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if-you-fan-a-fire · 2 years

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“The so-called “Freedom Convoy” descended on Ottawa this past weekend to oppose the new federal vaccine mandate for cross-border essential worker travel. It’s hard to believe that all the hubbub was about something as innocuous as the requirement to get a needle, but I suppose these are the unfortunate times in which we live.

The vaccine mandate required those in international trucking who cross the United States border back into Canada to be vaccinated as of January 15, or to quarantine for 14 days. Similar vaccine mandates have previously been rolled out for other federally-regulated employees, such as those working in air, rail and marine transportation.

The Biden Administration has imposed a similar mandate directed at all essential and non-essential foreign travel into the United States, which also required Canadian truckers crossing the border to be fully vaccinated by January 22.

CTV News has reported that those leading the “Freedom Convoy” claim that up to 26,000 truckers may not comply with the mandate. However, this seems like a considerable overestimation. The Canadian Trucking Alliance (CTA), for example, says that 85 per cent of the approximately 120,000 truckers who regularly cross the U.S.-Canada border are already vaccinated. The Federal Minister of Transportation, Omar Alghabra, puts this figure at nearly 90 per cent.

According to these numbers, then, somewhere between 12,000 to 18,000 truckers who regularly cross the border are currently not vaccinated, and I’m willing to bet that more than a few of them would rather get the shot than lose their jobs. So far, the Liberals claim there has been no noticeable reduction in trucks moving goods across the U.S.-Canada border.

Ultimately, the number of truckers who prize their “freedom” to get others sick over maintaining their livelihood is likely to fall well short of the projections made by the political hucksters orchestrating this modern so-called Woodstock of the petit-bourgeoisie.

The extent to which this convoy is actually about trucking or truckers is debatable. The network of far-right, wealthy organizers and donors backing the convoy certainly calls claims of authentic connection to working-class truckers into question. The convoy’s two principal organizers are known figures of Canada’s far right. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network draws a range of further connections between the convoy and far-right, racist, and xenophobic extremists.

The Toronto Star reported last week that GoFundMe, through which the convoy organizers were raising money, was freezing $4.7 million until it verified where the funds had come and on what they’d be spent.

Convoy organizers claim the funds are used for fuel, food and lodging for participating truckers. However, when the convoy rolled through my hometown of Kingston, Ont., on January 28, Kingston Police counted 17 full tractor-trailers, 104 tractors with no trailers, 424 passenger vehicles and six RVs heading eastbound on highway 401. That’s some expensive gas and hotels.

CBC News reported that at least one-third of the $2.8 million raised that they analyzed came from anonymous donors or those using fake names. In some cases, donations as large as $25,000 were made anonymously or using aliases, the latter a violation of GoFundMe’s terms of service. As of January 31, the convoy had raised more than $9.4 million through its GoFundMe page.

On January 26, the CTA, released a joint statement with Alghabra, Seamus O’Regan, the federal minister of labour, and Carla Qualtrough, the minister of employment, workforce development and disability inclusion, distancing itself from the so-called “Freedom Convoy.”

The joint statement reads, in part: “Since the outset of the pandemic, the Government of Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance have engaged regularly with one another and with other key partners to identify emerging issues and mitigate disruptions. This engagement has been critical to keeping trucks moving, while also keeping Canadians safe from COVID-19. The Government of Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance both agree that vaccination, used in combination with preventative public health measures, is the most effective tool to reduce the risk of COVID-19 for Canadians, and to protect public health.”

The CTA, as the largest trucking employer association, has had to strike a delicate balance in all this. It called on protesters to remain peaceful and sought to disavow any connection to far-right elements without connection to the trucking industry. The association of provincial trucking employer groups had previously argued against the vaccine mandate before it was implemented, knowing that a vocal minority of its small business membership opposed the policy. On the other hand, as the business representative for the industry that is most engaged with the federal government, it understandably wants to maintain its access to those with influence and power.

The CTA’s statement continues: “As the pandemic continues, it remains critical that essential goods reach Canadians as quickly as possible. In fact, this is a top priority for the Government of Canada and the Canadian Trucking Alliance. To reach this goal, and to bolster Canada’s economic recovery and long-term competitiveness, it’s important to tackle two major challenges facing industry – supply chain constraints and labour shortages.”

