Ontario’s vaccine passport program will be gone in just over two weeks.
Premier Doug Ford announced he’d be scrapping Ontario’s requirement that customers provide proof of vaccination to access many types of businesses, including restaurants and theatres.
#BREAKING Ontario Premier Doug Ford has announced that the province's vaccine passport program will end on March 1.
“Given how well Ontario has done in the Omicron wave we are able to fast track our reopening plan,” Ford said.
Ontario follows Alberta, Saskatchewan, Prince Edward Island and Manitoba in putting forward a concrete date to get rid of vaccine passports since the freedom convoy began.
Ford did not indicate when Ontario’s mask mandate would be lifted, telling people they’d have to wait “just a little bit longer.”
Ford insisted the move was not a response to the trucker convoy, which has been calling for an end to all vaccine mandates and vaccine passports at the federal and provincial levels.
In his remarks, Ford defended the vaccine program but conceded it had been “divisive.”
“I know that this period has been one of the most divisive times in our history,” Ford said. “One of the hardest things about this pandemic is the way it’s fractured us as a society. Differing views about government policies, the limits of personal freedoms, different views about vaccines, public health measures, and what steps are necessary. All of it has polarized us in a way that we could have never imagined.”
Before implementing Ontario’s vaccine passport regime, Ford claimed to be against the policy, which he said would create a “split society.”
Parliamentarians heard on Thursday that nobody was fired or held responsible for the federal government’s mishandling of the national emergency stockpile.
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) sent masks to the landfill, shuttered several warehouses and reduced its operations, severely impacting the nation’s COVID-19 response.
PHAC shuttered three out of nine warehouses containing medical equipment meant to deal with emergency situations including a pandemic. In total, 8,839,942 masks, gowns and other personal protective equipment (PPE) were tossed aside a year prior to the COVID-19 outbreak.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, PHAC officials were grilled by MPs Thursday during a Commons public accounts committee meeting.
“There were serious issues. I believe in accountability,” said Conservative MP Philip Lawrence. “How many individuals have been held accountable? Has any individual at Public Health realized any repercussions due to this tremendous failure?”
PHAC president Dr. Harpreet Kochhar evaded questions by Lawrence, claiming accountability lay with the entire department.
“The accountability as such rests with the Public Health Agency in a cumulative way as well as with provinces and territories,” said Kochar.
“So to be clear no one has been held to account even though there were significant lapses that put our front line workers at risk?” Lawrence asked again.
“I reiterate the point that we are working very closely with our partners,” said Kochar.
“I’ll take that as absolutely no one in your department was held accountable for putting our front line workers at risk, which I find absolutely abysmal,” replied Lawrence.
In 2020, PHAC vice-president Sally Thornton – who was in charge of the stockpile – went into retirement. During testimony at the Commons health committee, Thornton admitted she had no idea how many supplies PHAC had to deal with the outbreak.
Even after COVID-19 began to spread, the Liberals did not act to restock even though the government received warnings in Feb. 2020 that it was low on PPE.
It wasn’t until the following month that the Liberals moved to buy more protective equipment, which by then was being sold on global markets at incredibly inflated prices.
On Day 22 of the Truckers for Freedom Convoy, crowds formed at border crossings across the country despite the federal government’s warnings, the GiveSendGo fundraiser was hacked and police cleared out the Ambassador Bridge blockade.
Crowds at the Ambassador Bridge had largely cleared out on Sunday. Reports emerged that police had made dozens of arrests, and trucks and cars were seen being hauled away.
Police have cleared the entire Windsor protest zone and are pushing back anyone remaining who may be blocking the road leading to the Ambassador Bridge pic.twitter.com/MKx3o9C4gt
This footage shows the measures the government was putting in place on Sunday to clear protesters. Armored personnel carriers and police in tactical gear moved in on the demonstrators.
Trudeau is terrified of the Freedom Convoy. Look at who is doing his dirty work.
Trucks can be seen leaving the blockade at the border crossing.
Trucks pulling out if remaining Windsor encampment down the road from the Ambassador Brudhe. After several warnings, police told protesters they’ll be arrested immediately if they don’t leave. pic.twitter.com/4q3Hd0DZts
After most of the protesters were removed from the blockade, police officers were seen clearing out media and observers several kilometres away from the site.
This area is well past the bridge. Police are giving the media a lot of orders here. Protesters are nowhere near us. pic.twitter.com/G2Ns6F001c
In Coutts, Alberta, an increased RCMP presence over the weekend didn’t deter crowds from gathering at the blockade and showing their opposition to COVID mandates and restrictions.
Videos of RCMP officers wearing tactical gear and carrying guns were posted to social media.
Coutts: One guy asks “what’s your guns for guys” to the tactical team. The other guy is casually eating prime rib and potatoes surrounded by lights and tactical. pic.twitter.com/RP4NzqAYmc
This report from Rebel News confirms that RCMP made one arrest at the border blockade on Sunday night.
