Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

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>Aside from a billion dollars+ in trade blocked when the protest -- having achieved nothing terrorizing the residents of Ottawa and blasting horns/setting off fireworks around the clock

I don't think, it is entirely fair to blame it all on one side. What the government could have done is meet with the protestors and solve the problem diplomatically. Agree on a reasonable compromise, like suspending some restrictions conditional to hospital utilization. The protestors with reasonable demands [0] would have then condemned the complete nut jobs, most general public from both political camps would have supported the peaceful resolution and Trudeau would have been known as a good diplomat. After all, it's his direct job - negotiate terms on behalf of people he represents.

Instead, he decided to basically threw a tantrum and declared that it's below his royal highness to go negotiate with some pesky trucker plebs, quickly passing emergency regulation barring public assembly on the Parliament Hill and near "official residences" [1]. This is the most divisive and nonconstructive way of handling the situation, and I do think this is done on purpose.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P8tzXazvyHQ&t=44s

[1] https://www.gazette.gc.ca/rp-pr/p2/2022/2022-02-15-x1/html/s...

No we do not meet with terrorists. That is what the occupation was, terrorists harassing, intimidating and torturing the businesses and residents of Ottawa.

I think everyone has a right to protest, peacefully, and many have in Ottawa. None of them terrorized the city for 3 weeks. Before you say that it was a "peaceful" protest note that there are many types of terrorism [0] and this occupation fits into "Civil disorder – A form of collective violence interfering with the peace, security, and normal functioning of the community.".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terrorism#Types

The Federal government can't agree to compromises on healthcare matters; that's provincial jurisdiction. It can't agree on compromises on border vaccination; that's US jurisdiction.

YouTube videos are not citations. No one is going to watch them or try to read the tea leaves of some third party's interpretation. The literal demand of the organizers of the group (a separatist and a white supremacist) were that the government resign en masse. The trucks are emblazoned with "Fuck Trudeau" flags and signs. The rhetoric coming from the various participants has been aggressive and apocalyptic.

No, Trudeau should never have met with them. I'm no Trudeau fan, but there was zero value in ever meeting with this group. They should have been swept up the moment they broke the first law.

"like suspending some restrictions conditional to hospital utilization"

Like almost everyone who has takes on this here (including DHH), you seem to know perilously little about the actual situation, yet you've got a lot of takes. The vast majority of mandates are provincial, for instance, not federal, just as health systems are managed at the provincial level. Ontario (the province that Ottawa is in), actually has a conservative leader, but the so-called "truckers" didn't target him at all, and their minimal foray into Toronto was immediately squashed by a much more capable police force. Nor did they do much about any other premier. Because it had little to do with mandates. These people simply don't accept democracy. They don't like Trudeau, therefore he's got to go. I mean, they literally said it over and over again. That's cool, but we just had an election so they can take their mini insurrection and go home again.

The linked video has ~750K views and features Benjamin Dichter, one of the 3 convoy leaders, outlining 2 very realistic demands:

1. Abolish federal vaccine mandates for border crossing.

2. Abolish ArriveCAN - the app used to track health/vaccination status during border crossings.

Both are very specific demands. Both will have close to zero effect on the actual COVID deaths. Both are within the federal government's jurisdiction. Both are extremely hard to defend in the public's eye. So what does the government and the news agencies do? Completely ignore the reasonable take, pick up much crazier demands made by a different person, that are easier to refute, and play the usual guilt by association game, implying that everyone against the mandates are supporters of the nuttiest imaginable cause.

The video was made February 15th, weeks into the blockade, and long after it was painfully clear that the public was turning dramatically against the convoy. At this point the Premier of Ontario and the federal government were openly discussing measures to squash the occupation.

A week earlier the organizers had quietly dropped their memorandum of understanding's insurrection demands.

"Completely ignore the reasonable take, pick up much crazier demands made by a different person"

What I described were the demands in effect by the organizers for weeks. In interviews with convoy participants, zero of them seemed to believe that removing a border vaccine requirement (completely and utterly irrelevant given that the US government has their own mandate that makes Canada's extraneous) would be enough for them to go home.

In other words, the organizers managed to agree between themselves and come up with reasonable demands, but the government showed complete unwillingness to reason. So Benjamin Dichter showed himself as a better diplomat than Justin Trudeau.

I am just in awe at this. Astonishing.

After a three week long insurrection based on profound ignorance, and thousands of instances of criminality, you think the government -- just as it was about to have the resources available to put it down -- should have shook hands and said "you win" to these people? And just to be clear, even if we though the army of QAnon aficionados would go for it, I assure you they would have expected amnesty.

No, I don't think so. It was *way* too late to suddenly try to eek a win out of this.

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