Spokespeople from the trucking industry frequently complain of being afflicted by a “labour shortage.” Conservative MPs, of course, are now parroting this line, with the added caveat that the vaccine mandate will exacerbate the labour shortage and other supply chain issues.

As Steve Viscelli, author of The Big Rig: Trucking and the Decline of the American Dream, argues, the narrative of a perpetual trucker shortage serves those with real power in the industry. The myth of a constant labour shortage allows trucking firms to lobby governments for looser regulations concerning labour rights, worker training and safety.

The “labour shortage” is in fact almost entirely superficial, the outcome of hollowing out the trucking sector’s labour market. Up to the 1980s, trucking was a heavily unionized and much more regulated industry. Beginning first with the 1980 Motor Carrier Act in the U.S., the continental trucking industry was deregulated to break the power of organized labour and increase competition through a proliferation of small, non-union firms. Once free trade agreements with the U.S. came into force in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Canadian trucking was similarly overhauled in order to compete with American firms.

In the wake of deindustrialization has grown a sector populated by many competing for-hire trucking firms, a proportion of which are operated by relatively wealthy small business owners. However, the result for most trucking workers has been disastrous. Working conditions and pay have become so degraded for the majority of people working in the trucking industry that turnover is at record highs. Workers are only able to countenance the terrible conditions for so long. This leads to a situation where there is actually a surplus of trained and licensed drivers, but growing numbers of them driven out of the industry by its horrendous conditions.

Deregulation has since been followed by the racialization of the trucking labour market, a familiar pattern to anyone familiar with labour market “reform.” Trucking firms are now dependent on a steady influx of temporary foreign workers whose vulnerable citizenship status leaves them ripe for exploitation.

Uday Rana at the Globe and Mail reports that one in five truckers in Canada is South Asian, with large concentrations in Vancouver and the Greater Toronto Area, particularly in Brampton. South Asian drivers interviewed by Rana weren’t concerned about vaccine mandates, but rather about wage theft, poor working conditions and ensuring that their family members, often living in multigenerational households, don’t become infected with COVID-19.

Employee misclassification is also rampant in the trucking industry. Small trucking firms frequently force their drivers into independent contracting relationships, downloading financial risks and expenses onto workers who should be classified as employees with regulatory protections.

Misclassification further relieves small employers of making contributions to Employment Insurance, the Canada Pension Plan and workers’ compensation, which denies misclassified workers access to these vital social programs. (For a particularly vivid illustration of the experiences of racialized truckers with employee misclassification and labour rights violations, I highly recommend that Class Struggle readers check out Sara Mojtehedzadeh’s in-depth, investigative piece in the Toronto Star from last month)

As research my coauthors and I published last year found, the trucking sector accounts for nearly 80 per cent of the labour standards violations that workers reported to the federal government’s Labour Program, which enforces the Canada Labour Code, between 2006 and 2018. This level of lawbreaking is even more startling when you consider that only 17 per cent of federally-regulated employees work in trucking.

Our research further discovered that small businesses with fewer than 100 employees accounted for 89 per cent of labour standards violations between 2006 and 2018, even though these smaller firms employ only 13 per cent of workers in the federal jurisdiction. In short, if you’re asking who is, far and away, most likely to break the law and systematically violate workers’ rights in Canada’s federal jurisdiction, the answer is small trucking firms.

Interviewing many federal labour inspectors in the course of the research further confirmed this: most inspectors spend the vast majority of their time chasing around “mom and pop” trucking companies for wage theft, employee misclassification and a host of other labour standards violations.

It’s safe to assume that the people who made the trek to Ottawa aren’t the same people filing labour violation claims with the federal Labour Program. Rather than exploited workers in a deregulated industry, my guess is that the “truckers” actually present in Ottawa were by and large self-employed owner-operators: the small contingent of wealthier small proprietors who have made out quite well in the new wild-west of for-hire trucking. It was a “revolt” of the petit-bourgeoisie, financially backed by wealthy right-wing grifters.

This weekend’s idiotic pageantry was thus a political consequence of the decades-long class project to remake the trucking sector, a project which has dismantled a highly unionized industry, formerly made up of relatively well-paying and stable jobs, and replaced it with a poorly regulated labour market of hyper-competition among small owner-operators and other precariously-positioned workers.

Liberal nostrums about “trusting the science” of vaccines aren’t enough to address the much deeper issues on display in the “Freedom Convoy.” Only the heavy lift of union organizing, building worker power and re-regulating the trucking sector’s labour market can help beat back the power of the far-right and its small business supporters.”

