Over the last three weeks, the Canadian government and its legacy media have been ruthless in their attempts to demonize the 2022 Freedom Convoy as a plot by fringe right wing extremists to enact a Canadian version of America’s January 6/21 “Capital Riot” in Washington DC—grossly mischaracterized as an “armed insurrection.” In the following paper, Jason Unrau sets the record straight: the trucker convoy currently protesting in Ottawa against Covid mandates is a festive, nonviolent organization that has inspired an international movement, incorporating truckers, farmers, doctors, public servants, and a diverse cross-section of patriotic Canadians who want nothing more than the immediate restoration of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms that for the last two years have been suspended well beyond time limits set for a State of Emergency and without the Trudeau government ever having “demonstrably justified” the need for any suspension of the Charter. Pictured above: screenshot of the Freedom Convoy ADDRESS TO THE NATION on February 6, 2022. Seated in the front row from left to right: Tom Marazzo; Dr. Paul Alexander; Dr. Roger Hodkinson; Jeff Gaudry.

“By knowingly not prescribing agents that are effective at prophylaxis and minimizing the effects of COVID-19—by intentionally preventing that from happening, you are killing people. Pure and simple.”

Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MD

The Real Reps of the Convoy

Who represents the Freedom Convoy? If you believe the legacy media, the truckers are a disorganized rabble of fringe conspiracy theorists, white supremacists, extremists, domestic terrorists, racists, sexists, antisemites and misogynists. But the truth is, the Freedom Convoy is a nonviolent, very carefully structured organization composed of, in the words of Pierre Poilievre (MP, Carleton, Ottawa), “hard-working, law-abiding and peaceful truckers” as well as a number of Canadian public servants and physicians such as Dr. Roger Hodkinson, with whom I conducted an interview (see below), and Dr. Paul Alexander, an epidemiologist and former COVID Pandemic evidence-synthesis advisor to PAHO-WHO (Pan American Health Organization-World Health Organization).

But Poilievre’s comment fails to capture just how impressive the convoy leadership truly is. Even a smear campaign by The Globe and Mail fails miserably to discredit them. The convoy’s chief spokesman, Tom Marazzo, is a former captain in the Canadian army who is acting as liaison with police during the Ottawa protest.

One of the main organizers is Chris Barber, a Saskatchewan-based trucker who says he’s “fully vaccinated,” but has helped establish the convoy to end all Covid “mandates and government overreach.”

Another leader is Pat King, an Alberta-based trucker and social media influencer, and Jeff Gaudry, a trucker from British Columbia who supported the government’s Covid response early on, but believes “that the passport system was a direction we should have never gone in this country.”

Then there’s former Mountie, Daniel Bulford, who resigned from the RCMP over the vaccine mandate, and has also been working closely with local authorities on behalf of the convoy. He was a corporal in the RCMP and worked with the emergency response team at National Division. He has, moreover, been a personal-protection police officer tasked with safeguarding politicians and the Parliamentary precinct.

Tom Quiggin, meanwhile, works on “protective intelligence” for the convoy, and used to be in the PCO (Privy Council Office), the RCMP, the military and even international arms inspection before he left government in the early 2000s.

Benjamin Dichter claims to be double-vaccinated: he is a podcast producer, money manager and cryptocurrency enthusiast who has been working with the convoy’s chief fundraiser Tamara Lich, an Alberta-based politician and former member of the Maverick Party. She has helped the convoy raise over $10M in public donations, despite ongoing attempts by the government to block those funds.

Fortunately, on February 3, 2022, the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms announced that a “legal team is working on behalf of Convoy organizers to ensure all funds raised by GoFundMe are released to the truckers for their intended purpose . . . to cover the costs of the convoy, specifically food, fuel, lodging, and other necessary related expenses.” The Justice Centre also confirmed that “it is representing the Freedom Convoy 2022 in Ottawa and has a team of lawyers on the ground providing legal assistance and advice.”

