A protester dances on a concrete jersey barrier in front of vehicles and placards on Rideau Street, on the 20th day of a protest against COVID-19 measures, in Ottawa, on Feb. 16, 2022.
And the rest of us – people who believe in institutions and expertise – need to figure out what to do about that, because lately, many of yesterday’s conspiracy theories do, in fact, have the ring of truth about them. Meanwhile, remember those vaccine mandates? It wasn’t so long ago that a broad and influential swath of the general populace accepted, as if it were holy doctrine, the argument that the unvaccinated should not be allowed to travel, work or sit in restaurants. These mandates were then levered into a divisive wedge issue by the Liberals against the Conservatives in the 2021 election.
In other words: The most demonstrably dangerous faction of the trucker convoy was arrested and disbanded before the government invoked the Emergencies Act. It’s difficult to reconcile that fact with the Liberals’ decision to use that act to subsequently freeze the bank accounts of convoy organizers without a warrant. One doesn’t have to like the convoy to acknowledge that this was an abuse of power.
Well-intentioned attempts to suppress wrongthink are not only misguided on their own merits, they are destined to fail. Even more so when institutional power is increasingly disintermediated by the internet. That is exactly what is happening., less than half of Canadians trust the justice system and the courts. Police fare the best out of the lot – but even here, trust topped out at 65 per cent of those surveyed in the fall of last year.