I’m not 100 percent against occupations. They are often effective ways of protesting. In particular when truckers, miners, and other blue collar workers, who have access to big machinery and who are used to hard work get involved, they tend to be very effective protesters. You see this most often in France, where truckers routinely shut down roads.
Protests are about causing inconvenience to someone, about getting in their face. A protest which doesn’t do so, isn’t effective. There was a time when they were, but that time is now generations ago, because our modern elites don’t care about protests that don’t scare or hurt them.
The truckers have a right to protest, but it’s not a protest I am in political sympathy with, as I don’t have a problem with vaccine mandates. It should also be noted that the majority of Canadians support vaccine mandates. Of course, just because a majority agree with you doesn’t mean you’re right. A majority of Americans opposed Martin Luther King, after all.
What is interesting about the trucker occupation is how cooperative the police have been, especially in Ottawa, where the Chief let them into the core, let them set up supply camps and logistics. The truckers deliberately disabled some vehicles to make it harder to re-open the streets and remove them. In Toronto, the police did keep the truckers away from a few key areas: some hospitals (one of which, actually, I’ll spend time at on Monday), and the capital, but they did let them occupy a fair chunk of important downtown real-estate.
Vancouver’s is the most interesting case, because while the police didn’t do much, by the time the convoy rolled into Vancouver civilians had seen what was up, and counter protesters blocked the convoys over and over again as best they could.
The convoys then, are non-city people coming to the city to protest, and they aren’t generally welcomed by those who live in these urban cores, most of whom don’t agree with the truckers and are the ones inconvenienced.
As noted, the police really haven’t done much, though that’s beginning to change in Ottawa. Few arrests, no impounding vehicles, etc…, outside of Quebec, where the province has simply sent in the vehicle inspectors (truckers hate vehicle inspectors) and made a point of photographing all the plates. I’m familiar with how left-wing protests are treated in Canada, and I am confident in saying that if this was some First Nations or anti-poverty protesters, they’d have been broken up already with however much violence the cops felt like using (probably a lot) and thrown in prison, with their vehicles already impounded.
Certainly, Canadian police have done so for protests that caused a lot less inconvenience than occupying the capital city and the largest city in Canada’s core.
So, fairly obviously, the police are in a fair bit of sympathy with the truckers, and that includes the leadership. The Chief of Ottawa police has been, in fact, co-operative.
The final thing to note here is that the money from this appears to have largely come from the United States, not from Canada, and so does the ideology. Canadian traditions are a lot less about, “can’t tell me to not make my fellow citizens sick,” than the USA. Canada is the “Peace, Order, and Good Government” country. In general, the right-wing in Canada has been very badly affected by US-based ideology, going from being Red Tories to folks who think Trump was pretty good, actually.
Americans still have an idealized idea of what Canada is like. The truth is that we have a much smaller population than the US, and a much smaller economy, and all our trends are moving in the same direction as the US: more and more neoliberalism, more and more right-wing “populism.”
Inequality has grown worse for generations, and this has left us vulnerable to right-wing agitation in ways we really weren’t in the past — because the social contract has been broken in the same general ways as in the US and most of the West. The difference is solely that we started from a better place, but in the province of Alberta, for example, the government is doing their best to move towards privatized medicine and gutting Medicare, in very much the same way as Britain has.
With the center solidly neoliberal, even as they pretend to be liberals, and with the left primarily concerned with identity politics, the hard-core of the left’s old power used to be people like truckers and miners and farmers, and they have slipped over to the right, even though their material interests largely aren’t served there. But the right panders to them culturally, while the center thinks they’re uneducated louts and the left despises them as socially backwards.
And so we have the trucker protests. Truckers have power because they have heavy machinery, and they’re using it. Many of them are sincere and think they are doing the right thing, for the right reasons. Most Canadians don’t agree, but the police are sympathetic, the Premier of Ontario’s daughter is with the protesters in Ottawa (because he’s a right-winger rather similar to Trump), and, after all, neoliberal politicians like Trudeau really want to reopen and aren’t entirely opposed to the truckers’ demands, though they are wedded to vaccines.
Societies are subject to revolution when an elite faction wants it, the enforcer class is unwilling to defend the status quo, and there is a significant popular faction who want change. All three are generally necessary.
If I were among Canada’s current rulers, I’d be worried, not by the left, but by the right. The left doesn’t have an elite faction supporting it or the complicity of at least some police. The right, even if most Canadians don’t agree, does.
