The demands of the group are so nonsensical, there’s literally nothing to negotiate. Instead it seems like they’ve simply been tolerated by the government and especially by the police. It turns out that part of that was because the cops knew there was a violent armed sub-group, which they just busted (14 guns, body armor, large capacity mags, machete…), and they were afraid to escalate the situation. (Though we’ll see, now - it doesn’t fully explain the highly relaxed police response compared to… every left-wing protest which was orders of magnitude less disruptive and violent.)
There’s a lot of actual Americans in the group, too. The initial “demand” documents were all written in American English, and most of their funding is coming from the US, it turns out. So it’s hardly representative, even when you consider the relatively small number of people involved.
This would very likely have elevated the grifting leaders to the position of “Martyrs for The Righteous Cause”. It’s tough to do the peacekeeping, law enforcement and politics all at the same time. So far it’s cast these vacuum-headed malcontents as not being on the side of the Canadian people, and I’m alright with that.
That’s sort of true, but I think these protests are reflective of a start walking right and see how far we get ideology that is only left of their US counterparts because of where they started.
The Canadian government has not negotiated at all with the so-called truckers convoy. The Opposition has continually criticized the Trudeau government for not extending “an olive branch”, to quote interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen, but Trudeau has refused any talks with them whatsoever. So that’s false.
If you don’t think a Carbon Tax is aggressive, then you’re not looking at what the US and China are doing, which is nothing. Behavioral economists and non-partisan government policy experts widely agree that a carbon tax is probably the best tool governments have to incentivize decarbonization of the economy, so enacting that was refreshing evidence-based policy. On the scale of what industrial nations are doing about climate change (ranging from zero to having a lot of summits), the carbon tax is extremely aggressive.
Quebec is like the Tennessee of Canada. A lot of overly conservative religious nosybodies, a history of trying to break away, and surprisingly fun strip clubs.
It is aggressive in a relative sense, but it is still not punitive enough to significantly impact behaviour (several provinces have also found ways to offset the impact of the tax). It is set to get more punitive over time, but whether that schedule is ambitious enough remains to be seen.
That was the mayor of Ottawa (a Liberal), desperate to give his beleaguered downtown residents some respite from the madness, negotiating to have truckers move their rigs away from residential areas, with limited success unfortunately. Hard to blame him though. So not the Canadian government. You should edit your post because again, it is false.
Even if you overlook the Confederate and Nazi flags, there’s a puzzling amount of US and Trump flags in Ottawa. (Even the Canadian flags are a bit sus. Canadians don’t tend to be the flag wavers that Americans are.)
Yah, and now more than ever, when you see a flag in a store window or on a truck or whatever, it’s an easy marker for people you probably want to avoid. Overt nationalism is just not our thing.
Joke taken, but in all honestly that’s really more about saying “hey this <brand|product|org> is not American”. Canada struggles to build our own culture in the shadow of this overwhelming behemoth down in the basement there, so the maple leaf is a little tug at the heartstrings to that effect. It’s often cynical marketing, of course, but it’s also just kinda nice to have our own thing, even if only a little.
