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Six Months After the Freedom Convoy, Trudeau's Lies and Cowardice Are Clearer Than Ever

Editor's note: “Gord Magill’s article illustrates how no aspect of the government’s response to the Freedom Convoy was made in good faith. The government and the obedient, bought-off media attempted to portray what is possibly the most peaceful mass protest in history as dangerous and potentially violent. When demonization and harassment failed to deter the protesters, the government resorted to brute force and invoked the Emergencies Act. The protest was against government overreach – and the government resorted to even greater overreach to shut it down. Unfortunately for Prime Minister Trudeau, he seems to have underestimated the determination of ordinary Canadians – the truckers, the protest organizers, and the thousands (if not millions) of citizens who attended the protest or supported it in other ways – to push back and regain the freedoms that his government is encroaching on. The trucks may be gone from Wellington St. but the resistance to “mandates” lives on! Many Canadians who once took their freedoms for granted are starting to wonder whether the draconian measures of the last two years, allegedly to contain a deadly virus, might have more to do with imposing a globalist agenda that they were never consulted on.”

 

By GORD MAGILL, TRUCKER


It's been six months since Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cracked down on one of the largest labor protests in recent history. In February, thousands of Canadian truck drivers joined what became known as the Freedom Convoy, driving to Ottawa and parking their rigs in the capitol city in protest of Trudeau's vaccine mandates. I was one of them. But rather than meet with truckers, Trudeau demonized us as extremists, and then invoked the never before used Emergencies Act, meant to be used during times of war or terrorism, granting the government extraordinary powers they do not normally have. He then used the Emergencies Act to freeze the bank accounts of protest organizers and those who donated to the truckers and had Convoy organizer Tamara Lich arrested.


Six months later, it's clearer than ever just how unjustifiable Trudeau's actions really were. In a recent report, the CBC, Canada's federal public broadcaster, found that at the time Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act, an agreement for truckers to leave the city's residential streets had already been reached between the City of Ottawa and Lich and other organizers. The Emergencies Act meant that the agreement wasn't given time to play out before the government took such a draconian move.

Hundreds of "Freedom Convoy" supporters march in downtown Ottawa on Canada Day July 1, 2022 in Ottawa, Canada. - The so-called "Freedom Convoy," which inspired copycat protests in other countries, began in January 2022 with truckers demonstrating against mandatory Covid-19 vaccines to cross the US border. DAVE CHAN/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

"This is a black mark on Canadian history," Dean French, who organized the agreement, told the CBC of Trudeau's actions. "History will show this was a total overreaction."


Indeed, some truckers had already begun to leave Ottawa before the EA was invoked, as had those truckers blocking several border crossings.


At the time, Trudeau's Minister of Public Safety, Marco Mendocino, claimed repeatedly that the RCMP, Canada's Federal Police Force, and Ottawa's police chiefs asked for the Emergencies Act to be invoked. And yet, this appears to be false; according to both the Commissioner of the RCMP and Ottawa Police, neither asked for the Act to be invoked.

"No, there was never a question of requesting the Emergencies Act," RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki said on May 11. "I did not make that request. I'm not aware of anybody else in the Ottawa Police Service who did," agreed Former Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly.


They didn't just lie about the police, though. From the beginning, Trudeau cast the striking truckers as Nazis and extremists. "Freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery... are not," Trudeau said at the time, in one of just many such iterations of the theme, and Canadian media and other politicians dutifully repeated Trudeau's talking points.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. SEAN GALLUP/GETTY IMAGES

Yet even at the time, there was overwhelming evidence to contradict that. Canadian Journalist Rupa Subamanya found "a diverse group of truckers and protesters, vaccinated and unvaccinated, and of many different ethnicities and backgrounds, at Freedom Convoy. Their stories haven't been told." Her narrative comported with video footage from True North Centre, which painstakingly chronicled the falsehoods of many claims made about the Freedom Convoy and its millions of supporters across the country were false.

This reporting echoed my own experiences, both in Ottawa, where I was one of the many thousands of Canadians who welcomed the Freedom Convoy to town, and in my 25 years on the road in four different countries, where I have met truckers from every possible background and ethnicity, all of them sharing the same values of respecting freedom, individual worker sovereignty, and bodily autonomy.


And yet, these debunkings never received the full-throated attention of the original claims made by various antagonists of the Convoy.


Trudeau didn't stop at smearing the truckers. He created political prisoners. Trudeau had Freedom Convoy organizer Tamara Lich arrested and charged with "counseling mischief" for the crime of setting up a GoFundMe to support protestors living in sub-freezing temperatures. Those funds were later redirected away from the Freedom Convoy under pressure from leftists. Lich was famously brought to court in handcuffs and leg shackles, as if this slender grandmother was some kind of dangerous terrorist.


Trudeau's response to the Convoy will forever be a deep stain on his record.


And yet, whatever ultimately results from the enquiry into the invocation of the Emergencies Act or any committee looking into actions by all of the players during the Freedom Convoy demonstrations, the effect that the Convoy has had on the rest of the world is deep and profound. Farmer protests that erupted in The Netherlands and are spreading throughout Europe took inspiration from the Convoy, and have now lead to the recent resignation of the Prime Minister of Italy. And here in the U.S., politicians have started to make noise about supporting the working class in recent months, no doubt due to working people's issues being forced into the limelight by Canada's Truckers.


This Labor Day, while we ostensibly celebrate the contributions to society made by the workers of the world, some consideration should be given to many issues bubbling under the surface which were brought forward by trucker resistance to vaccine mandates. These include surveillance of workers, poor pay which has no hope of keeping up with inflation, and a disconnected media class which attacked us for standing up for our rights as workers. This Labor Day, thank a trucker for standing up for your bodily autonomy.


Most of all, six months after the Freedom Convoy, Trudeau's lies, cowardice, deceit, and draconian overreach are clearer than ever. We will not forget.


Gord Magill comments on issues around trucking at Newsweek and elsewhere, drawing from his 25 years of experience On The Road.


The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

 

This article was originally posted on Newsweek.com website and can be accessed here.

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