03 - The Truckers and the Tyranny

Transcript

hello welcome to intimate discourse my name is jason in this episode the truckers in the

tyranny um dimitri and i are going to be talking about the

truckers protest in ottawa and canada and the subsequent events

that followed from that uh this episode was recorded in toronto

on april 4 2022 80.

imagine this you're a middle-aged man working two jobs to support your family

you've remarried and there are more than enough kids to go around your life like everyone else's life has

been made much more challenging by the covet pandemic not only have you fretted over

contracting the virus itself but you've worried about your kids getting it fairly confident that they'd be okay

given the overwhelming evidence suggesting as much but fears linger and pester the mind nonetheless

because well they're your kids and because something tells you that the media and the government wouldn't be

making such a big deal about this if the virus wasn't something relatively scary as once passed and you got your vaccines

dutifully wrapped a layer of cloth around your face whenever going out in public and patiently waited for things

to get back to normal month after month you listen patiently while each subsequent wave hit and your

government instituted new rules or reanimated old ones in reaction to this uncertainty and based on the advice that

they were getting from their health team you were told that the mask didn't work and then that they did work and then

that only some of them worked you were told that we needed to flatten the curve for two weeks so that the

hospitals weren't overwhelmed then it was a month that we needed to reach a certain level of hurt immunity or have certain

percentages of the population vaccinated then it was just up in the air basically

things go back to normal when we say they go back to normal and they may never go back to normal

you're a rational person who can empathize and with how difficult it must be to navigate these waters you

understand that there's being some confusion you want to do your part to help

you're doing what you're told you're getting the vaccine and you're wearing your mask you've watched your hours be caught in

income slash during this crisis and you certainly worry about what will happen to your job when this is all over

or worse if it's never over but we're all in this together and the government has our back after all

they've been doing their best to keep the support checks flowing and ensuring everyone is safe

and then one day you start looking more carefully at the data and start listening to the voices who have been questioning the overarching narrative of

the situation and those who have been critical of the government's response to the pandemic you wonder why so much of it has been

censored or maligned as misinformation true you aren't a scientist but statistics are statistics aren't they

and if the idea is to get to the truth of what's happening and marshall an appropriate and effective response why

are some solutions that based on the data appear perfectly reasonable not being discussed

and worse forbidden to even mention on certain platforms and so another christmas goes by and you

spent the holiday awkwardly interfacing with your family over choppy zoom calls and congregating in cold cluttered but

appropriately ventilated garages you miss the sumptuous family get-togethers and impromptu visits with

friends and it feels like this thing could go on forever in the midst of these winter doldrums

you spot yet another negative story on the news a group of truckers have assembled and formed a convoy up in ottawa

apparently they're protesting mandatory vaccination requirements at their jobs the mainstream media in general portrays

these activists as alt-right fringe bumpkins who are desecrating statues and flying nazi flags

but you've started to realize that there's always a lot more to this story than what's being shown on the news so

you do some research you watch some interviews with some of the people on the ground in ottawa

you see the canadian flags flying high and proud on parliament hill and the people waving them are smiling friendly

and they look a lot like you through various streaming feeds you watch them singing songs banding together and

basically having what looks like a large friendly barbecue you listen to some of them speak and a

lot of what they're saying resonates with you so much so that they engender some of the your feelings of frustration and

burgeoning mistrust in what the government is doing that you feel like you want might want to join them and maybe even sing along with them

unfortunately you have too many responsibilities to just stop and leave right now but perhaps perhaps there's some other small way you could help

imagine this you're a 77 year old grandmother who lives on your own you've had to downsize your living situation

since your husband of 50 years passed away about a year before the pandemic head the two years of covid has been

merciless although you're relatively healthy yourself you know that your age makes it more likely that you could encounter serious complications should

you be infected with the virus you've had your shots and are very careful about who you interact with

following the advice of the experts at health canada and the advice of your doctor you've kept safe so far and busied

yourself during this ordeal catching up on your reading and rediscovering some long forgotten hobbies

it was all stimulating and maybe even a little exciting at first but two years have passed your

grandchildren are growing at a rapid pace and you're mostly watching it happen through a sterile and vicarious distance

there are zoom calls yes and this last christmas the family even came by to the lobby of your building where you spent

some time chatting and laughing and being together all very responsible all very careful

feeling the touch of family but as if through a cloudy pane of glass it just isn't the same

you want to hug them again and hold them you want to see your grandson's dimples when he smiles and watch his whole face

explode with wonder when opening a christmas present you want to watch your daughter watching them and imagine what she's thinking

fully soaking in the memories and tucking them away for later these things matter now more than ever

when you first heard about ottawa being besieged by truckers you thought to yourself oh great just what we need more

problems more trouble from a selfish group of people who somehow think that they should be an exception to the rule

but as the days went by you noticed more and more stories about this popping up in your facebook feed

some of your friends kids were even there in ottawa they posted videos of themselves online

and you could see them all there having meals together talking laughing they even had bouncy castles for the kids

and the people speaking were passionate and mostly good-natured they just sounded frustrated and sick and tired of

being told what they could and couldn't do by people with whom they had very little in common you wanted to help and be a part of

something that seemed to offer a little hope in these dark times

and imagine this your family had immigrated to canada 20 years ago when you were but allowed

you've watched your parents work themselves to a feverish pitch always doing what they could to provide you and the rest of your siblings with the best

of everything they had big dreams for you in particular and although that pressure occasionally manifested in what you

might describe as dictatorial intensity you knew that they pushed you so hard out of love and out of a desire for your

life to be all the things that theirs wasn't but the truth is you've never felt completely at home here your parents

native culture was so rich and vibrant and when you heard them tell stories from from back home

there was a certain nostalgia that you couldn't help identify with yourself as if it were also your own native culture

what was canada anyway what does it mean to be canadian even though your parents had friends who had grown up here and

spoke fluent english they always seemed more comfortable in their own community around friends of similar background

certainly canada had a robust healthcare system the air was clean relatively speaking the country vast and open and there

weren't wars breaking out in pockets of the population whenever segments of the society disagreed about something

but it seems somehow stale by comparison when you heard all the stories from back home

though your parents would always sing the praises of this country you always felt that once you got your university degree and became established in your

field you might even take everyone back there maybe you'd retain dual citizenship or

something as there was definitely some practical benefits of that but home is where the heart is and your heart just wasn't canadian

as much as you never wanted to burden your parents with these thoughts they could read you like a book as parents often can

and they had readily discerned your misgivings kova didn't help you felt the government was being too

heavy-handed with all the new rules and regulations you and your friends were in an age bracket to which the virus posed

very little threat at least according to the data in the months and then years that you spent sequestered at home away from them

and away from school was having serious deleterious effects on your university years you knew that your dad was of a similar

mindset though he was still working throughout the crisis a lingering and vaguely malignant cloud of doubt seemed to

follow him around he had lost some element of certainty there was a discernible lack of bounce in his step

when he approached you one morning to go on a field trip just you and him you were excited but wondered what it was all about

and when you arrived in ottawa and started interacting with the others there you saw your father's sense of conviction begin to reassert itself

the two of you shared stories with others there shared in the feasts cheered with zealous enthusiasm during some of the speeches

your dad was even interviewed by a couple of people so that he could express what he felt needed to change it was beautiful democracy in action

you were so caught up in the passion of the moment that you and some of the people you met there decided to send some money to the convoy's go fund me

page not much but every little bit counts you wanted to contribute in some material way

you remember standing in the field your father beaming with and passionate at your side surrounded by people who are

all just like you it was the first time you truly felt proud to be in this country maybe this you thought is what being a

canadian really means now what do all these people have in common you may ask

well aside from their passion and their desire to exercise their inherent rights as canadians they're all also at risk of having their

bank accounts frozen and being investigated by csis or the rcmp when the trudeau government invoked the

emergencies act sweeping economic powers came along with it banks were ordered to freeze personal

bank accounts of people who were offering indirect or direct support to the protest

all of this without a warrant without even a court judgment using a piece of legislation designed to

combat terrorism the trudeau government has endowed itself with extraordinary powers

there are only two provisions that warrant the application of this law one to the extent that some national

emergency seriously endangers the lives health or safety of canadians and is of such proportions or nature as

to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it or two

seriously threatens the ability of the government of canada to preserve the sovereignty security and territorial

integrity of canada the government ordered crowdfunding platforms to report suspicious

transactions banks were ordered to freeze accounts and were protected from civil liability for doing so

the contention the contention on the part of the government is that this was necessary to allow the free flow of goods and services to and from the

united states and also to deal with the truckers who were apparently so tenacious as to be unable to be dislodged from the streets

of ottawa without the invoking of this order by cutting off their financing

when isabel jacques an assistant deputy minister at the ministry of finance was asked whether these financial measures

would affect everyday citizens like those mentioned earlier who had donated a small amount she said

based on the knowledge that i have i think it would be unlikely that someone who gave twenty dollars three weeks ago or even twenty dollars post february

15th that they would have been captured by a freeze it's not impossible in view of the order

but in view of the exchange of information and the focused approach that was taken to stop the illegal funding of these activities it would

appear to be unlikely that this occurred but not impossible

now think about what this means even just listen to the phrasing of that response

not only is the government legislatively equating a peaceful protest with a terrorist action but they're saying that

if you want to donate to a cause that you believe in even if that cause is relatively benign by any reasonable measure

that you can have your bank account frozen at the whim of bureaucrats in ottawa setting aside the flagrant civil rights

violations action we also have to think about how this might affect advocacy and charity groups moving forward

wouldn't someone now be more reluctant to give money for a cause that they believe in if they thought that there would be even

a small chance that their bank accounts would be frozen could you not conceive of a situation where you might think twice about

donating money to support a certain political party that might hold views opposite to that of the political party in power

or contributing to a women's rights group where a more conservative government be in power or contributing to black lives matter or

similar groups that represent the rights of some visible minority your rights as a canadian now have a condition attached and that condition

will change with the vicissitudes of the current social climate and depending on which political party is in power

there's something powerful about having inalienable rights carved into stone somewhere and enshrined into law

these first principles should form the backbone of an inviolable legal framework it should be known and expected that

these rights and freedoms are protected that they above all else are what constitute us as a people in any

democratic country it is absolutely imperative that there always remain a clear distinction between the judicial

branch of government and those of the executive that distinction is what instills trust in a people and faith in their nation's

institutions we are a nation of freedoms and also a nation of laws but we what we should

never be is a nation subjected to the whims of the executive branch of government that isn't democracy that's

tyranny and uh

on that note uh welcome to the show my name is jason and i am here as always with dimitri hello everyone

so we are at this point at the point of this

recording this um uh this convoy you know the emergencies act

has been you know revoked and um uh the

convoy has uh dispersed and i i don't know actually i don't think there's still protests going

on i mean we have the mandates lifted so there's a few freedom rallies here and there um on foot mostly and there was a

sorry a what did they call it it came in the news last week a slow rolling trucker

protest where they would drive slowly through cities but not actually stop yeah yeah that was the new straight

motor the newest yeah the newest the creative solution to what's going on yeah right interesting well i did hear that there

were um like it seemed somewhat infectious when it happened uh here in canada and i'm

pretty sure there was similar uh convoys or certainly rallies in the states and elsewhere um following that i

think with the same sort of thinking in mind but it did mostly start here this was the spark that lit the

fire right yeah what an unexpected uh country for it to be in but perhaps that's where it's

supposed to from the most unexpected uh source when you're like okay the canadians have lost their uh cooled over

this now right right yeah like okay this is getting serious guys and what's the temperature in ottawa at that time right

you know like in there oh yeah so it shows you the depth of uh the passion

i guess and this the uneasiness what was going on and how much people were actually willing you know don't forget

the the bridges and uh it's cold enough in a a bridge area right and it's

blowing they're waiting for some trucks to pass by that's some very um it definitely lends some grit to the grits

yeah dedication yeah yeah yeah it's it's with canada doing it first it's like you

know you're confronted with a by a gang or something and the small guy it's a friend of yours starts attacking

them and you're like oh wait a minute like i don't want to be late to this uh this fight so like you know maybe we

should kind of sort of start at the beginning like what you know being so cold outside and everything

certainly most people don't feel like leaving the comfort of their houses to go protest outside but you know there's a lot of things that have happened up to

this moment that created this moment and for me one of the key twists in the plot came around once uh

the middle of summer 2021 when vaccination progress was finally

making uh its way through canada and you started seeing like everybody was getting along up until that point

and it was once the vaccines got out that the uh i would say that's when the division started to the fissure started

in society yeah um yeah but prior to that we were all in this together you know wearing masks and

gloves and everything else nobody seemed to have an issue it was truly the the interjection of the technological

uh solution to the problem that seemed to create the greatest divide

and one of the key moments for me is when the one of the main papers here in toronto the toronto star on august 26