Update: The Ottawa police have begun to choke off supplies. Hearing right-wingers squeal about how police seizing gasoline and food is illegal and wrong is very precious, since I don’t remember any of them complaining about it when police seized the property of homeless people who were causing a lot less trouble.
Dan Lynch
Thanks for your insight on the trucker protest.
I can see some half-truth in the trucker’s complaint — that since the vaccines offer little protection from catching or spreading Omicron, why should vaccinated truckers be exempt from quarantine? In a competently run country like China, EVERYONE entering the country has to quarantine.
So our so-called leaders need to address that, and in general they need to offer an up to date plan for the virus. Right now, the West has no coherent plan, no end game, no light at the end of the tunnel. While I personally support vaccine mandates and Covid restrictions, it’s human nature that people are going to grow weary of the restrictions.
I think the right’s “freedumb” arguments are wrong on several levels, but the West’s Covid half-measures are at best, temporary bandaids.
Mary Bennett
About your update, Mr. Welsh where you mention hearing “right wingers squeal about how police seizing …”; that would be another way in which Canadians are becoming more like Americans. We are used to the way the right uses open and blatant hypocrisy as part of its tool kit.
NR
Hope everything is okay health-wise, Ian. Best wishes.
marku52
Ian I’d be interested in why you support a vax mandate, now that it is shown that the vaccines have no public health value, ie, they don’t stop transmission of the disease. If they did that, it would be a totally different story. The measles vax, for example, stops the spread of the disease. I read all the time “I support a mandate, I don’t want my policeman or fireman to infect me.” Well, as I pointed out, these vaccines don’t do that. Maybe some vaccine in the future will. And the point of the vaccines is that they *DO* protect you. So if you believe in the vaccines, you shouldn’t care if the fireman is unvaccinated.
Jason
Take a look at the self-described leaders of the movement (such as one Pat King) and see that those at the top are largely made up of some of Canada’s most notorious fascist and white supremacist groups.
anon
I’m pro-vaccines and would like to see mandates everywhere although realistically I don’t believe that will happen in a country like the USA. It will work in Asia, and possibly Canada, but these sort of mandates do not align with American culture and ideology. It is concerning that Canada is moving in the same direction as America. I’ve only been to Canada a handful of times – Vancouver, Quebec City, Montreal, and Stratford – and thought it was a lovely country. My visits were never long enough to see the ugly side of it, but whatever problems there will get uglier if it becomes more American. That’s why I stated on another post that countries need to be very careful who they let in. Any country letting in Americans should make sure that this type of ideology similar to the truckers is left behind. Any American who can’t abide by vaccine mandates and common sense gun laws that have been adapted by the rest of the developed world should not be let into a country en masse by the hundreds of thousands or millions.
Ian Welsh
Vaccines massively reduce hospitalizations and deaths. Not having hospitals overwhelmed is important. To put in personal terms, there was a period last year where tests at the hospital I go to went from a couple week wait time to 3 month wait time (they’re back down now.)
A cancer hospital. If I personally die due to cancer (unlikely, but the chance is not zero) it may be that the reason why is that treatment was delayed due to the hospital being crushed by Covid. This is true of many other people and not just for cancer.
Vaccines are not the way to control Covid, but they do at least keep hospitals running.
I am also given to understand that viral load matters for transmission, and that vaccines reduce viral load. It’s obviously not enough by itself, the countries that have controlled Covid have not relied on vaccines as their primary method.
But even if they have no effect, I would still support them. They are, actually, MORE important in countries like Canada where we refuse (in most provinces) to actually use non-Vaccine methods properly.
Ché Pasa
In the United States, too, far more people are in favor of mask and vaccine mandates than are opposed. The opposition movement that we keep hearing about and see people in the streets and setting up occupations and threatening revolution over mandates represents a loud minority, but they get plenty of coverage and have plenty of help from people in high places, the police, and many electeds.
As Ian says, just because a majority is in favor of X doesn’t make it right. But we’ve been in a situation where the majority of voters, for whatever reason, do not see their policy interests implemented, do not see their candidates elected, and find themselves under constant threats, extractions and pressure from an overclass which abides in power no matter what.
I’m not particularly aligned with whatever these truckers in Canada are trying to do — do they know? — but I certainly understand the frustration of not getting their way, even if they are being manipulated by forces outside their own movement.