- Adam King, “The Trucker Convoy Is Not A Workers’ Revolt.” Passage. February 4, 2022.

#convoy nonsense #canadian far right #reactionary politics #political protest #truckers #truck driver #white supremacy #covid19 #antivax #coronavirus pandemic #coronapolitics #canadian trucking alliance #workers' rights #working conditions #working class politics #astroturfing

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beardedmrbean · 3 months

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In a classic example of better late than never, a Federal Court in Canada ruled on Tuesday that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's invocation of The Emergencies Act in 2022, used to crush the largest and most peaceful protest in Canadian history, was "unreasonable," "unjustified," and "violated the fundamental freedoms" set out in Canada's constitution.

The case was brought to the court by a number of individual applicants as well as several Canadian civiil liberties groups, including the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. And in the decision, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley expressed what every trucker and other participant in the trucker's Freedom Convoy knew to be true: There was no justification for granting the government powers that amounted to near Marshall Law over a protest that was 100 percent peaceful, with no violence or property damage committed—that is, until the Emergencies Act was passed, and the police trampled grandmothers under horses, fired tear gas canisters at journalists within point blank range, beat protesters down and smashed the windows of the truckers rigs, and generally deployed the type of violence that the government had knowingly falsely accused the truckers of engaging in.

The government also froze the bank accounts of truckers, seized donated funds, and shut down of the economic lives of hundreds of Canadian citizens, a draconian measure which shocked the world.

Every protester and trucker who took part in the Convoy knew that the government and it's bought and paid for media were lying to the public about the Freedom Convoy, and though it feels good to once again be proven correct, that doesn't change what happened. It also doesn't change the division in Canadian society which took place under COVID, and it remains to be seen if this ruling will put an end to the ongoing punishments of various Freedom Convoy protesters which continue to this day.

For example, the trial of Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, who emerged as public faces and leaders of the Ottawa portion of the Freedom Convoy, has now become the longest mischief trial in Canadian history. Finally getting underway in September of last year, the trial proceeded in fits and starts into December, and is set to resume in February.

Or take Guy Meisner, a trucker from Nova Scotia, was one of the first to be arrested and charged when the crackdown began after the Emergencies Act was invoked. He will be back in Ottawa near the end of February for the ninth time to face his "mischief" charges.

Then there is the case of Christine Decaire, a woman who protested in Ottawa and was charged by the police, who was acquitted last year; much like this ruling today, however, The Crown has decided to appeal her acquittal. To drag an innocent person back to court is the kind of grossly vindictive behavior on the part of the Trudeau Government that they have become well known for.

There are dozens of cases like this working their way through the system.

And then we have The Coutts Four, a group of men who were arrested in Alberta right before the Emergencies Act was invoked and have been kept in custody without bail nor trial ever since. Hopes are high that this ruling may help change their circumstances, but it has now been two years since they have seen their families, which is a grossly offensive situation, especially in a country where nearly everyone gets bail.

All of these cases point to a level of vindictive cruelty on the part of this government as constituted under Trudeau, who was only too happy to champion the fair treatment of someone who fought on the side of The Taliban in Afghanistan and was later apprehended by American forces. Champion the rights of his own peaceful citizens to a fair trial? Apparently that is beneath the Prime Minister.

Trudeau's deputy, Chrystia Freeland was behind the bank account freezing acting as Finance Minister, and she appeared almost immediately after the ruling to announce that her government would be appealing, claiming to "remind Canadians how serious the situation was." This though all the evidence and testimony presented in 2022 at the official inquest into the invocation of the Emergencies Act found that no threats existed, and everything the media said about the truckers was a fabrication.

Justin Trudeau has remarked in the past that Canada is a "post-national" state that has "no core identity," yet when that identity asserted itself to say enough is enough to the strictures of his punishing COVID Regime, he was only too happy to unleash the full power of his "post-national" state to attack these citizens whom he holds in utter contempt.

It appears that there is no ruling Trudeau will not appeal or lawfare he will not pursue to ensure punishment of the enemies of his party.

Justin Trudeau is not a leader, but merely a narcissistic tyrant. This week was only the latest evidence.

Gord Magill is a trucker, writer, and commentator, and can be found at www.autonomoustruckers.substack.com.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.

