Shameful that a peaceful protest is met with this response. How can a person protest meaningfully if any peaceful protest can be called illegal?
I do understand that the truckers were disturbing the peace of ordinary people - I think this should be discouraged. However there must be a way to peacefully assemble without the government's approval.
I don't see how we can have meaningful civil discourse if you need permission to protest at all.
I live in Ottawa and I assure you that this protest is not peaceful. I've had friends physically assaulted, spit on, and yelled at just for wearing a mask into a business. Not to mention the constant honking that was reaching levels above 100db inside people's homes.
Homeless shelters were raided by protestors, businesses have been forced to close due to threats, and people are afraid to leave their homes.
I and my friends have been there for 3 weekends and haven't seen any of that.
> Homeless shelters were raided by protestors, businesses have been forced to close due to threats, and people are afraid to leave their homes.
This is hilariously inaccurate. Everyone's bringing food TO the truckers and there's so much food there that truckers are refusing to take more.
Amazingly, we live in 2022 where everyone has a phone camera and Ottawa, the capital, has security cameras everywhere and yet none of this ever gets captured on camera and nobody seems to capture the face of the people supposedly doing such things.
Here's one actual violence which did get captured on video:
The protestors on the first weekend going to the Shepherds of Good Hope homeless shelter and taking food (and being violent with staff) was extremely well documented.
I literally heard honking today. The only reason there is less honking is because there is a legal injuction and truckers who honk can now be sued civilly. But they still persist.
This seems incredible peaceful for it's scale then? Pretty much every major protest I've seen over this COVID period had significant looting, vandalism, and actually setting fire to stuff. This seems just well insignificant compared to the scale of the protest.
I don't feel like that's the point you're trying to make but with such minimal activities you can link too and even less with confirmed links it really feels like you're stretching.
> You mean surveillance footage like this, of a protestor trying to lock the doors to an apartmnent building and start a fire?
You do know that they were NOT the protestors right? And even the Ottawa Deputy Police Chief has debunked it. The supposed "arsonist" was someone who was wearing face masks, had purple hair was was in his early 20s as max. You really think that's a trucker protester?
> Ottawa Deputy Police Chief on the alleged arson in Ottawa: “We don’t have any direct linkage between the occupation—the demonstrators—and that act.”
Like I said, somehow the "homeless shelter" has zero videos of anything happening. We are living in 2022, not 1950s. Everyone has a video camera phone now a days and somehow not a single person captured such thing?
Your instagram link has not a single video of violence. You really are stretching your narrative.
Honking injunction was ONLY for continuous honking. Despite that, when I was there on Saturday after 9pm, there was no honking. Even if there were, you really think honking is violence?
I'm happy that you haven't experienced any of that. None of what I said is untrue. I'm glad there has been lots of support from this protest to attempt to make up for some of the damage. It is still an illegal occupation that is costing my city millions every day, thousands of people are out of work at the Rideau Centre alone, libraries have been shut down, school children are being intimidated...
I see you are concerned with the protest having the effects of
> Costing millions
> Putting people out of work
> Shutting down civic functions
> intimidating school children
I don't know anything about Canadian government's response to the virus, but would it be fair to characterize the effects of the response as any or all of the above? Or if not affecting you directly, then those you may personally know or simply your fellow countrymen?
Canadian here. To my knowledge the federal government did not intimidate children, and people who were forced to stop working were compensated.
People do feel irritation when we have done so much collectively, only for a small minority to pee in the pool.
It's a war against the health system. It's on the verge of collapsing in many provinces because of Covid, and folks like Maxime Bernier want it privatized. Ideological and manipulative greed.
> It's a war against the health system. It's on the verge of collapsing in many provinces because of Covid
This is extremely disingenuous and ill-informed. I would recommend people do a google search for "Ontario hospital overcrowd" and set the date filter to be before 2020 (before COVID). You will find articles for every single year in past decade where hospitals were overcrowded because of flu.
Ontario ranks the 3rd last in the world in terms of hospital beds per 1000 (only mexico and chile are behind us) and absolute last within Canada. We used to have almost double the hospital beds per 1000 back in 1990s but since then our population has exploded and also gotten older but we haven't done much to increase the beds until last year when we added a few beds but still nowhere near to what it is supposed to be and what it used to be in 1990s.
A well functioning health care system is required to operate at 85% maximum but Ontario has been running at over 100% in most hospitals majority of the time BEFORE covid.
Ontario has the fewest hospital beds per capita in the country at 1.4 per 1,000 people. That compares to the national average of 2.0.
In 1990, Ontario had around 50000 hospital beds. Now, we only have around 34000 despite our population exploding and also getting older.
