Politicians Fumble the Freedom Convoy Challenge


I have been angered, shamed, disgusted and frankly a little scared at the nonsense that has been displayed in Ottawa and other major cities this week, and I’ve already written a couple of articles about that subject. This one is a little different. I want to examine what triggered the angry response of the mob, and to ask, without excusing in any way what the mob has done and what the mob has become, how this might have been avoided.

When people talk about the current upset over vaccine mandates, people are heard to say “of course, most of that is provincial or even municipal jurisdiction, so they’re not even talking to the right people.” While that might be true for the restrictions on public gatherings, and the patchwork cross-Canada quilt of lockdown mandates and vaccine requirements for some classes of employment, it is emphatically not true for the quarantine requirements for cross-border truckers. That is Federal jurisdiction. Full stop.

So how did we get here? A January 10th article by Reuters news agency said “The mandate is the first policy measure taken since the pandemic began that could limit cross-border trucking traffic. Trucks crossed the border freely when the border was closed for 20 months because they were considered essential to keep supply chains flowing.” So, just to be clear, we’ve been gratefully accepting the services of cross border truckers, vaccinated or not, since the pandemic began, but now we’re not. So, something must have changed drastically to cause this late in the game imposition of a mandate, right? What was that drastic change?

Well, it must be that damned Omicron variant, wouldn’t you think? Here we were, rolling along thinking that the pandemic was nicely in control, and then wham! Along comes Omicron and blows everything apart.

Except, that’s not what happened. On November 19th, the Government of Canada announced “as of January 15, 2022, certain groups of travellers, who are currently exempt from entry requirements, will only be allowed to enter the country if they are fully vaccinated with one of the vaccines approved for entry into Canada. These groups include:…….
• essential service providers, including truck drivers.”

The Omicron variant was first reported to the World Health Organization on November 24th, 2021, and the first case was reported in Canada on November 28th, nine days after the decision to impose cross border trucker vaccine requirements was announced. So Omicron wasn’t the reason for the change in policy, unless Mr. Trudeau would like to claim some psychic abilities.

I think it’s fair to say, however, that Omicron may have influenced decision making following the vaccine mandate. On November 19th, when the vaccine requirement was announced, Canada was ticking along with a pretty flat case-line. 2402 cases were reported that day. By the end of November, that number had risen to 3511 new cases, so things were ticking upwards. And then it just shot out of control. On December 30th, our case-load peaked at 54,648 cases. The new case number dropped rapidly after that, falling from that peak in late December to 20650 on January 15th, and it’s been falling steadily since then, to 2051 cases on February 2nd.

The stress load on the health care system has a lag time in the curve. On November 19th, 1711 Covid patients were hospitalized with 446 of those in intensive care. Hospitalizations peaked at 11022 on January 24th, a little more than three weeks after the peak in new cases with 1233 of those patients requiring care in Intensive care units (ICU).

Faced with the evidence of health care system stress across the country, it’s not surprising that the government was reluctant to be seen to be doing anything that might increase the case load. On January 15th, as the new requirements came into effect, the hospitalizations were approaching 10000, more than double the numbers that had been seen in any of the previous waves of the disease. So, it’s easy to see why the government resisted pressures from the trucking industry to relax the cross-border truckers’ vaccine mandate at that time. But why did they decide to impose it in the first place?

In January 2021, Justin Trudeau rejected the notion of a vaccine mandate, saying “I think it’s an interesting idea but I think it is also fraught with challenges — we are certainly encouraging and motivating people to get vaccinated as quickly as possible but we always know there are people who won’t get vaccinated and not necessarily through a personal or political choice.”

By August, however, that opinion had changed, and vaccine mandates were a central plank in the Liberals election campaign platform. Mr Trudeau said there would be “consequences” for those who opt out of vaccination without a “legitimate medical reason”.

On October 6th, the Prime Minister’s office announced that “federal public servants in the Core Public Administration, including members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, will be required to confirm their vaccination status by October 29, 2021. Those who are unwilling to disclose their vaccination status or to be fully vaccinated will be placed on administrative leave without pay as early as November 15, 2021.

Now, I have no problem with the PM changing his mind on the effectiveness of vaccine mandates. I believe that he was trying to follow the science, and the science said that we were out-performing the United States and many other countries because we were buying in to the vaccination program. The PM simply decided that anything that could increase the vaccination uptake was worth doing. It seems pretty reasonable to believe that having threatened hundreds of thousands of Federal civil servants with time off with no pay, it was difficult to defend allowing truckers to cross the border from the Covid-ridden republic to the south without imposing some precautions. And the timing of the truckers’ mandate, which was announced four days after the civil servants began to feel consequences, leaves me in no doubt that the one action was linked to the other.

There is no scientific evidence of which I’m aware, and I have looked for it, that says that cross border truckers were a significant source of community spread of Covid-19. This wasn’t done to avoid community spread of Covid. This was done as a prod to encourage vaccination, as a sop to the irritated civil servants, and as a vote-grabber.