The most recent addition to the convoy’s list of representatives is Brian Peckford, former premier of Newfoundland and one of the original architects of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms—who, by the way, has recently launched a legal challenge against the federal government to end all Covid travel restrictions. Peckford joined the convoy shortly after Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau threatened to invoke the Emergency Measures Act in order to crush the freedom convoy using military force.

So what, then, is the 2022 Freedom Convoy’s stated purpose? What are their ultimate objectives? Their Campaign Statement on the fundraising site GiveSendGo states the following:

“To our Fellow Canadians, the time for political overreach is over. Our current government is implementing rules and mandates that are destroying the foundation of our businesses, industries, and livelihoods . . . We are taking our fight to the doorsteps of our Federal Government and demanding that they cease all mandates against its people. Small businesses are being destroyed, homes are being destroyed, and people are being mistreated and denied fundamental necessities to survive. It is our duty as Canadians to put an end to these mandates. It is imperative that this happens because if we do not our country will no longer be the country we have come to love. We are doing this for our future Generations and to regain our lives back.”

The Freedom Convoy’s terms are that it will remain in Ottawa, embedded in the parliament precinct, until Trudeau lifts his unlawful vaccine mandates and passports (which prevent unvaccinated from leaving the country, or accessing rail, air travel or federally regulated transport). Each time Trudeau has lashed out at the convoy and rebuffed their offer to meet, the convoy has stood its ground, reiterating demands: that the truckers aren’t going anywhere until all the mandates—from masks to vaccines—are lifted.

Public support for the truckers is massive, despite what legacy media says. Images of crowds waving Canadian flags and pickets from overpasses and highway-side pitstops abound. These spontaneous, flash-crowds demonstrating popular support—following Trudeau’s remarks calling the trucker convoy a “small fringe minority of people . . . who are holding unacceptable views”—have been impressive enough to prompt Nova Scotia Premier, Tim Houston, to outlaw “gather[ing] alongside Highway 104, the Nova Scotia-New Brunswick border, or at the Cobequid Pass toll area in support of the 2022 Freedom Convoy.”

As of February 11, 2022, convoys not directly affiliated to the main organization have since appeared at three major bridges spanning to the United States, including Ambassador Bridge, a main transport artery, which supports 25 percent of all international trade between the two countries. There are also convoys disrupting cross-border traffic between Coutts, Alberta and Montana and a similar protest at the Manitoba/US border.

Canada’s 2022 Freedom Convoy has inspired similar efforts internationally, in Europe and as far away as New Zealand and Australia. Meanwhile, at this writing, one is said to be gearing up for a run to Washington D.C. to visit President Joe Biden.

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Trudeau: Vaccine Pusher

On the eve of the official convoy’s arrival, a triple-vaccinated Trudeau remained immovable on his policy of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports, urging everyone to get their vaccinations and boosters before retreating to his cottage to isolate five days after testing positive for COVID-19.

But this glaring irony had no purchase among Trudeau’s votaries in his bought-and-paid-for media, who went to work on their next assignment: discrediting and smearing the convoy, but on a grander scale and with a ferocity not seen since they aimed their guns at Donald Trump. In fact, an even more glaring irony issued from Trudeau’s lips when he said at a recent press conference, “Mandates are the way to avoid further restrictions.” American satirist JP Sears noted the sterling logic behind Trudeau’s statement and observed, “In other words, restrictions are the way to avoid further restrictions.”

On the matter of vaccine safety, Trudeau’s government had indemnified the manufacturers and by June 1, 2021—barely four months into the mass vaccination experiment—Canada’s Chief Public Health Officer, Theresa Tam, announced compensation for those “who have experienced a serious or permanent injury after receiving a Health Canada authorized vaccine.”

AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 jab was basically shelved by this stage, at least for a first-dose, based on blood clotting risk, especially among over-50s. Later we would learn of increased myocarditis risk among young men and other injuries. By the federal government’s own count, as of February 4, 2022, there were more than 7,500 adverse events, among them 44 cases of cardiac failure; 39 cardiac arrests; 229 cases of thrombocytopenia (opposite of clotting); heart attacks, 99; myocarditis/pericarditis, 1,720; and more than a dozen other adverse reactions of ‘special concern’.