#nunyas news #hope all kinds of lawsuits happen over this one #should be funny

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megabuild · 13 days

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PLEASE please tell me what white supremacist propaganda X has put in his videos i dont watch him because. well i dont like him. but i have to know

youtube

spent a whole video saying that the news were reporting badly on the canadian trucker convoy and making them out as nazis because (checks notes) they flew nazi and confederate flags. less propaganda and more sympathising

youtube

also said some odd shit about white privilege but if im real im not going to rewatch this video to remember what because ive seen enough xisumasays for a lifetime

#anon #asks #discourse

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roboe1 · 3 months

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gsirvitor · 7 months

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Wait wasn’t there someone in the Canadian parliament that called the truck protesters Nazis? Now they are celebrating a actual nazi?

Explain Canadian parliament, aren’t you supposed to be smarter than us?

Yes, the Liberal party of Canada called them Nazis, specifically Trudeau has.

Now, remember there was one guy who kept showing up with a Nazi flag, he also kept getting kicked out by the Truckers and was most likely a Federal plant.

During a heated exchange in the House of Commons Feb 16, 2022, Justin Trudeau accused Conservative MPs sympathetic to the trucker convoy of standing with "people who wave swastikas."

The comment came in response to a question from Conservative MP Melissa Lantsman, who is Jewish. Lantsman, the MP for the Toronto-area riding of Thornhill, said Trudeau "fans the flame of an unjustified national emergency."

Trudeau's full statement is as follows;

"Conservative Party members can stand with people who wave swastikas. They can stand with people who wave the Confederate flag,"

"We will choose to stand with Canadians who deserve to be able to get to their jobs, to be able to get their lives back. These illegal protests need to stop, and they will."

Mind you, it is not only uncouth for a Prime Minister to use inflammatory language in the House of Commons, but is something that can have you removed from the debate.

Chrystia Freeland is also the one responsible for using the emergency powers act at the behest of Trudeau, she, the granddaughter of a Ukrainian Nazi propagandist, used the government's emergency powers to steal money from the protesters, freeze the bank accounts of any who donated to them and their families, send in military police and federal police to violently suppress the most peaceful protests ever seen and trample a grandmother.

Smarter? We aren't smarter.

Oh, and let's not forget that the military police's group chats were leaked, showing they were looking forward to getting violent with the protesters.

Oh, and you'll never hear about this, but there are massive protests happening right now due to the government trying to trans kids, and push gender theory, ideology and pornographic books in schools.

youtube

This is happening across Canada, if Rebel news wasn't filming and reporting on it, it would have never been seen, just like the Convoy for Freedom.

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survivingcapitalism · 3 months

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“Obstruction charge against Indigenous journalist Brandi Morin proceeds,” read the tweet, linking to an article on Welund’s intelligence platform — an article that can only be accessed by corporations, law enforcement agencies and governments who pay huge sums to access Welund’s “intelligence.”

The government of Alberta has two publicly disclosed sole source service contracts with Welund North America Limited, a Calgary-based Canadian subsidiary of Welund that was incorporated in 2016. Both contracts are listed as being with the Ministry of Justice and the Solicitor General, and both list Edmonton as the location of the contract. One contract ran from 2018 to 2021, with the other running from 2021 through May of 2024. The total cost of the two contracts is over $140,000.

A secretive multi-national surveillance company run by former law enforcement and intelligence operatives with a track record of spying on activists and public figures posted, then deleted, a tweet about journalist Brandi Morin.

Both contracts specify that the payments are for a “subscription service that supports government-wide multi-issue intelligence and risk-assessment capability of the Provincial Security and Intelligence Office (PSIO).”

PSIO is itself a secretive organization, with no web presence or public contact. However, references in several reports, and declassified documents released as part of the work of the Public Order Emergency Commission (which looked into government response to the Trucker Convoy) show that a man named Bill McAuley is a director of PSIO, and PSIO is an arm of the Alberta government.

#Canada #Alberta #Brandi Morin

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kayla360 · 2 years

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How do I explain to my parents that I’m traumatized?

How do I explain to them that seeing the Canadian flag even on official building makes me shutter every time?

How do I explain that when I hear beeping and honking it scares me to my soul?

How do I explain that when I went skating with my Indian friends and I arrived a couple minute late I saw pure relief on her face that I was there because I was white and by me just being there the chance of her getting attacked by the “convoy protest” drastically went down. Also there was an extremist anti-immigrant flag the other side of the road.

