The Message of the Truckers’ Protest in Canada. It was Feb. 8, when supporters of the Truckers Convoy blocked traffic in the Canada-only lanes of the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Windsor.
Canadian truckers who don’t want to get a vaccine called COVID-19 used their rigs on Monday to block the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan. This is the busiest land-border crossing in North America.
People in France or the United States might see this as more like a week of civil disobedience than a week of protest in the United States. The fact that it happened in a country that is very strict is a warning to the political class in the West: COVID-19 rules, mandates, and extreme meddling in people’s lives are killing a lot of people. It’s time for them to get back to making their own health risk assessments.
On Tuesday, the Ambassador Bridge, which carries $323 million worth of goods each day in cross-border trade and an estimated $137 billion worth of goods last year, was able to reopen. But truckers are still protesting in Ottawa, which is making the city less peaceful.
As for the truckers, they should be prosecuted if they break the law, as we said for Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protesters on the left, as we said. It turns out that the Omicron virus isn’t as deadly as it used to be, and positive test results fall. Truckers are telling democratic governments that it’s time for the pandemic emergency orders to come to an end.
As a result, for two years, truckers were not required to get vaccines because they were deemed “important” staff. Estimates say that about 85% of them have been vaccinated. There are only a few Liberal Party MPs in the government now, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in charge of them. He has ordered that truckers get vaccinated if they want to come back into Canada from the United States.
There are people on the Canadian left who think the truckers and their supporters are nothing more than right-wing Trump supporters. Mr. Trudeau has called them “just a few people who are yelling and waving swastikas.” However, the fight against COVID-19 overreach has spread across the world. Police used water cannons on an estimated 50,000 European protesters in Brussels in January to show that they were tired of restrictions and mandates. For the last month, protesters have taken to the streets in other parts of Europe as well as in the United States and New Zealand.
Polls show that most Canadians don’t help with the Ottawa protests. However, a recent survey by the Angus Reid Institute found that a majority of people want to lift restrictions, which suggests that the Trudeau mandate, which came into effect on Jan. 15, was a political mistake. A backlash has been caused by him getting people who were not used to talking about politics excited. This has made Canadians more divided and raised the stakes for a showdown with the truckers.
Mr. Trudeau says that he has the power to make truckers show proof of vaccination at the border and that he can stand by this claim because of this. Canada’s provincial premiers are always relaxing COVID rules. Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe says by the end of the month, Saskatchewan’s vaccine passport, negative test requirement for people who have had a vaccine, and the mandate for people to wear face masks will be abolished. On Tuesday, too, there was a meeting.
Mr. Trudeau is being criticized by a Liberal Party member of Parliament from Quebec for a COVID-19 agenda that he says is dividing the country and making people less trustful of the government.
The lesson for the COVID-19 police is that even though you’ve lost the most law-abiding people on the planet, you’ve lost the political plot. Time to try a new way that is more understanding of the need to get back to a normal life that isn’t dominated by pandemic fear and government rules.
Biden should declare the pandemic over so that people can go back to their normal lives where COVID-19 is treated as an “endemic.”