2021 had on their front page you know this wasn't buried somewhere

this is literally in bold letters on the front page of a maybe the most major newspaper in all of

canada and uh what was written was if the unvaccinated person catches it

from someone who is vaccinated boohoo too bad i have no empathy for the

willfully unvaccinated let them die i honestly don't care if they die from

covet not even a little bit unvaccinated patients do not deserve icu beds

was this um quoting somebody no uh i don't know who the person or was it who wrote that but

it's on the front page of the toronto star wow i like the editor and almost like and surprisingly enough

like um the other two articles that you can see that were on the front page as well um in much smaller font because by

far this took up the center part of the the whole front page but the one of the other articles says

simmering divide over who isn't vaccinated and off to the right no jab could mean no job for air canada

employees you know so this whole there's a whole uh coming together of this narrative

with the bold print down the middle and then articles surrounding it to the left flanking it to the left and flanking it

to the right right and uh really trying to guide the narrative in a certain direction and um you know

we've never had speech like this in canada and and the more concerning part wasn't that it was just

canada had gone off the rails of one particular newspaper you're hearing the same sort of stuff out of a lot of western democracies

so even howard stern roughly the same week in the summer time had said uh you

know unvaccinated americans deserve to die at home and should be refused hospital access

and i believe macron of france said something very similar uh so in western democracies we've never

had the governing bodies speak like this in such a divisive way to their own citizens or endorsing it or you know in

this day and age where people get cancelled for one wrong tweet you're literally saying a certain percentage of the population may go die right yeah

it's incredible how normalized that is i mean and with such vehemence you know i hate that word but

i don't know how else to describe it like with such vehemence that they utter these things like um

and howard stern you know i used to listen to him i used to he was so um

if ever you would think there would be a free thinker like it's strange how i don't know if

it's um you get older and your views sort of calcify and you sort of don't um

um you don't have the time for what you would regard as an ulterior opinion um

but uh it is really um speaks a lot to our

to where we are as a society that that is so normalized now oh and why do you think it i mean why would you think like

what is in it for the toronto i don't even know if it is so normalized because um yeah it has become normalized on this

one particular topic right but if you say the wrong thing not to you know dead a beat hor uh beat a dead horse but then

you have someone like don cherry who would simply utter you people you come here to our land of rape and honey

people are coming to our land of milk and honey sorry referencing some music there and um and what not and uh you know

within three days the person is fired without much of a debate and howard stern like don cherry is sort of the shock jock

you're tuning in to hear the alternative point of view right so to your point to have someone like howard stern who's

normally you tune in to have the you know the extra perspective that maybe mass media wouldn't uh present

toe the company line it doesn't really seem natural it doesn't seem natural for howard cern

to speak like this it doesn't seem natural for the toronto star which is a center-left publication here to be uh be so divisive

so and you saw it across the entire world so especially the western world so i don't quite know what it is but it

definitely makes you feel like there was a underlying connection in a way of thought from the top down that was

really against the natural flow of each country but i and this is the thing i always i

know i'm a bit of a broken record with this but this is the thing i always can't wrap my head around is you know i

i would agree that this does seem to be [Music] a narrative like why the toronto star

would have and i don't want to beat them up but it's i mean they sort of beat themselves up but a lot of the major papers do this and a

lot of the major news outlets do this as well uh where they just stick to the narrative and they just have the same

this hypocrisy again about um how they're talking about one side of the issue and then when the the alternate

side comes around they take a different stance and it just becomes this um

uh you really wonder what what the motive is you know are they are they being told

i mean forget about the you know if we could even talk about these organizations in the aggregate like forget about like the individual

reporters you can assume that it's sort of um disseminating down from the top of the organization but why is why does an

organization like the toronto star i think they're i can't remember i think they're owned by thompson corporation or something but like i don't know if it

goes that high or if it's sort of they run independently from that but you know what is that what is it just that they

want people vaccinated is it is is it as simple as they think that they're doing their part in getting some message out that is going to benefit i have a hard

time even believing that i think there must be something um some sort of a mysterious pressure that is creating

these sorts of headlines because you know you just literally wrote on the front page let them die about people and

at this point in summer 2021 israel had already finished their round of vaccinations most people had been

double vaxxed by march 2021 and by summer 2021 they were already talking in

israel about a third dose because the rates of infection and transmission were skyrocketing so there was enough

scientific data at the time to say wait a sec the vaccines seem to be really helping against hospitalization but not

so much against infection and transmission and the whole point of this headline is basically we need to

separate you people because you're going to get sick and you're going to spread it to other people and that's a terrible thing so there's enough science at this

point that a major publication should be ahead of the science and on top of the science and they weren't

so you're right so when you when you start following uh a storyline rather than the emerging

data it becomes a narrative and what is the point of the narrative what is the purpose of the narrative i

can't really tell you but it was definitely coordinated in terms of attack across all western

nations yeah because i the default you know you go to the occam's razor

kind of principle and the default thinking would be well it's just because they want more clicks they want to sell

more advertising and but does that doesn't necessarily make sense like i guess it does in the sense that it's a

shocking thing to put on the on the front page but you know it's not like they're going back and forth it's not

like they're trying to i would think a good way to get clicks would be to have two opposing sides

within the paper so you're you're doubling you know reinforcing people's beliefs and

doubling that or even just having some contentiousness between them but it's like they're

putting out a um pamphlet that says this is what you need to believe for the like a manifesto like

a shiny pdf of the features and benefits and that would be the positive and then the uh so yeah to your point they don't

have two sides of the opposing opinions they simply have here's the positive reinforcement if you do this you'll get

all these wonderful things and if you don't do it that would be the opposite point you can just go and die

and that to them in their headspace is something like two opposing uh forces that make it more well balanced

but yeah the data wasn't there for that that was very suspicious to me and i think it really irked a lot of

people globally not many people want to say that out loud but um it's just unprecedented right

when when was this headline when did this headline happen august 20 august 26 2021

okay so we're getting into the weeds then why would a whole trucker convoy start oh it's like january january but i

believe as we started this point here like this is some of the underlying where the fissures first started to

crash right and if i can just read i just take a second here one of the comments i pulled out from that article

online is um i want to read it out because it represents how the typical person was feeling in canada

and um if you just bear with me it'll take me like 30 seconds but i think it'll will really highlight um

yeah just the general um consensus of opinion around this and i just want to also point out why

scientists knew this was wrong but why they didn't actually uh why didn't they follow the data so the

comment goes like this a little context here for the americans in ontario the

province were toronto lies of the people eligible to be vaccinated 83 percent

have received one shot 76 percent have gotten both why is this important because in the

province's hospital's icus 79.9 of covet patients are unvaccinated

they typically are over 60 percent of daily new cases all of this despite being less than 17

percent of the population and this is with the delta variant being the main culprit in the driving new

infections the toronto star was quite crude and contemptuous of basic humanity with that

front page but they're not wrong that the unvaccinated are the reason why kovac continues to be a substantial

issue in the city and province so that would be you know how the average um uh

news report on television on print uh when you communicate with people the whole pandemic of the unvaccinated yeah

what they failed to mention though in these stats sorry that was that that was a comment uh about the from the article like um

you know on the online version right when you're scaling through you can get some you know nice uh generalized sort

of feedback from people right and i thought yes this is i've heard this this this argument

a thousand times by now the issue that nobody seems to talk about is that when they run these

numbers they're using a cumulative uh metric so they're starting from january first to the beginning of the year

january 1st 2021 through to basically september 1st 2021. so since most of

canada was not vaccinated yet of course the majority of things are going to come skewed towards unvaccinated because most

of canada was unvaccinated up until six weeks prior to this article i see right

so you needed to start the data collection from the day that most of the people had been doubly vaccinated if

this is the point and as that data played through coming through now to december and january when the trucker

freedom convoy kicked off that data really changed it really started showing

uh arguable benefit of vaccinations and whatnot so even here you can see why there might be

a narrative forming around a certain way of thought why it's a pandemic of the unvaccinated but it's based on a

statistical misrepresentation of taking an accumulative effect from january 1st

when almost everybody was unvaccinated and counting those unvaccinated people as cases

with everybody else until september 2021. yeah like that seems like an agenda you know to to misrepresent

something like that like they must well you could think that um the toronto star the people writing this report

maybe they just got the numbers from somewhere else and they're like well this seems pretty convincing so and they

take that and then throw some you know um vehement rhetoric and i said that

word twice and i hate it so much um you but then

someone somewhere along the line was saying these are the stats we want you to have

and they would know when they pulled them that this was misrepresenting well you could say they

were doing like the noble lie in order to just encourage people because the way out of the pandemic is through

vaccination and you know what not um fair enough but i would also argue at

this point in time when we have a a higher level of education globally than we've ever experienced

and access to tons of data just from your telephone or your laptop that the era of

the noble lie has to end because it's creating too much room for

misinformation or just this this belief in our structures that we've always really had a lot of belief in i think

it's time for like absolute transparency and just let the chips where they fall where they may so this may be a way of presenting data

that is just simply outdated for the more astute person in 2021 2022 and certainly

a lot of people had time to do research because half the world was uh unemployed and at home collecting a government

assistance so it just doesn't play well and doesn't age well and the damage from that will

unfortunately i think will create a greater amount of anti-vaxxers that ever existed because they're just simply not going to believe in the uh

the authorities like they used to yeah so it's a good so it's just it's a terrible thing you know and it was

pretty easy to sess out and um you know you can forgive it for a week or ten days but at some point um

you need to move forward and the unfortunate part was after this then qr codes generally started rolling out in

the fall of 2021 and so i think all this really led to the momentum of what brought out three four months later the

freedom convoy yeah yeah just this enough is enough and uh yeah because

it's often billed as the original i think catalyst for it was the

mandate on truckers to have to be vaccinated because whether they could cross the border or come it

was like come back into canada i guess which i would have thought they had to have been anyways you know you never had a dog in a race for this one you

crossing an international border yeah right and as far as i know that's how that whole thing sort of started but it

really obviously evolved into something uh greater and something about more

about more than just one specific mandate or even just mandates in general but more i think it was

sort of a a rebellion against the

the way that the government had been treating the people uh during this last uh year and a half

yeah it's we we experienced division in our society that we've never had before and you know it started with the

divisive language around vaccination and it continued the visit the divisiveness

with the qr codes you know and which had no scientific basis whatsoever since everybody can

roughly spread it and get infected at the same rates or a marginal benefit for

six to ten weeks is that really the standard that we need in order to create a segregated society and when will it be

ending because if israel is on the third shot at that point and most people can then look forward ahead if it's waning

