Zeitgeist

You don’t read. I’m triple-vaccinated and strongly oppose vaccine mandates. To think that in a country like Canada, which has more fully-vaccinated people than Britain, we’re maintaining these mandates, is disturbing. You don’t value our Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which is there to ensure that citizens’ rights aren’t removed. There’s no good reason for continuing to suspend those rights. Trudeau has taken an unconstitutional position. I’ve already explained this. Moving on.

You sick puppy. So you think that racking up points with government approved ideas and behaviour in order to have basic rights is okay? Wow

I’m pro-vax and have been so consistently. I’m anti-vaccine mandate. Vaccine passports are unconstitutional.

As the Canadian government continues to maintain vax passports and other creepy pandemic tools that have caused understandable revolt, Britain has moved on. I guess Trudeau wants to keep an iron curtain around Canada so we don’t know what we’re missing. https://apple.news/AX1DW8uDAQXCh877WHicQ7w

You don’t even have a Constitution. You can’t work, travel or enjoy basic rights without proof of accepting a government-mandated health program. You can’t criticize government in media. The government-supported media and institutions, as well as the private companies that must obey the memoranda, are constantly blaring accusations of colonialism and shaming Canada itself. Your kids probably won’t be able to afford a home. If the government of Canada hates Canada, violates its citizens’ supposedly Charter-protected rights, and ridicules anyone who opposes dictates as radicals with “unacceptable views”, you can live that dream — a totalitarian nightmare really.

I don’t want to live in a dictatorship. That’s for control freaks like you.

In that case hopefully my family can move south too. Money and people go where the freedom is. Duh.

I’ve never seen anything like this in Canada. Alarms sounding among our veterans.

There are precedents for this in Canada. From the National Post, Dec. 6, 2017: “Canada has a long history of subjecting its people to questionable and dangerous experiments. During the Second World War, mustard gas tests were conducted on 3,000 volunteers at a military base in Suffield. In the 1960s, CIA experiments conducted in Quebec on unknowing subjects analyzed whether it was possible — with the use of LSD and electroshocks — to eliminate memories and build them back up.”

That’s a tiresome old hat woke argument. You’re not allowed to see the protesters as regular Canadians. They must either be radicals or privileged by race. You’re buying into the narrative that these people are lesser in some way. It’s wrong and undermines the genuine concerns about freedom for all Canadians. Canada is a fascist country.

Yup, Canada is becoming Cuba. Young people won’t be able to buy homes. They’ll rent little apartments, work from home or as essential workers under public safety measures, have curtailed freedoms, and live a subsistence lifestyle. Nowhere to take your complaints.

But will they though? None of this will appear on CBC, CTV, or Global. You won’t find it in the Star or Globe. All people hear about from government is blockades and hurting trade. Really sad what’s happening in Canada.

So what? Most Canadians are white. It doesn’t make the protesters racist or privileged, and there’s a wide range of cultures and races in the protests. What sucky woke bullshit.

The sad part is, I’m not sure average Canadians consuming legacy media really understand how far Canada has fallen. Yes a big chunk of the country hates Trudeau and wants him gone, but I worry that there are enough gullible people to keep this guy going through minority government for a while yet. I stand firmly and honestly by my position that Canadians are living under unconstitutional policies and a government that is refusing to acknowledge its violation of citizens’ rights. It won’t respond to the very serious concerns of a sizeable portion of the population that opposes mandates. It’s oppressive. Canada is a totalitarian country right now. I don’t like Canada now. We’re less free than Americans, and not all US states are equally free. I’d like to thank this forum for maintaining important freedom of speech, which is under threat in Canada.

Wow, the US left is starting to turn on Trudeau. I knew he crossed the line, a few lines actually. Watch tonight’s Bill Maher. Just so you know, I’ve been a liberal almost all my life. The protests aren’t about left versus right. Of course. It’s about privileged policy makers failing to recognize the impacts of their policies on the people who do the heavy lifting. It’s also about securing civil rights for all.

That’s the bogus argument that keeps emerging, that somehow the convoy is a protest of the white privileged. I think the idea is that if they can make these essential workers of all different ethnic backgrounds look like retrograde radicals and racists they can be discredited on that basis. Guess who makes up a disproportionately large portion of the unvaccinated? People of colour, poor, people with mental health issues — oh and a lot of feminists (“my body, my choice”). The game of stereotyping and discrediting has to stop, because those little Charter rights that the truckers are fighting to protect are all about protecting minority rights. I also find it ridiculous that the leader of the traditional party of the working class, the NDP, is looking down his nose at these protesters. Who knew our left wing ruling coalition is run by elitist snobs? The Liberals are no longer liberal and the NDP are no longer democratic.

Trudeau is the most autocratic PM in my lifetime by far.

Look at these very concerning fascist ideas about how our government is considering dealing with the protesters: “Trudeau said authorities are prepared to hit protesters where it hurts the most by suspending commercial trucking licenses and pursuing charges that could result in jail time. He also warned that criminal sanctions could be levelled that would stop the protesters from ever travelling internationally again.” CBC

Well that would lead to civil war and perhaps intervention by a foreign power, the US. For those with a big hate-on for the measures and the strength to hang in there for the long haul, such an outcome might be welcomed. I’m sure that people are seriously weighing up whether Canada as a nation-state is a better option than annexation. Don’t kid yourself, our institutions aren’t as solid as they appear. What’s happening to Ukraine militarily is, to some extent, happening to Canada ideologically as some Canadians are openly wondering if they’d have more freedom as Americans. The only real political opposition to our left-wing rather totalitarian government is the Republican Party, which isn’t even Canadian. They seem more interested in defending the Canadian constitution than the Liberal government.

