle. Americans tried to copy it, but it never ascended very far and then fizzled. The Canadian protest didn't launch an Arab Spring or anything close to it. But we didn't know if it might. Remember this as only a year after the Jan. 6 coup attempt in Washington DC, so rebellion was still in the air. It could have ignited, but luckily it didn't. No one needs a rebellion based on stupidity and ridiculous internet claims. Also, Russia invaded Ukraine a few weeks later, so Canadian idiots were no longer the biggest news story in the world. Real issues took over.
Sources: Aggrieved entitlement. White nationalism among the protest leaders. The emergency declaration. The police tighten the circle around the protesters. The biggest outrage was a woman being trampled to death by a mounted officer, but that was a huge exaggeration of the incident. Not even a serious injury. I recognize this blowing issues out of total proportion.
No comments:
Post a Comment