And now that the Canadian Parliament has voted on partisan lines to approve Trudeau’s first-time-ever invocation of the Emergencies Act, a piece of war-powers legislation that permits him to play the dictator ruthlessly suppressing such basic rights as speech, peaceable assembly, due process, and even property via access to one’s own businesses and bank accounts, the analogies to Third Reich jackboots don’t seem so inapt.
But in some ways it’s off-base. As an autocrat, Trudeau isn’t so much Hitler as King Canute, the 11th-century English monarch who, according to legend, sat on his throne by the seashore and futilely commanded the incoming tide not to wet his feet.
In all the hysteria among progressives and the media over the protesters, whose main crimes were honking their horns and disrupting traffic, everyone seemed to forget what they were protesting: a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for Canadian truckers driving their rigs across the U.S.–Canada border. Trudeau launched his civil-liberties crackdown on Feb. 14, exactly as governments national and local around the rest of the world, not to mention business entities, were backing away from vaccine mandates, and indeed mandates of any kind related to the coronavirus.
Those governments and businesses had realized—and statistics were backing them up—that the vaccines rolled out to combat the original strain of coronavirus in early 2021 were all but useless in preventing the spread of the Omicron variant of the virus that became dominant in November 2021 and remains dominant to this day.
Vaccination can still mitigate the severity of the illness and reduce the likelihood of death, but Omicron itself, while highly contagious, isn’t very deadly except among populations whose health is already compromised. Most people experience it as a bad cold or a case of the flu. Death and hospitalization rates have plummeted. Furthermore, two years into the pandemic, people have grown tired of draconian coronavirus measures—such as mandatory mask-wearing—that celebrities and politicians flout regularly for photo-ops and are generally ineffective anyway unless worn to hospital-level standards of hygiene.
Still, during the fall of 2021, as the Delta and Omicron variants surged, progressive governments became fixated on the idea that if only they could somehow compel 100 percent of their populations to get vaccinated, they could stop the virus dead in its tracks. Vaccine mandates and “passports”—barring people from workplaces, restaurants, public buildings, and entertainment venues unless they could show proof of vaccination—became omnipresent in liberal jurisdictions. The Trudeau administration’s vaccine mandate for Canadian truckers—nearly identical to a Biden administration mandate for U.S. truckers driving south from Canada—was issued on Nov. 19, 2021, and set to become effective on Jan. 15, 2022. It required them to show proof of vaccination on crossing the border, or, alternatively, to take a COVID test and quarantine for 14 days.
Before that, truck-drivers had been considered “essential” workers whose tireless hauling of food, fuel, and medical supplies and equipment during the deadliest months of the pandemic in 2020 had exempted them from vaccine requirements. The Trudeau administration’s reversal of that course rankled. About 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, so their objection wasn’t so much to the vaccines as to their own heavy-handed demotion to serf status by the laptop class. They called their caravan to Ottawa the “Freedom Convoy.” Their goal was to be able to make for themselves the cost-benefit analysis on COVID-19 vaccinations.
Already in January, and certainly during February, public and private entities were abandoning wholesale the vaccine mandates that had seemed so urgent just a few months earlier.
It should have been easy for Trudeau and his government to read this handwriting on the wall. Nearly every Canadian province—Alberta, Labrador, Manitoba, Newfoundland, Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Quebec, Saskatchewan—has in recent weeks announced that it has either dropped vaccine mandates or will phase them out by mid-March. The consensus is that given the sharp decline in the virulence and deadliness of COVID-19, people should have the freedom to decide for themselves whether anti-COVID shots are worth it in the long run.
Trudeau’s administration could have followed the lead of the provinces and decided that it was time for everyone, truckers and their regulators included, to return to normalcy and scrap the already out-of-date vaccination requirements. The protest would have dissolved overnight, and the truckers would have driven home.
Instead, Trudeau and his intransigent government chose to squander their good will by treating as domestic terrorists a nonviolent group of people who spent their days and nights dancing on the streets of Ottawa and entertaining their children with bouncy castles. King Canute would have resonated with the futility.
