The Calgary protest was surely one of the largest held in living memory, yet it barely garnered notice from the legacy media outlets.
I don’t doubt there were other demonstrations in other parts of Canada on that day, but it is tough to find reference to them as there appears to be a concerted effort on the part of the mainstream media to ignore them. It is little wonder demonstrators have been standoffish with mainstream reporters at times.
The Freedom Convoy phenomenon hasn’t been shut down through the police action in Ottawa—it’s been decentralized. The heavy hand of the law only scattered the demonstrators and has made them more determined than ever to push back against government-imposed pandemic mandates.
To put it in short, this isn’t over by a long shot.
While the government, empowered through the invocation of the Emergencies Act tries to chase down the funders of the protests in what amounts to a political witch-hunt, protesters have moved their actions closer to home where large amounts of funding won’t be required. Local protesters can self-fund or pass a hat for cash donations at protests. I noticed a donation box at the Calgary rally, and I don’t doubt it was pretty full at the end of the day with cold, hard, untraceable cash.
While that sounds like a tiny minority, think about it. That amounts to millions of Canadian citizens who have been villainized, banned from travel, shut out of business establishments, cut off from family members, often put out of work, and kept from even attending their children’s sporting events. Do we expect these millions of Canadians to passively accept living as second-class citizens in perpetuity?
On top of the unvaccinated, there are millions more like myself who, while being supportive of vaccinations, are appalled with the coercion being imposed upon their fellow citizens. Free choice has to reign and we can’t pretend that the ostracization and coercive efforts of the state respects the ability to choose.
The narrative of the protests being supported by nothing more than an extreme, fringe minority is demonstrably false.
With millions of Canadians opposing the government’s ongoing mandates, the protests will not end.
As more people are chased down, shamed, criminally charged, and potentially bankrupted by the measures being imposed through the Emergencies Act, the nature of these protests may change for the worse.
People are being cornered and feeling they have nothing to lose. There is nothing more dangerous than a person who has been put into that position. As some of these people begin to feel that peaceful protests are not achieving change, they may feel compelled to take more extreme actions. Nobody wants to see this.
The heavy hand of the state is failing to quell the protests. The government hasn’t the resources to play a form of whack-a-mole in order to shut down protests springing up across the country like daisies. They used all they had in Ottawa and only managed to scatter the protests.
How many weeks or months of this national disorder is the government willing to put us through? How heavy-handed will the state get as desperation sets in on their part?
Force is failing. It’s well beyond time for the government to try reason.
While Prime Minister Trudeau appears more intransigent than ever, perhaps principled members of his caucus will force a legislative compromise to come about.
Canada won’t become stable, nor will it begin to truly recover from the COVID-19 pandemic until the federal mandates are lifted. Millions of Canadians are being impacted by these mandates with little benefit to be seen.
Protests are only going to become more widespread and potentially disruptive as long as the government tries to end them through force. Respect and compromise are the only ways out of this, and we haven’t seen much of either from Ottawa so far.
