It’s been a sad week for Canada, as protests continue in the nation’s capital

Opinion

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This article was published 05/02/2022 (1055 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

It feels like something broke in Canada this week. The nation that has always been a little too smug about its values of civility and respect seemed to have disappeared, replaced by what looked far more American than Canadian.

If you had told me protesters in the national capital would leave their feces at residents’ front doors; that drunken protesters would urinate on sidewalks from atop their trucks; that in Alberta a protester would deliberately try to run down an RCMP officer, my response would simply have been, “No, not in Canada.” I now live in a city under siege, with the police apparently paralyzed to remove this infestation that has invaded Ottawa’s neighbourhoods.

The divisions the pandemic has bequeathed may melt with the snow, but only if we take deliberate steps to see that they do. The prime minister would do well to drop his excoriating rhetoric about anti-vaxxers. His job now is to heal, not to hurl partisan thunderbolts. The public health authorities should begin to move toward more openness, more willingness to err on the side of manageable risk about schools and indoor gatherings. Masked, yes, but the tolerance for lockdowns is quickly evaporating.

We still have not done the door-to-door canvassing with vaccine teams that ended polio seven decades ago. Canadians have been on a stomach-churning roller-coaster. We have been astonishingly willing to put up with the disruptions to our lives, and our governments are close to crossing a line with a majority of Canadians unless they begin to offer a more appealing spring ahead.

I was astonished by two sidebar stories in our very unpleasant week. The first was the number of young students from the University of Ottawa and Carleton I saw out in their schools’ regalia, joining the demonstrations with singing, flag-waving and drinking as if they were attending a homecoming event. The second surprising groups were the number of older Ottawans who would tell anyone who asked that they were triple vaxxed, but still supported the demonstration because it was “Time for the government to give back our lives!” That each group was blinkered to the threatening insults hurled at the masked, along with the obscene slogans and swastikas, was jaw-dropping.

In both Ottawa and Alberta, operations to end the illegal blockades and occupations would have begun by now if the demonstrators were predominantly Indigenous or Black people. The blatant double standard of hundreds of white men not even receiving parking tickets is something that will need to be explained when this is over.

It seems increasingly likely that a military solution is in store; police services have neither the authority nor the capability to overwhelm massed groups of enormous trucks. We may only hope that the deluded truckers respond to a show of force, without it needing to be applied.

In the middle of an already painful week, we were also subjected to the Conservatives’ ritual bloodletting, now a biennial event. Ironically, Erin O’Toole’s ouster was partly triggered by his shambolic approach to the truckers’ invasion.

More worrying for the party was the revelation of how close the Tories are to another breakup. You have stunningly arrogant young MPs like Mark Strahl, who used the prime minister getting COVID despite being triple vaxxed as an opportunity to question vaccine mandates. It’s an idiocy that a large majority of voters would find insulting. Without an intervention from Conservative leaders who know how to win elections, it seems likely that the next leader is doomed to face the same fate as his or her two predecessors.

Let us hope that leaders of all stripes and from all industries now call for a return to Canadian values: tolerance, compromise and acceptance of difference. When the last Trump flag, Confederate flag, and Canadian flag desecrated with the swastika have finally left town, we will need a national dialogue about recovery, reconciliation and rebuilding — else this murderous pandemic will have laid poisonous seeds for our political future.

Robin V. Sears was an NDP strategist for 20 years and later served as a communications adviser to businesses and governments on three continents. He is a freelance contributing columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @robinvsears