There’s also the heartrending story of 17-year-old hockey player Sean Hartman. He played for the TNT Tornados in the town of New Tecumseth, where all individuals 12 years of age and older are required to show proof of vaccination to enter a recreation facility. Dan Hartman believes one dose of the vaccine killed his 17 year-old son. But unfortunately his testimony about vaccine safety before Toronto Board of Health was scrubbed from Youtube, much like Dr. Hodkinson’s was.

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The Smear Campaign

On Saturday, January 29, 2022, as thousands of people flooded Parliament Hill to support the truckers and a carnival atmosphere was developing, legacy media, for example Global News, singled out one Confederate flag and a Nazi flag and fixated on these isolated events as somehow representative of an incredibly diverse throng of Canadians, deliberately ignoring the official 2022 Freedom Convoy leadership.

But if you were a shut-in living under your bed watching CBC News on January 29, you may have believed a horde of Trump fanatics and Nazi lumberjacks were ransacking our G7 capital, looking for Trudeau, when in fact an unusually well-organized and diverse group of Canadians had come together in the spirit of peace and love to wrest their country from the hands of a “basic dictatorship” admiring tyrant.

The huge influx of people did not go unnoticed by my local convenience store owner, a Syrian immigrant who raised his family in Ottawa. He told me that since the truckers arrived, business hasn’t been this good since Canada Day:

“There is no problem with these guys, they’re nice and spend money. I don’t think they like Trudeau, though.”

On day six of the massively supported protest, which the Trudeau-media and our hapless mayor were now calling “an occupation”—it became clear to local police that the convoy was immovable. Nevertheless, Trudeau still refused to meet with the official convoy representatives, and I doubt he ever will. Instead, legacy media turned its resources upon organizers and participants, and in a few days, journalists knew more about the convoy and the minutiae of its activities, than they cared to know about the risk-profile for jabbing the nation’s children with experimental pharmaceuticals.

Documenting media smears and escalation—there’s even a website called convoytraitors.ca aimed at doxxing participants—all aimed at Canadian working class men and women now encamped in their trucks, could fill a book. So in the interest of time and space, I urge you to read Ottawa resident Dave Maybury’s “A Night With the Untouchables.”

Maybury did what the official Canadian press hadn’t bothered to do for almost an entire week: put a human face on the freedom convoy and articulate a vast chasm between reality and legacy media reporting. (Another notable article that has tried to humanize the protesters is “What the Truckers Want” by Ottawa journalist Rupa Subramanya.)

“I have read a lot about what my new neighbours are supposedly like,” Maybury writes, “mostly from reporters and columnists who write from distant vantage points somewhere in the media heartland of Canada.”

“Apparently the people who inhabit the patch of asphalt next to my bedroom are white supremacists, racists, hatemongers, pseudo-Trumpian grifters, and even QAnon-style nutters.” 

No stranger to mainstream media smear and slander is Alberta pathologist Dr. Roger Hodkinson, who arrived with the convoy and has helped other MDs find the courage to speak out against vaccine mandates and the safety of the vaccine itself, addressing huge weekend crowds.

I doubt a better image exists for the abysmal state of public discourse in this country than a flatbed trailer loaded with dissenting physicians with bongo drums and bullhorns speaking truth to power against corrupt government, Big Pharma and their mainstream media stenographers.

On the seventh day of gridlock in Ottawa’s seat of government, one of the largest days of the freedom convoy protest, Hodkinson applauded the convoy’s resolve: “These truckers have bigger balls than their god damn trucks!”

Interview with Dr. Hodkinson

I first spoke with Hodkinson in the fall of 2020, eight months into crushing pandemic restrictions across Canada, following the now laughable “2 weeks to flatten the curve,” and even back then he was seething.