Many hospitals in Ontario operated at above 100% capacity in 2019. According to the Ontario Hospital Association, Ontario’s hospitals have faced low or nearly flat funding for years — with only an increase of 5.4% from 2012-19, compared to an average of 12.9% among other provinces while population increased and hospitals absorbed inflationary costs. Ontario’s Ministry of Health’s own numbers show the province has the lowest per capita health spending in Canada. The Registered Nurses Association of Ontario notes this also held true in 2018, and that the province had the lowest registered nurses per capita and the second-lowest hospital spending per capita rate in the country, after Quebec.
CBC News in January 2020 (before COVID) found 32 of Ontario’s hospitals were filled beyond 100% occupancy nearly every day in the first half of 2019 — including Ontario’s 10 biggest hospitals.
A study of 169 of Ontario’s acute care hospital sites during the same period found:
- 83 hospitals were beyond 100% capacity for more than 30 days.
- 39 hospitals hit 120% capacity or higher for at least one day.
> Canada ranks near the bottom of OECD countries when it comes to hospital beds per capita. For context, we had 90% of hospitals beds in use in Canada before the pandemic even started. Why are we not having a national conversation on the inadequacies of our healthcare capacity?
> Many of the posts are demanding Premier Doug Ford's government repeal Bill 124, 2019 legislation that capped annual salary increases for many public sector employees, including nurses, at an average of one per cent annually for three years.
ALC stands for Alternate Level of Care - patient is someone who is occupying an acute care hospital bed but not acutely ill or does not require the intensity of resources or services provided in a hospital setting.
In Ontario, there are 5375 ALC open cases. 42.2% (2268) of which are waiting for LTC. Median wait time to get into an LTC from a hospital is 114 days. This is an insanely high number of people tying up hospital resources through no fault of theirs but because of incompetence of LTC. Instead of fixing this, they want to falsely blame the unvaccinated.
> In Ontario, as of Jan. 17, "42% of those awaiting transfer to long term care facilities were unable to find a placement. This amounts to about 2,200 people, and the median wait for an LTC placement for someone in the hospital is a staggering 114 days."
As if this isn't enough, Ontario and Quebec fired unvaccinated health care workers (many of whom had natural immunity from infection) and are now allowing COVID+ nurses to work if they are vaccinated.
How can we claim to provide equitable healthcare when we are denying fundamental freedoms based on discriminatory practices?
There is no pride in a health care system, however “free” it might be, if its existence is fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.
I share the sentiment of busymom0 and can relate how bad the healthcare is here in Quebec.
The hospitals have been overloaded and badly managed for a long time, way before the pandemic.
Most hospitals here have been operating above 100% capacity for many years. Waiting time to see a doctor have been reported to take in average 15 hours and up to 20 hours (pre-covid data in 2019) [1]. God forbid if you need to be hospitalized, as it can reach 24-48 hours sometimes.
Firing nurses over COVID measures before Christmas certainly didn't help, which is worth pointing out.
The politicians are trying to shift the blame of the bad healthcare systems happening under their watch to COVID.
> if its existence is fundamentally incompatible with the human spirit.
Agree we designed systems that could barely handle the flu, and we are paying the price. I'm not defending the politicians, certainly not Legault.
Where do we go from here? Fund back to average OECD levels, raise taxes, or honk and yell freedom while healthcare workers burnout?
And yes, a tiny number of nurses were suspended, but it's noticing compared to those who left the field from exhaustion from mandatory overtime and rigid scheduling.
Coffee shop with the window smashed (speculated it was because of the visible pride flag)
These trucks are extremely difficult to remove. And while you can still remove them if the air brakes are on it takes longer. Not only that, most rig towing companies won't do anything for fear of reprisal.
The problem for your narrative is that there are dozens of livestreamers showing the exact opposite of what you claim. Unless YouTube shuts them down, you cannot control the narrative no matter what story you spin. It's a new age, stop playing cards from an old one if you want to be believed.
I understand that many, many people are having fun, being kind, and are generally enjoying the party atmosphere. That does not discount the fact that people are being intimidated, put out of work, and assaulted every day since this has begun.
Do you forget that many of these truckers and their many supporters have also been put out of work by COVID policies? The hypocrisy there is palpable.
If you're concerned about getting Canadians back to work, should you not also be concerned with the economic damage done by mandates and lockdowns with no end in sight?
Ironic that you're complaining about violence in the context of a protest against forcibly jabbing people with a vaccine they don't want. The government's policy here is violence in itself.
If you truly were concerned about violence against innocent people, you'd be on the side of the protesters, not spreading unsourced lies in effort to have them silenced.
If someone doesn't want to get vaccinated, they're very welcome to go work in a job that doesn't require it; I know people that are happily earning a living while unvaccinated. There is no right to be able to work exactly the job you want on your own terms.