You have to separate the issues. Of course most people and all parties want the blockades gone. The majority of people also want pandemic measures to end. The pandemic measures represent a suspension of our Charter rights. So the question is, do we recognize that while the methods of the convoy are disruptive they provide powerful support for a policy change that most Canadians want and therefore have value, or do we simply ignore the important message and focus solely on ending the blockades by any means necessary? I think that since the convoy’s message has such importance, at the very least government must address the protesters’ concerns as at least part of the solution to ending the blockades. Ignoring the protesters and resorting to removing them by force is short-sighted. If the federal government can’t provide a firm date for the ending of vaccine mandates, I think it’s reasonable for the protests to persist. Well it doesn’t matter what you or I think, without an end to the mandates the protests will persist.

True, but the winds of change are upon us. Trudeau will be associated with government overreach. Ford knows the writing is on the wall. He knows the time has come to drop vaccine passports. https://apple.news/AN8karNbZRnm2pSjlavRoKA

Give it up. No one with a sense of reasonable respect for others wants to live under continued mandates and restrictions in the current context. They have to go. Trudeau is foolish to hold back reopening to make a point that he is in command of our lives. No PM can override our rights without damn good reasons. So the question is, how long do you think Trudeau can get away with flogging his reasons? One only has to look across the border to see freedom returning. Oppression is a hard sell now.

Government and media have tried to paint the protests as just a movement of anti-vaxers pushing back against vaccine mandates, but it’s much bigger and deeper than that. The protests are really about pandemic privilege and the differences between the ways “protective” policies impact different classes differently. The political class and the corporate executive class that devised the directives were the classes most insulated from their impacts. They could work from spacious homes, get away to cottages and other family retreats, and import into their households many of the amenities that the public had to sacrifice: gyms, pools, and during the strictest lockdowns, even natural spaces. It’s interesting that many of the pro-mandate/restriction posters on here and other sites tend to fall into or closer to this privileged group. The truckers have been the essential workers who couldn’t remove themselves from the risks of public work, nor did they demand that insulation. The powers that be quickly forgot the truckers’ sacrifices when the opportunity to further insulate themselves from risk arose by making sure that everyone got vaccinated (even after we saw that vaccines reduce rather than eliminate risk). A small percentage of truckers asked that their healthcare discretion be respected if they chose not to be vaccinated, but that discretion wasn’t respected by government. Of course many people from all walks of life wanted the same discretion, but once again it was the truckers who put themselves at risk by taking on everyone’s cause, this time the right to medical discretion, not just being able to have goods delivered. The reason the government is having a hard time getting the police onside is because the police are essential workers too. They can relate to the cause of the truckers, farmers, and other essential workers. They’re from the same economic class and bear similar burdens. Taking away rights is no small matter. We the vaccinated lost freedoms in the name of fighting a “health crisis”, but the unvaccinated lost more, including the respect of government and the same media who lionized many of these same people when we were most at risk and needed food on our table. Of course we want the blockades to end, but for the sake of our very rights as citizens, our government owes the protesters serious consideration and attention. I know in my heart that vaccine passports are unethical. They have pushed some people to the brink of what a person can handle, including unemployment. Governments still can’t explain how many requirements should be added to the passports and how much the passports have encouraged vaccination. More worrisome, it isn’t clear that vaccines are enormously effective with our current variants, though I’ll grant that they probably have helped prevent deaths and hospitalizations. It’s certainly not clear that making people get vaccinated subject to the loss of citizens’ and basic human rights is justified. Given where we are with the milder variant Omicron, falling hospitalizations, and two years of pandemic mandates and restrictions, there is simply no persuasive argument to maintain vaccine mandates. Mr. Trudeau, it’s time to back off of your untenable position, respect the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and let the truckers who served us so heroically throughout the pandemic return to their jobs without mandates. Many of the unvaccinated are from vulnerable socioeconomic groups, are people of colour, or have mental health challenges. Many have legitimate concerns about the safety of vaccines that haven’t been around long. Call them paranoid or conspiracy theorists, but there are plenty of historic events that illustrate the dangers of government overreach, such as the sterilization of developmentally delayed people. Removing the blockades through force will not end the protests and could lead to bigger problems We need a political solution. Given the trend of western governments lifting mandates and restrictions, there’s really only one responsible solution: End vaccine mandates.

Just end the damn mandates.

This whole mess should be laid at the feet of the Prime Minister. Refusing to even discuss a timeline for the removal of vaccine mandates has alienated a significant segment of the essential workers who served us throughout the pandemic, at a time when most western democracies are ending pandemic measures. It’s tone deaf, arrogant, and arbitrary. Want to end this mess, Mr. Trudeau? Provide a firm end date for the mandates. That date must be soon and any reasons why the mandates can’t be lifted immediately must be clearly explained. I just don’t see the impasse ending otherwise. If force is used to make protesters leave without an unconditional end date, there will be bigger problems ahead for the Liberal government.