what will the fourth shot do what will a fifth shot do so i think you found a lot of that frustration just percolating up until

the whole uh christmas time or so right right i'll just say one more thing on this uh

uh you know by january 2022 like many countries were signaling the end of mandates at the time canada was increasing their

mandates you know so we had countries at that time norway sweden finland netherlands

the uk who were all basically just on a snap dropping coveted mandates and then we

decided roughly at the same month january 2022 no we're going to actually increase our

mandates on a very small number of uh because they said 90 of truckers are roughly vaccinated so you're going to

actually create a mandate for the last 10 percent that's going to change it when all of a sudden the rest of the world is getting rid of mandates right

just you're actually moving the opposite direction of the natural flow of the pandemic and how the world was was

responding to it so then you have to question yourself you're going to be continuously moving in the opposite direction are you moving in that

opposite direction because of data or because of an agenda and and furthermore um

there was also i this is a pretty big point like in early january uh 2022 a

video surfaced of our prime minister in canada justin traveau justin trudeau on french canadian television in french

saying that the unvaccinated are racists misogynistic and why do we tolerate them

yeah i and i remember hearing that and it's incredible how first of all well

let's get to the bottom of this maybe maybe uh you know um

there's been a lot of talk about whether this convoy was um organized by white supremacists you would always hear that

in conjunction with um with the um talking about this convoy and i mean

first as far as i'm concerned that the question doesn't even matter like it's the movement became so big that how

it started and even even even if there was some um uh

notion of that at the very beginning and i i certainly don't know that there was um it became much more than that like i

mean going hearing the people in ottawa talking like i didn't see any people who were talking about race at all and um you

know i didn't see any nazi flags or like so i mean but even taking that out i'm

curious how much validity there is because i really don't believe um you know i think that first of all if you

look at anybody's past there's always going to be something so like it's it's trivially easy for

a news organization or anybody who does a little bit of research to find something to besmirch somebody in the

past i don't know enough about the organizers to you know say you know they're misrepresented or not but like i would

agree with you jason and i i would say most canadians um didn't really care because the movement grew to something

to represent uh something much much larger i mean the whole world started having trekking

trucker rallies so whether the the three or four leaders had some um dubious background or whatnot

when it reaches a certain critical mass they represent such a small part of that energy and and just in furthermore like

if you're going to go something center right or right wing you're inevitably going to find a few people a

small percentage of supporters on the right who are going to be extremists yeah

who will be uh white supremacists or nazis or whatever you want to call it neo-liberals but conversely if you want

to have the same scrutiny if you're going to go left of center and in canada that would be like the ndp that's where

you're going to find your communists so when you get to either side you're going to find the fringe elements to a certain

degree hopefully a very small minority but that's where they're going to be residing you it's easy to pluck somebody

out of a group and you know if they're in any way affiliate with it uh find the worst things about them and you know

broadcast that as if it's to represent the group as a whole and i mean that's just not true in any case um

i would agree but um just just to bring it back to the divisiveness before because i think that really played um

played into what what energized this freedom convoy i mean on january 24th

2022 uh you know france's strict vaccine passport and mass mandates had done

absolutely nothing to stop the spread of the virus with the country hitting a record of 464 000 cases in a single day

so when this data starts coming out and saying well you got to keep wearing a mask you must have segregation in society because it's for your health

benefits but the data is coming through going if 400 000 cases in a single day is considered benefit um what would

happen if we didn't have them five hundred thousand five hundred fifty thousand what kind of damage are we doing to society in a greater

point of view exactly um and so so all this i think it was just energizing people and not to

mention we had the omicron variant come out around christmas time and i for one never thought it was going to be a

regular christmas because i could see the numbers going up with the delta variant almost on par

with an unvaccinated population with the alpha variant in christmas 2020. so at

this point i'm like christmas is done like i don't think we're going to be able to have a normal christmas um because

you know if my business got shut down when there was 700 cases in ontario in 2020 and we're at 900 cases today we're

moving up we're going in the same general direction um so so i i think the frustration came

when people who thought after being doubly vaxxed and they were going to be able to have a normal christmas and this

is where hits more of mass acceptance of the freedom convoy realized they too couldn't have a normal christmas anymore

the the all the ingredients were there for something to erupt you know christmas is a very time to be

with family you've done you've done your part you've taken your shot and you still don't get a christmas right right

right yeah it's like working hard in the field fields all day and um you're really looking forward to that cold beer

when you get in and they're like we're out of beer you have to go like i said you have your prime minister calling people um misogynistic and racist and uh

you got qr codes and why do we tolerate them and um this is not this is not the

way most canadians envision their country right and it has all the elements of

of causing unrest and people thinking twice about what they're doing and being like okay

like it's it's january 2022 now and this doesn't come down to whether you have in general liberal beliefs or uh

conservative beliefs or new democratic party beliefs this is simply like really felt like it was coming down as a

narrative from the leadership almost on a personal individual basis very vindictive the tone was not uh

trying to unify the country or create peace it was really trying to drive a wedge yeah

and there's only so far you can push people with that and if it's minus 30 so be it it's minus 30 because there's

greater things at stake um it's um i think it's remarkable how many

people you know you mentioned political affiliation or whether you're liberal or conservative

and i would say republican or democrat i really don't think those terms mean as much

with this issue i i really do like it's surprising how many people would describe themselves as uh liberal that

are saying yeah i'm liberal but this is it's not about that like it's uh it's

about all three parties major parties in canada should agree on the charter of rights and freedoms right you know so

why does this have to be a partisan it's probably one of the most unifying topics we could ever possibly have right so

then when the protests did start and you know how the media was portraying it

basically just mimicking the words of the prime minister like you said a fringe movement

nazi flags initially the cpc was saying it was a truck small truck a rally to

protest road conditions in bc this is this was printed yeah i think

that was a separate a separate thing though it was a separate thing and that's where they get a little bit tricky but they knew damn well that the

trucker rally that was being referenced was not about that they were just simply using that one to like kind of like uh bait and switch you

over and then hopefully the other one would just slow down or not make its way in the middle of winter right across one

of the largest countries second largest country in the world all the way to ottawa so anything to kind of diffuse the

situation and take maybe a little bit of a wind out of their sails right you know so i want to um

i think as it's been for several years now probably about a decade um

more and more i've been noticing and i think a lot of people have been noticing the media um being

uh i almost want to call it like a monoculture or something they have their say they have their they have their

stories and they sort of stick to it and it doesn't really feel like the news anymore you'll get some sort of big

stories that they'll be covering like you know wars or insurrections and such but there's always a ben there's always

a narrative to it and it's always um um you never feel like you're getting the

full story so when i saw uh this trucker convoy when i one of the

first [Music] i happen to be watching cbc at the time and it's not something that i generally

watch i used to listen to cvc radio and watch cbc a while ago in my younger days and i miss those days

but i feel it's quite biased now but um i was watching it i was at my mom's

house and they um had um

there was a story or this is the story about the the that woman who was purportedly dancing

on the tomb of the unknown soldier and i watched i watched the feed and

the way that they were describing it was uh the the pith of it was um these

uh rowdy narudo wells are out here um

you know dancing on the just being disrespectful to the tomb of the unknown soldier and flying nazi flags just

sounded um like a bunch of uh hooligans really and

um sort of disrespectful hooligans and i my distrust is so high now in the

mainstream media that i was like okay well i don't necessarily believe that and so i went online to to find the

actual video that they were referencing in the in the story and it showed um this woman just giving a speech and

there wasn't there was no dancing that i could see and it's certainly any kind of um

motion that was being displayed here was a um there was nothing disrespectful

about it it was very kind of um i think a spirited speech from what i even recall of it but there was no there

was nothing that the implication from the news story was that these people are hooligans and they're being

disrespectful and you you certainly don't these are the bad guys like can i ask you a question yeah

why do you think the media took her dancing and gave it that slant

it's a good question i i really just sort of came to me now as i was listening to you

and um by by desecrating something like a monument

uh parliament hill tomb of unknown soldier

shows that you have very little they're trying to portray that these people have very little respect

for the institutions of canada right low character low character but the respect

for the institutions so therefore you know you're setting up this argument subconsciously in the viewer's mind

where on one side of the spectrum you have these protesters who are disrespecting

the institutions and on the other side of the sp of the arguments you have the mandates which are

almost by by creating this sort of dichotomy between the two you're going to make the mandates of the pro-canadian

thing to do because you're doing it for your neighbor right these mandates are the way to end restrictions sort of

thing yeah uh juxtaposed against the desecration of things that are all things that are canadian and again

they're making it so simple and binary to make your decision to go into the direction of well i'm going to trust

the prime minister science the mandates i'm going in this direction not the

direction of desecration of states it really is religious like isn't it like it really has that us or them like

you're you're holy or and virtuous or you're a heathen and you'll be burning in so i think you

we will find as we're talking through this that you're going to see many times they're basically saying

you're in plato's cave these are the shadows we're representing and these represent the the good virtuous citizen

and my god if you look the other way you're going to not want to look the other way but if you do you're going to be the disavowed citizen that has been

you know uh exiled right from community right yeah and so i think actions like

this are playing into the underlying narrative uh to just create mass

formation around one singular idea yeah yeah it's incredible and i really don't know i mean you can still or i would

still guess as to the motivation behind all of this other than it being as simple as you know cpc's funded by the

government and the government wants them to do acts but it it stretches beyond just

publicly funded television channels so um

you know i don't want to go down a whole rabbit hole here because i this is always my thing it's like well who are these cobble of people that are

malevolently plotting the destruction of the world as we know it um but um

there it does it does seem that way it does seem like there's a purpose behind it but simple to you know just on a more

simple level the cbc could not survive without government subsidies

so if they wish to keep any part of their business going they simply have to do whatever the government asks of them

did you know during this time that it came out that um the government here in canada was paying social media

influencers uh money to go into their tick tock and

instagram and everything else and do uh promotional videos for the government's

narrative that's one thing unto itself but when you go to those sources social media

you're assuming it's more authentic right and therefore when you go there and then you're getting actually watching what is

presumed to be more authentic but they're actually paid for um it really shows the level to which the government is willing to

hide the amount of money they're willing to spend in order to push a narrative yeah yeah that's uh yeah

so it may be as simple as just survival of the institution itself and as you trickle down

quite a few canadian media enterprises get subsidies but as you dwindle away as the numbers get

smaller and smaller you'll find occasionally little pieces of truth popping up in those articles first from

those publications sooner than you will find from the cpc yeah interesting

it seems to be directly related to the amount of money you get to how much you actually follow the mandates of the

federal government and if you get lesser money you'll break away a little sooner right so there could be a very simple

direct tie financially to all this and it's no deeper than that it could be a darker more global thing um probably is

but that would be from the government i think moving outwards we have to have a show to explore that because i

it well first of all i'm fascinated by that kind of uh that whole conspiracy theory like the

whole idea that there's some global um you know maybe there's like a lex luthor on top of it all or something but

we need to explore well we need to explore it because it's i am sure people would hear like little clips of that and it's like well that's crazy and it does

sound crazy but you know we need to explore that more we need to

flush that out because i'm curious even um like all this stuff sort of comes from

somewhere right this purpose comes from from somewhere and is for sure but i almost the franchising of ideas

so just like you were to take hellenism everywhere and some people call alexander what he did alexander the

great taking hellenism was the first like sort of global franchise because he was exporting a culture across different

nations and that that had to change the culture where they were going to in order to have the people buy into it in

a modern sense that'd be like mcdonald's opening in russia or opening in india but not using beef in their products

so when it comes to these global conspiracies at a higher level i think when you get into the world economic

forum young global leaders that are part of the world economic forum they are

going to the head bases learning the new ways of thinking and then disseminating them across the planet

