The Canadian Freedom Convoy is definitely a watershed, but there’s much work to be done to right the wrongs and repair the damage of the last two years. From Jeffrey A. Tucker at brownstone.org:
All in less than one week, Israel has repealed restrictions and is backing off vaccine mandates, even as cases and deaths are hitting new highs, and implausibly so in the most vaccinated and boosted country in the world. The UK has backed off too. Same in Denmark, Ireland, Finland, and Norway. Switzerland has joined in, and Sweden has rolled back its plans for an extended vaccine passport in has decided to get rid of them completely. Saskatchewan is ending all restrictions.
We are seeing local governments and universities in the US gradually stepping back. No new cities have joined the brigade for vaccine passports and Denver, CO, is stopping theirs. Poor suffering New York City, assaulted by a new segregation mandate, is reeling from the mandates, and surely a rethinking is coming. How many states now wish they had taken the path of Florida, which is experiencing a remarkable economic boom?
Monmouth University tracks attitudes in the US toward government and media as it pertains to the pandemic response. At this point, every arrow over time slants down to the right. The number of people opposing vaccine passports outnumbers those supporting them by 10 points. A polled 70% say it is time we accept Covid as normal.
It’s beginning to feel like a long-overdue crumbling.
It is surely not a coincidence that all of this accelerated the same week as the trucker convoy formed in Vancouver and made the trek across the entire US/Canada border, in the snow, ending up in Ottawa and gathering many tens of thousands of citizens to protest. The Prime Minister fled the city and went to his bunker, making what looked like hostage videos that denounced the truckers with all the usual epithets.
What’s even more striking is that the media in the US and Europe did not cover the convoy, probably the largest in history and certainly the most important protest in modern times in Canada. The topic never ended up on the front page of either the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal. And yet: the effect was hugely powerful. Public opinion in Canada swung 15% to create a solid majority against all restrictions and mandates.