Protesters are still allowed to protest peacefully, they just aren't allowed to occupy the area around parliament and shut down border crossings for weeks, and intimidate and enact violence against the citizens of Ottawa. Nobody is stopping anyone from peacefully protesting in Canada, give your head a shake.
But it seems that every time the "unpermitted location" changes with every protest! In this case, it's "the area around parliament" and "border crossings" - in Quebec it was "this particular road" or "these schools" during their "Red Square" tuition protests.
In my opinion, Parliament is almost always a valid place to protest - outside a politician's or ordinary person's private home, much less so.
By invoking these emergency powers, I think it's hard to dispute that the Prime Minister's Office is stopping a peaceful protest!
This is the action of people who are not being heard. Trudeau could have de-escalated by meeting with the protesters, but he instead essentially said they should shut up and go back to driving.
It is absolutely false that Trudeau could have deescalated by talking to the convoy leaders. This is demonstrably false, as the mayor of Ottawa set up a meeting with them to negotiate some terms where the convoy would be restricted to a specific area in Ottawa. A meeting with the mayor, exactly what the convoyers want right? Then at the last minute they backed out. This whole "meet with us" is a move to be recognized and the moment Trudeau met with them, they would ratchet up their demands to a higher level. These people are foaming at the mouth with hate for trudeau, they have "F*CK TRUDEAU" as their slogan and painted on their trucks, they don't want to meet with him.
Why do they think they aren't being heard? We've heard them, they're wrong, and we're not going to do what they want. The vast majority of canadian oppose the convoy and support public health measures. This is just a childish tantrum.
Nobody intimidated or enact violence against Ottawa residents. Based on what I saw with my own eyes last week, protesters and truckers are friendly and peaceful. IDK maybe they turn to werewolves at night, but the most aggressive thing I saw there was "fuck trudeau" signs everywhere.
My friend was accosted for wearing a mask on Saturday in a restaurant. One of the two downtown grocery stores had to close because the employees were being intimated by the protestors to let them inside without a mask. A neighborhood ice cream store employee was assaulted for wearing a mask while walking to work, and the store closed down. The biggest shopping center downtown has been closed for 3 weeks, putting over a thousand people out of a job because the protestors kept trying to force their way in to stores without wearing masks.
These are not protests against the government. They harm actual people on the ground trying to get on with their lives.
I'm sorry the YouTube streams have not shown any of this. Who'd have thought that even youtubers can have editorial intent!
Being asked to take their mask off in a belligerent way. We can argue about the relativity of violence all day long - but the fact is that this behaviour was not really heard of before the protests began and can be traumatising. My friend was with a group so they were able to handle the situation but there have been incidents of things going worse.
Moreover, the mask mandates are provincial, not federal. If people are opposed to that, they should go heckle at Doug Ford, the Ontario Premier in Toronto, not at Trudeau in Ottawa. The fact is that the protestors don't have a common coherent narrative.
Practically speaking, a heckling and laughing at from a large group of angry protesters against a single person minding their own business is basically an unspoken threat of violence. It is definitely intimidation.
Both of the grocery stores downtown closed because of alteractions with protestors. Front-line workers have been affected the most because they can't avoid going out. The rest of us are mostly not going downtown because there's rampant harassment if you're a woman, queer, POC, etc.
That hasn't happened. Grossly exaggerated statements are not what I and my friends who have been at the Ottawa protest for 3 weeks have seen.
We aren't living in 1950s. Everyone has a phone camera now a days and Ottawa, the capital, has security cameras everywhere and yet none of this ever gets captured on camera and nobody seems to capture the face of the people supposedly doing such things.
Like I said, we live in 2022. Everyone has a phone with video camera. How come such "violence" never gets captured on camera despite thousands of people there and several live streams?
Your original comment relayed anecdotal evidence. Are you now saying it doesn't prove anything?
Violence does occur in cities, and it will continue to. I've seen no evidence protestors or attendees are violent or even aggressive, and livestreamers passing police and asking them impromptu specifically this confirms it.
There's bouncy castles for kids to play on, multi-ethnic groups dancing together and holding native ceremonies or prayer, people giving out free food, public handing dollars directly to truckers because of the frozen funds - every weekend it's packed with families, smiles and good vibes. And then the "news" comes on and says it's an "insurrection" (yeah, don't they just always have bouncy castles) and Trudeau says they're all racist transphobes.
It's laughable.
If more violence/crime is occurring, a more likely explanation may be the friendly and busy atmosphere his driven drunks/addicts/homeless out of the city centre, and these people are now committing crimes they would ordinarily commit in the city centre in surrounding areas instead.
That would suck for those affected, but all of this could be over in hours if Trudeau would simply remove the mandates and the passport. (Which are the Ottawa's protest organisers only demands, as they've reiterated multiple times.)