Is this another warning to the overclass? It ought to be, but it probably won’t be. And when the fascist (erm, “rightist-populist’) hammer comes down (Canadian truckers the Vanguard?) who will be first against the wall? Trudeau? Hillary? Kamala?
Astrid
Ian,
I hope your hospital visits will be relatively painless and effect a full recovery.
If vaccines are only 70% effective at keeping people out of hospitals (and that protection rapidly drops mere weeks after the shots and will likely further diminish as Covid mutate further from the wild type) and 80%+ of the population will take the shot without a mandate, then is a mandate going to make a substantive difference in hospital load?
Wouldn’t mandating N95 masks and ventilation, or closing down borders, or closing down schools and restaurants, be a lot more effective than forcing unwilling people to take up a poorly tested vaccine with substantial known side effects for a large portion of the population? And if those less invasive and better understood forms of protection cannot be mandated, how is mandating vaccination supposed to work out?
It’s pretty clear to me that vaccine mandate is not supportable for the current MRNA vaccines. They’re pushed to divide the population and distract us from how truly evilly incompetent the Western governments are.
bruce wilder
I am enough of an old-school liberal to be highly skeptical of the combination of vaccine mandates and vaccine passporting: creating a privilege and breaching autonomy — these are direct violations of liberal ideals and, yes, a liberal would accept a pragmatic argument but an old-school liberal does not “follow the science” — rather we look for science to make especially persuasive arguments with integrity.
I am vaccinated and boosted and I recommend vaccination, but I do not know that I am especially safe to have as a guest at a restaurant nor do I feel I really know to what degree or at what rate the vaccinated are getting sick and occupying hospital beds or dying. I do not know, because powerful institutions apparently want draconian power but not the responsibility for finding out what is going on and proving it publicly. I cannot just go along with such feckless authoritarianism.
Get back to me when the moral-panic-“left” is trying to cancel not Joe Rogan, but Anthony Fauci or Rochelle Walensky for spreading misinformation deliberately and recklessly. I know — you should know — not goin’ to ‘appen.
someofparts
Hope things were okay at the hospital today.
Ian Welsh
The percentage of people in Toronto hospital ICU for Covid is about 70% unvaccinated in a population where only 13% have no vaccination at all. So the protection from severe hospitalization is very high.
https://www.ctvnews.ca/health/coronavirus/inside-an-icu-where-70-per-cent-of-covid-19-patients-are-unvaccinated-1.5738198
The numbers for general hospitalization also indicate very good protection from vaccination from disease severe enough to require hospitalization.
As I have said repeatedly, other approaches than vaccination are better, but it is clear that our rulers are not willing to do those other measures. In countries where other measures will not be done properly, vaccination is necessary. This is not an ideal world where I am in charge and get to choose my Covid policy mix, if it was, Covid would already be over.
Toronto General is where I had my test today, and it is part of the “University Hospital Network” where I get all my cancer care. To put it crudely, fucking up Covid is putting my life at risk by delaying my treatment, and I am not the only one.
Someofparts: it was fine, the police did keep those streets clear. Test was boring, but results were positive in terms of no cancer spread to bones.
Z
I’m for any kind of working class resistance at this point. It has to build somewhere somehow and it’s a step in the right direction. I’ve got much more common ground with them than our scumbag rulers.
Z
Z
The January 6th Insurrectionists … or whatever you want to call them … I’m for them too. Too bad that their clown price Trump was too much of a coward to pardon them.
I’d imagine that all revolutionary movements start our messy and imperfect.
I’m for any kind of resistance against our rulers who are in fact enemies of all life on this planet.
Z
NR
Here’s a good piece on the trucker protest, it’s not a working-class movement at all:
https://www.trucknews.com/blogs/the-so-called-freedom-convoy-was-never-about-truckers-or-border-mandates/
different clue
Here is a link to an individual Canadian’s statement about his neighborhood and area being under trucker occupation.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ottawa/comments/sn5ysp/how_the_ottawa_residents_were_abandoned_by_all/
NR
https://youtu.be/QOHGhn0o_pI
This video has some great insight into why the police haven’t cracked down on the truckers but do crack down, hard, on indigenous and similar protests. The short answer is that the truckers are doing what the wealthy elite want.
Jim Harmon
Not a fan of this gang of “protestors.”
