What is my question to the members of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that held Ottawa and some other places hostage recently. 

You said you were a trucker convoy, but you became something else and that was a very dark entity. It started honestly enough when a group wanted government to end restrictions imposed in the middle of the COVID epidemic. That is fair.

The right of people to petition government on various matters is CENTRAL to our democracy. It started out as a group representing truckers, but most major trucking organizations were not part of it. As so often happens in protests the idea morphed into something else. That happens a lot.

A ticket to govern?

In the end the group was overtaken by a radical fringe. One faction wanted the government to resign and have the group from the convoy run the country. Like that was going to happen. The expertise the group had was blowing horns and blocking streets. That isn’t much of a calling card or a ticket to govern.

What the group did ultimately was to alienate people. The uprising lost support almost from day one. Nobody ever won over a population to a way of thinking by blowing horns and keeping people up all night or by blocking streets and disrupting the way of life of those people. That’s not how successful revolutions work. 

The Ottawa protest in particular had no “command and control” and that “command and control” is a virtue in any uprising, getting people on the same page. Instead, some people were out of control as in elements that went urinating on the grave of Canada’s Unknown Soldier; someone else flew a Nazi flag; and another group wanted free food from one of Ottawa’s homeless shelters.

The Smell of Trump

Now to me one of the most disturbing images was that of a Donald Trump supporter on horseback waving a flag. That was disturbing because in the end this wasn’t a protest of truckers. It was a group of people that believed government to be the root of all their troubles.  It was a group that included right-wing extremists and in the air was the unmistakable smell of Donald Trump and that which he stands for.

I think the protesters by and large were manipulated. They were a destabilizing force funded in part at least from afar. 

The good news is that Canada is a great nation. It was discovered early on that this wasn’t a trucker’s protest, it was something else. Their high-water mark was getting coffee and sandwiches for their group. They will go home now and will not have learned anything. Meanwhile we ordinary law-abiding citizens did. We who know that there’s more to defeating a pandemic that blowing your horn all night will carry on. 

The clinic was for seniors, like me, over 70. I lined up in the bitter cold outside Waterford Valley High School for over an hour. It was no fun, and the lineup was outside. Why outside? I still don’t know.

Now before you feel much sympathy for me, I am in good health. That wasn’t true for everyone. There were several senior people in walkers and a good few more with canes and, if you think everyone arrived by car, you are dreaming. Not everyone has a car. That line of senior citizens seeking vaccination went halfway round the building. I did get my vaccination. 

‘Anti-Vaxers’

Fast forward two days. Same building; same plan of battle. People trying to get vaccinated. The difference is that on January 8th there was a protest staged by a handful of “anti-vaxers.” Their activity shut down the clinic for the day.  Mercifully government is going to pass legislation that will ensure public access to buildings engaged in health care, but that is months away. Appointments for January 8th were moved forward 24-hours. 

Here is where rage set in with me. Forget about the vagaries of “the right to protest.” The image in my mind is of an old woman in a walker with a scarf up over her face waiting in the cold and trying to get a booster shot. 

If I had been lined up on protest day there would have been words and a question to the protesters:

Turnabout is Fair Play

“Who the hell are you that you think you have a right to disrupt a clinic in the middle of a deadly epidemic?”

Now turnabout is fair play, so here are a few questions for our readers and I suspect you are going to get them all right. 

First. How many of those protesters were doctors? Secondly, how many of the protesters were nurses? Thirdly, how many of them worked ANYWHERE in the health care system or knew ANYTHING about medicine save for something that fell off the Internet and hit them in the head. 

I suspect you got one hundred percent in the test.  

Others Rights

Those protesters are somewhere tonight. I really do feel badly for them. In a world already complex and where the challenges are real they are in a bad position because they don’t have a clue. 

To not understand what they did was wrong and why society will have to deal with them is somehow sad.

They understand something about rights, but not about the rights of others. Too bad. I hope the old woman who didn’t get her shot that day is safe.