The mandates clearly don't work for their intended purpose of coercing people, and instead just motivate people to fight back yet stronger, in this case harming the economy and causing inconvenience to some. That's squarely on Trudeau's governance, nowhere else.
The passport is a completely silly idea given the facts regarding transmission, as many other countries have realised and since dropped.
It's a no brainer on Trudeau's part to simply drop both things. But instead he's chosen to humiliate himself spreading nonsense lies about the truckers and the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of Canadians who support them.
If the disruption is causing you grief, maybe write to him or your local Liberal representative and suggest he/they drop those things? They're demonstrably no good anyway, so it'd be a pretty simple win-win for everybody.
Yes that's correct, our democratically elected government with a charter of rights and freedoms and independent judiciary is allowed to impose reasonable restrictions on citizens freedoms under specific circumstances. No, a mob of thugs who represent a minority public opinion are not allowed to impose their will on society. If that's supposed to be a mic-drop comment you're going to have to try harder.
I think there's difference in what "reasonable" means here, regardless of what the issue is and who is doing it. My argument is that there must be some form of protest that is always legal (even if not sanctioned by the government) and that minimal form of protest must be public. That no restrictions can be reasonable on this minimal form of protest.
All the people who are cheering this emergency powers move, have not made clear to me why this particular protest has surpassed that point outside of noise issues in private (and non-public) areas (which I do understand are difficult).
"Minimal" and "block important roads for weeks" don't intersect, in my view.
Nobody said they can't protest. Nobody invoked the Emergencies Act when they initially blocked the roads. When they remained blocked for a week, still nobody invoked the Emergencies Act.
Minimal protest? Sure, absolutely that should be allowed. Nobody's making it not allowed. But "minimal" isn't where these protest are, and they haven't been for a while.
It's nice that the government gave them permission to protest for a week, sure. For comparison, though, the Tiananmen Square protests lasted over a month before Beijing invoked their equivalent of the Emergencies Act. According to the Wikipedia article:
> The protests started on 15 April and were forcibly suppressed on 4 June when the government declared martial law and sent the People's Liberation Army to occupy parts of central Beijing.
The protests have been going on longer than that. The judicial injunctions have been violated for more than a week, however, and the protesters continue to violate them and the police continue not enforcing them. That is the reason we have escalated to the next step (for which Trudeau will pay at least some political price for).
Why bring up Tiananmen Square when this is Canada? We have plenty of comparable protests.
You're right, it would have been more helpful of me to find an example of a protest in Canada that blocked roads for more than a week, which would prove Trudeau's response is disproportionate by Canadian standards. I don't know of any example of that, or of judicial injunctions being violated for a week, so I accept your point.
The inability or unwillingness of the Ottawa police force to enforce the court-ordered injunction, and the additional inability or unwillingness of other provinces - like Alberta - from re-opening the border is the reason for this.
If the protests were in-person, not causing major, disproportionate interference with the Canadian economy and all injunctions were being both obeyed and enforced, there would be no need for this act.
The rule of law is breaking down and this is required to ensure that the fabric of Canadian society does not deteriorate.
"A mob of thugs"? Really? Type ottawa livestream into youtube, filter by Live and watch. You won't see "a mob of thugs" or even the remotest resemblance, even if you watch for hours. These are ordinary people and their kids.
Almost three straight weeks of multiple livestreamers documenting every aspect of the protest non-stop for hours unedited all day and all night, of thousands of highly-skilled resourceful people with a deep knowledge of logistics and shipping - including of dangerous goods, and including possessing truckloads of fuel - and the best you can come up with is one clearly-unassociated utterly moronic lone actor supposedly attempting to "burn down a building" by lighting a few bits of paper in the middle of a hard floor of a building filled with smoke alarms and sprinklers and in clear view of a security camera and the building residents?
1. This was not a lone actor, you can see two men in the footage!
2. This is not clearly-unassociated, this happened as a result of an interaction between residents in the building and protesters!
3. Stop downplaying attempted mass murder you ass, the two men clearly attempted to burn the entire building and kill all of its inhabitants. You can see in the footage that they attempted to tie the exit shut so that residents couldn't escape. Shame on you for defending this.
Do not accuse me of defending this/these persons actions. I am not "defending", and did not, "defend" the actions of this person or persons.
It's a completely abhorrent and utterly stupid and harmful action whether or not it was motivated to intentionally physically kill anyone or not.
As for whether it's one or two people, I make no apology for paying less attention when watching something from legacy media sources who I've witnessed continually falsifying stories on this subject.
I honestly thought I saw one man twice but if it's two it's two, and I update my statement to "lone actors". I'm not going to watch that crap again so I'll just have to take your word for it.
And yes, I did see someone attempt to tie a door shut with what looked like an old t-shirt, it seemed to me much more like someone trying to create the appearance of an attempt at mass murder (and always in the direct line of sight of a camera).
