patrick.net

Hello from the centre of the trucker protest. I live 4 km from Parliament Hill [downtown Ottawa]. I have walked the streets of the protest on two occasions for about 4 hours each. Yesterday and today I ferried several drivers to my house for showers and conversation. I put one up for the night and will continue to try to be of service.

The Mass Psychosis Media continues to call these people racists and announce without evidence that they are destructive and violent. The Prime Minister in Hiding has called them ‘racists and misogynists with unacceptable views’. His only response to any question is vaccines. I have seen nothing but smiling polite and thoughtful people who may hold some very different views on many issues than I do but are united over the one issue of the protest, which is that vaccines should be a choice. The unvaccinated ones that I have spoken with have long lists of personal anecdotes about adverse reactions and tales of absurd regulations and restrictions from across this huge country. […]

The Liberal Party government and the left of centre party, the New Democratic Party (the one I used to vote for) that keeps their minority in power, claim that this a small fringe group of right wing extremists. The right wing politicians are capitalizing on their frustration and gaining their support by giving them a voice, but most are hard-working people who don't want anything to do with politics. The implementing of a requirement for compulsory inoculation for truck drivers crossing into Canada from the US touched off a protest supported by jabbed and unjabbed alike. They have the support everyone who has lost a job by the same restrictions on all government workers, Provincial or Federal no matter what kind of working conditions they have. My daughter-in -law works alone in the forest, tending to a fish spawning channel. A friend's son, a financial analyst who has always worked from home. Both have lost their employment. Farmers have now joined the protest. For every one who is on the Hill, including myself , there are at least a dozen who would be there with them if they could. The coordination that has gone into making sure everyone is well taken care of is very impressive.

This morning a heavy equipment mechanic was strolling among the trucks offering repairs. The downtown hotels are ignoring their mask requirements, allowing drivers to use the public washrooms and happily booking rooms that have been empty for almost two years.

There are widely trumpeted complaints from people who are not in this small capital city, that it has been 'paralyzed' . A few blocks near the houses of parliament are blocked by trucks. The rest of the city is experiencing nothing worse then the usual tie-ups from road construction and snowbanks. Relations with the police have been excellent and there is always a clear lane for emergency vehicles. At least there was until the city officials ordered large snow removal vehicles to block intersections. Did I say that we have a lot of snow that needs clearing? Blame it on the truckers.

The occupied area is the where the high-rise office buildings of government agencies and banking and other corporate headquarters are located. This area has been a ghost town for two years and the logistics of getting workers up the lifts with social distancing is an impossibility. These people have been working from home and the local radio station even did a story two weeks ago on a failing shoe repair business, a shop that used to be crammed with people sitting in their socks while the cobbler fixed their footwear.

The government is doubling down. Parliament has hardly sat during the pandemic and just returned from extended lockdown Christmas break on Monday. The conservatives tossed out their moderate leader this morning and have probably chosen an interim one while I am writing this.

It is very difficult to find information on what events are scheduled on the Hill or what danger the protesters now face. Facebook pages have to be rebuilt every day because they are taken down almost immediately.

Liberal MP Breaks Ranks: Trudeau Govt’s Policies Divisive, Reassess All Measures
Government and Covid-19, Protests, Truckers / By Gord Parks / February 8, 2022
Quebec MP Joël Lightbound just finished a press conference in which he sounded much like Interim Conservative Leader, Candice Bergen, MP, in her speech Monday, Jan. 31, where she lambasted Trudeau for his divisive politics in not supporting truckers and protesters outside on Parliament Hill for wanting their freedoms. Lightbound says the Liberal Party’s divisive politics, which spreads beyond the truckers and into broader society, must stop and that all Covid measures and vaccine mandates must be reevaluated like Dr. Theresa Tam has stated and like many other countries are now doing. A road-map with clear benchmarks on how to lift restrictions should also be part of the party’s move forward.

Lightbound says there are other party members who also feel “discomfort” over the current state of affairs.

Bell and Rogers target TRUCKERS with planned blackout (after they had their fuel stolen)
THE BLACKOUT WILL BE PUBLICIZED

Jessica Rose

I will be doing my best to keep lines of communication open. Trudeau asked the truckers to go home. They said no. So he’s commanding the cell companies to refuse service in a planned blackout.

A bit more evidence of police resignations:

I will be doing my best to keep lines of communication open. Trudeau asked the truckers to go home. They said no. So he’s commanding the cell companies to refuse service in a planned blackout.

