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Pull up the videos the Canadian truckers have made. They are uh, unhappy. And they have support. If Antifa CA shows up at their stuff my money says the action ain't gonna be fun.
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Under Socialism the people are only supposed show to gratitude for everything their wise government does for them. Those protestors are "right wing extremists", under the control of "foreign powers", etc. -
Since I live in Ottawa and like pretty much everybody in the city, am affected by the so-called "Fredom Convoy" allow me to offer a few comments. The protest started because the government stated that any trucker who is involved in driving across the US - Canada border was going to have to be vaccinated. Obviously if they are in that business and are not vaccinated, they are going to be unemployed. Their original objective was to demonstrate in downtown Ottawa and try to get the government to change its position. Given that almost 90% of the population is vaccinated, including most truckers, this was a non-starter. Even the truckers association agreed with the government and opposed the convoy. The government was never going to change and in fact even if they did, it would be meaningless because the US government introduced the same requirement.
The objectives then changed and expanded to a protest against all covid restrictions and included a demand that the Prime Minister step down. This was even more unlikely and just made the organizers look foolish
There was some fear that as is often the case, the right and left wing loonies were going to infiltrate the movement with the objective of causing trouble through violence and perhaps getting the police to over-react. The Ottawa police chief let it be known that they had called in police reinforcements from around the province and the (federal) Royal Canadian Mounted Poice and that they intended to infiltrate the crowd with undercover officers and planned to arrest and charge anybody who tried to do anything other than protest peacefully.
So what has happened. To a large degree the protest has been very noisy, totally disruptive of traffic and life in downtown Ottawa and fairly peaceful. There have been a few absolutely disgusting incidents however. The National War Memorial is very near the Parliament Buildings and contains the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. Some absulutely stupid bitch was videod, dancing on the tomb while some unknown person urinated on it.
Due to COVID, much of the province is in partial lockdown until tomorrow. Specifically there are no restaurants open for sit-in and since there is almost nobody working in downtown Ottawa at this point, many take-out places have closed. That means that there is almost no place to get food in the downtown area and virtually no open restrooms. The exception was the Rideau Centre, a failry high end shopping centre two blocks from Parliament Hill. I understand that some take out restaurants were open there and since the temperature the other day was about minus 20 degrees, people flocked to the shopping centre. That would have been OK but there is a legal requirement that they be masked. Of course, a lot of them refused to mask and threatened the staff, many of whom are young women. The operators closed the shopping centre and its restrooms. Before they did that, some people who couldn't get in, urinated on the floor.
Finally, since there were such problems in getting food, a mob (and that is the right word) got to a downtown soup kitchen that has serviced homeless street people for years and demanded that they be served instead of the street people and effectively threatened the staff. You can just imagine the level of disgust at the truckers
Bottom line is that everyone in Ottawa is totally fed up and wants the police to clear the streets immediately even if it means bringing in tow trucks and dragging away the trucks parked on Wellington Street in front of the Parliament Buildings. It would also seem that a gofundme campaign in support of the convoy has raised $8 million and there are now suggestions that the city should go to court to try to obtain some of that money to pay for the security costs which are about $800,000 per day.Comment
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Trudeau is probably huddled with his advisors, trying to come up with some sort of provocation-the Reichstag Fire, anyone ?-to discredit the protestors, work in the Russian angle, etc.Comment
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Actually Trudeau has COVID and is in isolation for the moment. As an oddity, his wife was almost the first person in Canada to get COVID. She caught it while on a trip to England two years agoComment
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I wonder if the Occupy Ottawa Truckers are going to start delivering basic services, since they've managed to shut everything down by clogging the roads. Maybe set up an Autonomous Zone or something. We we know they won't run vaccination clinics. That much is clear.Comment
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Notwithstanding all the media attention, unless you are right in the core of the city, everything is running as smoothly (or not) as it was before the truckers arrived. Of more importance is that other groups of truckers have closed off some of the international bridges, particularly the one between Windsor Ontario and Detroit. Over $300 million worth of goods go over that bridge every day, much of it consisting of car parts for the factories on both sides. Apparently Ford is having to close one of its plants due to a shortage of parts.Comment
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Once spring arrives everybody's gonna be happy and go back to work. Right?Comment
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Well, we're all sick of covid, so to speak.
Good post by Mark.Last edited by dryheat; 02-12-2022, 01:39.If I should die before I wake...great,a little more sleep.Comment
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Just some thoughts:
Large sympathetic rallies have broken out in France.
Now to Canada:
First, one thing that determines the success of who succeeds in these things is how willing the protesters are to lose freedom and property. That's never been a problem for the Left. Their professional agitators and independent opportunists (vandals and thieves) have no problem with spending some time in the can, they've all been there before. If you have a job, a mortgage and a loving wife and kids you've got more to lose; not to mention you've spent your life more or less following the rules.
Sympathy or lack by the 'gubmint: The Left despises middle and working class people and we know it. A lot of "Rs" do to, Liz Cheney looks on her Constituents as serfs and her current actions, not just her complicity with the Jan 6 dog and pony show, prove it. They will drop the hammer a lot quicker on a working class mass protest than on the "chop zone" which they are sympathetic to. Trump got elected, not because of the Russians or because he was some kind of charlatan but because millions of people felt he addressed their real desires and then, when he was elected did what he said he was going to do. It was a big, big jump and the left is still scared to death of this guy.
There will always be opportunists who will look on any disruption as an excuse for a party including dancing on the tomb of the unknown soldier or the yahoo who shows up with the Swastika.
Americans giving interviews in Canada, in support of this strike is counterproductive to the cause, for obvious reasons.
I read an article which I won't include which compared this to the fall of Ceausescu in Romania. Ceausescu was one of the most brutal of Commie dictators and actually came to believe his own propaganda about what a patron of the people he was. When he lost his backup, the Soviet Union, he didn't do what most other Commie Euro dictators did and negotiate a deal or go into exile. He actually gave a speech to a very surly mob that he ordered to shut up when they booed him. When he tried to get out the overloaded helicopter couldn't get off the ground. He was arrested, subjected to a "Drumhead" Court martial, convicted after a very short hearing, immediately taken outside with his wife who was as hated as him and unceremoniously mowed down with AKMs (got to have some gun reference right.) Got a Romanian AK, give it a pat. They weren't even offered a blindfold. So lets not get carried away on that.
For transgressions much less than what's going on here, the British Left, the Labor party has been reduced to a "rump." That of course isn't permanent. We can only hope the Democrat Congressional disaster in a bit over 8 months is enough to seriously hamper any more toxic authoritarian damage from the "Cutie Cortez" Socialist/Communist wing of the Dem party which totally controls it's actions, and that is not debatable. They won't condemn Castro, for example, executing his political adversaries in large number just for being his political adversaries because he improved education/indoctrination. The same goes for the Commissars in Venezuela who are not only floating in oil while not being able to keep the lights on were actually to systematically starving their people. My daughters school right now has a bunch of Venezolzano kids who came over in the current migrant flood and you'll have a long wait to see any of those people vote for anything like they left. The memory of the oppression of the Cubans by the Fidelistas has literally endured for generations in their descendants in this country.
Hey, in the words of "Chairman Mao, "to make an omolette you have to break some eggs. The left breaks eggs people lose their lives and property. The right breaks eggs they cause traffic problems and maybe some shortages.Comment
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