Witnessed 1 arrest, and the seizure of 1 tractor + 1 semi truck at the hands of police, will know more after speaking to the legal defence in the morning, took place in Coutts where the blockade is restricting border access
In another showing of national pride at the Coutts border blockade, protesters were heard singing O Canada.
In Surrey BC at the Pacific Highway border crossing, crowds continued to gather on Sunday.
This series of photos from the protests yesterday document the atmosphere on the ground between law enforcement and those demanding the return of their freedoms.
On Saturday, demonstrators on horseback arrived at the protest to show their support for the blockade.
It’s far beyond a Trucker Freedom Movement now. Horses march through peaceful protest near 176th PAC Highway trucker crossing in Surrey, B.C., in favour of ending all COVID-19 mandates.
— Hungry for Truth with Drea Humphrey (@DreaHumphrey) February 12, 2022
A legacy media report confirmed that the RCMP arrested 4 people yesterday at the Surrey border crossing.
Furthermore, the Canadian Border Services Agency is now telling travelers to avoid the Pacific Highways border crossing due to ongoing protests.
Back in Ottawa, large crowds gathered again on Sunday to listen to speeches and hear live music outside the Parliament Buildings.
Former Newfoundland Premier Brian Peckford, the last living signatory of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, delivered a powerful speech on Sunday, encouraging demonstrators to maintain their fight for freedom.
“After two thousand, three thousand years of people getting their rights, we’re now forced to try and keep our rights. How ironic history is,” the former Premier remarked.
[1/2] Brian Peckford, last living premier who signed Canadian Charter of Rights & Freedoms speaks to #FreedomConvoy2022 in Ottawa Feb 12.
Charter's Section 1 [Read👉https://t.co/E2nrmxdoGn] being "illegally" used by governments, he says.
Peckford reminded the demonstrators how the first two lines of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms read.
“We as a country have two principles – the supremacy of God and the rule of law,” Peckford said. “Section 1 was to be only used in war, insurrection or the threat of peril of the state. It wasn’t to be used to try and combat a virus that 99% of people recover from and with less than a one percent fatality rate.”
Peckford went on to demand the government establish an independent inquiry to determine how freedoms and rights were compromised during the pandemic.
Outlines possible solutions: • refer the vaccine mandates to the Supreme Court. • establish independent inquiry, to determine how freedoms & rights were compromised.
Later on Sunday, GiveSendGo was hacked and visitors to the site looking to donate to the trucker convoy fundraiser were temporarily redirected to a clip from the Disney movie Frozen.
Overlaid text outlined the intentions of the hackers to shut down Givesendgo on “behalf of sane people worldwide.”
Detailed information of every person that donated to the convoy fundraiser was also leaked to hackers. Names are now being published on social media by far-left activists. The Givesendgo set up by the Truckers for Freedom Convoy organizers is currently not active.
Politicians have referred to the freedom convoy as a “political message,” believing the protest consists of only conservatives but this is simply not the case.
This massive protest has united Canadians of all political stripes, ethnicities and religions. As Anthony Furey explains, the freedom convoy is a social movement in opposition to pandemic restrictions.
After laying off a third of its workforce over vaccine mandates and receiving $187.5 million in pandemic bailouts, VIA Rail is now asking the federal government for more taxpayers’ money,
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, management at the Crown corporation asked for millions more in funds to avoid having to make “drastic cuts” in the Summary Of The 2021-2025 Corporate Plan presented in the House of Commons.
“Without sufficient and timely funding VIA Rail would be obliged to make drastic cuts which is a significant business and reputational risk exacerbated by layoffs, significant restructuring costs including employment security and severance payments and start-up costs when the service resumes,” claimed company staff.
“It may take until 2024 to return to the level of demand seen in 2019. Under such conditions VIA Rail, while continuing to prudently provide needed transportation services to Canadians as it has done in 2020, would be forced to seek additional funding through 2022, 2023 and 2024.”
Last year, the Liberals gave the company $187.5 million in COVID-19 relief as well as for a plan to cover VIA Rail’s deficits. Despite the bailout, the company laid off a third of its workers – totalling 1,016 employees – after the Trudeau government announced a vaccine mandate for federally regulated industries.
The same vaccine mandate applied to unvaccinated travellers, who are now prohibited from boarding domestic or international trains and flights.
VIA Rail’s revenues plunged 98% at the height of the pandemic while ridership on trains has fallen from 5.5 million to 1.1 million.
“As a result of the present operating environment VIA Rail had to manage an unprecedented revenue shortfall as it continued to provide much needed transportation services to Canadians,” management wrote.
The Department of Transport had said that it would work closely with the Crown corporation to help them find the “right amount of” taxpayers dollars it would take for them to recover from the fallout.
“We are working closely with VIA Rail and the Department of Finance to ensure their variables, the revenue projections, are well understood by us, by them, so they have the right amount of money to deliver this essential service to Canada,” said the department’s chief financial officer Ryan Pilgrim in May 2021.
