For the first few weeks of the Freedom Convoy, Ottawa police treated the protesters with respect and even sympathy. No doubt they were frustrated at the resolve of the truckers to try and get Ottawa to rescind the useless vaccine mandates that in particular targeted truckers as they necessarily crossed the border to bring goods into Canada (particularly fresh produce most of which is imported) and to support our export industries. The truckers were largely vaccinated and their angst was more about seeing many of their ilk being vilified and attacked by the Trudeau government for a personal medical choice that harmed no one but themselves and not even themselves if they were young and healthy or had already been infected with COVID and recovered. The majority of Canadians are also opposed to vaccine mandates which seem to be a Trudeau virtue signaling edict rather than a public health benefit.
A real leader would have admitted these mandates had outlived their usefulness now that 90% of Canadians have been vaccinated and joined many American states and global jurisdictions in ending the vaccine mandates. But not our Prime Minister who just doubles down on his policies even when they are demonstrably of little value.
Coming back to the police, Canada has long enjoyed a professional police force who always try to resolve issue peacefully and and eschew the use of unnecessary force. Not so in Ottawa today.
Rebel News reporter April Lavoie was physically attacked and shot in the leg with a tear gas canister for simply doing her job - reporting the news. Apparently she was struck three times with a police club as well as being shot. That needless violence inflicted on someone who was not only not part of the protest but also a reporter protecting our free press was out of character for Canadian police and I would like to think it was an act of an over zealous and frustrated Ottawa policeman and not a sign of a deteriorating level of ethics in our law enforcement agencies. I would like to, but I can’t.
Ottawa police trampling peaceful protesters on horseback points to a more serious problem that got little coverage in Canadian mainstream media (long exposed as a propaganda arm of the Trudeau government) but made it into the prestigious American news magazine “Newsweek” not known for its lack of support for Liberal or Democratic governance. Canada is now more of an international laughing stock than a paradigm of good governance and sensible policing.
The juxtaposition of unnecessary force being used to quash a peaceful protest in Ottawa is in stark contrast to the lack of media outrage over the violent attack on a Coastal Gas Link construction site by about 20 men armed with axes. It seems in Canada today, if your illegal acts line up with left wing ideology you are free to wreak havoc on ordinary workers doing their jobs within the law, but if your allegedly illegal 1protest contests Trudeau you are a target of law enforcement and state sponsored attacks on your livelihood and savings. Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland was almost ecstatic in announcing that bank accounts and cryptocurrency wallets of Canadian had been frozen because the targets of this abuse donated money to a protest. We saw no such angry and draconian outcry out of Ottawa to punish the legion of left wing activists who donated millions to pipeline protests or climate change activists with much of the funding coming from outside Canada.
I am hopeful members of Parliament will reign in the overreach by Trudeau and demonstrate that Canada still has a democracy that works, but I am not optimistic given NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has stated his party will support the invocation of the Emergency Act despite the absence of any emergency, presumably because he believes the political calculus will benefit his failing party. Singh has labeled the Freedom Convoy as a threat to democracy rather than a group of truckers wanting an end to vaccine mandates, a stereotypical move by an authoritarian leader to justify harsh measures by blaming ordinary citizens for the very things that leader wishes to carry out. Socialism is a far greater threat to democracy than the Freedom Convoy which had no more chance of overturning a government than a ranting lunatic on a soap box in Hyde Park has ever had of bringing down the U.K. government and Singh is smart enough to know that.
What we have now is left wing leaders endorsing the use of force to quash dissident voices that don’t line up with their ideology and suppress free speech, backed by police forces akin to thugs. We have seen that in Venezuela, Turkey, Libya and China in recent years but this is a first for Canada and not a postive step.