This climate of malicious disinformation was aggravated by the stentorian hyperactivity of the federal government’s propaganda apparatus. Potential liberal leadership candidate Mark Carney wrote that the truckers were trying to overthrow the government. This was a deliberate falsehood.
Once they arrived in Ottawa, they parked their trucks in inconvenient places, made a good deal of noise, but did absolutely nothing to justify allegations that they were united by extremist views or had any seriously illegal purpose. These were independent truckers who for their own reasons did not wish to be vaccinated and most of their activities were deliveries across the Canada United States border and when they returned to Canada unvaccinated, they were required to undergo quarantine for two weeks.
Obviously this would eventually lead to bankruptcy if not starvation.
In the circumstances, and in the light of subsequent research on the Covid virus and its treatment, it is clear that their objections were reasonable. Of course, no serious country can tolerate the roads adjacent to its principal federal government buildings to be congested by protesters indefinitely.
The truckers were jovial and rather likable and only occasionally slightly over boisterous, and this matter could have been dealt with by normal police methods.
Other than in the fact that the authorities did not use live ammunition, we effectively, incredibly, managed to emulate the public relations and human rights disaster of the government of the People’s Republic of China in clearing Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989: a thoroughly unjustified recourse to coercive force, extraordinary prosecution, and freezing or confiscation of assets.
With the same zeal that the government attacked the truckers, it should put CUPE in trusteeship and decertify it as a bargaining agent
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This was the first use of the Emergencies Act and the first invocation of extraordinary powers by the federal government since the other Prime Minister Trudeau use the War Measures Act in 1970.