The Great Canadian Freedom Convoy
As Canadian truckers descend on Ottawa to protest for freedom, Trudeau flees.
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is a coward for leaving his state residence ahead of the trucker convoy protesting his January 15 COVID vaccine mandates. “What a complete coward,” political pundit Lisa Boothe blasted. “He won’t even face the citizens he has discriminated against.” Dubbed the Freedom Convoy, truck drivers last week began a long trek across Canada — originating in Vancouver bound for Ottawa — to protest Trudeau’s vaccine mandate and other COVID restrictions.
Trudeau’s excuse for fleeing the city was that he had come down with a bout of COVID. Meanwhile, the crowd of protesters was estimated to be as high as 20,000, and despite authorities’ proclaimed fear of possible violence, none has been reported. There wasn’t even a single arrest.
Earlier, Trudeau had dismissed the protest movement as a “small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other, who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to ensure our rights, our freedoms, our values.”
“Freedoms” doesn’t mean what he thinks it means.
The truck drivers are protesting Trudeau’s mandate that all Canadians would need to be fully vaccinated before they could travel across the country. While 90% of Canada’s truck drivers have already been vaccinated, protesters object to the government’s infringement on basic rights, including the right of free movement. Furthermore, this “fringe” movement is growing rapidly, and supporters have raised over $9 million to assist, and judging by the crowds of people who showed up on the roadways to express their support, this was far from a small band of disgruntled freedom lovers.
The convoy was reported to have been as large as 50,000 truck drivers.
In his rally in Conroe, Texas, over the weekend, Donald Trump noted the Freedom Convoy: “The Canadian truckers … who are resisting, bravely, these lawless mandates are doing more to defend American freedom than our own leaders by far. And we want those great Canadian truckers to know that we are with them all the way.”
The reality is that Trudeau has stepped all over Canada’s 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the nation’s highest law, which expressly protects Canadians’ right to move free throughout the country and abroad. The last remaining signer of the constitutional charter, former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford, is now suing the government for violating the charter. He slammed Trudeau for slandering the unvaccinated as “racists,” “misogynists,” “anti-science,” and “extremist,” and he called Trudeau’s question “do we tolerate these people?” divisive and undemocratic. “This is completely against the democratic and Canadian values I love about this country,” Peckford argued.
Trudeau complains that truckers have shut down his city, ironically, in a protest related to Trudeau mandates what time the net effect of shutting down his city – and the rest of the country.
Of course, the little reporting the mainstream media has deigned to grant the Freedom Convoy is mostly negative and misrepresents their protest. In fact, Washington Post political cartoonist Michael de Adder depicted the convoy of trucks as a supply chain of fascism. Does he even know what that word means? As Mollie Hemingway astutely noted: “The far-left Washington Post, owned by one of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful men, defends tyranny of the elite regime it’s part of by saying that citizen opposition to it is … you guessed it … fascism. Such evil.”
Maybe that’s why convoy leaders held a press conference and didn’t allow the mainstream media.