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/convoy-truckers-canada-soup-kitchen-b2003765.html
Ché Pasa
For Ian:
All good wishes for successful tests and treatment and full remission. May you be happy, healthy and able to enjoy life — and continue to inspire others through your insights.
praxis
Ian,
I think the vaccine mandates are a fragile crux that have undermined trust in public health and leadership. The efficacy (against spread, death, lasting immunity), messaging and (somewhat) safety have all been over promised/delivered. Vaccine mythology has also allowed our rulers to divert blame for their own failures.
The vaccines have become less effective. The roll off of boosted immunity quicker. How long is the game of wack-a-mole going to go on? If it falls apart, which is quite possible, public health is toast.
Z
NR,
Yeah sure, truckers aren’t working class and the wealthy elites welcome a protest that is gathering steam and shutting down a major city. All brought to you by the reputable folks at http://www.trucknews.com. Gotcha!
How deep did you have to dig to find that “good piece on the trucker protest”?
Z
someofparts
Well Ian, you will be in my thoughts. I am at the age where a couple of my close friends are fighting to keep cancer at bay and I see the toll that takes on them. Even the medicine they take to protect themselves has hard side-effects. Wishing the best for you.
someofparts
As to the general topic at hand, I think those of us in the US should get used to apologizing to Canadians. We will be doing a lot more of that going forward.
Barry Fay
Ian – in the article you link to it says this: “Ontario is reporting 3,448 people hospitalized with COVID-19, and 505 in the ICU, a number that experts are worried could increase over time. Among the ICU cases for which vaccination status was reported as of Jan. 12, 157 were unvaccinated, 19 were partially vaccinated and 167 were fully vaccinated.” In other words, there are MORE vaccinated that unvaccinated in that ICU. Basing your opinion on such truly unreliable data is a surprise. There are MANY FACTORS contributing to serious Covid illness so it is misleading to concentrate on only one of them to make a point. Forcing people to take an experimental drug that does not even seem to work (see the statistic on Covid deaths and infections pre-vaccine and post vaccine!) is quite simply immoral.
Z
Ian,
Best of luck.
Eat well and don’t work too hard.
Z
Ian Welsh
If 13% of people are unvaccinated and make up almost half of the people in the ICU, while 87% are vaccinated and make up almost half of the people in the ICU (we’ll skip partial vaccination), that means that vaccination is, in fact, helping a great deal to reduce ICU usage. This isn’t controversial, the math works perfectly, etc…
Roger Mellie
Up here in Canada, the extremes of both left and right are highly Americanised. All of their most insane rhetoric comes from south of the border, be it inane MAGA slogans or defund the police, etc. There are no ideas remotely resembling “Peace, Order and Good Government” in either camp. They both hate this country.
As one of the half-dozen or so Canadians who actually believe police should come down hard on all protestors the minute they break any law, I say fuck them both.
Ian Welsh
Personal: I’ll find out next week what the treatment options are. As cancers go what I have is one of the most survivable, and I’m definitely hoping to avoid the worst treatments, like chemo, I too have seen what they do to people. In some cases, I’m not sure it was worth it, honestly.
NR
Z: That site is specifically for news about trucking, I have no idea why you would say it’s not reputable. And yes, the wealthy elites want everything opened back up with no COVID restrictions at all. These truckers are useful pawns toward achieving that goal.
Trinity
I will echo everyone’s wishes for your wellness, and also happiness at your good news. Please do not die!
I’m not sure if I’m for or against the truckers, but I’m against vaccine mandates for the poor product that is being pushed on a population that has been deliberately misled and lied to. The real problem to my mind is tying a mandate to a poor product. The lack of thorough testing before release, the misleading headlines, the lack of sharing true results, etc., all suggest no mandate at all. The fact that they aren’t even designed to prevent and end the virus’s presence in the population.
The numbers I’ve seen (and posted here regarding the US) indicate overwhelmed hospitals in many states, and the expectation is for this to continue with the even more virulent omicron variant.
Also, it has been the plan all along to convert (in reality: subjugate) populations in other countries than the US. This is and always has been a grab for power over the world, not just the west, and the unspoken reason why Russia and China are a “problem”. I’ve believed this for years, and watching their actions the last few years support this “hypothesis”, while nothing has appeared to refute it. Yes, I know, I sound like a crank, but so be it. Every day, every month, this seems to be the trajectory. They don’t care who lives or dies, they don’t care about us at all, they want to enslave/control the world, all its assets (whatever is left) and continue to enhance their own lives at everyone and everything else’s expense.
