Thousands of Canadians are out to protest vaccine mandates and forced vaccines, but of course, the media and our politicians continue to belittle them and ignore them. Today's show is all about the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers who are fighting the government's attempt to force vaccines across the border.
00:00:00.020Thousands of Canadians are out to protest vaccine mandates and forced vaccines, but of course, the media and our politicians continue to belittle them and ignore them.
00:00:09.640I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.
00:00:16.460Hi everyone, thank you so much for tuning in. Happy Monday. I am back in studio now, and I feel like it's sort of a game of Survivor at my house right now.
00:00:25.060I am the last person in my household to not have COVID, so my husband came down with COVID over the weekend, and it's not pleasant, for sure.
00:00:34.140It is an unpleasant illness. He's got a sore throat, the same as what my mother was complaining about last week.
00:00:40.600But, you know, I'm sort of happy that they're getting Omicron, they're going to have the antibodies against it,
00:00:45.980and hopefully the more people that get this COVID, get this strain, and can get through it, the closer we will be to just having an end of the pandemic.
00:00:53.160I think we're all just very, very sick of it, and you could see this happening as Canadians were spilling into the streets over the weekend to protest in favor of freedoms.
00:01:02.180Huge, huge freedom rallies across the country.
00:01:04.820This, of course, should have been the number one news story every time you turned on a television or any newspaper you picked up,
00:02:38.080And in addition to protesters out on the street, we saw the Freedom Convoy, the truckers in Canada organizing and starting their descent.
00:02:58.580They're driving across the country from Vancouver all the way to Ottawa to demand an end to the vaccine mandate.
00:03:04.720So the Freedom Convoy 2022 protest comes after Ottawa enacted a policy requiring truck drivers to show their proof of COVID-19 shots at the border or they will be turned away.
00:03:14.920In an email shown to True North, convoy organizers say truckers will begin a slow roll from multiple border points on January 23rd and head towards Ottawa.
00:03:23.780They hope that slowing down major transportation routes will garner attention for their cause.
00:03:28.520And they were, we have clips from all over.
00:03:30.840So they start, like I said, we started in Vancouver.
00:03:32.820They're making their way all the way across the country.
00:03:36.060So we have clips from Vancouver, Langley, Smithers, BC, Surrey, some from the other side of the country, Amherst, Nova Scotia, Brooks, Alberta, Chilliwack, and Abbotsford, British Columbia.
00:03:46.380Lots of images of truckers showing their discontent and their displeasure with these heavy-handed vaccine mandates.
00:04:36.060And no surprise, what the media is picking up on is the opposite.
00:04:51.940So here's a story over in Post Media about the Canadian Trucking Alliance condemning protests by unvaccinated truckers.
00:04:58.180So they found a group who were more than happy to have forced vaccines, and they were condemning those who didn't want them.
00:05:04.060So the Canadian Trucking Alliance issued a statement on Saturday saying it does not support and strongly disapproves of protests staged on public roads, highways, and bridges.
00:05:13.500Alliance president says that both Canada and the United States have cross-border vaccination rules in place, and truckers must adapt and comply.
00:05:20.760So no sympathy for the individual truckers who have their own moral concerns and don't want to get vaccinated.
00:05:26.820Instead, they are jumping on the side of the fancy people of the politicians and the elites in the media saying, no, they can't do this.
00:05:34.920And the pylon continues against these truck drivers because they raised over $3 million through a GoFundMe campaign.
00:05:41.620So Canadians reaching into their pockets, supporting these truckers and their freedom and their individual say whether or not they want to have something injected in their body.
00:05:50.200They raised $3 million through the site GoFundMe.
00:05:52.800And GoFundMe says that they're going to hold the funds until the organizers are able to provide details on how the funds will be distributed.
00:06:00.660Of course, GoFundMe is just like every other left-wing tech organization meddling in where they shouldn't, shutting down free speech,
00:06:08.200and in this case, donations that people are giving out of their own pocket to an organization or to a cause.
00:06:14.740And for some reason, GoFundMe is getting in the middle.
00:07:20.000And so he just likes to denigrate anyone complaining about it.
00:07:24.000Now, of course, we have anyone who's been to a grocery store or anyone who's even just been on social media has seen lots and lots of pictures that look like this.
00:07:30.360Here's a couple of examples you can see on the screen for those watching.
00:07:32.940Lots of people tweeting empty grocery stores, empty shelves in grocery stores.
00:07:37.700We've seen it throughout the pandemic, but particularly bad in the last few weeks here and last few days especially.
00:07:45.200So this one guy says, oh, look, my grocery store in Ottawa looks just perfectly fine.
00:07:49.620And basically mocking anyone who has been dealing with the reality that the supply chain is completely in a mess, in ruins.
00:07:59.760And a lot of stuff, a lot of shelves are empty.
00:08:01.980A lot of people aren't able to get the supplies that they need.
00:08:04.560He eventually deleted this tweet because he was so ashamed by accidentally telling the world his own elitist opinion.
00:08:19.460The reality is that when you force truckers, when you force people who are in the middle of the supply chain to comply to an unethical rule that they don't want to.
00:08:40.260They're not really interacting with the public.
00:08:42.120They're sitting in a truck by themselves for the most part.
00:08:45.020And maybe when they're interacting with people, they're outside, where COVID doesn't spread as much.
00:08:49.120So they have a very valid reason not to get vaccinated.
