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Comment by john_moscow | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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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