We all, collectively, need to stop listening to them, and instead focus on what they do. That’s the best way to determine if I’m right, partially right, partially wrong, or entirely wrong. For the truckers, the most important data points are not what the truckers are, or what the truckers do, it’s exactly who is funding them.
StewartM
Marku52
Ian I’d be interested in why you support a vax mandate, now that it is shown that the vaccines have no public health value, ie, they don’t stop transmission of the disease.
The Covid vaccines have about the same effectiveness as most of the other childhood diseases. The difference is that we essentially FORCE everyone to get those childhood vaccines, and near-universal compliance means ‘no disease’. The problem isn’t in the vaccines, but that we allow hold-outs in the name of ‘freedumb’ which allows to virus not only to evolve into variants that evade the vaccines, but our treatments for it. (Regeneron doesn’t work against Omnicon now). \
So absolutely, there is plenty of moral justification behind a vaccine mandate. It’s not just your life and your health you’re risking, but everyone else’s too, and as the saying goes, ‘your rights end at my nose’.
StewartM
Hearing right wingers squeal about how police seizing gasoline and food is illegal and wrong is very precious, since I don’t remember any of them complaining about it when police seized the property of homeless people who were causing a lot less trouble.
Heh. Everyone has the right to protest, but some people have more right to protest than others. If Congress had been stormed Jan 6th by a group of BLM and antifa protesters, they’d still be cleaning up the blood.
Z
Even if this is funded by SOME rich people, the boyz on Wall Street don’t like any sort of labor movements and they are the biggest enemy we have. For instance I don’t imagine Larry Fink, Steve Schwarzman, Mike Bloomberg, or Leon Black are contributing money to it.
And even if this protest is slightly off-target in your opinion, the bonds that the truckers are making may very well come in handy in the future for a much needed General Strike.
Z
Trinity
Apologies for too much bold, thought I had the tags right and didn’t.
Z
NR,
As I’ve tried to post earlier, the site is owned by Newcom Media, which doesn’t exactly appear particularly sympathetic to labor’s view so it wouldn’t be surprising if they are more interested in running interference for the industry.
Their publications are Advisor’s Edge, Canadian Shipper, Conseiller, Finance et Investissement, Inside Logistics, Investment Executive, Road Today, Truck News, Truck West, Today’s Trucking, Transport Routier, Truck & Trailer, Today’s Bride, Solid Waste & Recycling, Canadian Underwriter, Oral Health.
Z
Astrid
Those childhood immunizations have been tested over decades. Most confer decades of immunity to disease after 1-2 shots, not just symptoms. If the MRNA vaccines were those things, the case for mandating vaccines would be much stronger. As it is, many people got boosters and are still getting ill. And their effectiveness is clearly waning with each subsequent variant drifting from wild type.
And…even for childhood immunizations, there are usually pathways to opting out. Kids might have to attend private school or be home schooled, but that’s very different from getting fired and losing one’s financial means of support.
Also, people who are harmed by traditionally mandated vaccines can claim compensation for their harm. If you die or become severely ill after talking one of the mRNA vaccines, you’re on your own. You can’t sue Pfizer or Moderna, and your not eligible for the government general vaccine victim compensation fund.
If I had to travel long distance or work a risky job, I would still get a booster, but the risk of getting vaccinated is definitely not zero.
Astrid
Okay, it looks like you may now be eligible for the US government’s vaccine victim funds, since it’s no longer on emergency authorization. Still, good luck claiming it if you just happen to drop dead or become debilitated days after a shot.
Ché Pasa
So…
The objection to mandates — whether masks or Covid vaccines or isolation/lockdown or what have you — has little or nothing to do with public health, which has most certainly been bolloxed by our overlords and their sponsors, it has everything to do with believing that PR has been shitty from the get go (true), and practically anyone with an internet connection could do it better (ummm….) and that The Government has no right to tell the plebs what to do especially given the endless contradictions put out by the various pooh-bahs. (Governments tell people what to do all the time, and most of the time we do it.)
The science sucks, the message sucks, the messengers suck, the vaccines can only keep most of us from getting deathly ill and dying in even greater agony than in our vaccineless state, and the whole exercise is deliberately implemented to stress health care systems to the maximum and ensure that the old, the poor, the already sick, and the Black and Brown die off sooner rather than later, preferably in a ditch. (all apparently true.)