like a franchise would disseminate a certain philosophy and that's when you get phrases that come back like after each

davos get together where all of a sudden each prime minister across the western world is saying build back better it's

like well this is the motto for this year we need to all promote this idea now yeah so you really could in a sense

control a lot of nations quote like relatively easily if you can have

the leadership of set nations all in one sort of group think yeah yeah and then

just trickles down from there did you ever play civilization yes yes yeah it's uh it just reminds me of

the uh how you'd have the religious you know if you wanted to get the religious victory this is i think civ 4 and on um

and uh and then you had the corporate like you could for financial reasons you could spread your corporate people and

it was sort of the same thing like you send them into another culture and they would uh propagate they're no different

than the catholic religion or any religion you know setting up churches across europe and then having the uh the

monks be basically the internet of their day the educated class traveling back and forth who were literate and had the

book and were able to spread but for religion it's like you think that

and who knows the motivations of the catholic religion doing that maybe it was uh financial or maybe it was just

they wanted to spread the word of god like legitimately uh when you know when it all started out or maybe even now who

knows um but what is the point of wanting to export for example wokism or like what is or

build back better what is the overarching like assuming there were some um

group of people that were organizing in some way to do this well each of these philosophies are going to

you know have a certain benefit build back better is basically just i

think cueing up people to understand that the new normal won't be the same as the old normal but

it will be better at least that's how it's sold to us and i'm sure when the leaderships from

different nations meet that's the sort of what they'll be hearing in the auditorium there and why we need to do

such a thing not to divert too far but you know if the world is going to um

you know a lot of people say we're heading towards economic hardships

shortages of food there's going to be a lot of unrest and in order to curtail that unrest

they're going to have to build more stringent systems which would mean less freedoms

it could be regarding bills on internet speech digital ideas what not um perhaps

it's not a bad idea perhaps you know in order to avoid protests like in ottawa they need to have stronger um

because what if what if people like what if a lot of trucks did show up what if there were bombs in the trucks things could have went wrong very very quickly

and then you would be begging for some sort of mechanism to prevent that from happening in the future um but i guess

freedom doesn't come without its dangers yeah yeah i don't think you can govern based on i mean then you're just in

minority report like you can't govern based on what might happen um

i guess i guess i just don't understand what the zealotry would be like why you know with

the wanting to spread the religion i understand religious zealotry because it's like well you're talking about saving your souls and saving the planet

i think they truly think they're doing the right thing you know perhaps in their minds and i'm

just just kind of going off here freedom isn't actually an obstacle to efficiency and the planet needs to

become more efficient if we're going to have seven eight nine ten billion people on it but do you think these guys are

you know do you think they think this far ahead i mean i i just i don't think they're particularly true and i just

don't see him very um prescient uh i i do think they think you know a

couple decades ahead yeah you're talking more like the soros level yeah people sorrows

schwab um for sure um yeah when you get into the these uh you know

group think uh yeah yeah there's stuff going on and they're trying to you know you know

and of course they're going to want to make money out of this too as the world changes so there's financial incentive on their point of view as well

um but it doesn't mean it's the right way and it doesn't mean it's actually better for the individual human on earth

so these are these are things that you know if they think they're better at least let's have an open debate about it

and talk about it yeah but further to this um convoy now as where

as what happened and how the media portrayed it as the convoy arrived in ottawa

what were they met with because i think the style in which they were met the steps that happened to them are very

potentially similar to what we may be seeing in the world moving forward so the leadership of the country

through direct conversation and through the media arms available in the country did

everything they could to call them fringe unacceptable views and just sort of

alienate them from the from the uh mindset of uh

what it means to be a good citizen and then the leadership refused to meet with them

right it's almost like having uh that you just all of a sudden the algorithm kicks you out

you know you have unacceptable views until you change your views we are not dealing with you

when in history have you ever seen a protest take place in which especially in a process that was overwhelmingly so

peaceful um not then the uh have a negotiations from either side

right what is the mechanism behind the scenes did not allow for negotiations because to be

quite frank and we'll get into this in a bit everything the truckers were asking for happened within 35 to 40 days afterwards

if the graphs and the numbers were going in such a way as they're always doing their modeling couldn't they have sat

down with the leadership of the convoy said guys you can actually chill out what you're asking for should be here by

spring we understand the frustration but we got your back we're all going to get through this together

i have a hard time thinking they would have continued in -38 and threatening uh fines if they were told those things yet

those are the very things that came true yeah but i don't i think obvi you know it's very political right like no

political leader because then that's just losing face i they couldn't the trudeau government

couldn't sit down and say like i mean they they could have sat down with them and they should have they uh

overwhelmingly should have um but for them to sit down and then sort of basically capitulate to their demands

like they they could say well we were going to do it anyway but is is his voter base going to believe him

or are they just going to think oh he just capitulates it's just that makes it makes overall like no sense to me whatsoever because as we were saying

earlier january of 2022 so many serious industrialized western

nations were already moving forward yeah so all the prime minister had to say is we're being a little extra cautious but

that is definitely the direction we should be there soon right you know that is how we see this playing out and

instead what we were hearing through media sources at that time like kathleen wynne i remember hearing on the radio one day saying well why

shouldn't we mandate a third shot don't you want an extra layer of protection who wouldn't want an extra layer of

protection this is the stuff people are hearing on the radio as they're driving home yeah right and

flies completely in the face of the scientific data in terms of making it mandatory and flies in the face of what

western europe was doing so so the the concerns of the the truckers and those who believed in

ending the mandates were very scientifically valid so i don't see why the government would feel

like they were losing face to your point unless they had another they had no intention of ever letting go

right because if they had an intention of letting go then they are both going to the same destination at slightly

different paces and that's fine science is an open-ended thing but if you have no intention of going there then you're

what you're going to do is not engage you're not going to negotiate because you're going to look like you've lost your your directive of course omicron

came and kind of blew that all up because we can see it's it's doing a better job of vaccinating the

world than the actual vaccines did but okay here we are

yeah i mean i i find it i would think it would be a stretch to think that trudeau's government would be

able to withstand the pressures of seeing all the other nations i mean i don't know how long the plan

was to sort of keep keep things locked down to your point maybe it just aren't that

smart because they really were so in their little bubble of groupthink they thought they could keep this going and

we're simply just as we can see we're ignoring the data as it's coming along right like i could see this coming from

summer 2021 and here we are in january 2022 with other western nations moving

forward and our government was still not admitting the data was going in a different direction yeah so perhaps

they're not that smart perhaps the agenda meant more perhaps a narrative was simply overriding any sort of statistical analysis that was coming out

at any point i don't think we would be in this position here in canada if it were not for the protests the government

will never admit that but but if you go back to the way the government

was talking even in mid-february which is just a month and a half ago at most

nothing that they were saying out loud then is the way we're living now yeah interesting

um and just to just continue on this like as they as they entered um you know the first

week and how the media portrayed the entire situation you know the government had hired bernie farber and he was

actively distributing false information he was saying on his twitter feed here are nazi flyers that are now being

posted around the city of ottawa which were then later proven to be not true and they were actual flyers from miami

florida and then uh at a anti-semitic rally that was happening there these are

intelligent people these are people that are now hired by the liberal government liberal government

and uh they had no issue of posting that and i haven't seen any retractions or even any news stories regarding this

yeah that's incredible yeah i the the amount of disinformation that's spread from

um mainstream media is incredible um so yeah we had the the tomb of the

unknown soldier the nazi flags like um that's what he was saying like it's just such a stark contrast to when you

actually like watch these feeds and you watch what these people are saying and yes like some of them are a little rough around the edges or you know the um

uh but you know there's nothing wrong with that like it and it i never heard anybody saying um i think there was one video i saw

with somebody because they were just as perplexed by all the media calling everybody nazis

and they said is there any nazis here and one person was like yeah i'm a nazi and i think that that was something that

that um on youtube sort of got a lot of traction because it was like yeah see there's nazis here but it's like okay

first of all there's always going to be somebody the guy could have been joking the guy could have been a nazi like i don't know they do exist but it's um you

can't define the whole movement on one thing i mean you would never have any movements nor did they show the uh one fully masked

person walking around the confederate flag you know first of all i don't even know if the majority of

canadians understand what the confederate flag is it has a completely different context here in canada compared to america it's a different

country a different flag what does it mean in canada well i think people don't understand its association

with the south and right right right okay like just think of uh tv shows that had confederated yeah growing up right that's a cool car

right yeah it's a flag you know yeah stars red white you know um and blue

um but the actual the people the protesters that were there were heckling the person with the

confederate flag to leave right yeah you know like why wasn't that portrayed

more and said they our own prime minister is saying there's nazi symbols there's confederate flags

and even to the nazi symbol on the flag somewhere and i still it's very hard to figure out who these people were it was

never resolved which again in itself is suspicious um some people say that nazi flag was there to say the canadian

government was acting like nazis not supporting nazis now i don't know if that's true or not but in this day and

age i don't know how you don't track down someone to try to like figure that out and if even if they were

take it in a negative context they were by far the minority there right yeah and and

yeah like you said like if the situation was reversed and there were actually people um with nazi flags do you think that the

cbc wouldn't send a reporter in to get a few words you know like so

we're just getting it's very hard to tell in this day and age with all the different sources of media telling you that

um this thing is about this and then the other media says no it's actually about that

and how do you sort of sift through all the um the chaff and i think it's

um you have to it's almost like you have to put the puzzle together yourself and you like

you get the sort of the media sources you trust you make sure you sort of vet it but you also kind of put things

together where it's like well if if somebody had a story and it was a it's a pretty sensational story saying like no

there's neo-nazis at this they're they're forming the backbone of this convoy and if that's

true then you should be able to get a you should be able to get evidence of that and show it on your on your show

and it should be pretty much incontrovertible you know well that brings me to our next point like what actually happened when the

freedom convoy arrived and it was pretty evident quite early how diverse the crowd was you saw men and women

uh you saw indigenous people you saw people of color you saw turbans you saw

people of baby carriages it was quite a joyous arrival despite the honking and

the unfortunate uh you know confusion it would create for people living down down down in the center of ottawa there

near parliament hill so yeah i think what you what we witnessed at that point was just canada's long

you know very gracious long fuse of patients had just worn out and it was universal

it may have taken to your point the burley truck driver who doesn't have the

higher order language skills in order to articulate what they sense is wrong with the country but that kind of person

those trades people who are crisscrossing the country have developed a certain amount of instinct a certain

amount of intuition that things are going in the wrong direction and

people i think instinctively felt that yeah you know and so the media the fact that they were going completely in the

opposite direction of this pain that the freedom convoy was physically representing by their presence in ottawa

and instead of understanding the pain that a certain percentage of the society has been through would only condemn them

slander them tell blatant lies about them uh has left a scar on my personal

uh trust in government and media that i don't think can ever be healed

yeah i literally saw them take the weakest elements of society and stamp their foot on them

and it really makes me feel a lot more uh understanding of what have happened to

people of color and indigenous people in canada when it becomes a power structure versus a powerless people

right so you can pick them whether it's a race or politics or vaccination but when it's

power versus the powerless that power is absolutely frightening and that's why we

have things like the charter of rights and freedoms you know the bill of rights in america to limit the amount of powers

because they knew that this can go completely the wrong way right but we're living this day and age now where

power from the top down is to be celebrated and the and the uh

the strength of individual um character and desire and rights

almost it gets played off in the you must be a greedy non-team player type citizen yeah which is completely flight

when you look at your charter of rights and freedoms they are not your familiar rights they're not your provincial rights they're not your federal rights

they are your god-given individual rights right and we don't hear people talk about your individual rights in

such a joyous tone anymore yeah that's true that's true it used to be really something to

