Editor's note: Andrea Widburg’s article describes the creative and courageous pushback of Canadian truckers against their government’s vaccine mandate – which boils down to getting the Covid vax or losing their jobs. According to the government, about 90% of truckers are vaccinated already. Whether or not that is true, this dictatorial mandate does not sit well with truckers. They organized a massive movement into Ottawa – convoys from across the country were to arrive there on Saturday, January 29. The first contingents to hit the road were those in British Columbia, which departed on January 23.
But the truckers’ expedition to Ottawa is about much more than vaccine dictates – it is about lifting the yoke of government impositions from the necks of the Canadian people – the unending cycles of lockdowns and restrictions that are destroying livelihoods and killing freedom in the name of fighting Covid. As the videos that Widburg’s article links to show, the Canadian people are fully on board with the truckers’ objectives, braving freezing weather to cheer them on along roadways and from overpasses.
The truckers have now arrived in Ottawa, where they were welcomed by enormous and enthusiastic crowds on Parliament Hill on both Saturday and Sunday. This despite the prime minister and mayor of Ottawa doing all they can to thwart them. Downtown businesses, normally open on weekends, were closed, so there were no nearby restaurants or facilities available for the crowds, and nowhere to escape the cold. The city authorities closed off many roads leading to the downtown, reducing the number of trucks that could get to the Parliament Hill area. The truckers say they will stay until the government meets their demands, but the government says it won’t do so and seems intent on forcing the truckers into a war of attrition.
Many, many Canadians are cheering on the truckers for fighting for our freedoms, but the truckers can’t win this battle by themselves. Perhaps civil disobedience will be required. What if restaurants just didn’t ask for vax passes? What if we all refused to wear mask and said that we’re doing so to support the truckers? What if? What if? What if? One of the signs supporting the truckers said, “Courage is contagious.” Let’s hope that is true!
You'll stand up and cheer after seeing these Canadian trucker convoy videos
By Andrea Widburg
Across the world, people are pushing back against COVID mandates. Monica Showalter wrote that "Europe's COVID mandate protests are getting big and violent." Europeans are doing that because they understand that, through the digital "vaccine passports" being enforced there, they are about to become slaves to a social credit system similar to the one used in China. But this post is about Canada, where protest has taken a nonviolent but incredibly inspiring form, thanks to truckers who are pushing back against vaccine mandates and tracking.
Canada has had some of the world's most hysterical and draconian responses to the vaccine of any nation in the world. In that regard, they perfectly reflect Canada's leftist, tyrannical drama queen, Justin Trudeau. A little less than a year ago, I wrote about Canada's eerie "police state" feel in response to COVID.
Things have changed in Canada since then...for the worse. Last week, the anonymous author at The Vigilant Citizen, whose family escaped the horrors of the Lebanese civil war in the 1970s, published a terrible portrait of Quebec or "COVID Hell." You should read it to understand how bureaucrats react when a very minor epidemic in the grand scheme of things hands them seemingly absolute power over a terrorized people.
The most recent assault on liberty was the Canadian government's vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the border from America. It requires unvaccinated Canadian truckers to quarantine, which is an impossibility for a job that depends on quickly conveying goods across the North American continent. In other words, take a leaky, dangerous vaccine that doesn't stop people from spreading or catching COVID, or lose your jobs.
The cool thing about truckers is that they're tough. You need to be tough to sit alone in a vast machine hauling tons of goods for days on end across thousands of miles. From my cross-country travels, I've come to have tremendous respect for truckers. These are not coddled office workers who can sit alone at their home computer wearing a fleece sweatshirt and comfy slippers. (That would be me.)
Therefore, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that Canada's truckers, rather than meekly yielding to this unreasonable, tyrannical mandate, organized a vast convoy (70 km long) that's traveling to Ottawa, Canada's capital. Tucker Carlson had Benjamin Dichter, the spokesman for Freedom Convoy 2022, on his show. The truckers chose wisely because Dichter could not be a better spokesman, and what he has to say about the government's electronic spying is frightening:
That's what the truckers are fighting against. What local, state, and national governments are doing is no longer about protecting against a virus with a less than 1% mortality rate — and that's a less than 1% mortality rate even though the Western world's governments are refusing to make therapeutics available to people. After all, we have time-tested, commonly used, very safe drugs that, even if they might not help (although they probably will), won't hurt. Instead, Western governments insist that if you get COVID, you must stay home until you're ready to die, and only then can you go to the hospital, where they'll give you Remdesivir, which doesn't work but can kill you.
Trudeau has tried to smear the truckers, calling them "a 'fringe minority' who hold 'unacceptable views,' opposing the way 'most Canadians' feel." Brave words, little man. I'm sure it's just a coincidence that, as the convoy neared the capital, Trudeau just announced that he'd been exposed to COVID and must quarantine. How nice (for him) that he won't be around when the convoy arrives.
Additionally, GoFundMe is being difficult. It's frozen a GoFundMe page that raised around 5 million Canadian dollars (almost 4 million U.S. dollars) to help the truckers with their expenses on the journey. The fundraising giant is claiming that it just needs confirmation that the funds will be used right. I don't remember that happening with the BLM funds, many of which went to bail out criminals or enrich activists. Still, GoFundMe insists that this is essentially a bookkeeping issue, so for now, calling it out is a wait-and-see matter.
Thankfully, some big guns have shown their support for the convoy. Elon Musk endorsed it for his almost 72 million Twitter followers:
So did Donald Trump, Jr. (830,000 Rumble followers, 7.2 million Twitter followers):
Across Canada, people are turning out to cheer the truckers on:
And now, as I promised, here are the truckers' own videos. They're incredibly well produced and genuinely inspiring. And again, note the popular support with hundreds of people turning out despite the freezing cold in that vast, often unpopulated land.
No wonder Joe Rogan says Canada is in "revolt" — no blood, no violence, just a massive "NO!"
America, where are you? Can't we, too, do something like this, which is nonviolent, liberty-oriented, and incredibly powerful?
One more thing: As you look at those truckers, remember that nonviolent protests by shipyard workers in the Polish city of Gdansk started the domino effect that pulled down the entire Soviet Union.
This article was originally posted on the American Thinker website and can be accessed here.