“Mixing politics and medicine is a dangerous game,” Hodkinson told me over the phone, a recap of his searing excoriation of Alberta’s pandemic restrictions and their chief medical officer, Dr. Deena Henshaw, at a November 13, 2020 Edmonton city council meeting on extending mask bylaws.

Mere weeks before COVID-19 vaccines would be pushed on the Canadian public, Hodkinson’s five minute Mancunian blitz over City of Edmonton Zoom was easily clipped, tagged and posted online where it spread rapidly on social media. 

Copies have since migrated to upstart VOD site, Rumble, because Youtube censors were scrubbing versions as fast as people could post them; the last to elude detection on Youtube was titled something like, “Jesuit Inquisition,” which showed the online-oppressed are not without a sense of humour. 

Though Brampton, Ontario doctor, Kulvinder Kaur Gill, has been consistently critical of government mandates and 21 doctors signed a letter to Ontario premier Doug Ford in September 2020, urging against more harmful lockdowns, Hodkinson’s visceral rant took on a life of its own and propelled him into the crosshairs.

Which is why I contacted him, in the first place, for an Epoch Times story about his lay-language repudiation of everything Canadian governments had done to that point in their purported fight against COVID-19, not to mention government directed media assaults meant to discredit him.

“This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public.”

Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MD

Hodkinson’s blunt assessment, which seems an eternity ago now, was that cloth and paper masks “were simply virtue signalling”; social distancing is “useless” and “positive COVID-19 tests do not mean clinical infection.” Moreover, case numbers, Hodkinson explained, were driving public panic; consequently, all testing should cease except for those who present with symptoms to hospital or to their personal physicians. Otherwise, he advised, just treat COVID-19 like the seasonal flu.

Hodkinson’s opening salvo is as relevant today as it was then:

“The bottom line is this. There is utterly unfounded public hysteria driven by the media and politicians. It’s outrageous. This is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on an unsuspecting public. There is absolutely nothing that can be done to contain this virus other than protecting older, more vulnerable people. It [COVID-19] should be thought as nothing more than a bad flu season. This is not Ebola, it’s not SARS. This is politics playing medicine and that’s a very dangerous game.”

That a “fact-checker” from Associated Press emailed Hodkinson the same day the story was published in Epoch Times is coincidental, in my opinion. By this time the video had been subtitled into several languages and was circulating internationally.

But having seen the correspondence from AP to Hodkinson, the so-called *fact-checker® seems more determined at total estrangement from facts rather than any semblance of honest inquiry.

“Good afternoon, Mr. Hodkinson,” writes AP. “The fact-checking team at The Associated Press debunks misinformation that circulates online. We are writing a debunk on some of the comments you made in Edmonton’s city council meeting.”

Before his encounter with rank stupidity masquerading as journalism, or the gonifs on Edmonton City Council, Hodkinson attended Cambridge University and United London Medical College, emigrated to Canada and finished a pathology residence at the University of British Columbia. Later he taught clinical pathology at Alberta University and is CEO of Western Medical Assessments, a diagnostics firm, where he’s been medical director for more than 20 years.

Or the Hodkinson-abridged version: “You might say I know a little something about this.”

Not so, according to Associated Press. After cherry picking Hodkinson’s remarks, on December 2, 2020, AP’s *fact-check® team concluded: Pathologist falsely claims COVID-19 is a hoax, no worse than the flu. Agence France-Presse also produced a similarly baseless *fact-check®.

These still fester online, and because shared videos or articles about Hodkinson contain incorrect professional affiliations, Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada originally denied Hodkinson’s association altogether.

When contacted for clarification, comms director for the college, Sandra Shearman, blamed social media.

“We updated our online statement to make it clear that while Dr. Hodkinson did not identify himself as a past chair of the college, this was incorrectly reported by other online sources,” wrote Shearman in an email. “In fact many social/online references to date have described him in this manner.”

In its correction, the college did recognize Hodkinson’s general pathology credentials bestowed in 1976, yet records from the 1990s—when Hodkinson said he oversaw the annual general pathology examination for the college—were conspicuously unavailable. Shearman wrote: “We do not have records of our exam committees from that far in the past.”