Was it a good move for Canada? Probably not. The truckers had been crossing the border for twenty months with no real evidence that they were causing a problem. Could we afford to knock a bunch of them out of the business? Estimates for the number of drivers who might drop out of the industry range from 5 to 10%, or 8000 to 16000 drivers. Could they be replaced? Bison Transport of Winnipeg said they’d raised the base rate for drivers by 20%, but were unable to attract new drivers. Meanwhile, the head of the Canadian Trucking Alliance estimated that the industry was already short some 18000 drivers. Supply chain disruptions and particularly the cost of freight has been blamed for some significant portion of the rising inflation rate in Canada.

So, I would say that the government embraced vaccination as the best answer to Covid-19, took a political plunge on vaccine mandates as a means to re-election, made themselves unpopular with the civil service by imposing the mandate on them, and then dropped it on the truckers (with no good scientific rationale and no good evaluation of the effect on the industry or the economy) to assuage the hurt feelings of the civil servants.

But there’s a bit more to it, I believe. On November 19th, the same day that the Public Health Agency of Canada announced the truckers’ vaccine mandate, Justin Trudeau met with Joe Biden. The White House briefing note on that meeting started off with “Their wide-ranging discussion included joint efforts to combat COVID-19” and then went on to list other things that had been discussed. On January 15th, Canada’s mandate took effect. On January 22nd, the US followed suit. On January 19th, per a Reuters article, Trudeau defended the vaccine mandate, saying Canada was “aligned” with the United States, its largest trading partner.

Although Canada’s mandate took effect first, the American mandate was announced at least a month before Canada’s. President Biden implemented his vaccine mandate for truckers in October. By November 10th, the mandate had been challenged in court and was subsequently rejected by the US Supreme Court. Is it even remotely possible that we have a vaccine mandate for truckers because Joe Biden was in trouble with his own mandate and Justin Trudeau agreed to do him a political favour? Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.

OK, so Justin Trudeau, making judgements that were somewhat scientific and somewhat more political, initiated a vaccine mandate for truckers and by so doing triggered this massive nonsense that is the “Freedom Convoy”. How have we done in dealing with this mess?

Well, first of all, policing has failed. From the very outset, the Freedom Convoy participants made it clear that they weren’t interested in a rational discussion of issues. Social media posts called for “our own January 6th event” and threats of violence against the Prime Minister. One group called on the Canadian military to assist the truckers and another proposed what amounts to an overthrow of the government by the Governor General and the truckers. Organizers of the convoy have been linked to the Yellow Vest movement, to a Western Canada separatist party, and to other right wing hate groups. Despite all these predictors of trouble, CSIS interpretation was that they do not investigate “lawful protest and dissent.” RCMP have failed to disperse blockades at international borders. Ottawa police made an early decision to avoid escalation, and that decision was probably wrong, as it allowed the convoy to get dug in and firmly settled in occupation of the downtown core. Other cities, having seen what happened in Ottawa, were much better prepared, and took actions that prevented complete capitulation of the cities to demonstrators. The fact that Ottawa could have taken pre-emptive actions, but didn’t, is a failure of intelligence services at all levels, from CSIS to RCMP to Ottawa Police.

What about political leadership? Yeah, what about that? Where have we seen any? The Trudeau government failed to read the tea-leaves properly and essentially triggered the demonstrations by turning their back on truckers whom they’d previously been praising for two years. The Federal Transport Minister said that blockage of the Ambassador bridge was a serious cause for concern, but that the policing of the bridge blockade was a matter for the City of Windsor and the Province of Ontario. Prime Minister Trudeau is very concerned about the blockades and is “working with local and provincial governments to put an end to the demonstration.” Premier Doug Ford offered “whatever resources were necessary” to the mayors of Toronto and Ottawa and then disappeared for more than a week while Ottawa suffered. The Conservative Party fired its leader for failing to make political capital out of the trucker’s protest and then appointed Ms “where’s my MAGA hat” Bergen to lead the team in Parliament and to provide useful and rational discussion of the Freedom Convoy issues. Do you know why this problem has gone on for so long? It’s because nobody owns the problem except the long-suffering citizens of our nation’s capital.

Indigenous people and people of colour have commented that the policing of this matter would be different if the protestors were natives or blacks, and they’re right. No politician wants to own the problem because there’s too much potential for things to go wrong and no obvious political gain. And being politicians, they’re more preoccupied with putting on their Teflon overcoats than they are with actually coming to grips with the issue. The leadership in this country might as well all be together on a cruise ship, say the Diamond Princess, for all they’ve done so far. 

 


2 responses to “Politicians Fumble the Freedom Convoy Challenge”

  1. How to end the Trucker convoy and its problems? Where is Mike Harris and /or Steven Harper when you need them! And maybe even Brian Mulroney. Think about it!

    • How to end it is getting to be a major problem. The Ambassador bridge and the Ontario state of emergency declaration drew a line in the sand, and the protestors have stepped blithely over that line. Do we have enough police to enforce the injunction? This could get really ugly.
      In the meantime, the Covid case counts are declining, and as we get entrenched and start taking hard-line positions over vaccine mandates, provinces are starting to loosen restrictions leading to the conclusion that the mandates will end soon enough, if only we wait patiently.

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