How do I explain that at one of the counter-protest I went to. My friend almost got into a fight and I had to physically drag him out before it went into a full fist fight.

How do I explain to them I got called, a bitch, a whore, a Justin Trudeau simp, a f word and more for being against the convoy online.

How do I explain to them I had multiple friends and acquaintances that got attacked and harassed in downtown for simply wearing a mask and I was so scared that I’ll be next.

How do I explain that the weekend the police raided them my boss forced me to go to work and all the public transport and Uber were out so I had to walk in the middle of downtown. I had to call my boss in tear because there was no way I was gonna be able to go true them and then he told me to stay where I was and he would get me. It took an hour of me being in one of the residential road close to downtown on my phone that was almost dead with my best friend being so scared seeing people in truck pass in front of me every time wondering if I was gonna get harassed or worse because I was wearing a mask.

And more importantly how do I explain to them why I didn’t flee, why did I stay fighting. Why did I continue when I was so scared.

How do I explain I went into another depression and had to quit school again for a semester.

How do I explain?

#tw convoy #anti vax convoy #karen convoy #freedumb convoy #trucker convoy #trauma #canadian politics #sorry I had to rent it out #convoy rent #kayla360

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xenosagaepisodeone · 1 year

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I was idling in the parking lot at work when an actual short bus with a Canadian flag on the hood, two flags hanging off the sides and a bunch of fuck Trudeau/pro truckers convoy graffiti scrawled in marker all over it just whips down main street. deeply upset that I wasn't quick enough to get a picture because I was looking at this thing absolutely bug eyed.

#submitted an anonymous post to the town facebook page asking if ANYONE got a pic of this...I am truly desperate

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beardedmrbean · 1 year

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Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau generated controversy for recently claiming that he never forced anyone in his country to get the immunization throughout the course of the pandemic.

In a clip shared to Twitter, Trudeau declared Monday that he merely incentivized people to get the vaccine, "while not forcing them to do so."

The clip generated a huge backlash online, with users claiming that the leader’s comments stand in contrast with his orders requiring vaccines for various groups of Canadians, including a mandate for all federal workers and federally regulated Canadian transportation sectors.

2 CANADIAN POLICE OFFICERS SLAPPED WITH MISCONDUCT CHARGES AFTER DONATING $50 OR LESS TO FREEDOM CONVOY

The Canadian government’s mandates for cross-border truck drivers were so despised among some truckers that they orchestrated the "Freedom Convoy," a protest of historic proportions in the nation’s capital that spread throughout the country.

Trudeau provided a sanitized retelling of how he implemented COVID-19 policies during a talk with German President Steinmeier at the University of Ottawa this week.

In a clip of the talk, Trudeau defended his implementation of the vaccine, arguing that he followed scientists’ advice that "vaccination was going to be the way through this." He also claimed he gave "incentives" for people to get immunized rather than force them to do so.

"And therefore, while not forcing anyone to get vaccinated, I chose to make sure all the incentives and all the protections were there to encourage Canadians to get vaccinated," he said.

Earlier in the speech, the Canadian leader acknowledged there were people who suffered "side effects" from the vaccine but argued that the rate of harm was higher among the population that didn’t take the shot.

In response to the claim, Chief Nerd posted a video of Trudeau from more than a year ago directly endorsing COVID vaccine mandates.

In that clip from February 2022, Trudeau said, "I can understand frustrations with mandates, but mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions – or having to be restricted."

CANADIAN RELIGIOUS LEADERS SPEAK OUT AS COUNTRY SET TO ALLOW EUTHANASIA FOR MENTAL ILLNESS

Twitter users blasted Trudeau for denying what he had done to Canadians during the pandemic.

Canadian criminal lawyer David Anber tweeted, "This man is a menace to society and the chief purveyor of ‘misinformation and disinformation.’"

Professor, evolutionary behavioral scientist, and author Gad Saad tweeted, "He is truly something else."

Lawyer and prominent conservative Harmeet Dhillon simply replied, "Lies."

Businessman and author Edward Dowd torched the prime minister, writing, "The gaslighting here is epic and all the folks who bought into his nonsense have been punked. Your dear leader now says he never forced anyone…those of [us] who supported him have effectively been abandoned."

#nunyas news

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