Almost 15 months after his own Trudeau-media Inquisition, Hodkinson is a key member of the counter-attack and confident in the convoy’s chances of bringing the illegally sustained State of Emergency to a close.

“The colleges of physicians and surgeons across Canada and across the western world have been brutal in their assault on the fundamental right of physicians to first of all do no harm and secondly, informed consent.”

Dr. Roger Hodkinson, MD

Since speaking out on the mishandling of COVID-19, the College of American Pathologists “has [had] its teeth in my backside,” as Hodkinson puts it, and he continues to get grief from Alberta’s College of Physicians and Surgeons.

“The colleges of physicians and surgeons across Canada and across the western world have been brutal in their assault on the fundamental right of physicians to first of all do no harm and secondly, informed consent. It’s fundamental to our profession.”

Hodkinson says this has violated doctor-patient privilege and chilled freedom of expression among Canada’s medical practitioners, destroyed public confidence in healthcare, and grievously interfered in an individual’s right to make personal health choices with all the information at hand.

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“There is absolutely no medical or scientific reason for prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown.”

Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill

Doctors vs. Colleges of Physicians & Surgeons (CPSOs)

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario began making examples of doctors like Hodkinson more than a year ago. The outspoken Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill, for example, has challenged her censure by the Ontario college after the regulatory body deemed several of her tweets “inaccurate and harmful.”

Gill’s provincial court challenge in September 2021 remains in limbo until CPSO completes its internal review. Social media posts flagged by CPSO in its warning to Gill included:

“There is absolutely no medical or scientific reason for prolonged, harmful and illogical lockdown.”

“COVID-19 is not a serious health issue.”

“If you have not yet figured out that we don’t need a vaccine, you are not paying attention.”

Following the College’s censure of Gill, CPSO issued a statement threatening to sanction any doctors who contradicted health authorities’ pandemic advice on vaccines, lockdowns and masking.

In response, 150 doctors signed the Declaration of Canadian Physicians for Science and Truth in opposition to the College’s move, stating that their “primary duty of care is not to the CPSO or any other authority, but to our patients.”

“We’re a group of doctors who are very concerned about this college statement and policy that we really feel is putting patients’ safety at risk and is undermining basic medical ethics that we’ve been following throughout all of our careers,” Dr. Patrick Phillips, spokesperson for the declaration, said during an interview last spring.

“The worst of it is from the ages of 8 to 25, I’m noticing a big uptick in suicidal tendencies. I also see people after suicide attempts. Honestly, it is heartbreaking.”

Dr. Patrick Phillips, MD

Phillips practises family medicine in Englehart, Ontario, about 200km northwest of Sudbury. He also works emergency ward shifts at regional hospitals and told me he witnesses fallout from public health restrictions that shuttered schools and shut down organized sports and other youth activities.

“I’m seeing in the emergency department [that] when parents or their children are suicidal, they come in seeking care,” he said. “The worst of it is from the ages of 8 to 25, I’m noticing a big uptick in suicidal tendencies. I also see people after suicide attempts. Honestly, it is heartbreaking.”

When I contacted the college to get a reaction to the declaration, I also asked if CPSO were currently investigating any physicians and if so, how many. Phillips confided that the College had opened a file on his activities, so I wanted to know the scale and scope of the CPSO witch-hunt.

Back-and-forth emails are banal, except that the PR person tried to make me spill the name of the doctor who had prompted my queries. Like the inherent privacy invasion of mandated vaccine and passports, the regulator had no issue trying to invade Phillips’ privacy.

Adding injury to insult, later in November CPSO sued four physicians: Drs. Mary Elizabeth O’Connor, Celeste Jean Thirlwell, Rochange Kilian and Mark Raymond Trozzi—an attempt to get compliance with ongoing investigations into vaccine exemptions they issued to patients and prescriptions for alternative therapies such as Invermectin.

