In Justin Trudeau’s mind, the Freedom Convoy is a flat-tire “fringe” that’s going nowhere except, hopefully, away from downtown Ottawa.
The protesting truckers and assorted nasty hangers-on blockading Parliament Hill are an unsavoury mix of Trump lovers, Nazi sympathizers, monument desecrators, statue vandalizers and rabid anti-vaxxers who are unworthy of being met, heard or heeded in any way, the prime minister declared Monday.
No doubt Trudeau will be wildly applauded by most Canadians for his hard red line against a protest whose head-scratching leadership is advocating the overthrow of this government.
On almost every point, the prime minister was absolutely right to denounce the vandalizing culprits in the convoy. May they all be found and charged.
But Trudeau may have gone too far in belittling everyone attending this bizarre protest and, by extension, their supporters because it could yet morph into a larger, more coherent movement.
While unvaccinated truckers started this protest, the thousands who shivered along the highways, filled the overpasses and contributed money, giving the truckers a feel, were reflecting a wider message.
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They are flipping the bird at heavy-handed government edicts, the lectures from self-righteous elites and constantly changing advice from medixjmtzywcal experts. The truckers were just an 18-wheel catalyst driving their anger forward.
Of course, this is all a political gift for Trudeau, at least in the short-term.
He gets to malign Conservatives aligning themselves with the protest, use it as a wedge in his favour and polarize a divisive health issue where he clearly sits on the side of thrice-vaccinated angels.
Trudeau, now infected with COVID-19 himself, was almost salivating at the opportunity to denounce Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole for showing poor judgement in meeting a few convoy truckers last week. For O’Toole, this nightmare never ends.
But polls reflect rising frustration and pandemic fatigue which could, if a decent opposition ever gets traction, represent a growing political problem for Justin Trudeau.
Bombarded with mixed messaging, spooked by doomsday hospital projections and hit with social restrictions which are tightened too late and loosened too early, the public is clearly ready to shift back to normal with or without government permission.
The dangled carrot that vigorous vaccination would create herd immunity and lead Canadians to an unrestricted lifestyle has repeatedly boomeranged back to just another lockdown. We are mostly fed up.
But, as Trudeau made clear, mandate doubters and vaccine skeptics will get no sympathy nor meetings from this prime minister.
Far from floating any compromise, Trudeau is doubling down on turning the unvaccinated into unemployable pariahs in their country with plans to go even further.
Consider the scheme proposed by his transport minister to expand mandatory vaccination to truckers crossing provincial boundaries.
Where is the epidemiology showing truckers are super-spreading the virus by crossing the Ottawa River from Ontario to Quebec to keep supply chains open? There isn’t any I can find.
If there’s a real genesis for this protest and what’s to come, it’s needlessly onerous regulations and restrictions which defy common sense and medical evidence.
We’re now at the point where polls show a clear majority of Canadians believe most restrictions should end, leaving them to take their own precautions for a semi-normal life.
And yet Trudeau has gone all zero-tolerance tough-guy, denouncing and dismissing anti-mandate protesters as an ignorant un-Canadian “fringe” sporting tinfoil hats.
That derisive designation could become Trudeau’s echo of Hillary Clinton, when she described Trump supporters as “deplorables” in the 2016 U.S. election campaign.
It was the slur that motivated a movement — and the deplorables won.
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A person holds their hand to their heart during a singing of O Canada during a rally against COVID-19 restrictions on Parliament Hill, which began as a cross-country convoy protesting a federal vaccine mandate for truckers, in Ottawa on Sunday, Jan. 30, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Justin Tang
