Rights, Freedoms & Gulags
At the time the truckers descended on Ottawa, many Canadians supported jail time, punitive taxes, denial of health care & denial of drivers' licenses for the unvaxxed.
As these photos, taken in Ottawa a year ago demonstrate, protesters weren’t asking for the moon. They simply wanted their fundamental, longstanding rights to be respected.
On the left of the protest sign below we see Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms in English:
Here it’s displayed in the window of a truck in French:
Many Canadians were deeply concerned about the direction in which this country was headed. Three days before the first Freedom Convoy trucks hit the road in British Columbia, a National Post headline proclaimed: More than one in four Canadians support jail time for the unvaccinated, poll finds.
The article said 37% of Canadians agreed with denying health care to the unvaxxed. (When’s the last time pollsters asked if it’s OK to deny healthcare to drug addicts, drunk drivers, terrorists, child abusers, or rapists?)
33% of Canadians thought the unvaxxed should be prevented from renewing their drivers’ license, 61% thought the unvaxxed should pay a healthcare tax of $150 per month, and two thirds!! favoured “mandatory vaccines for everyone over the age of five.”
When asked how much sympathy they might feel for an unvaccinated person who became seriously ill or died from COVID, “27 per cent said they had none at all.”
In other words, Canadian society was becoming ugly and dangerous. Politicians, academics, and journalists talk incessantly about respect for minorities. It’s now become clear that’s just meaningless blather. The past few years have taught us that the veneer of civilization is exceedingly thin. Most of our fellow citizens have no respect whatsoever for individual choice or medical autonomy. The harshness with which large numbers of people are prepared to punish those with whom they disagree is breathtaking.
Which means that, rather than being an exaggeration, the message on this sign is bang on:
We came very close to calamity. The truckers saved us from our own indifference. We must be vigilant to avoid being right back there again.
Donna - I just finished reading today’s post again and caught a couple important points I missed the first time. This posting is Super Great! have you considered sending it to all our elected representatives like Your MP, MPP and to each of our Federal party leaders? - What about as an opinion piece to all the newspapers and magazine editors? A couple months ago, I called my M.P.P.’s office (Ernie HARDEMAN) to arrange for an appointment and haven’t heard back yet - this snivelling old piece of crap into about his 8 th term never had the guts to get off his ass and leave his warm office of home to spend not even a day checking out what was really happening a year ago on Parliament Hill but supported that biggest snivelling bully at Queen’s Park ( his boss - Doug Ford ) who flew in the battle against the Freedom Convoy and our Supporters as Justin’s wingman and added fuel to fire not by dropping napalm on us but encouraging the atom bomb EMA Invocation!!!