By John F. Di Leo –
Thousands of trucks, thousands of cars, and thousands of pedestrians too, have descended upon downtown Ottawa, Ontario, the national capital of Canada, in what is now being called the Freedom Convoy of 2022.
As often happens in the United States, the counts will vary widely from news outlet to news outlet, perhaps based on the political affiliation of the speaker. With tens of thousands of trucks in different processions all meeting this week, it seems certain that the total number of protesters will be at least six figures, a truly stirring figure for a nation of only 38 million people (about a ninth the size of the USA).
Already, reporters mention every weird individual with a swastika or other hostile signs, in an effort to poison the viewer against the protest. Such others are obviously not a part of this protest at all… But they take advantage of the opportunity to mingle in with a larger protest, perhaps specifically to besmirch the reputation of the main protest itself, as Antifa regularly does at Trump rallies down here.
Politicians, reporters, and pundits alike will jump on the fact that the Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), primarily an association of big businesses, supports the mandates, and opposes the convoy.
No surprise there. Just as in the United States, national associations of national and multinational conglomerates are often in bed with big government. They team up to support crippling regulations together, perhaps, at least in part, because it helps to squeeze out the small businesses and independent contractors in any industry.
So, who is the Freedom Convoy, really?
The Freedom Convoy is a spontaneously organized group of truckers – largely independents – and it was specifically galvanized by the declaration that both Canada and the United States would refuse to allow truckers to cross the border in either direction unless they had received the COVID-19 vaccines. This is their livelihood; they are being told by government that they cannot earn a living unless they accept a controversial, unproven, and possibly dangerous vaccine, one which clearly should be voluntary at best, this early in its existence.
Reporters happily repeat that the CTA stresses that this is all an overreaction, "because, after all, 90% of Canadian truck drivers have taken the vaccine." They accuse the truckers of making a mountain out of a molehill. Who needs ten percent of any industry, anyway? If they won't get in line and follow orders, let 'em starve.
But the claim that these drivers are objecting to the existence of the vaccine is a misinterpretation, to say the least.
The freedom convoy is objecting to making it mandatory, to making so many things mandatory, that have always been a matter of individual choice in the past.
Not just the vaccine mandates, but all of them: There's a vaccine mandate for crossing national borders… maybe a vaccine mandate for crossing from one province into another is around the corner. There's a vaccine mandate for keeping your job… a vaccine mandate for getting healthcare… a mask mandate for going to a restaurant… a mask mandate for sitting at your desk in an office… a mask mandate for sending your ten-year-old to school… a mask mandate for living your life.
Just as in the United States, and in dozens of other countries too, governments and employers have exceeded their constitutional powers, issuing outrageous mandates, with no scientific or medical justification… and hundreds of thousands of Canadians have finally had enough.
Truckers, as a group, are very independent. Whether they work for themselves as owner-operators, or work for carriers, or for manufacturing or distribution companies as employed drivers, our truckers spend most of their days alone, riding in the cabs of their vehicles, rolling down the window to breathe fresh air, closing the window and using the heater or air conditioner as needed.
As a group, therefore, truckers have less of an opportunity to either be infected by others, or to do the infecting. If vaccine and mask mandates make any sense to anyone at all… And it’s very hard to make the case that they do… then truckers are certainly the least likely, even of these.
It simply makes no sense.
And this is why the Freedom Convoy has caught on, far beyond the trucking community. Tens of thousands of drivers, charging across Canada to meet at its federal capital, have excited a public unsure of how to respond to this tyranny until now.
They have threatened to tie up the city of Ottawa until Parliament has the sense to withdraw the mandates.
That’s a big threat, and one might think it a bluff, until one looks around the world and notices that the winds are already changing.
Sweden never went along with these mandates in the first place, and, two years in, their numbers are no different from anyone else’s, proving the medical pointlessness of these mandates all along.
In recent weeks, Great Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, and now Denmark too have finally seen the light, to various degrees, abandoning most or even all of these two-year-old economic and medical disasters of government overreach.
Is the national government of Canada worried? Well, they should be. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is in hiding, and its capital is overwhelmed.
The Canadian form of government looks similar to the United States' form, from a distance, but this is deceptive. In truth, Canada is more of a federation than the USA is. In fact, with its powerful provinces and traditionally weak federal government, Canada has more similarity to the system we had here, before the 17th Amendment wiped out the restraining powers that the states once held over Washington DC.
As in so many Western nations in recent decades, Canada‘s national capital has overgrown the bonds that its people had designed for it when they wrote the constitution and gave their central government life.
The people of Canada are rising up, declaring their independence, and demanding their liberty back.
God bless these patriots, and pray that the governments of the world learn their place again, so that the pendulum may finally swing back to the sovereignty of the individual citizen.
copyright 2022 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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(photo source: stills from BBC reporting)
