The many differences between Canada’s trucker protest and the 2020 BLM movement are symptomatic of weak and venal leaders who judge the merit of civil actions not on the issues per se, but rather on the dictates of woke politics.
A strange thing happened on the way to Ottawa, where thousands of long-haul truckers have converged to protest mandatory vaccination measures. The mainstream media, squeaky clean arbiters of news and information that they are, wasted no time portraying the protesters as a motley crew of knuckle-dragging fascists hell-bent on making life for law-abiding citizens as miserable as possible.
“In a scene at odds with Canadians’ reputation for niceness and rule-following, thousands of protesters … descended on the capital over the weekend, deliberately blocking traffic around Parliament Hill,” reported AP, which was just priming its audience for the stock Hitler analogies. “Some urinated and parked on the National War Memorial. One danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. A number of them carried signs and flags with swastikas.”
Next thing you know these media hacks will be suggesting that the Canadian truckers are colluding with the Russians. Oh, wait… they did that too.
Meanwhile, Althia Raj, an Ottawa-based columnist with the National, complained that the truckers have turned Canada’s capital into a “lawless zone.” You mean like Seattle’s police-free Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ), which was created at the peak of the George Floyd protests and forced to close due to a murder spree, right? Well no, not quite.
“There is incessant honking, midnight dance parties, fireworks in dense urban areas … and trucks and cars parked everywhere,” a sleepless Raj raged from Ottawa. “The occupiers brought horses, pizza ovens, bouncy castles, firewood and porta-potties. They erected a wooden structure on public property, handing out hot soup and toiletries.”
“Bouncy castles and porta-potties?” To be honest, that sounds like a typical Saturday afternoon at an amusement park, minus the deafening horn blasts from the 18-wheelers. Incidentally, despite the enormous sums of money raised by Black Lives Matter, I don’t recall ever seeing a single bouncy castle or porta-potty for all those restless demonstrators. But I digress.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who together with his family fled their home in Ottawa just as the capital was turning into a massive truck stop, attempted to demonize the ‘Freedom Convoy’ as a “small fringe minority” of Canadian citizens who hold “unacceptable views.” The Liberal Party leader, betraying a painful lack of situational awareness, has been forced to chew those words like a hot dog eating champ as the movement has fanned out across the country with little sign of any counter-protest, aside from a mounting police force.
Trudeau, it should be remembered, was whistling a completely different tune back in the balmy summer of 2020. As BLM and Antifa activists were running roughshod across the United States, torching and damaging 1,000 buildings in Minneapolis alone, the Canadian leader didn’t flee the capital during a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Ottawa. No, Justin Trudeau took a knee and bowed his head on Parliament Hill before condemning the racist “discrimination” he avowed was happening in Canada.
“Over the past weeks, we've seen a large number of Canadians suddenly awaken to the fact that the discrimination that is a lived reality for far too many of our fellow citizens is something that needs to end,” he said.
But today, Justin Trudeau is personally overseeing an act of discrimination against a large segment of the Canadian population, with all of the predictable consequences. By denying individuals the right to self-autonomy over their private lives, the prime minister has unleashed a campaign of hate and intolerance that has spread like a virus throughout Canadian society.
That much was evident when some $9 million in donations collected for the ‘Freedom Convoy’ were blocked by the crowdfunding platform GoFundMe, which, after declaring the trucker protest “an occupation,” said it would distribute the funds to charities of its choosing. Aside from the mind-blowing arrogance of such a move, which the platform was finally forced to abandon, opting to simply return the funds, is the question as to why GoFundMe didn’t interfere with the millions of dollars collected on behalf of Black Lives Matter. After all, we’re talking about a protest movement that was not shy about attacking the police and federal buildings.
So where did the bulk of the BLM funds go? Many of the donations (some of which, by the way, derived from Canadian citizens) were reportedly used as ‘get out of jail free’ cards by the hoodlums wreaking havoc in the United States and around the world.
“Bail funds to help arrested protesters get out of jail faster were at the forefront of the giving,” the New York Times wrote.
Yet who is being labeled as the terrorists? Yes, the members of the Freedom Convoy, who have only been charged with minor traffic infractions and a couple minor violations, like the use of fireworks and excessive noise.
Phil Gurski, a former Canadian intelligence officer, told local media that what has been happening thus far in the Canadian capital “is not terrorism.”
Since the start of this movement in January, “no one has died, no one has been threatened with death, no major infrastructure has been damaged,” Gurski wrote. “Labeling protesters ‘terrorists’ is inaccurate, unhelpful and sets a bad precedent for future demonstrations (for instance, if the truckers are ‘terrorists,’ what about First Nations’ protesters or Black Lives Matter?).”
Once again, liberals are engaged in a shocking display of hypocrisy, which underscores their commitment to political brinkmanship over democracy. When the BLM protests were at their peak destructiveness, Justin Trudeau and his Liberal Party did not miss a cheap opportunity to virtue signal and advance the agenda of this organization, which is purportedly committed to helping black folks (a number of people have criticized the organization, including black mothers who were promised that the funeral expenses of their slain children would be covered, yet, they claim, they never saw a dime).
Now that the shoe is on the other foot, and Canada has become ground zero for a nationwide protest movement, Trudeau and the human rights defenders of the Liberal Party are not to be found – not even to take a knee for the thousands of lives that their draconian policies have had on countless Canadians. Clearly, the most dangerous virus affecting the Canadian people at present is not Covid-19, but rather political hypocrisy and discrimination, for which the only known cure is democracy and all of the attendant boosters.
The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.