The issue is that Ottawa Police were afraid of media backlash if they did any crowd control for the initial "protest" weekend. This allowed the occupiers to move in heavy machinery as barricades. When the weekend ended and the trucks didn't move, they realized they were dealing with something closer to an insurrection than a protest, and they've been impotent to stop it since.
THe people of Ottawa overwhelmingly support ending the occupation. It has terrorized women, queer people and people of color on the streets. They've been violent and confrontational with front-line workers, which forced two grocery stores to close their doors, plus a large mall. There have been two documented attempts to burn down residential apartment buildings and trap the occupants inside.
This weekend hundreds of Ottawa residents marched in a counter-protest, and also blocked the road and held up a convoy of trucks for more than 8 hours. The occupiers are a small group of people who are acting badly - shitting in the streets, getting drunk, blaring their horns, and using their children as human shields. Everyone will celebrate when they're gone for good.
Then why require the mandate? I haven't seen any answer to that question besides the implied: "because we demand full compliance."
Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated:
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/health/2019/03/28/anti-v...
Is the science settled on whether 90% vs 100% has an impact on the health of society given omicron?
> Meanwhile, anti-vaccine people are single-handedly working to revive diseases that were almost eradicated
Conflating traditional anti vaxers with the new COVID anti vaxers is dishonest, they actually usually come from different parts of the political spectrum.
It is militancy like yours that is elevating opposition.
I am vaccinated but support anyone that stands up to a mandate, vaccination passes or emergency powers. I don't really have to justify that any further.
It’s amazing that the definition of a word like vaccine could change suddenly, because it is was incompatible to one virus — a mysterious super virus whose origin is still unknown, according to the WHO.
Accordingly places where transmission is likely (eg. a small intimate restaurant) are serious and potentially deadly health risks to the elderly, unvaccinated part of the population.
So long as our hospitals are overwhelmed (as they currently are) it's a very bad idea to open up these high transmission areas to unvaccinated people, as they'll inevitably catch the disease and are so much more likely to end up in the hospital in ICU.
This is why restaurants/bars/etc should continue to have vaccine mandates even though so many people are vaccinated.
The point isn't to coerce the last 10% into getting vaccinated. It's to protect the hospitals from being overwhelmed by new cases from the unvaccinated.
In all provinces, the elderly were the very first to get vaccinated. First. First to get second vaccinations, and for a long time, the only group allowed to even get a third shot.
There are no unvaccinated elderly people running around, unless they insist on not being vaccinated. In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
Your last paragraph makes sense, but the rest?!
> In such cases, that's their choice, and no one should take additional precautions for those opting out.
Yeah it's getting to the point where if stubborn old people want to meet their maker sooner than later, well sure that's their choice and we should let them, but at the moment the hospitals are overwhelmed and this has negative impacts on everyone, as it delays all the other surgeries and other work that the hospital needs to do.
I'm fine with lifting vaccine mandates once hospitals are unlikely to get overwhelmed, but it's not at all clear we're at this point yet.
Going to be very interesting to see what happens in Alberta and Sask over the next little while as they're lifting the vaccine passports.
notice the probable or confirmed case and know that hospitals (US) are eligible for additional reimbursement with covid “case” patient from a $100 Billion CARES act fund (at minimum)
>Individuals who received at least one dose was calculated as (# of individuals who received at least one dose) / (population estimate).
Deaths are also only attributed to Vaccinated category after 14 days from the second dose, else it’s a “unvaccinated” death.
This is the first vaccine ever where you can die 13 days after a vaccine, and be classified unvaccinated. It’s just magical how “science” to advance “public health” works.
https://www.alberta.ca/stats/covid-19-alberta-statistics.htm... — the source data for the site in the parent post
Sounds like a nonsense insane tin foil hat theory to me.
(This being said, very few governments did lockdowns properly, and therefore almost every half-measure taken was ineffective and wasteful.)
