I am a Canadian and I support the truckers.
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.