Plain Talk. We Deserve Better.

A searing op-ed from Al Jazeera goes for the throat of the "truckers' revolt." 

Nobody, not the truckers, not the agitators who stirred these idiots, not the police and definitely not the federal government will be remembered for the part they played in this.

What has been happening in Canada lately is not the product of a “lone wolf”. It is a broad, well-organised, well-financed, right-wing “siege” to dispose of a sitting government, using “freedom” from vaccine mandates as a convenient and PR-palatable fig leaf to do it.

Where was CSIS?

What has been happening in Canada lately is not the product of a “lone wolf”. It is a broad, well-organised, well-financed, right-wing “siege” to dispose of a sitting government, using “freedom” from vaccine mandates as a convenient and PR-palatable fig leaf to do it.

For days and weeks, hostage-takers in big rigs, tractors, and, of course, pick-up trucks, have been allowed, carte blanche, to block key land border crossings where lots of stuff and people are supposed to flow between Canada and its biggest and most important trading partner, the United States. The damage done is calculated to be in the billions.

Canada’s AWOL spies have, for years, been too busy spying on Canadians who want to stop wars and oil pipelines and keeping covert tabs on Indigenous “activists” to have been bothered, apparently, with twigging to this nation’s legion of 1/6 fans and wannabes and their costly, metastasising “siege”.

If the poor, homeless, and Indigenous Peoples or Canadians of colour tried to do all of the above, I doubt the cops or mayors would be “negotiating” with the “protestors” or inviting them to use police cruisers to take selfies because they want to avoid “provoking” violence.

Nope. The cops would be donning their “riot” gear even if there were no riot, deploying SWAT teams, mounting police-trained horses, getting their truncheons and Tasers at the ready before charging into the “left-wing anarchists”.

If you think I am exaggerating, watch this video of what Toronto police did last July to concerned citizens trying to stop the eviction of homeless people living in tents from a city park or this video of cops – high-powered weapons raised and cocked – using a chain saw to break into a house and arrest journalists and leaders of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation documenting yet another raid on sovereign Indigenous lands.

h/t NPoV