So as a napkin calculation how many normalised years of lost labour do we have from the deaths... 0.13 years from the 50-59 year olds, 40-49 0.08, 30-39 0.06, 20-29 0.08, 10-19 0.1, for a total of 0.45 years of lost labour from deaths if the whole country caught covid.
In a world were all economic activity can be turned on and off like a lightswitch it would make economic sense for Canada to flick that switch and leave it off for up to 5 months (of absolutely zero economic activity which is not the actual level of lockdown as essentials still run) to irradicate covid, from the impact of deaths on work produced alone.
So yes as a general rule I would argue that locking down entire countries can make great economic sense if you can lower your death rate (say by using the time where covid spread is reduced by rolling out a vacine that would reduce the lost time to 0.0045 years if everyone got it). Though of course you'd need to get into the nitty gritty of stunted business growth and if killing off 8% of people over 60 is a good way to reduce taxes needed to support them to have a definitive answer.
NB: I'll add that I'm replying to your question on the economic sense. Personally I find reducing the pandemic to this view deplorable but as some do argue it I thought I'd argue the countercase along those lines. I.E. Even if you're a heartless bastard only interested in money you should still be enforcing strict controls until your population is aproaching as vaccinated as it's going to get.
Add to that that the true cost of Covid-19 in survivors (including asymptomatic and mild cases) remains to be seen in terms of DALYs/QALYs, and is known to be significantly greater than zero. [1]
Car accidents are 30-40k/year in the US, so 10% of covid. And the number of measures taken to reduce car accidents is extraordinary - age limits, compulsory driver's licenses, city design rules (roads, pedestrian crossings, etc, etc), speed limits, car construction regulations, compulsory insurance, and more. Given that, what's the appropriate level of regulation you suggest for covid?
It’s obviously a rhetorical question. I’d suggest that in all cases whether such mandates are appropriate depends on their proportionality relative to the harms they prevent.
As a vaccinated person I flat out blame the people that didn't get vaccinated for making the last year much worse than it'd had to be. If we had better vaccine coverage we wouldn't need the restrictions that we had to put in place. They don't only put burden on the healthcare system (which they do), preventing people that need care from getting it (which they do), but they also mean the rest of us have to do more because they're not willing to do their share. I guess the bright side is that this is a tiny minority around these parts.
While we developed vaccines at an impressive speed, governments royally screwed up the rollouts and logistics. Had we all done real proper lockdowns and taken public health recommendations seriously for a few weeks, and had governments been properly supportive (ie.: enabling) of that, our current vaccination uptake might have been enough to eradicate covid-19.
Why do you think our hospitals are understaffed? It’s not because of the great pay of the Canadian system
That said you can't healthcare-capacity your way out of a pandemic, the USA has managed to overwhelm its capacity in numerous jurisdictions despite having much higher baseline capacity than any Canadian jurisdiction. It is not an honest argument worth engaging with.
Not sure what province you are in but using the Canadian average and a 40% increase in beds, that’s roughly $50 million per bed. That is quite frankly a colossal waste of money. Do you feel that this is money well spent?
Likewise if you think that the healthcare system capacity was the only limiting factor with respect to COVID-19 public health measures that reduced transmission your model of the epidemiology of SARS-Cov-2 is incorrect.
"I said $40k per person was enough to build an ICU bed for everyone in Canada."
You didn't say that in the comment I replied to, maybe you said it elsewhere?
$40k per person in Canada is 37 million X 40,000 - that's 1.5 trillion CAD, right? Is my math correct on that? That's 2 years of the entire federal budget where did you get that number from?
It’s mentioned in Pierre Poliveres speech in parliament, here’s a link: https://youtu.be/cGbnjF3OdNQ
Quality-Adjusted Life Years, and Disability Affected Life Years, respectively. Without an understanding of them, you can't actually have an objective conversation about measuring the impact of any kind of illness.