be proud of like freedom of speech used to be um you know people would speak about how

america the americas had had these like beautiful ideals and freedom of speech

and isn't it great anybody can you know you don't have that everywhere in the world but uh now it's not such a

it's not like you said it's not so celebrated well what is the expression i'm paraphrasing but people used to give

up their lives for freedom and now people are giving up their freedom for their lives

you know and i freedom is dirty it's messy it has its costs for sure but it

has proven itself over the last 100 years to create the most um tolerant and prosperous nations the

world has ever seen is it perfect absolutely not but the direction we're going in lately

is uh freedom has been tainted and is no longer the virtuous word it once was and

therefore its meaning has been tainted yeah um i'm reading this really great book uh called war by gwyn

dyer right now and he is it basically covers the history of war and uh it starts with like hunter-gatherers and um

it talks about how uh those societies were so much more individualistic and then when you got

into um the greek times and roman times how um you know you'd have your they they sort

of got more into having those phalanxes and having like a sort of structure where they'd all band

together and it was more about the group as opposed to the individual and the way the author talks about it is

comparing it to um sort of turning into like an ant hill like acting more like an ant like ants

would act and that kind of changed in the middle ages you had knights who were like fighting for glory and it was

individual glory and you know samurais in japan for sure like um uh

their honor was always at stake and then when gunpowder came along it became more that group think again because it's

like and the reason was simple is just like it takes a lot of training to get really good with a sword or to ride a horse and like simultaneously

uh use your sword and joust or whatever but um anybody can learn to shoot a gun

right like i never i never understood when they would line up on the fields of napoleon and just all shoot guns at one another

climb a tree do something yeah yeah yeah it's actually a great book and it talks about how they um you know the

reloading time of the muskets and how uh how the strategies changed and everything but

my point is that it sort of seems like we're almost it's like we're sort of lagging that war you know the military

always seems to be ahead of the rest of society in terms of technological innovation so like you get um maybe

we're now becoming that ant hill think uh where that's uh becoming more important than

individual rights and it's more about the the team or the clan yep the pendulum has swung and it

doesn't seem to be stopping at the moment the the scary part is when it swings back how fast and hard will it swing back the other way yeah you know

obviously the truth is in the middle somewhere but yeah you you can even see it down to like um

like something like a very canadian like a hockey game it used to be like gila fleur you know no helmet and the wind

blowing in the hair and this maurice richard smoking a cigarette as these yeah yeah and now and now when you watch the

game played you don't actually don't see too many times a person step up and win the game on their own

well yeah it's it's a lot less it's become so formatted so algorithmic so statistical right that

there is very little room in that mechanism to be the rogue individual right i blame billy bean

i blame billy bean wasn't he the guy who uh where he did um he had the the statistical way of analyzing players so

he and he kind of just revolutionized he was for the i think the oakland a's okay yeah moneyball yeah yeah and uh yeah anyway

you just sort of changed the way the game was played in a lot of ways where the statistics became more um

prominent as opposed to um i don't know what they were using before like as opposed to just like that guy's

got a good arm yeah um he'll he'll find it obviously you need both but um it and it may be something that

came out of trump uh the era that the um the word freedom has become tainted and

freedom yeah it does sort of do you make a strong society by creating

fair laws and then through this sort of uh equity then everybody has a good individual life or do you make a creator

of society by making laws that uh empower the single individuals and then

collectively when you have a lot of individuals who are living their best lives you have a greater whole i i think

it's a debate as old as time i think somewhere in between the two but you know looking historically back in

north america i would i would think it was more well young man you're on your own and you're free

go forth and you know reap what you sow but you're on your own and that's about it

and um today i think you'll see a lot more like

i could even say from my parents who are immigrants they never thought twice when they arrived here what can the

government give me other than just my opportunity right now i think that attitude's a little different you have

pretty substantial baby bonus checks and whatnot and different mechanisms to help

you integrate into the country more quickly uh i'm not quite sure it actually makes for a better country and

a better level of integration to be honest at the very least you have to be able to

talk about these things and figure out what is the better like i feel like if you even brought that kind of thing up and be like oh what you don't like the

you don't like immigration like you know what i mean what are you racist yeah it's quite it's quite it's quite bizarre

because then we go in the other direction and you of course you have different pronouns for everybody which is completely an individual thing right

62 different genders that's true yeah yeah you're amplifying the individual at the same time as uh

um yeah i guess that kind of contradicts the whole and ant uh theory it's really confusing yeah so

just moving moving forward you know that first weekend in ottawa was uh i i don't think anybody quite

expected including the authorities in ottawa uh the amount of

joy uh it was almost like everybody had been living a repressed and secluded life for

over two years and just simply being outside and being able to dance to bob marley with a coffee in your hand

without a mask on and just enjoy even minus 38 in the middle of winter in the middle of

dead of winter to feel that much warmth from social contact was long overdue

and i don't think the government here was ready for that and as we rolled through that first

weekend and they thought people were going to now leave ottawa the sunday of the first weekend

they didn't leave and i could have predicted that you don't travel from halfway across the country to simply spend 48 hours right

how talking about is the government smart or not how could they have misread the situation to such a degree

they could have very easily roped off downtown ottawa not even let the trunks say well i think to some to give them a little bit of um benefit of the doubt

like i i think there's something to the idea that look we're in a democracy these people want to protest let's give them their you know hour their 48 hours

in the sun and then they'll be on their way um yeah i don't think anybody ever expected it to continue to

sustain itself for so long they were serious the pain was real right fissures

in the country were deep and perhaps irreparable and for the government to

not understand a substantial amount of the population was feeling like that only indicates to me that they had no

idea like yes the under normal circumstances come have your protest we are a free country 48 hours by by

what terrifies governments is when protests actually last a long time and may actually bring down a government

when it gets mass acceptance the last thing a protest really wants is any violence because that's when the police

can come in and do whatever they want to stop the violence the fact that it was so peaceful

so diverse was the moment it began to actually scare the government and they had misread the play completely which

brings me to the monday right after because i'm just going to say it's almost like the it's almost like they're so used to

virtue signaling and this is like you know you get some protest about something that's like oh this is this

will burn itself out like this is just people just want their picture on instagram and it's like oh well no like

you said like this is real this is a real thing for people um it was a good way it was a good way to put it like i i

think that that i i think that they didn't expect it to be so mean so much to people

because the people that are making these laws are living a life of privilege the laptop class and

don't understand what has happened you know when you're told you can't go into a restaurant because you're

considered unclean dirty when the stats are actually going in a different direction and that you

know in in new york state a huge percentage of young black youth were not vaccinated so now for the better part of

a year or so down there they weren't able that very formative years group to be able to go into restaurants what kind

of damage does that have when the privileged laptop class is inside the restaurant and let's say that class

especially in america is mostly white and the poor black kid has to be outside the restaurant you're creating like

long-term fissures once again inside on a racial in this case because then a huge number of and for historical

reasons black people were not vaccinated in america that are so deep and the government just

didn't care right they didn't care in the least so that monday a very interesting poll came out the monday after the first weekend

here in ottawa an angus read poll that said the majority of canadians this is

the first time 54 percent now say it's time to end the covet restrictions and

leave responsibility for isolation to those at risk and this was up from 40

up to 54 the 40 was the last time they'd done the poll in early july so the mood had

switched that much in just three weeks wow from that day for and this was

universal across uh i said early july early january sorry earlier yeah yep okay so this was you know across all the

provinces i think just one was slightly 50 50 on it and this brings me to the next problem

of politics today and i've heard this mentioned quite a few times politics of today is really dictated by

polls rather than actual ideology because people just want to keep the power from the moment that day that poll came

out where now 54 of the population in theory agreed with ending the mandates

which was in line with what the freedom convoy was all about that day quebec drops the taxation of

the unvaccinated a week prior nope it's going to be on your t4 or whatever they call it in

quebec and if you want to be on vaccinated that's fine but we're ramping up the segregation

they didn't tell somebody if you're obese you got to pay more or uh you're on your third liver transplant or

whatnot all of a sudden the defining feature of a good person bad person was even being

instituted inside our taxation policies yeah that's crazy dropped the very first

monday the very first business day after the freedom convoy and saskatchewan the same day said they too will be ending

all coveted mandates the fact that those two things happened after the very first weekend i don't think it's chance

yeah so you know the government will never admit that uh the convoy changed

anything but if you look at the government's phrasing and articles and words and the cbc and whatnot even three

four days prior to the freedom convoy and the amount of things that changed thereafter

the the epidemiological trend was already happening they could have easily

have said these things if they wanted to so it was as a result i believe of the political pressure not the trajectory of

the virus itself because they could have said yes the trajectory is aiming downwards at some point in the spring we

theorize this will all be done they were not saying those words they were saying i even believe it have

a down christine elliott somewhere in the middle of february which is a good two weeks two to three

weeks into the freedom convoy we have no plans of getting rid of the qr code system

by march 1st it was done yeah yeah it's

it's pretty clear there was some major shift that happened did the disease just suddenly go away in a

two-week period yeah or did they realize they overplayed their hands and needed to actually listen to the population or

they weren't going to win the next election so yeah you know then we headed into the uh february 4th which was the first full

week after the first weekend of the initial freedom convoy uh blockade in

downtown ottawa and you know it was actually funny because on february 4th of that week the toronto sun came out that article as i

was saying that said there was a less crime downtown than there ever had been you know it's quite something so all

this idea that it was not a peaceful place to be very dangerous uh dancing on the tomb of the unknown

soldier and everything else a bunch of hooligans going into the rideau center and having to shut down businesses and

it was just a riot it was statistically it was actually turning out once again statistically yeah the stats are

pointing in one direction and the narrative is going in another it has never been a safer time to be downtown ottawa than during the protests um

i think that the uh the the the only thing that i would say about the statistics is they don't

necessarily capture the the qualitative aspect of of these types of things and i

think i you know just hearing some people like residents of ottawa at the time would

i mean there were words thrown around like oh this is a hell like listening and having to listen to them all the time and i know you said um you know

it's sort of what you signed up for you said it much more graciously but it's but it but it is to to sum it up i

mean you that's where you're living and when you're supposed you're supposed to be

able to have a protest well it's like saying you live next to the rogers center and you know when it's open it's

like oh it's always so loud baseball game is just really killing me right now i know we're in the playoffs and playing

every other night but no i don't mean that disparagingly i understand but it is a protest and it's a really trying

time in the country's uh trajectory and those uh people that were there were

representing the disenfranchised the uh the little guy really and so you know as

much as the pain the people were feeling having to live through for that short period of time of a

disruption those people protesting were living through more pain and through a longer period of time

so if you really want the total sum of pain to go down we have to fix what's actually the grievances of those who are protesting

that's how i would aim okay i mean i don't know about that they were necessarily suffering more you

could almost argue that they're just average people that went to the the ones that were approached but i wouldn't say

they were suffering more because those who were in those houses could afford to rent them or own them

those downstairs may not have anywhere to return to you if you're losing your job if you're being kicked out of

society you don't you may end up homeless as a result right and you can argue whether you know just get the vaccine it's you all your life will go

back to normal if you do this one medical intervention right and it's a very low cost and it's in terms of time

and it's free um yes but but at least they had somewhere to complain about actually

having noise you know these people were living in their trucks at -38 which at what point somewhere i will get to it you know the

government came around and started taking the fuel away from the truck drivers you know the making where they were

sleeping inside the actual trucks dangerous and cold right so yeah the honking is one issue and

it's terrible but i think in the net some you're going to find out what the protesters were going through overall was worse

it's just pain all around and i don't want to take a side in this guy nobody wants anybody to have any sort of pain

but if you actually want the total sum of the pain to go down we need to address what why the protest is

