The workers of the world are uniting against vaccine mandates…and the New York Times can’t stand it. A truckers’ protest over mandates in the Canadian capital of Ottawa has endured for over a week, and the Times’ patience with the “unlawful…occupation” of the city’s downtown has already evaporated.
The Saturday edition of the “Canada Letter” newsletter, penned by Ian Austen, opened with one long smear of the protestors.
Just over a week has passed since a convoy of heavy trucks, pickup trucks and cars began their noisy, intimidating and unlawful, according to the police, occupation of Ottawa’s downtown core.
....
….the Centretown neighborhood [is] a mix of high-rise apartments, condo towers, public housing, cooperative housing and beautifully restored heritage homes all plunked onto mostly narrow streets. And since the arrival of the truck convoy, the normally placid Centretown has become a congested and noisy nightmare for many residents.
“I’m receiving hundreds -- and I’m not exaggerating -- hundreds of emails telling me: ‘I went out to get groceries, I got yelled at, I got harassed. I got followed down the street, I’m so afraid that I can’t go out,’” Catherine McKenney, the city councilor for the area, told me on Thursday afternoon....
Noise has been one of the greatest issues in Centretown….
Day and night, trucks have been rumbling through their streets, blaring air horns -- some of them of the variety usually found on railway locomotives. Impromptu fireworks shows, some as late as midnight add to the cacophony.
And yes, Catherine McKenney identifies as non-binary and goes by "Mx."; the paper dutifully complied, and didn't challenge her charges of terrorism by the truckers.
“The horn blaring is really meant to terrorize this community -- and it’s working,” said Mx. McKenney, who will be running for mayor later this year.
If these second-hand anecdotes are indeed part of the picture of the protest, one is vividly reminded of similar, though much worse, incidents from the George Floyd racial protests of the summer of 2020 in multiple major U.S. cities.
But there weren’t just air horns in Minneapolis, New York City, and Portland (among dozens of other cities) but actual killings. The riots that grew out of some of the U.S. protests featured massive looting, vandalism, arsons, adding up to $2 billion in insurance claims and multiple arrests. Meanwhile, the Ottawa police, for all their insults, have yet to make a single arrest at the truckers’ protest.
Another large difference between the protests: The Times didn’t lead its coverage with insulting comments from U.S. law enforcement, who the Times actually suggested were fascist, in a lead story.
While the Times used second-hand information to condemn the anti-vaccine mandate protestors, it conveniently glossed over similar anti-social violence during an entire summer of U.S. rioting.
The week has brought numerous reports of people being harangued by protesters for wearing masks, demonstrators trying to rip down pro-vaccination signs on houses and others defecating and urinating on lawns. The air on many streets is filled with diesel exhaust fumes from idling trucks.
Many local stores have temporarily closed, while those that have remained opened have struggled to enforce provincial mask rules….
Who could tell? Canada’s overzealous COVID-19 rules have meant the country has been “temporarily closed” for nigh on two years now, despite new evidence from Johns Hopkins University that lockdowns ar essentially useless.