Why do you believe this? Do you assume there is no benefit to doing so? Or do you assume that the harms outweigh the benefits?
You'd be wrong on both counts. [1]
The health impacts of vaccinated, and unvaccinated, have been measured according to current models. And in current models, getting the disease does not offer as much protection as also getting the vaccine - and thus protecting the wider population is best done with a mandate. A minuscule number of individuals is posing a threat to the rest of the population. The freedoms of the individual end where society begins. One doesn't get to walk down the street threatening to punch everyone they meet, even if they never throw a punch.
There were no orders but recommendations only in regards to vaccines. I understand you realize the difference between the order and recommendation. Recommendation does not require compliance.
And the burden was caused by lockdowns and complete absence of vaccines in Canada for a big while
Now with Omicron (for the last few weeks at least) it's clearly not needed any more, but governments move slowly, so it'd take a few more weeks. There's other restrictions that were put in around that timeframe that no longer make sense, like requiring PCR tests, and all those are on their way out.
This protest makes no sense except as a way of sowing chaos and seeking to destabilize the country.
This allows the federal government to send the army if necessary (although Trudeau said they wouldn't), allows the police to fine and detain protestor that do not want to leave the blockade. And allows the federal government to require private companies to provide services, in this case towing companies to tow the rigs.
It also allows for freezing bank accounts of e.g. companies that have trucks participating in the blockade without a court mandate.
I think, but I am not sure, that this only applies to "strategic sites", in this case the border and maybe highways. Protester blocking a random street in Ottawa may not be concerned.
So, why require the mandate: To prevent the slim minority of truckers participating in the blockade from impacting everyone else for months.
But sure, it's all because of Trudeau's ego.
"beginning in early January 2022, DHS will require that all inbound foreign national travelers crossing U.S. land or ferry POEs – whether for essential or non-essential reasons – be fully vaccinated for COVID-19 and provide related proof of vaccination. This approach will provide ample time for essential travelers such as truckers, students, and healthcare workers to get vaccinated."
https://www.dhs.gov/news/2021/10/12/secretary-mayorkas-allow...
So it causes no harmful change for Canadians in general, for as you say, nothing changes.
So... why not give in to this demand then?
As an aside, forcing truckers to get vaccinated makes no sense. They mostly work in isolation, and it isn't like blocking the virus at borders really helps these days.
I support forced vaccination for front line health care workers, those caring for the elderly, where it matters.
Giving in would set a terrible precedent and would undermine Canada's continued existence as a free society.
Seriously? This smells like an attempt to paint the truckers as extreme right. Any quality sources for that claim?
"Health care workers in Ottawa are being harassed protesters against COVID-19 mandates" - https://www.npr.org/2022/02/12/1080354245/health-care-worker...
"Unruly protesters prompt early closure of two downtown grocery stores" - https://ottawacitizen.com/news/unruly-protesters-prompt-earl...
"Ottawa police issue 825 more tickets, respond to reports of protesters ‘harassing children’" - https://ottawa.citynews.ca/police-beat/ottawa-police-issue-8...
> Police have said they are concerned about how the convoy has attracted far-right and extremist elements, and on Sunday confirmed they were dealing with more than 60 criminal investigations, with alleged offences including "mischief, thefts, hate crimes and property damage". - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-60281088
"Canada: Ottawa protests full of 'hate propaganda'" - https://www.amnesty.org.uk/press-releases/canada-ottawa-prot...
I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
From a distance it's very hard to judge what's true and what isn't. My level of trust in the media these days is extremely low so reading stories about Nazi Flags I'm thinking "click bait". Meanwhile forums like reddit - and slowly HN as well - are clearly filled with "paid shill" accounts. So what to trust?
> I've been living in downtown Ottawa for weeks, I've been harassed.
I'm sorry to hear that. I did check your HN profile briefly and you "seem legit"
“define harassment” is neither a good argument nor a discussion in good faith.
