Canada’s Freedom Convoy truckers go on trial
unherd.com
unherd.com
They’re terrorists and seditionists. Use the trial to expose their crimes, remove all doubt of culpability, and lock them up. 10 years is practically a slap on the wrist. 150 years ago they would have been cleared out within a day via grapeshot fired from cannons. They should be grateful that the rest of us aren’t “conserving traditions” with the same zeal that they do.
Peaceful protests? WHAT PEACEFUL PROTESTS???
The TruKKKer QUANONvoy wasn’t peaceful in the least.
If I parked a big rig on the sidewalk in front of your home and blasted it’s horn all day every day for weeks on end, you would rightly call that psychological violence.
If I harassed you on the street, screamed in your face every time you stepped outside, and carried objects that are innocent on the surface but which could easily be used as blunt-force weapons, you would rightly call that immediate threats of physical violence.
If I paraded around with an ideology that demanded your death purely based on the colour of your skin, you would rightly call that racial violence.
If I demanded to overthrow your elected officials and undemocratically replace them with my own unelected goons that listened only to me, you would rightly call that political violence.
If I was in cahoots with the municipal police, which turned a blind eye to all of this and let me run roughshod over you and your community with impunity, you would rightfully call this legally-sanctioned violence.
There was no “peaceful protest” anywhere in Ottawa in the early months of 2022. There was just an assembly of anti-democratic fascists who wanted to replace political process and the rule of law with alt-right oppression and totalitarianism that spat in the face of Canadian values.
The only thing this trial is about is holding two men accountable for their decisions and actions.
And if we followed their self-professed values of “conserving traditions”, they would end up swinging from a noose or in front of a firing squad. After all, that IS the traditional way of dealing with seditionists.
> the rhetoric you're using is straight from the hateful propaganda spread by the PM and his "liberal" party. quite liberal, aren't we ?
What hateful rhetoric? The fact that everyone is being held to the same legal and social standard? Yes, I imagine not having any special rights does feel very much like persecution and hate.
And I’m not a conservative… yes, the Liberals ARE on the political right, they are small-c conservative through-and-through. They’re just right-of-centre reasonable ones which haven’t lost sight of reality, and aren’t obsessed with fascism and totalitarianism.
“If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.”
- David Frum, Trumpocracy
Most Canadians don’t share your position. Most Canadians see that TruKKKer QUANONvoy for exactly what it was: an alt-right, racist, ChristoFascist fringe movement protesting its slide into irrelevance and loss of special societal rights.
Hell, when 62% of Canadians oppose the convoy, and almost 50% strongly oppose it, the 17% that strongly support it (only one in six!) is very much in the minority.
And good riddance. Canada has no use for their ilk, and no place for them either. You want Christofascist totalitarianism? Go to any red state in America. They have exactly the kind of brutal oppression of anyone not white, cis, male, or Christian that you could ever want.
Videos shot by residents of 24/7 honking (https://youtu.be/cmL0ycjSIaU) is not “imagination”. Businesses complaining about racist assaults (https://twitter.com/sghottawa/status/1487854425368633344) is not “imagination”. And the demands of the convoy leaders to usurp elected officials and dissolve the legally-elected government is an open fact, as they published it publicly.
Your fact-free ideology is what is all in your imagination.
If that’s what Canada allows, then you’re right about the liberals needing to go so conservative leaders can secure the rule of law and order!
That does not mean I support their politics, their head organizer stated goals, or anything else whatsoever.
I empathize with Ottawans on being inconvenienced by their actions; even I saw some of that with protests happening in Toronto. But overall, that was a small price to pay compared to years of pandemic restrictions.
Someone will now tell me that the truckers weren’t at all responsible for ending restrictions, and that they just coincided with loss of public support for restrictions. That’s fine - there was a lot of anger going around and maybe the trucker convoy was a symptom not a catalyst for it.
At the very least, maybe governments will be a little more cautious implementing such egregious restrictions next time around.
The government(s) went way overboard with Pfizer proof of purchase QR codes to get lunch. Especially when uptake was 80%+
They also went overboard by locking down again over the holidays when everyone was already catching the most contagious Omicron. People not being able to go to a gym to stay fit, that already needed a barcode, swayed a lot of the public that things were going on too long.
But the obnoxiousness of the truckers also went too far for too long. The news of rifles and arrests in Alberta was (obviously) too far.
I don't have a citation on hand, but at one point more than a third of Canadians did support either the truckers explicitly or their aims, and that's a higher percentage than voted for the current governing party. Support was higher among younger people, sometimes over 50%. But this percentage decreased as time went on.
The government also completely failed to act diplomatically or to de-escalate the situation. Instead we had inflammatory rhetoric and a focus on some silly flags (which should be condemned, but a lot of people have doubts as to their sincerity, and I've seen some pretty gross signs against the unvaxxed too)
Some people, even in this comment section, take their rhetoric and opposition too far.
There is no doubt in my mind that the more time passes, the more we will look at Canada's response to the pandemic (especially in its later years) as a horrendous failure that harmed trust in public health, harmed social cohesion, and harmed our democratic and civil institutions. Everyone failed and everyone suffered as a result.