happening to begin with and to actually have some sort of negotiations or a talk to actually

just figure out this is where we are in the pandemic this is where we're going these things will never happen again

once we get through this you guys we've got your back i think a lot of it would have ended if they simply engaged them

in that way instead of from your ivory white tower tisk these people have unacceptable

views yeah you know it's it's that's a quite a bitter thing to throw in somebody who's been suffering

yeah that's a good way to put it and then we rolled in from that first

week and you know the media had to pay attention and yes of course the crowds got less and somewhere

around that time the honking was mandated to be stopped and they stopped

uh you know certainly monday through friday nine through five it's that's a very bad thing let's say for the general

population because people are working or living and whatnot but as we hit the second weekend february 5th and 6th

this is where things really began to change because we started seeing protests on mass downtown montreal

alberta toronto ontario and particularly the one in toronto it

was extremely diverse in character so this white supremacist nazi fringe

unacceptable views uh it was a much more universal

uprising against the mandates than what the government i believe ever anticipated yeah it was totally taking

on now that populist sort of movement and for me it was quite an endearing thing to see just

a man in a turban dancing at the corner of blooring avenue with speakers

uh playing his ethnic music with a hockey stick and a canadian flag on the top of it just for me that was

everything in one picture what canada is all about it was diverse it was ethnic it was

philosophical leanings bringing people together meaning freedoms and no mandates and this is why

in many cases our new peoples to canada moved here to begin with

yeah i think they are the greater uh what is the correct word stalwarts like

against canadian torchbearers sure yeah maybe they're actually they've come from

situations in which they never had such freedoms right they may be exactly the

type of canadian we need right now in order to protect these freedoms yeah you know as a just a quick little side note

i i just found it amusing because i worked very close to queen's park and i would drive down there and it was

completely blocked off on university when i drove down there and it was like a barricade you couldn't even get by and

then uh as a week maybe a couple weeks went by and you saw that there were only

the they would let people through but there were police cars everywhere and then like a couple weeks later the police cars like it was like half and

then there's just one guy there and then it was and then everything had dispersed but it's funny how they this is just a complete you know non-sequitur but it

was uh um interesting to me how they sort of decide is like

i think it's safe we could just have like three cars there joe you go out with your uh yeah um

time to stop the protest right okay guys

yeah no completely so so that was an amazing thing to watch and then around

the same time to february 3rd i believe it was there was news stories circulating that um for those who don't know around

queen's park in downtown toronto where our provincial parliament buildings are there's also it's called hospital row

where we have all the some of the best hospitals in the world there and there was news articles saying that

healthcare workers needed to start coming to work in planes clean clothing so they wouldn't be harassed by

protesters there was no incidents that i could find in any articles about

any problems of protesters harassing healthcare workers yeah i heard that too

so and i i did nothing wrenching it i i forgot all about that but it caught wind and it caught fire and you would hear

chit chat as i talk with a lot of people in the nature of my job this is incredible i can't believe they're harassing healthcare workers can you

show me quantifiably how many people were harassed and were these actually protesters well they were protesting

so i heard this too and it's interesting because i think it turned a lot of people off so if that was sort of if this was propaganda it was sort of

well aimed propaganda um but i my understanding was they were

protesting in front of hospitals well it could be but if you're not allowed to get close enough to queen's park you know like it's all in the same

connected area i mean if you're gonna get five million people not that was that many at all but at a certain point a disruption is a disruption right

certainly i i really really looking at the nature of the protest would have a hard time believing anybody workers or

patients trying to hit to a hospital would have been uh stopped in any way slowed down by the

nature of the protest and that's the thing you really get this it's this almost demonic caricature that the media

portrays and you think to yourself it's like this universal revulsion of whatever they're

doing it's like of course that's horrible like you're gonna interfere with like hospital workers who are these maniacs but it's it's so

outlandish that you could you then see the videos of uh the protesters and you're like well

wait a minute like these don't look like the type of people who would be doing it and as you said if that was a fake planted story what a well-played fake

planted story because it's you know when you're trying to like we said earlier they were gearing up the whole thing all these people dancing on

the tomb of the unknown soldier they're blocking the hospitals all the most wonderful pillars of a society these

people are against yeah and that's where you know you go back to before and i don't know if this was part uh that i ended up

uh closing my laptop and it didn't get recorded um it's frustrating uh but it

goes back to what we were saying before uh where how do you figure out what is true

anymore you know you have your news sources you can vet them all you want and really it starts to come down to

putting the puzzle together and and you start looking at the people like if you have a first-hand first-hand experience

if you're on the ground in auto and you're talking to people you've talked to you know 50 people and maybe one or two of them were kind of jerkish and

that's the most you could say anyone everybody else was great it really cuts to the it's it's very

it's a specious argument for them for the media to then say that all these people are nazis oh they're um they're

uh they're being aggressive toward healthcare workers because you're like well i met

these people and i mean but i'm gonna go sort of cut you off but

isn't that very similar and like thinking when they would say well

i've met some people from that race they weren't so good so you should hate the whole race this is really this or this

is really the type of thinking that we've power has been using for hundreds of years taking our ignorance and fear and

ramping it up to hate the unknown right so yeah it's almost like no good person

would go down there and check it out but let me tell you how they all were right right oh you don't want to go near those

people i'll tell you how bad they are and now all of a sudden you're extrapolating on the one or two

incidents the entire population uh what the nature of the character of the protest is yeah which in this case i

believe from what i saw in red was completely false so again it gets a little nefarious but

why would they want to demonize this crowd to such an extent yeah

uh man i can't wait for our show on conspiracy theories because i really i can't wait to get into all that

i just see the classic playbook going over and over again power versus the powerless information for those

ignorance uh let me tell you what to look at so you don't have to do the research yourself and extrapolating from

one or two simple um small whether it could be made up like the nazi flyer or one or two

random incidents out of like you said out of the hundreds of thousands for instance i'll just divert for a little

bit but one of the three arrests i believe there was only three that first weekend in all of toronto

was a person who was arrested protesting on foot because they had a smoke bomb

okay it's a it's a charge it's an arrest okay but that person was there

as a counter protester they were having the smoke bomb to go against the protest tours but they never

said such a thing in the news like not at least not very easily found right so again they took the piece of the

story and twisted it to their point of view somebody was arrested with a smoke ball yeah technically we're not lying

yes oh look and they never actually go go further with it and you know the

average i feel very sympathetic the average person at home sitting on their reclining chair and turning on the news that they want to trust and they've had

a long work day he's just going to simply turn this on and see the things that are being talked about them and the

large i've even had one client talking about oh i just couldn't get behind those people if they're beards they're

just such ugly beards that they have like and they just get so fixated on these little nuances without getting the

actual core issues it's all it's almost because a picture has been painted of them in the media

psychologically and they're you know they they see them and it's like they're predisposed to to feel some

sort of like antagonism toward them because they're they've been so demonized in the in the media

yeah it's movements like these that truly scare governments and when enough people protest people peacefully

that is when leaders do step down right yeah and so that for me was to

encapsulate what the second weekend of protests was all about because now it was really spreading across the country

it was any talk of nazi this confederate that was really now

not an issue because we've had i don't i don't even say how many people but thousands and thousands of

protesters across the whole country and it was really showing up not to be the nature of the protest to have these

types of people involved and that you know that brought us to then the second full week so we had

finished now the first weekend a full week a second weekend where i went across the entire country and the second

full week was where the beginning of the game started to change and i do believe it's because the things were spreading out for

instance ottawa on the second week declared emergency as a city that gave them now

new powers in order to to do something with the truckers

uh and uh also around that time too february 11th is when ontario the

province declared a state of emergency and that was largely to take care of what was now emerging to be a very

costly uh protest at the ambassador bridge in windsor so for those who don't know like the

ambassador bridging windsor represents 25 of all international trade in canada so when

you shut down that bridge i have the number of crucial artery yeah a crucial artery

uh let me see here i do have the number it was something to the tune of yes a week of protesting cost the auto

industry just the auto industry a quarter billion dollars and that's according to an analysis uh by east

lansing based economic research group so a quarter of a million dollars was lost

just to the automotive industry so you can imagine that the financial pressure our pro open for business conservative

government felt uh i'm sure there was phone calls you either take care of this bridge or we'll move our plans to mexico

so there was pressure and that it created then the reason for ontario so now we had two different emergencies going on emergency

powers one in the city of ottawa and one in the entire province of ontario and that that led us into um

the third week the third week don't you think though um you know

and maybe this is just my naivete but when i think about when i think

about it like there are laws against certain things so if you're standing

if your car is blocking the bridge and you're obstructing traffic can't you get towed like

is this just too simplistic i know there were a lot of uh a lot of trucks and but what were what was the problem well

there was it's a mysterious one i know in the case of ottawa apparently the

ottawa government called the tow truck companies to come and tow the trucks and the ottawa companies a towing company

started saying well we have a covet outbreak so we just can't make it down there today and then

they just started flat out refusing because they know their best clients are some of those truckers this is almost a

code amongst the industry so they didn't want to play ball that is one reason for bringing in the emergencies because then

they could like force them to actually do the towing right so in terms of the windsor bridge

i don't know but i would assume if you uh jam them in tight enough and you can't get a tow truck close enough to

lift these giant 18 rig 18 wheeler rigs it's probably harder to tow than you think if they don't want to be towed

yeah maybe yeah the practical considerations uh i just thought the i mean part of the

reasons they brought in the emergencies act was because you know while one of the one of the

only ways you could do it is if you couldn't deal with this uh any whatever the emergency was in any other way like you couldn't use local

police or federal police you had to have some extraordinary powers to be able to do this and that was the sort of excuse

for invoking it but i just have a hard time believing that like truckers

blocking a bridge is what brought the nation to its knees you know but just to play devil's advocate when you block the

road other than some sort of a highway traffic act lawyer breaking

is that in and of itself enough to bring in an emergencies act they are parking tickets

no i i know i i well this is what i mean like it's not um i i think that they're

you know even when there was the flq crisis and pierre trudeau the current prime

minister's father um it's the same it's as far as i know it's the same law the war

the war measures act became the emergencies act yeah there's some close

but that kind of made more sense like you know you've got these terrorists who are shoot killing people like there's a

member of the cabinet uh who was killed like so i still i still don't agree with uh yeah laporte yeah um i still don't

agree with that kind of thing personally like having those kinds of powers but um at least there it's like okay well

that's a pretty that's that's a life or death situation that is like maybe that might there might be an exception it's

not a it's not a parking ticket it's not a parking ticket yeah you know so we got to think like in legal terms what is the categorization of these rules right and

then what mechanisms do you want to bring in to take care of them now i know the emergencies act from the provincial

level allowed the provincial government to give fines up to a hundred thousand dollars and a year in prison so that was

a pretty uh you could you could argue that was a motivation to move the trucks that was

positive uh and in the sense of it actually freed up the bridge i also heard this i heard that the truckers

allowed one lane of traffic through the ambassador bridge it was just severely slow because there's only so much

traffic can go through when you're only you know going or coming in one lane and if not there are other ways around

there are you have to go all the way to buffalo sure but it is possible yeah i just think all the supply lines and

everything like it's all time logistics are you know they have to be there at a certain time and everything gets pushed

back so that it is a protest you know like it's it's a disruption by its definition i mean if

we're only going to allow legal protests then you might as well kiss protest goodbye because what is illegal i heard

i think i believe now in alberta you are no longer allowed maybe a specific city in alberta not the whole province to

protest on foot on the streets you can only protest on the sidewalks or

on public property i suppose so now what does that mean you're actually limiting the number of square

footage people by foot can actually protest so by definition you're never going to have a large protest ever again because

there's simply no simple no space to amass that many people yeah even parliament hill can only hold so