> PAT KING: Pat King is a far-right protester who has said in videos posted to social media that there may be future plans to target politicians' homes and that "the only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets." He has called for the arrest of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly.
> King has gained attention online for a video posted to Twitter in which he decries the "depopulation" of white people, as well as another video posted in 2019 in which he makes racist remarks about Jewish, Muslim, and Chinese people.
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-tracker/
"A new Angus Reid poll showed that 54% of Canadians support an immediate halt to all pandemic restrictions, a stark contrast to the 56% who said as recently as in December they would have supported another round of lockdowns over Omicron."
https://www.tasnimnews.com/en/news/2022/02/13/2662060/half-o...
> As the country rolls into another week of uncertainty, nearly three-quarters of Canadians (72%) say the time has come for protesters to “go home, they have made their point.”
https://angusreid.org/trudeau-convoy-trucker-protest-vaccine...
https://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/cur...
The specific question was "It’s time to end restrictions and let people self isolate if they’re at risk.", which describes basically the process that basically all provinces were going through prior to the protests.
Over 1.6 million people tweeted about the Canadian trucker protests over the country’s vaccine mandates, reaching about 330 million users. Of the top 100 most retweeted tweets on the topic, 79% were in support of the protests.
https://twitter.com/NarrativesProj/status/149361219856801792...
What did they do to terrorize those identities specifically and what did/do they benefit from it?
Pretty much every business in deep-liberal cities at this point simply ignores restrictions.
What mandate? Seems like there wasn’t one in the first place.
Using government power intended for things like war to suppress a protest is ridiculous, if this is what being "liberal" is about, I'm out.
I hope the response is a protest escalation. Not my country, not my protest, but I know who I'm rooting for.
Contrast this to what was happening in Minneapolis a couple of summers ago... people burning down buildings, shops, and police stations and the fire and police literally afraid to go places in the city until we had armed forces marching through the streets. Those are the kind of popular uprisings that need to be dealt with, not streets being blocked by unhappy people.
"Public safety" is a good one, you're free to protest but there has to be adequate access for emergency services to get to people in need.
"No significant destruction" is a good one, not just making a mess in the streets but when your movement starts actively destroying property, looting, etc.
If you keep doing economic harm, your movement will tend to get pretty unpopular pretty quickly and the social pressure instead of government force will likely get to you in the end.
Lots of people walking of the job will do significant amounts of economic harm, I don't want people in certain jobs to become effective slaves because their job is important to the economy. And also a general strike is a very powerful action which should be done from time to time, explicitly very economically powerful and definitely should be protected.
This one is also ripe for abuse - outside forces have been using agents provocateurs for centuries, often undercover cops.
Almost unexceptionally yes?
Arab Spring in Egypt, civil rights lunch counter sit-ins, the protests in East Germany in 89...
I'm actually having a hard time thinking of historic protests which didn't inflict economic harm.
Hyperbolic example: If there was a 0.01% minority in your country/region which was violently opposed to some existing minor local law or regulation, would it be ok for them to shut down half the economy over it? Think of all the secondary damage that's doing every time someone gets upset over something relatively-small in the big picture. I think most would think that's unreasonable. It's this question that gets at the heart of when and/or if it's ok for a heavy-handed government to come in and put a stop to things. When is it reasonable for the powers that be to intervene and "stop a protest" because the toll is too high for the weight and/or popularity of the matter at hand?
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 5.9 times more likely to get COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 17, 2022 to January 23, 2022, unvaccinated people were 11.4 times more likely to be hospitalized with COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
* "From January 10, 2022 to January 16, 2022, unvaccinated people were 21.8 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people who received their booster dose."
For the first point, I have some doubt as many covid infections go entirely undetected. If you don't have symptoms you don't get tested and don't end up a statistic. Even the CDC says it expects there have been 4x as many infections as reported.