Regardless, the motivations of this person or persons, whether your interpretation or mine, either way does not at all fit the profile of the truckers as I and many others have experienced it.
Anyone who spends any time watching their official announcements, or independent unedited livestreams of what's happening there, can instantly see that setting fire to apartment buildings is not remotely something they'd want to do, nor would it at all serve any of their stated goals and instead only work to utterly dismantle them.
They have bouncy castles for kids to play on. They hold multi-ethnic prayer sessions. They're voluntarily cleaning the streets of snow and ice, laying flowers on monuments, and having hockey games police. In Coutts yesterday the police hugged and shook hands with the protestors (and their kids) and they all sang the national anthem together. Look it up, some of us watched it happen live.
Hence my interpretation that whoever did this crap at the apartment building evidently aren't the same people.
Their most recent announcement was that they have moved some of their trucks closer to the city centre in order to cause less disturbance to residential areas. That's hardly characteristic of murderous terrorists.
They also stopped honking, initially between the hours of 8pm and 8am, and since mostly altogether, and if you bother to watch any of their official announcements they are clearly reasonable and intelligent people - the "story" presented by your "news" source simply doesn't fit. (And the pathetic attempt to portray that story by filming two random people disagreeing on a city street really didn't make the case.)
The truckers stated goals are that they want the (useless, and clearly not-working) vaccine mandates dropped so they can return to work, not to overthrow the government or even cause any further disruption. They've been explicit about this many times. Specifically they've said they want to go home, and when the mandates are dropped they immediately will. But backed into a corner as they feel they are, they're not moving until that happens.
Half of Europe and UK has already dropped the mandates, so it's not at all an unreasonable request given the present situation.
You come across as never having actually investigated or even heard anything they've put out as an official statement. Probably this is because they justifiably refuse to speak to the legacy media that continually mis-portrays them.
But if you search (easier to locate on bitchute or rumble), you'll find their press conferences and quickly realise the characterisation by the legacy media and trudeau, as many here have pointed out, is entirely incorrect.
Love it or hate it, the pandemic has caused the loss of life and economic activity. You can't shoot or offload guilt on the virus, so you'll move to someone or something you can blame. I putty the politicians that have lived just as miserable lives putting up with armchair dictators without any real power but to complain about how others do their jobs
This virus will continue to cycle through our world and continue to kill millions of people. Checked or no, this will continue until the virus dies or the vast majority are dead/immune. Nobody wants this; it's literally bad for everyone.
The gov has pumped billions to prop up the economy. Did you get your bail-out? I certainly didn't get 1 cent. I did my job without a belly ache; I've taken the inflation hit like everyone else. The least that I want to hear is selfish blow-hards complaining about governments putting a cap on their selfishness. We all hurt, and only working together will we heal.
This isn't about protesting "at all" it's about protesting in a way that stings the government. You can protest in a legal way but then you're dismissed. The Truckers are protesting in a way that can't be dismissed. They've chosen to risk serious consequences because to them the status quo is worse. Protests like this are a sign of a failure of leadership and representation.
Then let's hope for serious consequences so that the message is loud and clear, minority positions can't and shouldn't be allowed to overrule the majority in a democracy. Their voice is heard through their elected representatives.
Sometimes that means you don't get your way. Right now in my country the government in power acts in ways I really don't agree with but unfortunately they won fair and square and clearly have the support of the majority. For me that is disappointing and somewhat embarassing but I wouldn't dream of claiming that elections were fraudulent (USA) or simply ignoring mandate and consensus and trying to blackmail the government (CA).
I think it stops being a peaceful protest if you erect structure and continually inconvenience residents by blasting your horns 24/7. Go on the street, show what you protest against, what you want. But don't permanently take over a part of the city, let alone start swearing in your own peace officers [0].
I'm going to be honest, that seems remarkably peaceful, even when compared to the BLM protests from 2 years ago or especially the FLQ crisis of Pierre Trudeau. I don't think the truckers should be going into residential neighborhoods and making noise at all hours - but it's hard to argue that it's violent.
BLM protests in Ottawa were extremely peaceful, and met with harsh police retaliation. Protestors blocked _one_ intersection for one day, and they were all rounded up and arrested by dozens of police officers in the middle of the night.
It's not at all hard to argue. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you are not and have not been the parent of a small child. The psychological suffering the noise is causing is acute.
Uh, how is someone supposed to protest? I mean, I see clear differences between going up to someone's home or into someone's workplace and making noise in the street. Any protest is almost guaranteed to inconvenience someone, unless you want to limit a "protester" to yelling in their own home. So what would you suggest is the line?
You get to make your point in a protest, but the society has the right - and should have the practical ability - to ignore your protest if they wish to do so.
