Why the Trucker Protest Was Necessary

An identifiable minority was being scapegoated & targeted by the Prime Minister.

Click image to read the full news story

Memories fade. As time passes, it’s easy to forget how oppressive things were three years ago. Many good-hearted people sincerely believe the Freedom Convoy wasn’t necessary. They say the restrictions on normal life were practically gone by then.

But that isn’t actually the case. Rather than being a fresh start, the beginning of 2022 was more of the same. Exhibit 1 is a CBC news story from early January - a few weeks before trucks began arriving in Ottawa.

The national broadcaster gave it this headline on its website: Trudeau says Canadians are 'angry' and 'frustrated' with the unvaccinated. The following day, the article was reprinted verbatim on the Radio Canada International (RCI) website, a subsidiary of CBC that provides “Canadian news in 7 languages.”

The story includes a two-minute video clip of Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister. According to the CBC, it shows him pleading with the unvaccinated.

Click the image to see the news article in which the video is embedded.

But if you take the time to watch it - or read the transcript at the bottom of this post - you’ll discover he does nothing of the sort. He isn’t pleading at all. He’s insulting people. He’s condemning and scapegoating them. He’s encouraging one group of Canadians to be angry with another group of Canadians. A clearer case of sowing division, of inflaming conflict, is difficult to imagine.

There are many reasons why someone might have skipped COVID vaccines. A big one is that they’d already caught COVID and survived. But our Prime Minister is incapable of treating with respect people who think differently.

The video clip begins with him acknowledging that “the vast majority of Canadians” had already taken the vaccines “to protect their loved ones, to protect front line health workers.” As a result, he says, Canada is “amongst the top countries in the world in terms of citizens stepping forward to do the right thing.”

If taking the vaccine equals doing ‘the right thing,’ then those who’ve declined have done the wrong thing. At no time does our Boy Genius explain why being near the top of the heap internationally isn’t good enough. He could have said, ‘Well done! Canadians are amazing. Let’s take a bow!’ Instead, he publicly berated the non-compliant.

Governments, health workers, and fellow Canadians are all frustrated and angry he says. Cancer treatments and elective surgeries are being delayed, he continues, “because beds are filled with people who chose not to get vaccinated.”

Pardon me? Our hospitals were a mess long before COVID. A report titled Hallway Health Care: A System Under Strain tells us Ontario’s hospitals were so short of beds in 2018 that, “on any given day in the province, there are at least 1000 patients receiving health care in the hallways of our hospitals.”

Canada has significantly fewer hospital beds than other countries - 2.6 per 1,000 people. Compared to 6 in France, 7.8 in Germany, and 12.7 in Japan. Since governments manage our health care system, that bed shortage is their fault.

Long waiting lists for surgeries have likewise been a problem for years. When government-employed health bureaucrats chose to shut down operating rooms at three different points during the pandemic, those lists got longer.

Blaming the unvaccinated for well-documented, longstanding shortcomings of government-managed health care is grotesque. But the Boy Genius then went further. Confirming that Canada was still experiencing “serious public health restrictions right now,” in early January 2022, he said this was due to “the risk posed to all of us by unvaccinated people” who apparently don’t care about keeping “each other safe.”

The logic here was absurd. If getting the vaccine confers meaningful protection, then the fact that “the vast majority” of Canadians have received that protection should be viewed as mission accomplished.

But if the effectiveness of the vaccine my Prime Minister has taken multiple doses of depends on a decision that I make about my own body, if his safety depends on my submission to his point-of-view, we’ve got much bigger problems than a respiratory virus.

Cue the truckers. Cue the horns. Cue the Canada flags!

Here’s the transcript of that nasty video clip:

First of all, we do have to recognize that the vast majority of Canadians have stepped up, have been there to get themselves vaccinated, to protect their loved ones, to protect front line health workers. And that is significant. We're amongst the top countries in the world in terms of citizens stepping forward to do the right thing.

So it's not just about governments and health workers frustrated that there are Canadians who still continue to choose to not get vaccinated. It's fellow Canadians, as well. When people are seeing cancer treatments and elective surgeries put off because beds are filled with people who chose not to get vaccinated, they’re frustrated. When people see that we're in lockdowns or serious public health restrictions right now, because of the risk posed to all of us by unvaccinated people, people get angry.

And we have put forward many, many different measures to encourage, to reassure, to incentivize, to educate, to cajole, to remind people that it's never too late to do the right thing. It's never too late to go and get your first dose of vaccine. I can tell you that that frontline health worker who's giving you your first dose of the vaccine, even now in January 2022, will be immensely pleased to be able to give you that first dose of vaccine even today. Because they'd much rather be giving you an injection of vaccine than intubating you in an ICU.

We need to continue to do the right thing the way all Canadians - or the vast majority of Canadians - are. Keep each other safe, make sure our country gets back to the things we love as quickly as possible.