TORONTO – Second day of protest today in Ottawa. Thousands of protesters joined the “Freedom Rally” organized by a group of truck drivers to denounce the obligation of vaccination to cross the border with the United States and on Saturday they reached the Capital. The two-day protest was accompanied by an endless series of controversies, accusations and poisons destined to have a long aftermath in the immediate future. First of all, the demonstration of truck drivers, which started from British Columbia, in recent days has completely changed its nature and identity.
The protest in fact attracted like a magnet numerous components of the variegated Canadian no vax galaxy and in substance the dispute turned into an open challenge to the federal government and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. With a fundamental error, which has been highlighted several times: among the demands of the protesters – stop vaccination certification, enough with the lockdowns, end of anti-covid restrictions and so on – decisions have been brought into play that do not belong to the federal government, but to the individual provincial executives. But the elements of controversy certainly do not stop there.
The treatment of the statue of Terry Fox, covered with no vax signs, caused a wave of indignation, while the violation of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier was denounced by several parties, with numerous demonstrators dancing right above the monument. In addition to this, in the images that have circulated on the Net you can see swastikas and other Nazi symbols carried by some protesters.
On the political front, both the ruling Liberal Party and the NDP strongly condemned the demonstration, while on the right the assessment was different.
Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole met with a delegation of protesters – a move that some analysts see as a kind of tombstone to her shaky leadership in the face of the challenge launched by Pierre Poilievre – while several Conservative MPs took part directly in the demonstration.
Maxime Bernier, leader of the People’s Party, the political formation that in the last electoral campaign openly supported no vax and anti-lockdown positions, gathering a significant consensus, could not be missing among the crowd.
But the protest in Ottawa also captured attention from abroad.
In the United States Donald Trump expressed his support for the participants with a series of tweets and with a passage of the speech held in the city of Conroe, Texas “The convoy of participants – wrote the former president of the United States – did more to defend American freedom than our own leaders. We want to let those great Canadian truck drivers know that we are with them.”