You get to make your point heard to anyone who cares - both to the government and other people - but they don't have to care. If it turns out that general public does not want to hear and support your protest, then you simply wait until elections, and either get what you request or watch your candidate lose and peacefully accept that your requests are simply not going to be met. You don't get to stop the rest of the society until your demands are met, they don't owe you that. If the other voters disagree with your opinion and don't want to listen to it, you don't get to make them listen.
>You get to make your point in a protest, but the society has the right - and should have the practical ability - to ignore your protest if they wish to do so.
I dare say, if you've got things escalating to the point where people from all over your country plop themselves on the Federal government's front door
.. do you not realize how much that actually takes?
If one is so eager to dismiss the minority, then pray tell, how does anyone propose getting any change done? Further, why are you blaming the protesters for making your life more inconvenient when the only person who has been harmed already is...wait for it...them?
Because until that road got blocked, nobody gave a care 1.
That is successful protest. That is the consequence of Statecraft failure.
My key point is not all requests for change should result in any change. Some do, but not most, and definitely not all. Protests draw attention to some issue, and a protest is essentially a show of hands, demonstrating how many people care about the issue. It may reveal that there are very many supporters and the public wants something that the government does not provide - but that's not always the case, and certainly does not seem to be the case here, as the majority of Canadian voters seem to oppose their requirements. It does not necessarily raise support to that issue, it's perfectly reasonable for the public to decide that nope, they still oppose what the protesters request, perhaps even more than before as they're annoyed by the protests.
I mean, for every contentious issue there's going to be a part of the population which does not get their way. The whole point of democracy is that in such situations we discuss the issue, vote on the issue, and then the losers accept the decision and go home without escalating to action. The fact that some people are extremely dissatisfied with some decision does not necessarily imply that the decision should be changed nor does it imply a statecraft failure - how about all the people who supported the decision? Like, if the vote was somehow fake and misrepresents reality, then a protest can show that no, the majority does think differently; but if the protests simply confirm that yes, x% people are opposed, then the protest does not provide any information that deserves attention, the decision was made (and had the right to be made!) already knowing that those people oppose it.
The final escalation point of an ignored protest should be a call for general election if the public believes that circumstances have changed and the current government does not represent the will of the people anymore. However, if elections do not get what the protesters want, they should simply not get what they wanted because "we the people" have spoken that they don't want that. And, crucially, they can continue to peacefully request change and wait for public viewpoints to change, but certainly they have no right to disrupt others unless the demands are met, at some point the society has the right to say "we heard your arguments but made the choice to move on", and require you (with force, if necessary) to stop disrupting normal activities of the society.
And my main point is: if whatever compromise that has been enacted, still manages to draw enough crowd to clog up your Federal seat of power's streets, your job as a Statesman/woman has not finished. You're just moving the goalposts and going, "meh, good enough."
I think you've got your view backwards in the sense that every protest you've experienced up until now has been small enough to not be majorly disruptive because that crowd of "I will not accept this" hardliners was small enough where it would literally be folly to belabor the point further. That does not place an effective ceiling on legitimate vs. illegitimate protest, rather it puts a floor on the quality of your Statespeople at doing their jobs in a way that gets enough people not feeling marginalized.
That is clearly not the case here. Each of these protestors is someone feeling they are not being represented. They have the right to hold everything the bugger on up until some level of reasonability comes around. That is the fundamental dimension and action of politics. Just because it's been a good many years since the consent of the governed was pulled back doesn't mean it can't still be.
The number of people pounding the drum of "well these miscreants better watch out, the will of Canada is going to steamroll them!" or "It is the will of Canada that these people be pushed out of the limelight and ignored, so cut off their logistics, make it easier to enact financial violence (fines), and imprison them!" instead of "Well, shit, maybe we did go overboard a bit, didn't we?" disturbs me.
At the end of the day, those people are Canadians too. The mark of a country is how they treat their conscientious objectors.
And yes... I say that with a straight face accepting where the U.S. is on that scale recently. I just hope Canada doesn't follow our lead down the road to hell.
Okay, what would be the good response in your opinion in an ideal world for the scenario when a substantial number of people really, really (to the extent of putting lots of effort and risk) want something that even more people don't want? I mean, accepting their request is obviously not an option, that would be an even worse steamrolling over even more people.
As far as I understand your position, expecting the protesters to back down without satisfying their requests is also not okay - so what would be okay?
Freezing the accounts of the people you just disenfranchised enough to park on your doorstep, especially in the height of winter, and when you expect them to pick up and go away under their own power isn't it. That's just creating even more problems.