Ridiculed as “horse dewormer” by misleading commentators—often working for Pfizer-sponsored networks—many Latin and South American countries have distributed Ivermectin to their citizens, and most recently, Japan has authorized it as an early intervention for clinical infection of COVID-19.

“By knowingly not prescribing agents that are effective at prophylaxis and minimizing the effects of COVID-19—by intentionally preventing that from happening, you are killing people. Pure and simple,” as Hodkinson said.

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Truckers & Doctors in Government Crosshairs

As of this writing, hundreds of trucks continue to gridlock the streets around Parliament in Ottawa, where drivers vow to remain until Trudeau lifts his coercive and divisive rules, including vaccine passports for entering pubs, gyms and even big box stores, liquor stores and pot shops in Quebec; now the jab is required by the Trudeau government to (a) keep your federal government job, (b) to access air and rail travel and (c) to even leave the country (though this is an indirect consequence of a quid pro quo arrangement with the U.S.), applicable to all citizens 12 years of age and older.

These measures cannot be justified as promoting health and safety; they are being used to punitively abuse and coerce by attrition those who have refused to join the mob of experimental jab enthusiasts. Meanwhile, legacy media treats the truckers like it has done medical professionals who dared speak against encroaching and outrageous government overreach—poised now to extend into a third year, and indefinitely should new health concerns arise.

“But real scientists and real physicians, we should be questioning ourselves all the time. We should be open to questioning ourselves.”

Dr. Byram Bridle, MD

University of Guelph professor Byram Bridle, for instance, exiled from campus for refusing the university’s vaccine mandate, has written a letter worthy of everyone’s attention to his (former) employer, criticizing the vaccine mandate which has been taken up energetically by many other post-secondary institutions.

Bridle’s nine-page indictment of the university’s mandatory vaccine policy includes proving his own natural immunity from a previous COVID-19 infection, and concludes by posing the following question to the institutions’ president, Charlotte Yates:

“I have proven to you that I am immune to SARS-CoV-2, but you have banned me from the campus and ruined my life because I don’t have a piece of paper saying that someone saw two needles go into my shoulder. You have a piece of paper that says that someone saw two needles go into your shoulder, but you have not proven that you are immune to SARS-CoV-2. However, you are allowed on campus and your life can proceed uninterrupted. How is that fair?”

Bridle joined the trucker convoy on Friday February 11, when he told a small gathering at the truckers’ Sheraton Hotel HQ about the incredible toll that censorship in the academy and media were taking not only on dissenters, but on liberal democracy’s foundational bedrock of scientific and intellectual inquiry:

“I spent a lot of time waking up everyday wondering, ‘Am I wrong? Am I the one who’s wrong?’ We’re all being pummelled with this messaging . . . we’re being told that we don’t know what we’re talking about, that we’re not real experts. But real scientists and real physicians, we should be questioning ourselves all the time. We should be open to questioning ourselves.”

The Friday gathering at the Sheraton was supposed to be a debate: Bridle, Hodkinson and another outspoken physician, Dr. Paul Alexander, versus what ended up being three empty chairs—one for Canada’s ‘top-doc’ Theresa Tam, another for her deputy Dr. Howard Njoo and National Advisory Committee on Immunization Chair, Dr. Shelley Deeks.

“The truckers here, we really need you to stand the ground for everybody . . . I don’t think people understand; the public does not know because the mainstream media’s not carrying it . . . the few physicians who are willing to stand up, they’re being crushed. Their livelihoods are being taken away from them. They’re being isolated. It’s a classic divide-and-conquer strategy.”

[P]arents are not being told the vaccine is experimental; fast-tracked through development in less than a year, a process which typically takes several years or more.

Meanwhile, on June 17, 2021, during a child vaccination clinic at Walter Murray Collegiate in Saskatoon, University of Saskatchewan clinical professor of surgery Dr. Francis Christian gave a speech on the lawn of the Saskatoon school, urging a pause in vaccinating children in Canada and that provincial health officials were keeping parents in the dark.

