Heroes … A Bunch of Them

As I have been doing for months, on Sundays I feature some one who demonstrates courage and principle. Today I am addressing Canadian heroes … the members of the Ottawa Freedom Convoy.

If the elites ventured out and spoke with these people, it would take all of 10 minutes to see that this is a peaceful protest—and maybe there are points aplenty about how Canada’s COVID policy is a disaster. The same goes for the United States. The folks telling these people’s stories can be found on Substack.

 Rupa Subramanya, a freelance writer, had a lengthy post about the freedom truckers. She spoke to some 100 truckers, maybe more, and found that a) they’re not Nazis, b) they have legitimate reasons to be against the vaccination policy, and c) they’re not going anywhere. 

From Subramanya on Substack:

“I live in downtown Ottawa, within view of Parliament Hill, and have spent the past 10 days or so bundled up and walking around the protests. I have spoken to close to 100 protesters, truckers and other folks, and not one of them sounded like an insurrectionist, white supremacist, racist or misogynist.

B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the Freedom Convoy, is vaccinated, and he estimates that many—maybe most—of the truckers at the protest are, too. “I’m Jewish. I have family in mass graves in Europe. And apparently I’m a white supremacist,” he told me…

Ostensibly, the truckers are against a new rule mandating that, when they re-enter Canada from the United States, they have to be vaccinated. But that’s not really it. The mandate is a moot point: The Americans have a similar requirement, and, anyway, “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, are vaccinated. (The CTA represents about 4,500 truckers nationwide.)

So it’s about something else. Or many things: a sense that things will never go back to normal, a sense that they are being ganged up on by the government, the media, Big Tech, Big Pharma.

Kamal Pannu, 33, is a Sikh immigrant and trucker from Montreal. He doesn’t believe in vaccinations; he believes in natural immunity. He had joined the convoy because the Co Kudvid restrictions in the surrounding province of Quebec had become too much to bear. He said that he and his wife used to do their grocery shopping at Costco, until the government decreed that the unvaxxed would be barred from big-box stores. Since then, their monthly grocery bill had jumped by $200.  “Before,” he said, “we didn’t look at the price of what we were buying. Now, we sometimes put items back because we don’t have that much money.”

Peter, 28, a long-haul trucker from Ontario, told me that a divide had opened up all across the country. Pointing to the gleaming, ritzy condominiums near Parliament, he said he used to deliver the concrete stairs in those buildings. Since the cross-border vaccine mandate kicked in in mid-January, he’s been out of work. He refused to get vaccinated, he said, because the whole thing had been so politicized, and you couldn’t be sure who to trust. He refused to give his last name, he said, because he didn’t want the government coming after him, and he wanted to work again. 

I heard this over and over from the truckers. And it was not entirely crazy.

Theo, 24, felt the same way. He wasn’t a trucker—he used to work at a major accounting firm and now works another big company—but he was angry, like the truckers were. “They treated me like a second-class citizen,” he said, referring to his old firm. He explained that he’d refused to get vaccinated. He’d been vaccinated for other things. But he had a hereditary heart condition that, he said, made the Covid vaccine inadvisable—but he couldn’t get a medical exemption. At work, they made him mask up constantly. He felt like he was being publicly shamed. So, he quit.

Matt Sim, 43, who immigrated to Canada from South Korea, is director of operations of an IT start-up in Toronto and came to Ottawa with his wife to join the protests. He’d had Covid, and then he’d recovered, and he was skeptical of all the hysteria surrounding the vaccines. His family, back home in Korea, had lived through the Asian financial crisis of 1997, and that had made him skeptical of the media, the government, and powerful people in general. ‘There’s a group in power that always manages to create panic among the masses and siphon off public funds,’ Sim said.”

These people are heroes.

Thank you, Rupa Subramanya, for your effort.

2/13/22