That’s the rational objection. There are all kinds of irrational objections we needn’t go into. And based on numbers of those vaccinated and observing various public health protocols (masking and social distancing among others) regardless of mandates — though mandates help things along — the majority of North Americans (in Canada, the vast majority) are not objecting to doing these simple and effective things and surprisingly are going on with their lives as well.
We see that the vaccines are not able to prevent the spread of Covid, but masking along with vaccination can and does limit spread and prevents most people from enduring severe illness and death. Yes, there are exceptions. Just as there are with every vaccine and public health protocol.
People who are immunecompromised (I assume that includes Ian as it does me) are at much higher risk because vaccines don’t usually help us; treatments are limited, We have to be extra careful, which would be true even without Covid. Those who resist both vaccination and masking and who seem eager to spread the virus as widely as possible are as bad as some of our overlords — who clearly want us dead. The sooner the better, right?
I guess it would mean more stuff for them.
At any rate, I feel more empathy and pity for the truckers. They’re being screwed by their employers, not by the mandates. Most seem to know that. But they aren’t able to protest their screwage and those who are really responsible. They’ve been convinced the Covid mandates are the problem. And they aren’t. It’s sad. Sad all around.
different clue
Beau of the Fifth Column came out with a video comparing the Truckers protest to various Indigenous Nations protests in Canada, and his theory for the reason why the CanadaGov is being as permissive as it can get away with being about the Truckers, whereas it is swift, hard and vicious in repressing the Indigenous protests.
His theory is that racism is superficial and secondary to the main reason, which is that the Indigenous protesters seek the kind of social-order change which would cost many powerful people a lot of powerful money. Whereas what the Truckers seek costs no powerful people any powerful money at all.
Here is the link.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QOHGhn0o_pI&list=PLQDS8YKa2B0kkdfbs6x8dMPdm6u-XxWs6&index=7
different clue
Here is an article about some Indigenous Leadership criticism of the Trumpanon Truckanons besieging certain targeted localities in Canada, titled . . . ” First Nations Leadership Council Strongly Condemns “Freedom Convoy” Movement Across Canada and its Spread of Misinformation, Racism, and Violence ” and released by the British Columbia Assembly of First Nations.
Here is the link.
https://www.bcafn.ca/news/first-nations-leadership-council-strongly-condemns-freedom-convoy-movement-across-canada-and
Ché Pasa
So about this Trucker Revolutionary Vanguard — which seems to be spreading and actually being promoted by much of the media….
Hmmm. Assuming the truckers besieging Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada are owner-operators rather than drivers for FedEx or whatever, each one of the blockading trucks represents an investment, erm… debt, of around $200,000 with commensurate annual fuel, maintenance and insurance charges. Even though their numbers are small, this is a very expensive operation for the truckers. That’s a reason why they just might need all those millions raised on the charitable sites. But rumor has it, they won’t get much if anything from their supposed financial supporters. Hmmm. Even more screwage. Which is the unfortunate reality for truck drivers in the neo-liberal matrix.
They have a great deal to complain about, and they should. But complaining about the mandates and getting all revolutionary about it is pure transference and projection. Psychological, downright Bernaysian, manipulation. And look, only a relative handful of truckers can cause such fear and chaos.
I’ve been saying this for a long time: Teh Revolution does not require majority support or participation. A very small minority can, under the right circumstances, overcome the apparently impenetrable and implacable Government and seize power.
I’ve seen some of the demands of the trucker-insurrectionists, and it appears that they’re after the resignation of the entire Canadian Government and the installation of their own partisans in every office, and then the dissolution of Canada. Bah-dup-dup.
Reminds me just a little bit of the Tea Party activists in the US back in the day. Those of us who were paying attention knew it was billionaire funded astroturf from the get-go, but it was promoted tirelessly by the media as a ‘real thing,’ and for the nonce it was very effective in disciplining Republicans particularly but government in general to toe a right wing political line — or face consequences (defenestration, diselecton, insults, spitting upon, physical violence, constant yammering about lack of patriotism, blah blah.) It worked for a while. It was a pseudo revolution and we’re still living with the consequences.
We can’t say as much about OWS or BLM.
