What’s been going on up there in Canada with the Truckers?!
Freedom Convoy 2022
Many people have been asking this past month. “What’s going on up there in Canada with the Truckers?!!” Canadians are well known for being mild mannered, easy going, polite, and peace-keepers around the world. People are saying if the Canadians are miffed, something must really be amiss! This is something to check out.
So the first thing you do is look up legacy media to see what’s going on. There, you would have heard talk about Swastikas, Confederate flags, desecrating a monument, hidden weapons, occupiers blockading streets and a conspiracy to overthrow the government supported by foreign right wing extremist groups.
This sounds really serious. So, you search for amateur live feeds, to get some live action sense of what’s really going on there. And what would you see? Look at how those Crazy Canucks mount an insurrection!
These feeds show bouncy castles, street food and dancing and not as much as one broken window! And of course, all in -20° weather! This was Feb in Canada, after all. If you haven’t yet seen actual footage on the ground, here are two great summaries of what it looked like over the month of that protest in Ottawa, and all across the country.
Some videos look like a giant church service, with prayers, hugging, singing. Some independent media outlets had daily recaps of events on the ground. Others showed live feeds. These video clips explain that they cleaned up their garbage and shovelled the snow. They negotiated with local police to keep an emergency lane open, where to park their rigs and keeping the horns quiet at night.
Can these two things be the same place?
Clearly, what you’ve heard about this protest depends entirely on how you get your news. I’ll try to give you as accurate an account of this event as I can.
So, what was it all about? In January, the federal government announced that they were removing the truckers (Canadian or American) exemption, which required a 14-day quarantine for anyone not vaccinated crossing the US / Can border. Following the federal announcement, some truckers got together and decided to organize a convoy across the country, to arrive in Ottawa in Jan for the start of the new session of parliament. When they held a fund raiser campaign on a crowd funding platform, many other Canadians from all walks of life, cultural communities and provinces joined in. Polls showed almost half of Canadians sympathized with their cause.
Their primary demand was to re-open the USA border to US and Can truckers, which is federal jurisdiction. Secondarily, they said that it was time to drop all temporary Covid Mandates, provincial and federal. During the protest, the Provincial governments agreed, many other countries have agreed — the Canadian federal government didn’t budge.
Pandemic Challenges
Since this is so unusual this is for this country, I should probably describe the context leading up to this protest. Since the declaration of the global pandemic, governments around the world have instituted various policies in the hopes of decreasing the effects of Covid-19. Obviously, somebody had to do something about it. It is not as obvious that the science has demonstrated the usefulness of these policies, or whether they have done more harm than good.
The underlying question is, ‘who has the authority to decide these policies?’ Is it you or me as individuals, our family, businesses, the church, or the state?
In Canada, it has certainly been the federal government that has taken this on. In many countries, the government approach has been punitive. ‘We have come up with a good idea to deal with this, so everybody do it or you will get a big fine.’ These ideas have included: business closures, mask mandates, limits to number of people who can enter stores, restaurants, venues and even family homes, vaccination passports, quarantining of healthy people, curfews.
Some small business owners tried to object; many went bankrupt. For whatever reasons, big chain stores, by and large were considered ‘essential’, and so were only minimally impacted. Several churches were locked down from time to time in various provinces. “Church is Essential” marches took place in Canadian cities and across North America, with thousands of supporters.
Churches
A huge non-story in the legacy media in Canada last spring was the arrest of a pastor for continuing to hold church service in Alberta after lock-downs were declared. Another pastor is in prison, still awaiting a new bail hearing.
One of the pastors explained his position this way. Yes, Christians are told in the Bible to submit to the government. However, you can be submissive to the government while not obeying every law.
Submission means that we subject ourselves to the consequences of our actions if we go against the government’s laws. For example, Pastor Coates turned himself in to authorities instead of going into hiding. In this way, he exercised submission to the government without obeying what his conscience felt was disobeying a command from God.
According to Pastor Coates, all government is delegated by God. Therefore, our subjection to the government depends upon their subjection to Him from whom they receive their authority (even when they do not recognize it as such). He maintained that the government has over-stepped their God-given authority by dictating to churches how they may worship (eg. who may sing) and how many may worship in their building. God has delegated church governance, not to the state, but to the elders of the church. By these policies, the government has taken that decision away from the individuals and from the church leadership and crossed the line out of their sphere of authority.
Convincing or Coercing
Governments have tried to paint the non-vaxxed people as the scapegoat, in the high pressure sales messaging for the vaccine. Media have been running stories about higher percentage of people in ICU being not vaccinated, as if they are a threat to someone who is vaccinated against the disease. The whole point of a vaccine is to prevent that danger! Throughout this pandemic, PM Trudeau’s approach has been to ‘convince’ / encourage people to get vaccinated. This is his method of convincing people: By mandating that every company he could possibly control require their entire staff to be vaccinated or released.