“COVID-19 does not pose a threat to our kids. The risk of them dying of Covid . . . is even less than the risk of them dying of the flu,” he said, and added that parents are not being told the vaccine is experimental; fast-tracked through development in less than a year, a process which typically takes a minimum of several years.

“The principle of informed consent is being consistently violated in this province for the mRNA vaccine for our kids. I have not met a single vaccinated child or parent who has been adequately informed and who then understand the risks of this vaccine or its benefits.”

Less than a week after a video of Christian’s speech was posted to BitChute and spread rapidly on the internet, he was sacked from the local health authority and suspended by the university.

As Christian noted in his speech, the mean age of death from COVID-19 in Canada is 83.8 years, older than the average life expectancy. And by May 2020 it was well-known in the public health community that coronavirus severity stratified by age, and more than 80 per cent of victims succumbed in long-term care homes and suffered from multiple co-morbidities.

But instead of giving any consideration to Christian’s views, Saskatoon Star Phoenix, in a hit-piece, seized upon his personal misfortune by surveying his output of fiction and poetry; suggesting that these suspicious indulgences in creative writing “might provide some insight into his world view” and help explain why this “controversial professor [would] jeopardize an impressive career and reputation.”

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An Immovable, Unflappably Peaceful Freedom Convoy

As the freedom convoy in Ottawa stretches into its third week, spirits remain high and the truckers immovable, for now. They have even built a proper stage backlit by a giant outdoor television for a slate of musical entertainment scheduled over the weekend (Feb. 12/13).

That the convoy won’t be intimidated or cowed and the crowds keep surging, especially during the weekends, has precipitated a collective meltdown among local authorities and the press, both of whom have worked tirelessly to wear down the convoy and escalate the situation.

The legacy press and politicos continue to level their tired strategy against the 2022 Freedom Convoy, and in a desperate attempt to control the narrative, have even ramped up their failing rhetoric, using the same trite tactics of plying the pandemic health edicts by hammer-and-tong, PR exaltation of public health officials while silencing and *fact-checking® dissenting doctors.

Social media is filled with troubling comments from both the Trudeau-news network and elected officials: when will police start arresting people? Will Trudeau call in the military? Even The Globe and Mail’s chief Parliament correspondent, Bob Fife, has described the scene downtown as “anarchy,” while other reporters and city councillors consistently hammer away at their propagandistic wedges, inflaming public discourse with loaded military terminology; “occupation,” “siege,” and “terrorists”—hoping frantically to steer the narrative toward a January 6^th armed insurrection at the U.S. Capitol (of the North).

Truckers continue to hold the line in Ottawa, undaunted, and unflappably peaceful amid the blizzard of name-calling and toothless threats emerging from the Trudeau apparatchik.

Their demands haven’t changed: that the government respect and uphold the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, including the freedoms of its citizens to informed consent and to their right to bodily autonomy, without coercive restrictions on the right to earn a livelihood and the right to freedom of movement both domestically and across international borders.

Given the current restrictions, indignities and slander against truckers and other Canadians who declined a COVID-19 vaccine, and the absolute state of outrage among establishment players, Ontario Superior Court Chief Justice, Geoffrey Morawetz’s remarks before authorizing the removal of the convoy from Ambassador Bridge epitomizes the fog of cognitive dissonance that’s befallen our land:

“The activities that are the subject of this injunction, the freedom that those want directly results in the denial of freedom to others in society,” Chief Justice Geoffrey Morawetz told the court without any awareness of the irony issuing from his pen. And with a flourish of unconscious satire, he added: “The direct denial of their freedom to work. The direct denial of their freedom to cross and to move goods and services across the bridge.”

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Jason Unrau is a freelance journalist with an interest in resource development and Indigenous rights, particularly where they intersect. Through more than 20 years of chasing leads from the Canadian Arctic to Ottawa, he has been a staff reporter at Whitehorse Star, News of the North, Blacklock’s Reporter and The Post Millennial, freelanced for legacy newspapers and magazines, and most recently for Epoch Times and C2CJournal. This is his first article for The Secular Heretic.