A mistake to cast Freedom Convoy all as ‘fruitloops’. By Nick Cater.
In November 2020, Justin Trudeau assured Covid-weary, cooped-up Canadians relief was just months away. “When we get into the spring when there’ll be vaccines, we’re going to see the other side of this,” he said.
Some 15 months, 2.8 million infections and 23,000 deaths later, he faces the difficult task of explaining to Canadians why things didn’t exactly go to plan.
It is a challenge faced by every national leader who asked citizens to sacrifice freedom and put their trust in the machinery of state. Politicians of the utopian persuasion such as Trudeau, who believe central planning is the solution to everything, are finding it hard to admit they’ve been outsmarted by Covid-19. They appear mystified by the bubbling anger and resentment from people who took them at their word and thought the vaccines would be the end of it.
The Freedom Convoy that has descended on Ottawa is the largest, longest and loudest demonstration against a Canadian government since the counterculture movement of the 1960s. Yet since this is not a movement with a university pedigree, the progressive elite to which Trudeau belongs is treating it with disdain. He described it as a “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views”. …
Mainstream media has happily played along with the fruitloopification of the truckies and their fellow travellers, condemning them by association with white supremacists, anarchists and Donald Trump. …
In Australia, as in Canada, the anti-lockdown crusade has developed into a resistance movement against vaccine mandates. It has allowed some state leaders to take the same course as Trudeau by falsely labelling the heterodox movement as “anti-vaxxers”, adding additional slander as necessary. By this means, they have avoided addressing the chronic failure of the Covid-19 master narrative that emerged in early 2020: that the only way out would be the arrival of a vaccine. Until then, economic and civil liberties would have to be curtailed to stop the spread and flatten the curve. Eventually, vaccines would arrive and the nightmare would be over, assuming everyone took them. …
Coercive public health is a sure-fire way to build a groundswell of opposition to government measures that coalesces in movements such as the Freedom Convoy and its Australian variant camped in Canberra.
“The other approach, participatory public health, sees the need for coercion as a sign that something in the public health outreach itself has failed,” [Canadian psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Norman Doidge] writes. “Society’s leaders should not simply resort to force but rather confront the flaws in their own leadership.” …
Hindsight, of course, is a wonderful thing. The waning efficacy of vaccines and the need for extra boosters would not have been clear when the Doherty Institute modelled the effects of vaccination in the middle of last year. It was this that Australian governments relied on in their road maps for returning to life as normal. …
Scott Morrison spoke with rare political honesty at the National Press Club last week when he admitted his government had made mistakes at various stages of the pandemic because it couldn’t see around corners. His speech was all but ignored by a scowling and self-fascinated press pack determined to make the PM grovel before it, and then grovel some more. It is a pity, because his speech demonstrated an element of humility we are unlikely to see from the likes of Daniel Andrews, Mark McGowan and Trudeau. …
Levelling with the public may be costly in the short term, as Morrison discovered. But it is the only way to tackle the deficit of trust that could yet prove to be the pandemic’s most costly legacy.
Trudeau’s “small fringe minority … holding unacceptable views” is his “basket of deplorables” moment, his “let them eat cake” gift to posterity.
hat-tip Stephen Neil, Scott of the Pacific