I thought the word for that was coercion, not convincing. I thought the way you convince and encourage people was by writing a blog, not by threatening their livelihood. Was I wrong?
How to Treat your Opponent
Which brings us to a huge Ottawa story last month in the media in Canada, which caught international attention, about a group of truckers. These truckers were fed up with continued and increasing Covid mandates at a time when it looked like the pandemic was easing. The new vaccine requirement for truckers to cross the Can / US border, as thousands of them do every day, apparently pushed them too far. They decided to protest to say that it is time for these temporary mandates to end. The Canadian government refused to entertain the idea or even meet with them. It turned into a 3-week block party of support by a hundred thousand Canadians from across the country.
How did our PM respond to his citizens showing their concerns? When the Convoy first announced that they were driving across the country to Ottawa, he called them names. When the Convoy did arrive in the capital, Trudeau reportedly was exposed to someone who tested positive for Covid, so he self isolated in an ‘undisclosed location’. The day that the Emergency Act was to be debated in parliament, they suspended the house, due to expected violence in the police crackdown, which he instructed under the Act.
Defamation
In an effort to defame the demonstrators, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) made allegations that this group could only have raised all that money, if powerful international interests were funnelling in large sums to them. CBC and other legacy news outlets asserted that there was Russian involvement and support by terrorist groups and neo-Nazis.
Even worse than just parroting the PMO, On Feb. 10, the CBC reported it had thoroughly investigated donations given to the Freedom Convoy and concluded there were thousands of suspicious donations from foreigners.
As it turns out, most of the $10 million in donations were from Canadians, in small amounts, indicating a large base of support for them. Now that these allegations have been thoroughly debunked by GoFundMe, GiveSendGo and even the government’s own terror-financing investigators, CBC have now actually released some vague statement to that effect, but the damage is done.
During the protest, there was a fire set in a downtown Ottawa apartment building. Although the police say they have not found any evidence at all linking the man charged with this arson, NDP and Liberals gave this incident many times as a reason for cracking down on the Convoy.
The same thing happened with the story of the theft of some semi automatic weapons. There was never any link established to anyone involved with Convoy, but that didn’t stop MPs and legacy media using that as a weapon against them.
Brute Force
When one starts to question their legitimacy, as Trudeau did from Day 1 by calling them misogynist, anti-science bigots, you clear the way to legitimize violence against them. When he subsequently invoked the Emergency Act, protesters who insisted on their democratic right in continuing their protest were sprayed with tear gas, beaten with clubs and a couple even trampled by horses. Many truck drivers were hauled out of their trucks by force by police (no one knows from where — they wore no badges as required by law) and taken to be arrested but never charged with anything.
Apparently, roughly 120 people were arrested in relation to the protest. Ottawa Police are withholding their names so, for now, the public are unable to find out who they are, what conditions of bail were, and what charges were laid.
We do know one of the organizers was jailed for 3 weeks without bail for ‘counselling mischief’. She was finally released on bail the day after hundreds of people gathered in a prayer meeting in Ottawa worshipping God and praying for her release.
These are reportedly her conditions; we have not been able to get confirmation of them from her directly. She was to leave Ottawa within 24 hrs and is not allowed back till her court date, is not allowed on social media, or have someone post on her behalf, and may not have any communications with other convoy organizers.
This leader has been treated eerily similar to another current case of a Canadian trying to make a difference in society, this time in Saudi Arabia. This blogger was sentenced to prison for ‘Insulting Islam.’ Raif Badawi was just recently released and these are his conditions: he has a 10 year travel ban and is banned from posting on the internet. This convoy organizer is apparently being punished for insulting the PM’s sensibilities, rather than Islam.
Courage : Vice or Virtue?
Regardless of what you think of Covid mandates, I think you have to admire this lady’s courage to stand up for what she believes, as her democratic right and duty. Her political leaders and local media reporters have not showed her any such thing. Which raises the question of what the media’s proper role in a democratic society is. And, where is our democracy heading? These will be the next two blog topics, so stay tuned.
Since when did fear become a virtue and courage a vice?
With all of this talk of racism and Covid, among other social issues, fear is inevitable. However, the legacy media narrative has been that anyone (doctors, or truckers) with the courage to stand up and speak his mind is seen as suspect. With the various intersectionality groups, we are being encouraged to see ourselves as victims of one thing or another. I realize that we need to work out some issues from our past. But it isn’t healthy to stay there. Is there a better narrative to be heard?