I'll be frank. The government committed the first overreach here. These people were hard working, contributing members of society when they were free to do so. That was taken away, and no equitable exchange offered, or convincing justification given besides "father knows best", so I'm not surprised this has blown up as spectacularly as it has. They've been painted with broad strokes by the media as nuisances for making themselves collectively heard. That's what you do in a democracy. The ball is in the government's court to come back to the table, because those prople will still be Canadians at the end of this. So ignoring or squashing the problem won't make it go away.
If the government really has as much support as they think they do, they don't need formal policy, everyone will just do as they do; they just need best practices in place, and people to continue following them. If they actually don't, and the polling has methodology problems, then you're taking a step back toward normalcy and getting people back to work. The fact supposedly, what, two thirds, approve of the measures wasn't necessarily framed in a way where people are taking into account the overall cost in liberties in the long run. I'd have to review methodology.
I'm increasingly finding that as much of a hardline idealist as I tend to be, when dealing with the masses of dissatisfied people, pragmatism is often the better way to go. Get enough of them to leave to decrease the size of the protest. But if you double down on the authoritarian streak, get ready to hemorrhage support. This isn't the kind of thing you get the chance to do twice.
Work with the city to park in a designated spot and then protest on foot in front of parliament. Not 'move-in' and set up hot tubs, saunas, and sleep in your truck on Wellington.
What if the city doesn't want to work with the protesters? Do the protesters have to prove that they tried to work with the city? What if the protest is against the city itself?
I have issues with asking permission to protest, even if it's an issue I don't support.
There have been regular anti-vax protests throughout the pandemic. They are afforded time to disrupt traffic with a procession that usually ends in parking at a central district and legitimately ends that day. No cities have blocked their rights to protest within the legal construct they've been afforded. If this is too authoritarian for balancing the rights of protestors and the rights of everyone else, I recommend finding a new place to live. This is a sad but necessary limit of protest to distinguish protest from occupation. Even "occupy NY" largely allowed people to live their lives without significant burdens (though I'm sure some were unfortunately affected).
Honestly, if they had moved in _purely_ on foot, we would not have gotten to this point. We've had anti-vaccine/anti-mask/anti-mandate protests weekly in most major Canadian cities and they've been untouched, no matter how annoying or inconvenient the population finds them.
The blockades of the border and overwhelming presence of truck/train horns at all hours of the day were the tipping point.
I along with my friends (who are vaxxed but only did so because their work coerced them) have been at the protest in Ottawa for 3 weekends. It's always been peaceful, friendly and almost like Canada day celebrations.
It was loud the first week due to honking but even that's stopped. And even if there were honking, that's not violence.
I am brown and my buddy is black and neither of us met with anything other than friendly hugs and fist bumps. Then we get home and see an entirely different reporting on media and by government.
Here's an article written by a government employee who lives right above the protests:
EDIT: Reply to comment below, I was personally there because of the air-travel mandate by the Feds and restaurant/gym mandates by my province. Triple vaxxed Trudeau can fly even while he caught COVID. Triple vaxxed Mayor Jim Watson can go to restaurants and gyms despite being COVID+. But I am not allowed to fly or go to restaurants and gyms even if I can show a negative COVID test.
I also talked to nurses there who worked for 2 years taking care of COVID patients, caught COVID along with their entire family, got natural immunity which is superior, and then got fired for not taking the shots. Yet Ontario and Quebec is letting COVID+ nurses to work if they are vaxxed.
Also women are a lot more against the mandates than men based on my impression which seems to match the surveys.
Are you friends federal government employees? If not, then the vaccination policy is enacted by the corporation they work for, not the government.
I'm glad you have felt at home at the protests, I'm sure if you tried to ask critical questions about vaccine efficiency and the active participation of far right extremists like Pat King in the protests, you'd have received a much colder welcome.
Thousands of people in Ottawa have been affected by the occupation. At least 1000 workers of the Rideau Center are out of a job because the protestors kept trying to force their way into the shops without masks. Covid is a respiratory disease and the use of well fitting masks are shown to significantly reduce transmission. Why are the protestors ignoring the science behind the policies?
If the protestors are rational, why haven't the protestors called out the loud lunatics amongst them who are on bullhorns shouting how Trudeau is a devil worshipper and pedophile?
Why have white supremacists like Pat King been allowed key roles in the protests, and allowed to - literally - dance on the sound stage set up on parliament hill?
Why did the organisers refuse to answer - earlier today - the simple question from a reporter if there were any firearms present amongst the protestors?
What was the rationale behind the "MoU" that called for the democratically elected government to be deposed and replaced with a junta composed of the protest organizers? That wasn't even a fringe demand, it was front and center.
Nobody from the protests has had any rational answers for these questions. I'm sorry, but for the residents to be able to accept the inconvenience of being occupied, they have to sympathise with the elements of the protests.
> At least 1000 workers of the Rideau Center are out of a job because the protestors kept trying to force their way into the shops without masks.