Trudeau has ordered crop dusters to drop zyklon b and anthrax on the protesters.

Testimony of Canadian policewoman. Hearts are breaking open. The trucking movement is going to do it. The time has come. The truth is rolling.

Truckistan Amb. Poso 🏁
@JackPosobiec
17h
UPDATE: Truckers reject Kenney's statement. Say they want a PERMANENT end to mandates, not a temporary one.

Syd Fizzard
@SydFizzard
17h
Coutts border blockaders were not happy with the announcement by Jason Kenney today, updates sure to come soon.

Help their legal defence at TruckerLawyer.ca

Nick Motichka, a 10-year veteran of the Calgary Police Service, delivered a strong message on Facebook to his fellow regulation enforcement officers: “Police are here to help and protect people” not “to do the politicians’ dirty work… What is happening in Ottawa, with the clear political influence on the police, to physically exert political will on peaceful protesters for nothing more than possible political gain is so very wrong, on so many levels.”

A working-class liberty movement
The Canada truckers protest goes global — and it’s about more than just vaccines

February 9, 2022

The problem is that the single biggest threat to any “order” is a disenchanted and capable minority — like, say, truckers able to snarl downtowns and blockade highways. If the consensus that underpins an order crumbles, if the mass buy-in that’s needed to sustain an order is no longer there, then the order itself can also give way. This is why Trudeau has no choice but to talk to the truckers: there is no other way out and they wield more power than he seems to think they do.

Yet beyond that, it’s also worth asking: do Canadians really subordinate liberty to order? Do their leaders really imagine that one of the most reliable impulses in human history, the desire to be free, suddenly goes dormant north of Buffalo? Yes, Canadians are more likely than Americans to be vaccinated and to support vaccine rules. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t grown weary of all the hectoring and bullying, the isolation and the depression and the enforced gloom, just like the rest of us have.

Protests often begin in response to specific policies only to grow into something larger. And just as the Tea Party in the United States blossomed out of opposition to Obamacare, just as the gilets jaunes in France exploded out of a fuel tax, so too do the Canadian truckers appear to be expanding their brief beyond cross-border vaccine mandates and into grander ideas of freedom and choice. The demonstrations have become a kind of primal honk against the entire dismal public health regime. And as another winter quarantine drags on, it’s not unforeseeable that they could garner mass support.

There’s another dimension to this too: political movements are very often mobilizations of one class against another. This appears to be the case with the truckers. I haven’t gone outside in days! white-collar remote workers wearing their Succession snuggies cry, neglecting to mention that their public-health staycations are made possible by those who must go out, by cooks and grocers and deliverymen and, yes, truckers. This is what the class divide looks like in the year 2022.

It may be that those who procure our food for a living have finally had enough of being pushed around. And the class identity here is enjoined to the ideology. It has been most absurdly suggested in some conservative circles of late that individual liberty is mainly a concern of elites. In fact, the opposite is true. It’s the ambitious bureaucrat and the gooey-eyed professor of theory who think they can remake society through force; the working man covets his freedom. The real divide over liberty runs not down the American-Canadian border but between the managerial class and the hardhats.

And so, thanks to those hardhats, things are now moving quickly. The truckers’ latest move has been to blockade the Ambassador Bridge between Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit, Michigan, responsible for much of the commerce between Canada and the United States. Another border crossing into Montana has also been corked up. The provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan have responded by announcing they’re ending all Covid restrictions. Copycat protests have popped up from Australia to New Zealand to France to Belgium.

Trudeau has thus backed himself into a corner. Against such a mighty adversary, he has no choice but to negotiate, yet by sneering at the truckers, he’s ensured that any overture will look like a humiliating about-face. And that’s not even touching on the trainwreck of optics he’s created: this spoiled dauphin, this ludicrous Kennedy of the tundra, talking down to workers who want only to make decisions for themselves. After months of gray austerity imposed by heavy-handed government, a cheerful spirit of liberty is in the air.

A working-class liberty movement

No jab no mask no test no form

Lots of donations coming in for the protests

A flood of Canadians packed the streets of Toronto yesterday, refusing to comply with the whims of the government. Trudeau, smearing the movement from a distance, has yet to engage the people.

🇨🇦 Protesters block Canada-bound traffic on Ambassador Bridge in Windsor