Juno News - February 14, 2022


The freedom convoy is a social movement

Mentioned
Justin Trudeau F. Trudeau COVID-19
Here’s what Ontarians have to say about Ford’s state of emergency Invoking the Emergencies Act confirms that Trudeau has lost all control

Episode Stats


Length

3 minutes

Words per minute

190.13

Word count

651

Sentence count

18


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I talk about what I think is going on in the streets of Canada right now, and how establishment voices and the political class are failing to see what's truly going on on the streets, and why it's not a political statement.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Establishment voices and the political class in Canada are really failing to see what's
00:00:09.800 truly going on in the streets of Canada right now as people protest COVID-19 restrictions
00:00:15.500 and mandates. There's one big way of thinking about it that I think they've screwed up. They're
00:00:21.940 not seeing it the right way. And an example of this is Doug Ford giving his press conference
00:00:26.720 a couple days ago when he talked about bringing in a state of emergency to deal with most acutely
00:00:31.440 what was going on at the Ambassador Bridge, the blockade there, but also what was going on in
00:00:35.340 Ottawa and elsewhere. Doug Ford giving his statement said multiple times that okay guys you have made
00:00:41.080 your political statement but your right to make a political statement doesn't mean that you can do
00:00:46.700 this that and the other and therefore we have to bring in these these policies. He made other social
00:00:51.040 media posts as well using this phrase political statement and I think that's rather telling and
00:00:55.920 and I think that's part of the problem both right now and also speaks to a problem that we've had
00:00:59.860 in our COVID response for quite some time now. Political statement. Whoa whoa whoa. This is not
00:01:05.880 a political statement in the traditional sense. Yes there are some people waving the banners that say
00:01:11.280 F. Trudeau. Okay a lot of people waving the F. Trudeau banners and they're clearly uh they would
00:01:16.360 clearly prefer that Justin Trudeau not be Prime Minister anymore. So yes that's that's political in many
00:01:20.520 respects but more broadly speaking what we're seeing here this this really kind of diverse collection
00:01:26.960 of voices coming together it's not a political statement it's a social movement because yes we've
00:01:34.140 got people with certain political views but we've also got people with other political views coming
00:01:38.760 forward on this issue. A diverse array of individuals you've seen the polling numbers perhaps that show
00:01:43.080 uh 50 percent of Green Party voters support what's going on in the streets of Canada right now. So a really
00:01:48.960 diverse collection of voices diverse in all senses of the word religions and and uh and ethnic backgrounds
00:01:55.560 and walks of life and and and professions I mean we're just seeing so many different people come
00:02:00.820 together here. Disparate grievances in some sense they have particular concerns particular focuses on
00:02:07.980 different aspects of the COVID-19 rules restrictions mandates but they're all coming together coalescing to
00:02:13.900 say enough is enough we've had enough no more of these rigid rules no more of these rigid mandates and
00:02:20.100 that's what's bringing these individuals together as part of a social movement as opposed to one
00:02:24.600 particular political statement. There's a lot of people on the streets who vote actually different
00:02:29.200 ways they're not all just you know conservative voters or People's Party of Canada voters uh they have
00:02:34.260 a variety of perspectives in that regard and it is a social movement but the problem is Doug Ford and
00:02:39.820 Justin Trudeau and others not just right now with the protests but for many months now they've been
00:02:44.300 conceptualizing COVID-19 as as a run-of-the-mill political issue as if it's akin to whether or not
00:02:50.960 you should ratchet up this tax credit by 50 bucks or lower the tax credit by 50 50 bucks as if this whole
00:02:56.620 idea of all these big things we've done to people's lives shutting things down on and off again
00:03:02.460 telling people your children must wear masks for two years straight who you can see who you can't see how
00:03:07.500 far apart you have to stand from people as if these these very very visceral things that have proven
00:03:13.460 quite traumatic for many people as if it's just some basic little politics as usual it's not a political
00:03:19.360 statement when people say we've had enough with these things it's much more of a broad-based social movement