Those workers are "out of a job" because of the very COVID policies that the truckers et al are rallying against. COVID did not take away those jobs. COVID policies did.
"It was loud the first week due to honking but even that's stopped. And even if there were honking, that's not violence."
Some trucks had train horns installed, significantly louder than regular horns. Trucks were honking continuously, all night. There is a line where too much noise can be considered violence. Certainly, if I was downtown and had a baby trying to sleep during that shit I'd be throwing rocks at trucks at 2am.
"got natural immunity which is superior" is factually incorrect, at least to every statistical study done by national health orgs.
I see many people say "this person, who is vaccinated but got COVID anyways, is allowed to do X. Other person, who has a negative COVID test but am not vaccinated, cannot. That is hypocritical." Can someone explain the hypocrisy?
People do get that negative COVID tests have relatively little proof value after a day or so right?
> "got natural immunity which is superior" is factually incorrect, at least to every statistical study done by national health orgs.
Natural immunity of an unvaccinated person is superior to a vaccinated person without natural immunity, all else equal, and the difference isn't even close. It concerns me that people still don't accept this.
See https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.08.24.21262415v... for conclusive proof of this. I don't have my notes on that study in front of me right now but off the top of my head natural immunity was at least 7x superior when compared to people who were double-vaccinated but with no exposure to the actual virus.
- previous COVID exposure + no vaccination is 3x smaller incidence than vaccination without covid exposure
BUT
- previous COVID exposure + vaccination is 2x smaller incidence than without vaccination
arguing that "I got exposed to Covid so the vaccine is not useful for me" is factually incorrect. I had not been clear enough in my objection. So protesting vax mandates have even one less leg to stand on.
So many rules have been dubious and nonsensical. I don't recall the specifics, but it seems like at one time in Alberta you could get together with 20 people, but you could only have ten people get together for a funeral.
The point of allowing a person to do X is based on the safety of them doing X. If we are preventing X due to fear of covid, then it makes sense to prevent people from doing X if they have covid, regardless of their vaccination status, and allowing them to do it if they do not have covid, regardless of their vaccination status.
Some of the rules appear to be punitive towards people who have chosen not to be vaccinated, and not designed to curb the spread of the disease; that is why hypocrisy is being called out.
>Some of the rules appear to be punitive towards people who have chosen not to be vaccinated, and not designed to curb the spread of the disease; that is why hypocrisy is being called out.
If more of the population were vaccinated the spread of the disease would be curbed (there are still places under 60% vaccination in the US, for example). It would not be sufficient, but yes the point is to create spaces where you have less risk.
The rule is designed to get more people to be vaccinated. It is accomplishing that objective.
(more nuanced is that I don't believe "vaccinated means everything is OK" is the right position either, and that "vaccinate, but also try to do stuff at half capacity" etc etc would be better but...)
A room with 100% vaccinated people is going to be safer than a room with 100% of people showing up with day-old negative covid tests. (EDIT: actually not sure of this as much now that I'm thinking about it...)
Ultimately the rules forcing vaccination are a result of a huge part of the population refusing vaccination, which is the single most effective policy. It's roundabout because governments don't have the courage to just force the issue (or waited too long and now there's a coalesced movement against it).
Sorry if unvaccinated people feel bad because of it. If they cared about not getting people sick they would vaccinate. Taking covid tests every day doesn't improve your immunity.
Yes, I am. That's why I said that I don't believe that vaccination is a magic bullet and that it doesn't magically make everything safe.
But the argument isn't "does vaccination magically solve everything", it's "does it make things better relative to the costs", and that seems absolutely unobjectionable. We can walk and chew bubblegum here, but antivax positions seem to be to do neither out of some vague principle of freedom.
If there was a free test of COVID that could judge with a high degree of certainty tell if you were infected or not, this would go a long way to assert your point. But since rapid tests are expensive, hard to come by, and not free (for the gov), we have to live with trade-offs.
The sad point off this is that you're contagious when you're still asymatic, so even those wanting to do the right thing cant prevent accidental spreading. All we can do is reduce our transmission rates as low as possible. Vaccines did a great job of that pre-omicron and though Omicron seems to spread just as freely in vaccinated populations, those with vaccines had far better health outcomes. Who knows what date will throw at us if/when another significant variant mutates into our lives.
The guy being interviewed is just a dude, not a leader in the movement AFAIK. But he’s probably a good representation of what the average person attending the protests wants.
Attacking another user will get you banned here, regardless of how right you are or feel you are. Perhaps you don't feel you owe political opponents better, but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
I do understand that the truckers were disturbing the peace of ordinary people - I think this should be discouraged. However there must be a way to peacefully assemble without the government's approval.
I don't see how we can have meaningful civil discourse if you need permission to protest at all.