many people and then no matter how many people you put in there the government will simply say the cbc hmm it's four or

five thousand people not that many well if you can't get any more there what are you going to do

so this is where i believe the game can get rigged oh of course you can peacefully protest but the way we cut up

our centers you'll never get more than two three thousand people in any one spot and we'll just call you a fringe right

yeah i don't like what's happened to language you know i don't like that it's people add an adjective on there and now

suddenly it's a it's a different thing that they're talking about like a protest is a protest like when they call it the so-called

freedom right convoy right right why so-called to them it is freedom yeah yeah you can be you don't say so-called

isis like they call themselves isis you call it isis you're going to want to go somewhere it's called blm right right

like really you have to and yeah all the i mean that's that's the

media being the media you know but it's like like language in general if you're talking about um if you're talking about

a thing like you have to be able to use words that

actually reflect what they're supposed to reflect and all this tweaking of language that goes along goes around

these days is really um affecting how i think our minds are even

able to relate to one another you have these verbal modifiers that then guide you in a certain direction

yeah and one person's freedom is another person's um racism you know it's like yeah well i i remember i was speaking to

someone else and she said to me well i just want to have my flag back it's terrible that these people have usurped

the canadian flag for their purposes and uh

furthermore um freedoms why have they lost any freedoms i haven't seen any of their freedoms lost like excuse me

um they can't walk into a restaurant they've lost their jobs they've been told on the front of the

toronto star you might as well die we don't have icu beds for you

you can't get on an airplane and leave the country right which is i think built into the uh

charter of rights it's yes it is oh yeah brian peckford the former premier i believe of newfoundland

labrador is suing the federal government for that yeah um so so yeah this

i in the mass media i don't think they've done at all a good job of indicating how curtailed these

people's freedoms have been because they simply said well if you want your freedom just get a vaccine it's so easy

so the the hurdle the way they present it is is so small that it's almost like you're

choosing not to have your freedom right so you have no right to complain yeah because it's such a small little prick

what are you scared of a little needle you can have your freedoms in a heartbeat we're not holding the back you

just need to do this small little act right and that's where it does take on a bit of a baptism or a bit of a religious

movement you know a baptism is just you know and i'm greek orthodox is dunking a baby in water per se but you know from

that day forward you're supposed to be almost like reborn into the faith of a completely different religion in a sense

right and so this is where it does take on religious overtones the entire the

baptism is now getting the vaccine and you're part of the good people the good community you know

yeah yeah so after ottawa and after ottawa and ontario declared

emergencies it was during the third full week that we then trudeau on february 14th

valentine's day declared the emergencies act so for the first time in since it's a

valentine's day massacre yeah it's quite something

and yeah that allowed that the emergency act allowed authorities to declare certain areas as no-go zones um i believe that

would mean then both on foot and truck because what i couldn't understand at

first was well okay if you have a problem with trucks in downtown ottawa so be it but why are you kicking out the

people they're just on feet right you know they can walk around they're on foot they can like protest if they want you're allowed

to protest aren't you but i suppose since they had the emergencies act the entire area got declared a red zone and

nobody's allowed which again i don't understand the nature of this because then you could have just taken three four thousand people and said we'll

stand just one foot outside the barrier now we're allowed to protest again right right it's kind of funny how it all it

all played out yeah of all of these things i i mean i've

been pretty pissed off with the way that everything's been handled with the kovid

i won't say everything but how a lot of it has been handled since the very beginning and [Music]

in general uh over the past couple of years um just just in general i've been pissed

off about about everything and everyone um but yeah specifically about the way that the uh government has been handling

the covet crisis and multiple governments not just the trudeau government um but uh what really kind of

when you get into the truckers convoy and it almost seems like it was like an

add-on or something at the end where you take the whole covet crisis as a whole and it's kind of like you know some

extraordinary measures were implemented but for the most part i think that most people can still kind of get behind some

of it because it was all in the name of health and like yeah i was all um you know

really people aren't sort of looking at the data and i think there's you know mass censorship and there's a

lot of really um undesirable things that were happening but really when you get to the end of

the um the trucker's convoy and what happened with his emergency act declaration i find is one of the most

uh terrifying things that i i think has come out of this whole thing much scarier than the disease that's for sure

um so and potentially much longer lasting yeah exactly and it's almost like a i almost felt like a test case or

something where how do you get um in a democratic society how do you

impose a rule based upon such um species evidence in

terms of um coming forth with the reasons

you know this whole this whole act was um the pretext for it was that there is well

let me see i have it here you have to have a s

an emergency that seriously threatens the ability of the government of canada to preserve the sovereignty security and

territorial integrity of canada or to the extent that some national emergency seriously endangers

the lives health or safety of canadians to such a proportion or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of them

to deal with it and i just i mean the fact that they couldn't deal with

people pro some people protesting and clogging some streets up that's terrifying from a law enforcement angle

it's like what are we you know um if we can't deal with that then what can you know what what happens when the uh

somebody just bombs parliament or something um but from uh from a um

from a legal standpoint from an ethical standpoint the the emergencies act endowed them

with a bunch of powers to freeze bank accounts and to set a precedent that now any government that wants to invoke this

because once these things are invoked and you the just like the notwithstanding clause and then this leads us into the um the declaration of

the emergencies act which is the war measures act uh revisited

and uh this is where i have i think my gravest misgivings about um

certainly how the trucker protests were handled but also how

over the last few years during the whole covet pandemic there's been a lot of

things i haven't agreed with that the government has been doing but this is i think takes the cake

where whereby they declare that there an emergency exists because of these

protests and that's you know kind of dubious enough but then you get into

the fact that this emergencies act now allows them to you know clear a large swath of the area disband the protest

and um deny people the the right to speak and the right to do what they should be able

to do uh what it also does though is it enables them to impose economic um

uh measures against against the not only the protesters but the people who are supporting the protesters so

like in the the opening salvo to this whole podcast you know

you're talking about people who are just regular canadians and some americans um and some people from overseas and i

think you're going to get into the statistics on that but like people who looked at what was happening

here were inspired by it and wanted to contribute to it in some way because it was a big difference between

what they'd what they'd been seeing on the news before before then and um and they

wanted to take some action and be a part of something so to then go after those people and you

know i know that the um kind of party line is well we we didn't set out to specifically handle

those people and probably we wouldn't have gone after people who just donated 20 or so but i think the point here is that

you know canadians want to have like faith in their financial system they don't they they don't want to put their money into a bank account and think well

maybe this will get seized one day or maybe i shouldn't donate money to this charity because you know it might get

seized like that is undermining trust on a major level once you've set precedent

you can it will be just easier and easier in the future to do this over again and at that point you can kiss

your charter of rights and freedoms goodbye because the president is beset you'll declare emergencies act off you go i think actually some of the powers

in which the finance the government was able to have as a result of the emergencies act have now been decoupled

from the emergencies act and are permanently in place so

and they may be on the financial side uh if i believe correctly so financial you're just you know cancer culture you

have been financially financially cancelled right yeah the rcmp rcmp said they saw no evidence

after the fact of any terrorist financing and this is uh opposite of what the cbc

was reporting at the time saying perhaps russia was involved right it's always always true always

those russians yeah uh the convoy was funded by canadians not foreigners

fintrack said said fed up people and not terrorists

funded the convoy foreign extremists were not involved

they discovered and there was simply the number that got floated around

initially i believe from trudeau in parliament was over 50 of the financing was coming from abroad

so you would argue in this case we need the emergencies act because what is happening here in canada is

being financed by external factors that are not canadian right and this was proven to be wrong

because gofundme when they researched they said 88 of the donations came from within canada yeah i have a pretty small

uh amount of trust in banks and biggest big institutions in the first place but like when you when

you think about the idea that somebody donating money to something that they believe in can just have that taken away

in a country like canada i mean it's really shocking and it shook it really shook me i you know and what a

great use case for for something like bitcoin because like why would why would anybody why wouldn't

you go with a trustless system like bitcoin as opposed to uh something where you have um

some part some uh sort of centralized power that can then you know at the flick of a switch just like freeze your

account or or even just asking questions you know even going in and um

um you know maybe you're maybe you just don't have access to your account for a few days but commenting your

unacceptable views yeah you know you can get very dystopian black mirror social credit sort of i

think that's where that evolves into right like those kinds of things it almost sets the stage for a kind of

social credit and like the trajectory is in that direction yeah which is the wrong wrong direction right certainly and it's

terrifying for me just how much then government is far more linked with our financial systems which

are private enterprises our media and our corporations yeah you know even

initially the qr code systems were all supported by scotiabank arena and air canada and then it trickled down to the

mom and pop pizza shop if you simply left it in the hands of the average small business owner nobody wants to have to be checking anybody's vaccine

passport as they come in and shop but because it started from the top down and

maybe that's the nature of all this is that everything is not coming from the actual people and moving up it's coming

from the top and drifting down and you're to your point bitcoin is the complete opposite direction it's

starting with the little person being able to transact however they want with whomever they want whenever they want

yeah yeah it's um i i think the the implications of this action are going to

[Music] echo through our immediate and probably distant

future uh i think we just have to be careful as a society and it it

the act itself is one thing but the reaction that seemed that society seemed to that canadian society seemed to have

to this um was fairly muted like there just wasn't a lot of outcry um and i mean it

just seems like such a massive government overreach like so many of the premiers across canada

and for those who don't know premiers are the yeah like the captains of the province

you got it yeah uh we're against the the emergencies act yeah it wasn't all of

them i think it was unanimous it wasn't yes like i have i have that wrong i have a quote here from uh the saskatchewan

premier scott mo the illegal blockades must end but police already have sufficient tools to

enforce the law and clear blockades you know i can go further on

um down to alberta's premier jason kennedy who told

reporters that he told trudeau earlier on monday that he would prefer if the emergencies act did not apply to alberta

as such a move was unnecessary in the province furthermore quebec premier

francis francois lago also warned that he did not want the emergencies act to be applied to his province warning that

he thought such a measure would be divisive not it's not the time to throw fuel on

the fire yeah so this is not some universal once it happens everybody enjoys what's

happening and must fall in line right this is a hotly condensed contested thing and there's several liberties

groups out there who are now suing the government saying this protest this freedom convoy did not meet

the threshold the criteria for instituting such an act like let's not forget the um

when trudeau initiated that on february 14th the windsor blockade which was blocking the border was already starting

to be broken up if not totally broken up the powers that the police had in

windsor which is in the provinces of ontario which had declared its own emergencies

emergency was sufficient to break up the blockade so if ontario the province has

given new powers to the police agencies and ottawa the city has given new powers to the agencies do you really need this

on the federal level right yeah yeah and you know what now that i now that i say that i i think i misspoke i

think that ontario was for the emergencies act as well i believe they might have been too yeah yeah

um yeah it's fine it's amazing that this was uh uh that sort of happened the way it did

and i you know there was a 30-day period so because he revoked it like if so a

few days after for actually for those of you who don't know um the act was invoked and a few days

went by and there was kind of uh i wouldn't say a public outcry but there were enough people saying

um that that this was overstepping some bounds

um [Music] but and enough so he did he did walk it back and um

nine days later nine days later and i think it was so does that mean that he's still because

he's supposed to if i recall he's supposed to be able to i within 30 days present it to

parliament and give the reasons why he thought it was justified which looked like they were also wanting this to be

in power for a long time so when they did remove it in nine days like i said they did keep some of the elements they

made them into regular law and it might be the financial element okay

which you know not the i don't know how to word this per se but

that emergencies act allowed them to then freeze people's bank accounts that story went viral worldwide

the whole world was looking although it wasn't really reported on within canada other

liberal democracies around the world were saying what is up with canada they're freezing people's bank accounts