00:08:52.080Trudeau's putting in this heavy-handed policy, forcing them to get vaccinated.
00:08:55.720His staff are mocking people who are complaining about the supply chain disruptions that are happening.
00:09:00.520And look, here's a story in Global explaining exactly why this is a problem.
00:09:05.460Canadians may see less food in grocery stores, but experts say it's no need to panic.
00:09:09.420Of course, Global throws in the experts, what the experts say.
00:09:12.020But the important takeaway from this piece here is that the Canadian Trucking Alliance estimates that as many as 32,000 Canadian and American cross-border truckers may be taken off the roads due to the mandates.
00:09:24.100That represents 20% of the 160,000 truckers total.
00:09:28.780And that's in addition to nearly 23,000 drivers the industry was short before the mandate.
00:09:33.480So you have an industry where not a lot of people want to work.
00:09:36.100It's a tough, tough job by yourself for long, long hours and on roads, often dangerous conditions, trying to meet deadlines.
00:09:44.240And on top of that, you're putting in this mandate that shouldn't even affect them.
00:09:48.680You know, you could have a conversation about requiring people at hospitals that are engaging with vulnerable people about making sure that they're vaccinated, making sure maybe teachers are vaccinated, keep the schools open, making sure that public-facing people get vaccinated.
00:10:03.060But a trucker is not a public, yeah, sure, he's doing cross-border transportation, but he's in a truck by himself.
00:10:09.620So the idea that you would force these people to get, and it doesn't even make sense.
00:10:14.740You're sitting, he's sitting in a truck by himself and you're forcing an already, an industry that's already has shortages and has issues.
00:10:22.740You're artificially making it 20% fewer employees there.
00:10:26.780So way to go, Justin Trudeau and your idiotic staffers mocking this whole situation.
00:10:32.440Meanwhile, you're the ones that are causing it.
00:10:34.880Now, that's just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the horrible media takes.
00:10:39.240So aside from usually ignoring the issue, ignoring the big protests, ignoring the trucker convoys, this time the media is sort of piling on, talking about how it's a bad strategy.
00:10:48.520It's a bad strategy that these truckers are protesting against the vaccine mandate.
00:10:54.940Truckers should have been more prepared for the vaccine mandate, experts say.
00:10:58.620So they speak to someone who's a professor of the School of Public Administration at Dalhousie University, questioning the wisdom of the truckers' lobbying strategy.
00:11:08.080Given how firmly Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has staked out his position in favor of vaccine mandates during last year's federal election, Trudeau really drilled in on putting the pressure on for vaccines.
00:11:18.180This professor said, if some companies are making an effort and others aren't, I don't get it.
00:11:23.240It's another thing, again, if companies are really resisting it, as though the government doesn't have the right to do this.
00:11:29.140So she's basically just saying that this is a bad issue.
00:11:48.840And in the same story, we've got another bad take.
00:11:50.700This is an individual called Andrew Steele, who's a vice president of consulting at Strategy Corp, so basically just a lobbyist.
00:11:57.360And they said that polls show that public opinion is overwhelmingly in favor of strong vaccine requirements for essential workers and that companies and trade groups need to read the room.
00:12:08.240If you're making a public relations or government strategy, you should align with public opinion.
00:12:13.040Governments, especially in a high-stakes, massive crisis like this, don't run in the face of public opinion and do the opposite.
00:12:19.140So, again, basically just saying, look, this is popular and therefore you don't get any rights.
00:12:41.160So the CBC, instead of covering the issue, instead of looking at the issue of why these truckers are protesting, the CBC just completely made up their own reason why the truckers are protesting.
00:12:52.480Everyone knows that the truckers are protesting against the vaccine mandates, except for the CBC, who spun this story, invented this story, that the truckers are actually protesting dangerous conditions on B.C. highways.
00:13:04.680So here it reads, hundreds of people joined a convoy led by truckers in B.C. protesting hazardous road conditions on the province's highways.
00:13:14.020The rally organized by the West Coast Trucking Association made its way from Surrey to Vancouver Saturday in hopes to bring awareness of the icy and dangerous road conditions that truckers have to deal with in the winter season.
00:13:27.180And then they find some guy, some guy who's like confused about what the protest is actually about to say like, oh, yeah, we're just we're just protesting the icy roads.
00:13:35.260We're we're we're these Canadian truckers who are protesting winter.
00:13:38.440Basically, we're protesting acts of God.
00:13:40.740Sometimes we're driving and it's snowing and we want the plow to be there, but the plow isn't there yet.
00:13:44.840And so so they concocted this whole idea that this is what the protests were actually about.
00:14:05.380They're protesting Trudeau and the heavy handed vaccine mandates.
00:14:08.960And so they had to add this little correction at the bottom saying it is different from another rally that left Vancouver for Ottawa protesting vaccine mandates on Sunday.
00:14:18.020And so, of course, they added that after getting ridiculed because everybody knew that the protests were not about the icy roads or truckers are protesting winter.
00:14:26.200You know, maybe one guy was out there protesting winter.
00:14:28.400Everyone else was out there protesting the vaccine mandates.
00:14:31.980And the CBC wrote the story about the one guy and pretended it was everyone.
00:14:34.940And then afterwards pretended that they knew the difference and they just had to clarify, oh, this is a different rally than the big one that you've probably been seeing lots of images about on social media and, you know, through your friends online.
00:14:47.320And so really, really stupid, idiotic take by the CBC.