Canada fights over liberty

 Matt Purple:

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This finger-wagging approach to the most serious political strife Canada has seen in a generation was also adopted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Last week, as the protests began, he was scurried away to an undisclosed location where he railed against the truckers like some blow-dried Lear. Trudeau did return to Parliament on Monday, but he still refused to extend any kind of olive branch. To the demonstrators outside, he said only: “This has to stop.”

The problem is that no one seems to know what stopping this would look like. The same Canadian left that regularly suffers heart palpitations over police brutality in America is now demanding that the cops clear out Ottawa like it’s some kind of Tim Hortons-spangled Fallujah. But the city’s chief of police says his force can’t just do that, that they’re overwhelmed and outmanned. Towing experts warn it would be all but impossible to remove the big rigs. And Trudeau himself has ruled out sending in the military, an unthinkable move in a country that prides itself on politeness and peace.

So what then? Some in the Canadian establishment seem to think the trucker protest will eventually buckle under the sheer weight of public opinion. They point to an industry estimate that 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, before daintily clearing their throats and asseverating that unlike those rubes down south, Canadians don’t tolerate divisive politics. Americans might be uppity libertarians, but Canada’s founding values are “peace, order, and good government.” Emphasis on the “order” part: assault rifles and Gadsden flags are nothing but gauche up north.

Let’s assume for a moment that all this is true. The problem is that the single biggest threat to any “order” is a disenchanted and capable minority — like, say, truckers able to snarl downtowns and blockade highways. If the consensus that underpins an order crumbles, if the mass buy-in that’s needed to sustain an order is no longer there, then the order itself can also give way. This is why Trudeau has no choice but to talk to the truckers: there is no other way out and they wield more power than he seems to think they do.

Yet beyond that, it’s also worth asking: do Canadians really subordinate liberty to order? Do their leaders really imagine that one of the most reliable impulses in human history, the desire to be free, suddenly goes dormant north of Buffalo? Yes, Canadians are more likely than Americans to be vaccinated and to support vaccine rules. But that doesn’t mean they haven’t grown weary of all the hectoring and bullying, the isolation and the depression and the enforced gloom, just like the rest of us have.
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The truckers have reached an Atlas Shrugged moment with the government Covid hectoring and Trudeau appears to have lost the support of a key group of Canadians fed of with an arbitrary and capricious government.  As viewed from my place in Texas it is a beautiful thing to see liberals thwarted.  As I have often stated I do not oppose vaccines, but the mandates are counterproductive and have been a serious mistake.  They are unpopular in the red states and people continue to flee the blue state control freak governments.  Eh!

See, also:

Protest Is Protected by the Charter, Legal Group Supporting Truckers Tells Police

And: 

The Ottawa Mayor Threatened Anyone With A Gas Can Offering Material Support To The Truck Drivers, So This Is How Ottawa Responded (Video)

The result was that almost everyone began walking around with gas cans. 

And:

Alberta concedes to truckers, ends immunity passports