Trudeau Screwed Up and So Did The Freedom Convoy
I didn’t agree with the mandate requiring truckers to be fully vaccinated, because we were already dealing with supply shortages and rising prices here in Canada. I didn’t want that to get worse. Approximately 90% of truckers were already vaccinated and Omicron was already spreading like wildfire throughout the country. It seemed to me that requiring a few thousand truckers to get vaccinated wouldn’t make much difference and wasn’t worth the tradeoff of making the supply chain issue worse. However, the federal government did have the right to implement that rule. I just wish they hadn’t.
Those who didn’t agree with the government’s decision had every right to protest it and I don’t blame them for wanting to (even though for them it obviously didn’t have anything to do with supply chains or inflation). However, they didn’t have the right to protest it any which way they wanted to. Protests should be “peaceful” or “non-violent,” but they should also not significantly disrupt the lives of other citizens.
If people were allowed to protest by blocking off streets and vital trade routes and blast loud truck horns all day and night where people live and work, we wouldn’t be able to function as a society. There has to be a limit. The law in Canada has such limits, contrary to what many of the protestors seem to have thought. Without drawing a line in the sand somewhere, any group of people with a cause, legitimate or not, could do major damage to a community or even the entire country.
Ending the blockades was not just a matter of the federal government taking action. The federal government actually did very little. Two Ontario judges granted injunctions that were brought forth by citizens of Ottawa and auto parts manufacturing companies. Thousands of Ottawa citizens have taken part in a class action lawsuit against members of the convoy, seeking damages in the hundreds of millions of dollars (the judge in this case also allowed bank accounts to be frozen). The Premier of Ontario, a conservative, denounced the blockades and declared a provincial state of emergency, giving Ontario authorities extraordinary powers to help end the blockades. The mayors of both Ottawa and Windsor were vehemently against the blockades. And polls showed that approximately two-thirds of Canadians were against the tactics of the protestors and are in favor of the vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the border.
The majority isn’t always right, but that’s the way it works in a democracy — the majority rules. It’s far from perfect, but it’s also far from a dictatorship, which is the main thing that needs to be guarded against. This question lingers though: what if a minority group is being mistreated, how do they create change without extreme tactics that punish the majority? First, I would say that’s not what was happening in this case. We’re all living under certain Covid restrictions which are the government’s best understanding of how to prevent hospitals from breaching capacity. Second, I would say that Gandhi and MLK both had the right idea. The Gandhi and MLK method won’t always work and in those cases I’m not sure what you do, but it is the place to start.