even one mother and what's how many there might have been who donates twenty dollars because

she bought a t-shirt to support the truckers now you know can't get into her bank account even if it's just one person

it's one too many yeah because it had it had no positive effect to do this

so the uh this will make people very very skeptical

of any sort of digital currency in the future because they can see now at a drop of a hot

flick of a switch you can be simply excluded from your financial life right

well any any centralized digital currency yes yes which they're planning

they are planning dc's central central bank digital currency yeah yeah

yeah no i just wanted to distinguish it from uh something like bitcoin where it's decentralized and not to be played

devil's advocate to my own point you you may not just want bitcoin because let's say perhaps your bitcoin gets stolen somehow you have no mechanism in order

to track it down no insurance so just like we have cash and we have credit maybe in the future we'll have various

forms of centralized and decentralized digital currencies perhaps that's the best way but it really feels like it's

going more like it will be mandated just centralized and that will be where 99 of all transactions occur anyways

yeah it'll be interesting to see where that goes and i think that's another show where you start to see

how these cb dc's are going to

how they're going to evolve and what place what part they're going to play because yeah they are coming

and in many ways it might be a better experience it'll be the same thing

um [Music] in a sense as having a banking app or having a bunch

of stuff on your phone whereby things are a lot more convenient but it's a lot less secure whereas in this case it'll

be things will be a lot more convenient but you don't necessarily have the privacy or the anonymity

uh to be able to you know you could um like you said you could they could shut the top off if they wanted to you could

have like electric vehicle i mean you would have a hard time uh let's call it weaponizing these

trucks so it's create a protest if they were all on some sort of grid you could just shut them down remotely yeah which

would be very appealing to those who want to keep power like the government yeah you know or your phone

we can just tell you're in the area because you have your canada digital id app and uh it'll warn

you as you're entering the zone this is your last warning turn around otherwise and you wish to protest you chose not to

right right boom next thing you know your digital currency is turned off or your car won't start for a week yeah

you know it's a lot of power that i believe the technology in this case is moving much much faster than our

discussion on such technology and as a result there seems to be almost next to zero

next to none governance uh any laws regulating how this technology will be used right

yeah yeah so that brings us into now like the uh the fourth weekend the the february 19th and 20th when now we have

the emergencies act on a federal level across all of canada and the quote-unquote riot police move

in in ottawa and if you i don't know if you noticed this but they didn't have badge numbers they didn't have names on their

uniforms they did not look like any form of police i've ever seen in canada before i don't know what tier of

enforcement this was i'm not sure maybe the ottawa police didn't want to play ball or maybe they were just clothed in different uh

um different uniforms in order to do this i i didn't notice but

and they were on horseback as well some of them were yep and one of the more terrifying stories came out from uh

there was protesters and they were trying to stand their ground and the police were gently pushing forward or

police riot police forward and forward at a certain point riot police on mounted on horseback came

through at a pretty pretty aggressive attack angle and yeah some of the protesters moved out of

the way some didn't some moved in a little bit but one very uh older indigenous lady had her walker

and she she got trampled pretty good by one of the horses i saw that yeah yeah um

you know it's just it was it was going thermal nuclear at a moment you didn't need to yeah the crowd was

moving this was just simply a power play what scared me the most was the ottawa police tweeted out

uh somebody threw a bicycle at one of their horses but don't worry

the horse is okay yeah like literally 180 degrees lying

and there was no bicycle no photo of any bicycle in any event people have scoured it there's nothing there the only mo and

it came out right within minutes almost of this event happening so maybe you're trying to get that as another

incident show me you know yeah i guess yeah that's true you know this this lady's indigenous she's standing up

let's talk about diversity she's elderly female and indigenous standing up right there showing what the well all

true faith in canada is all about wasn't yeah on a walker as well or with a walker um yeah i saw that you know and

it's hard to say like i i don't always like you know i i find myself um

with great sort of empathy for sometimes what police have to deal with on a daily basis it looks extraordinarily

frustrating like seeing seeing other protests and seeing other um events where they're being shouted at or

you know shoved or you know they really you have to have stoic patience in in some sort

of policing yeah not for defending the police you know it's not the police it's the the laws

and what you know yeah i think a lot of them probably uh i think that i think it was very hard i

think it would have been a hard thing to do to be in ottawa police trying to get out some of these protesters who you probably agree with like let's be honest

right yeah there was quite a few police officers donating money as well and a couple famous video clips

went viral of police officers in uniform supporting right the the protesters they're human

you know you wouldn't get that angus read poll at 54 agreeing that mandate should be ending if it didn't include some police officers and law enforcement

and government officials right that's half the country more than half of the country uh

just for me the issue in downtown ottawa was about the trucks focus on the trucks get rid of the

trucks that people can stay why did there was no need to bring in horses that was just a pure power play

yeah those people at that moment were of such egregious danger to the citizens of ottawa they had to bring in mounties in order to

knock them out of the way you know i don't understand why they have the horses anyway anymore like i see them trotting around toronto sometimes and

it's like what is what is that you know uh you know besides animals it's kind of hard to be undercover on a horse too

yeah exactly and like yeah and i always think like what am i gonna what are you gonna do pull me over like you're gonna chase like it like it's a western and

i'm gonna dry i'm gonna drive away you know like there used to be an sctv skid i don't

know if you saw the undercover mountie if you come up plain clothes but on a horse hey you

cool kids would you know where i can score some weed well he's on a horse

yeah so yeah i've always thought the same thing maybe it's for sure but uh it does it

there they are a menacing girth to them and yeah i just didn't see there was just no need to run horses

there they started pushing people out friday afternoon by sunday afternoon they were

gone they would have been gone by sunday with horses or without there was no need yeah it wasn't like they met some sort of stalemate bring in the horses

we have nothing else to give right it just that was a power play and then

they lied about it and so again if there's one topic that i really just want to hammer down it's like

power is terrifying and we need to do everything to equalize it and make more

more equality yeah uh just through and how do you get that through through proper governance

in a supreme court that you know is unbiased and and you know laws that are well written

and to minimize the power of the government so these things only happen in the most dangerous of times

yeah and i think we also need a responsible media like people who are going to report i mean if you're a government like maybe it is time to

defund the cbc and it's a sad thing to say but it's like i

like there needs to be a separation between you know the state for lack of a better word and um people who are reporting on

the state what is the cbc giving canadians that they can't get from other private outlets

nothing so i would i would fully support defunding the cbc with the exception of

maybe the radio and the french canadian component because that is certainly an underserved community that could use

yeah in terms of national unity uh a singular message that can make its way around to everybody in canada in both

languages yeah so the radio component the online component sure the french

component but this uh two close to two billion dollars a year that we're giving

them in subsidies in order to stay it's not just subsidies i believe it's 1.4 billion in subsidies and maybe 400

million and guaranteed advertising so it's close to 2 billion right you know over a 10-year period that's 20 billion

you could be putting into hospitals and what would create a better country more money going into hospitals or having

the news on if you know the government's point of view is that's their media arm their propaganda arm so they need that

in order to get the rules to get through anyways yeah we're in very strange times jason i don't know it's strange it's and

it's sad because it used to be a unifying force like you know going in and seeing cbc playing on a television you would

see it at hotels and different places it was like this it was like the cnn but public uh a

public it was fantastic yeah and unfortunately now like when you can just call out lies left and right center

it's uh and you see this and you know what there's nothing wrong with getting things wrong but when they get things

wrong in one continuous direction that's not simply an error of their core competencies

that's a narrative yeah we all make errors that's totally fine but errors should be a little bit to one

side a little bit to the other because you're trying to get it right but when they're always airing on one side

it's hard to what you need to do is after giving yourself an hour of cbc you need to bounce around for another hour through

other media channels and try to get some sort of balance yeah and the truth will be in the middle somewhere but yeah i'm all for defunding

the uh the cbc in general for the telling and the lcbo while we're on it

for taking requests it's yeah you bring it on um okay well do you have anything else

that you want to uh well i just i want to just recap you know so yeah the riot police did what they needed by by the

end of february things had wrapped up i believe it was february 29th it was nine days later that trudeau ended the

emergencies act you know in a sense he tipped his hands and perhaps those who are really in favor of digital currency

may have even whispered in his ear like buddy you've shown too much power too soon how are we ever going to get proper

digital currencies through when people can see it gets turned off right away like i don't think that was a smart move on their point

what did they actually achieve by freezing bank accounts they that stopped the protest they was already wrapped up

yeah i i don't know what did you achieve it was a really bad move politically uh like i i i don't

know i don't know what they gained out of that and so even those really in favor of uh digital currency will be

terrified of what the trudeau government did because now they've made people more skeptical of such power yeah um so that

just brings me down to like a timeline of like things that you know things that changed after the freedom convoy because

one thing we keep bumping into continuously well the freedom convoy didn't change anything it was going to

happen like this anyways and i truly don't believe it it was such a singular narrative where we were told

just in early january that if somebody was against the mandates they were racist misogynistic

uh why do we put up with these people of unsub how do we tolerate them with their unacceptable views we went from that

sort of top down from the leader of the country early january to march 1st

no longer having qr codes all within 60 days if the trajectory epidemiologically was

going that direction there was no need to talk like that in early january because you can see the trend line yeah

so that's narrative over statistics i mean on one hand it's refresh it's um

reassuring to know that things can change that quickly you know that it's not uh necessarily going to be

a long grueling process the power of a protest it's like that whole arab spring you

know it really um it's it's like it builds up and it builds up and then finally there's a breaking

point and the floodgates open well and maybe that's how change happens you feel like you're not getting anywhere for a

long time and then you bring in the horses you bring in the horses uh and then it just all comes tumbling down

very very quickly right i've always said that and it can be a grind you know pushing against the narrative and

sometimes is this futile why am i stressing myself out just go with the flow

but you see history shows itself that it does you have to stay with the

axe to the grind for a long time and then it all comes down all at once yeah yeah so like you know january 31st was

the first monday right after the vax tax right after the first weekend by by quebec's taxation of the unvaccinated

saskatchewan the same day got rid of the mandates march 1st which is just a month

later ontario ends all qr codes um march 11th bbc the british columbia got

rid of their masks march 12th quebec ended their qr code system march 21st ontario ended their mandatory masking

although masking is still in effect in quebec until maybe april 15th so

yeah i think the mood of the country changed dramatically due to the freedom convoy

but nobody will say it for fear of some sort of repercussions you know in in their personal life private uh

public life god god forbid their employer sees that they were pro something of this nature but

there's been a lot of things moving behind the scenes yeah yeah it's interesting it's interesting to examine

this topic and i think it touches on a few things that are

close to both of our hearts and also i

do with the protest other than privately cheering it on but um uh i mean i didn't donate money because

i won my bank accounts ceased but um i i i really it made me so proud to be

canadian like it made me think you know this is what um

it's really good to see people standing up for what they believe and and after you saw the nature of it it really just

seemed like like it was a win for the home team i guess it was a win for freedom a win for democracy

by people who are very salt of the earth and very it just felt if i could just step back and look at it spiritually it

felt like this energy that the truckers and those who supported the anti-mandates represented

was very similar to the type of energy that must have been needed to move to such an isolated and cold country 200

years ago and forge what turned into one of the freest countries on earth that was a hard

journey and it was through hard work that they actually achieved such results and this to me was

literally that energy several generations later saying oh no you don't we are not going this way

this is not the canada that i grew up in my parents fought for and i don't want my children to live in in the future

and i think that scared the bejesus out of the ruling class the world is going in a very different

direction to that energy it's not over yet but this was

a a round that we won on points yeah it wasn't a knockout but we got

through with a win uh yeah well well put um okay well let's leave it there and uh

thanks for listening today and we will talk to you next time

bye take care