When the gross contrast in the approach of Canadian authorities to the truckers compared to their immediate and constant violence toward First Nations’ protests is pointed out, we should be reminded of similar contrasts in the United States. Enormous and ongoing violence toward, say, Water Protectors and other Native protests, no less so against Black and Brown protesters in the streets (going so far as to make legal running them down if drivers want to) compared with the astonishing level of deference and kid-glove treatment of the Capitol rioters on the day of the siege and since. Skin color isn’t the only reason why. But the visuals can’t be denied.
So what does this mean? It means that a significant and perhaps controlling faction of the ruling class and their police and militaries are on the side of the rightist proto-revolutionaries.
And in a sense, it’s all over but the shouting.
I would just point out again how easy it is for a small minority mob to pull off this kind of shit.
Connect the dots
The argument that unvaccinated covid are clogging up hospitals is diminished by the fact that, In true neoliberal form, the number of hospital beds has been dramatically reduced in the last decade+ and hedge funds have closed many insufficiently profitable rural hospitals.
Prior to Covid, I took my mother to ER several times and there were no beds for needed admission, instead camping in hallway.
Hospitals are financially incentivized to code an admission as covid even if admitted for an injury so there is vast opportunity for statistical manipulation.
Israel, the most vaccinated country in the world exclusively Pfizer, has now parted ways with Pfizer and signed with Novavax –a traditional technology, as they are experiencing waves of infection and hospitalizations even after even a fourth jab.
The public was part of an vaccine centric experiment that ignored early treatment of repurposed drugs and that experiment has failed. To suggest that we should be mandated for jabs every 6-9 months of mrna technology is insanity risking damage to our immune systems.
The conflicts of interest involved in mandating experimental vaccines while ignoring early treatment and promoting weight loss for the high risk obese etc are monumental.
different clue
About Israel signing onto the Novovax vaccine . . . whatever else the Israelis may or may not be, they are not antirussianitic racist antirussianites. So they will not avoid Russia’s Novovax vaccine for antirussianitic racist antirussianite reasons, the way the DC FedRegime and the US Upper Class Occupation Regime are, and will.
So Israel will become an interesting test case for whether Novovax works better at the population level than the mRNA para-vaccinoids do. If it does work better, the antirussianitic racist antirussianite MSM media will suppress all discussion of that fact the very best that they can.
It will be interesting to see if Novovax’s success, if there is one, gets more exposure in Canada than it will get in the US.
Trinity
“To suggest that we should be mandated for jabs every 6-9 months of mrna technology is insanity risking damage to our immune systems.”
Given that the sociopath’s stated goal (imho) is to enslave the world, and the easiest way to do that is through debt, one possible reason why they chose the path they chose of an untested, unreliable technology. But that unreliability is to them a feature, not a bug, that may ensure, at some point, people will eventually become willing to take on debt to purchase an overpriced, not-totally-effective alternative to death. It follows that they will then claim, again, that there is no alternative.
NOVAVAX (Novavax) is made right outside Washington DC (Gaithersburg, MD) and it is designed to contain the virus, the more traditional type of vaccine we are used to. I just want to reiterate, it’s been there, “next door” to US policy makers, for almost the entire covid period. The company was started in 1987, and immediately began testing their vaccines in relation to covid. AFAIK, their ads only appears on local television stations. I learned of it from a coworker who lives in Gaithersburg.
Hexafoos
Neoliberals aren’t pretending to be liberals, they are liberals.
Jessica
Ian,
I hope you recover quickly, easily, and fully. You have really had more than your share of health issues in this life, haven’t you.
It makes no sense to me that the Canadian government would add a vaccine requirement for incoming truckers now, when they did not have it all along. Yes, the case for vaccines to keep the hospitals functional is strong, but the vaccines only provide limited protection against transmission and for omicron even less.
I am also amazed that the US government let the Ambassador Bridge be blocked. Maybe Ottawa could have caught folks off guard, but anyone could see that bridge as quite a vulnerable point.
I wonder if Trudeau is willing to let Ford deal with the tar baby.
BTW, I think of Canada and the US being connected with a bungee cord. Canada can diverge from the US but the more it does, the greater the pull back toward US norms. I wish that were not so.
Grant
I am appalled by the government’s refusal to meet with protest representatives and make any concessions or efforts to resolve the underlying issues which a huge number of Canadians have expressed concerns about. I think when this many citizens gather to support a human rights issue they deserve an adequate response. The truckers I have listened to are all calling for peaceful, respectful and nonviolent behavior from their supporters. They have invested too much time, expense and energy to simply pack up and go home with nothing but condemnation from our government.