On day 21 of the Truckers for Freedom Convoy, the standoff at the Ambassador Bridge deepened, large crowds returned to Ottawa, thousands gathered at a border crossing in Surrey and protesters in Toronto told True North what they thought of Premier Doug Ford declaring a State of Emergency.
In Windsor, the ongoing standoff intensified after a judge granted Ford’s court order to remove the blockades yesterday. Reports from legacy media outlets confirmed that the crowd at the bridge had grown.
Saturday morning, RCMP armoured personnel carriers arrived at the scene.
RCMP reinforcements have arrived at the Windsor protest site including officers in military-style gear in the back of the line pic.twitter.com/Gas0fy9NY1
This aerial footage from the standoff was recorded earlier.
Standoff at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor this morning, as police move in to try to disperse protesters on the sixth day of the Canadian border blockade pic.twitter.com/Gmodl8sLOX
“Right now we’re asking everyone here to leave,” the officer can be heard saying. “The police are asking everyone to leave. If not, you could be arrested for mischief.”
Despite the increased police presence and threat of massive fines and jail time, demonstrators continued to gather throughout the day.
A crowd near the bridge blockade can be heard singing O Canada.
Even though police have been moving in on protesters in Windsor, pushing them back, the crowd size actually seems to be growing. More protesters are arriving and few are leaving. pic.twitter.com/zC44VwqtUA
Later in the day, police began setting up concrete barricades – apparently trying to replace one blockade with another.
In Windsor, Ontario at the Canada/U.S. border near the Ambassador bridge concrete barriers are being installed on the street to block off areas that have been cleared.
Back in Ottawa – at what legacy media still refer to as the “occupation” – a huge crowd of peaceful protesters gathered outside Parliament for the third weekend in a row, demanding the return of their freedoms.
After dismantling a fence that had been set up around the National War Memorial, Canadian veterans gathered at the foot of the Cenotaph to say the Lord’s Prayer and sing O Canada.
It was a powerful moment.
After dismantling the barriers around the War Memorial in Ottawa, Veterans say the Lord's Prayer and sing O Canada. pic.twitter.com/AiuTXgqL67
In Queen’s Park in Toronto, crowds reconvened to continue their protest against COVID restrictions.
True North asked demonstrators in Toronto what they thought about Premier Doug Ford’s decision to declare a State of Emergency on Friday.
Here’s what they had to say.
Meanwhile, four thousand kilometres to the west in British Columbia, another convoy headed from Chilliwack to Surrey to set up a protest at the Pacific Highway Border Crossing.
This was the scene.
At the Pacific Highway border crossing in Surrey, BC right now. Crowds assembled here today in support of the #FreedomConvoyCanada2022.
Tried to get a sweep of the whole crowd at the Surrey border. They were all gathered in the centre of the intersection here. Traffic was virtually not moving. More crowds were right down by the crossing but didn't get a chance to go. #FreedomConvoyCanada2022pic.twitter.com/HR8o1bSFLc
A group of Canadian doctors has joined with the Canadian Travel and Tourism Roundtable (CTTR) to call on the federal government to end “unnecessary and non-science-based obstacles to international travel, such as the pre-departure and on-arrival PCR tests for fully vaccinated travellers.”
The collective has said Canada’s current COVID-19 restrictions are “obsolete and out of step with other countries worldwide” and that the vast majority of travellers and workers in the travel and tourism industry are fully vaccinated.
McMaster University medicine professor Zain Chagla said that COVID-19 testing at the border does not make sense anymore.
“When first put in place, Canada’s travel rules were designed to keep COVID-19 out of the country,” said Chagla in a press release on Thursday. “Now that the virus is here and community spread is responsible for approximately 99 per cent of all infections, the rules governing travel are obsolete.”
McMaster University infectious disease division director Dominik Mertz said that PCR tests should be eliminated for international travel because they can deliver positive results months after a diagnosis.
“These Canadians may be facing a first positive test in the pre-departure testing abroad and as such may be unable to return – while no longer infectious and in fact, being the best protected travellers,” said Mertz. “This policy is unnecessarily stranding Canadians abroad, leading to travel delays, financial penalties and potentially hazardous quarantine locations.”
The CTTR called on the Canadian government to provide a reopening timeline for the travel and tourism sector as it had done with other industries across Canada. The available science, said the CTTR, has evolved – “so too should the response and measures to keep Canadians safe while allowing the travel and tourism industry to reopen.”
Sources told CBC News that the Canadian government is close to removing mandatory PCR testing for fully vaccinated people who travel abroad.
Currently, any person who travels outside of the country must provide a negative PCR test prior to returning home. The test must be taken within 72 hours of scheduled departure on a flight or arriving at a land border.
“Our government is actively reviewing the measures in place at our borders, and we should be able to communicate changes on this next week,” said Health Minister Jean-Yves Duclos at a press conference on Friday.
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.
On Friday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency in response to the ongoing convoy protests in major cities and along the Canada-US border.
True North’s Elie Cantin-Nantel spoke with the protesters in Ottawa to get their reaction.
