If there’s one message I’d drive home to the progressives, the politicians, the legacy media, the police and anyone else hysterical over the Freedom Convoy it is this – 

It’s NOT the vaccines, stupid.

In fact, the absolute insistence on this narrative and the portrayal of the truckers as low-class, racist, misogynistic, and even toothless – as in lacking teeth, not guts – by the country’s power elite proves to me how much these critics are disconnected from the silent majority.

At risk of making progressives lose their minds even further, I would say that the great divide in this country over the Freedom Convoy is much the same as the one south of the border that led to Trump’s presidential win.

You might say the truckers in our Freedom Convoy are Canada’s version of Hillary Clinton’s “deplorables.”

The double standard is staggering. In recent years, the legacy media, snotty progressives and elitist politicians have turned a blind eye to repeated CN rail blockades, the decapitation of statues of our founding figures and all kinds of Antifa warfare.

Now, those same elites are pushing the narrative that the truckers are nothing short of treasonous. There have been endless cries for them to be criminally charged for standing up for their rights against what has been the most draconian set of lockdowns in North America – and in the case of Quebec, the Western world.

The COVID pandemic has been completely mishandled by Canadian governments, including Trudeau’s feds.

Yet the ones who are finally speaking out are called criminals. It is cancel culture in its most brazen form.

But make no mistake – the trucker protest is not about the on-again, off-again vaccine mandate. 

It is about tremendous overreach by governments at all levels – overreach that is still trying to take away the millions of dollars people have donated to the movement, to take away the fuel that is keeping them warm and, on Friday, sent an army of police to the Windsor border to “break things up.”

Most citizens have very short memories, but it was just a year ago that Trudeau completely botched the procurement of COVID vaccines, having made a questionable deal with China.  Canada was left well behind the United States and many other countries when it came to getting vaccines to vulnerable seniors in the first place.

Despite the angst and the outcry from the left, you don’t hear a peep about that now.

Nor do we hear much about Trudeau’s costly and highly ridiculous hotel quarantine program for those who had the audacity(!) to travel outside of Canada. The travel program was punitive – vindictive, even – and is still wasting tens of millions of dollars on testing travelers who are fully vaccinated, and as protected from COVID as it’s possible to be.

How many people remember the fines of $5,000 and more for failing to follow Trudeau’s edicts to the letter?

The bottom line is that we Canadians have been lied to, bullied, punished, subjected to ever-moving goalposts and isolated in oppressive lockdowns.

Our politicians have subjected us to never-ending mask mandates, vaccine mandates, lockdown mandates and social distancing mandates. We’ve watched as the unvaccinated are treated like untouchables, banned from polite society.

Most of us have become worried – if not terrified – by this government overreach.

Those of us with a fighting spirit are frustrated by the willingness of far too many to capitulate to government edicts despite there being no end in sight and those rules not making sense anymore. We don’t know whether to laugh or cry when we see people fully masked while walking outside or driving alone in their cars.

One thing is for sure, though – the truckers have shaken up the status quo, attacked the power mad and have made the elites lose their minds.

At least one group is finally fighting back against this absurdity.

They should be celebrated, not mocked and thrown to the wolves.

Author

  • Sue-Ann Levy

    A two-time investigative reporting award winner and nine-time winner of the Toronto Sun’s Readers Choice award for news writer, Sue-Ann Levy made her name for advocating the poor, the homeless, the elderly in long-term care and others without a voice and for fighting against the striking rise in anti-Semitism and the BDS movement across Canada.