For the next two, those aren't things which need government compelled vaccinations. You're taking a risk with your own health, I don't care if you take a risk and it kills you.
If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
The only metric that should require vaccination should be to prevent public spread, and then only if the risk to other people is beyond a threshold. It is pretty clear that omicron burned through populations regardless of vaccination status or previous infection. Forcing vaccinations could have lowered this rate a bit, but doubtfully enough to prevent everyone who was going to be exposed from being exposed anyway at a slightly later date.
If you're forcing vaccinations so somebody is more likely to get infected in March rather than January, it is not worth it or a justifiable action. That seems to be the situation with the current vaccine and current dominant variant. Infection is inevitable, short term delay is the only achievable goal, therefore mandates are no longer an acceptable use of government power. Omicron isn't in decline because people were smart or safe or did what they were told, it declined because it ran out of people to infect, vaccination rate didn't seem to significantly alter this pattern around the world except for when the peak happened and perhaps how wide and tall it was.
> If hospitals aren't able to handle the wave of patients, put government weight behind staffing hospitals better and creating temporary hospitals for overflow.
You just immediately contradicted yourself. "It's only a risk to you", but also the government needs to find more hospital staff to take care of you. The fact is, nurses and doctors are burnt out and they're leaving the field because of this bullshit. They don't have enough people to train new health care workers, and even if they did it takes years before they're qualified. You can't just throw money at a staffing issue like this.
Forcing someone to inject something into their body against their will in order to save you a few tax dollars is simply disgusting.
Frankly, I'd be more than happy forcing everyone to inject saline once if it saved everyone $10...but I do well, I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes. But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that. Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social. Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
Twice right? And then a saline booster every 6 months too right?
> I'm not especially concerned about "a few tax dollars" and I'm happy to pay my taxes.
Your lead argument for mandating vaccination was the potential cost of care.
> But inflation from printing money hurts everyone, as do cuts from other government programs meant to help those in need, and both are likely. Maybe over-taxing the rich would too, but that'll never happen, so I'm not sweating that.
I have no clue what you’re talking about here.
> Still, I think it's disgusting that you'd rather let people be homeless, starve to death, or die from lack of access to medical care than that we just demand that the members of society stop being anti-social.
I said no such thing.
There’s a world of difference between opposing a mandate that everybody take a vaccine and opposing vaccines.
Everybody who wants one should get one. They’re free, available on just about every corner, and I’m not aware of anyone right now who wants one who can’t get one.
I’m also not aware of anyone except the most paranoid triple vaxed that still wear a mask outdoors. Now thats anti-social. Not “following the science” either.
> Alternatively, I think it's disgusting that you think you're entitled to everyone's money for treatment that a simple 15 minute trip to the pharmacy could have prevented, which you avoided just to spite all of those people who now have to pay the tab. If we could exclude the voluntarily unvaccinated from COVID-related medical treatment, that'd be a good and fair compromise, but for some reason anti-vaxxers throw a tantrum when that's suggested too.
We do it for smoking. For obesity. For just about every other choice a person can make. There’s nothing special about covid that you should give up dominion over your own body. Hell, for the vast majority of non-obese under 50, it’s barely a flu.
For posterity, for the third time: obesity is not comparable to COVID, because obesity is not a problem which is instantly resolvable for almost no cost and no effort.
Smoking is also not comparable to COVID, because nicotine addiction is also not a problem that is instantly resolvable, for almost no cost. We also tax the hell out of nicotine, which helps offset the burden smokers place on society. If you're content with how we treat smokers, is there some way we could analogously tax the voluntarily unvaccinated to help offset the burden they're placing on the rest of us that you'd be happy with?
Anyway, that's what's special about COVID and vaccination: it is a problem that is almost instantly resolvable for almost no cost.
I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way. There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation. You can argue from that, if you want; but if you're going to try arguing from specifics, by analogy to specific things, you need to actually think those specifics out.
For posterity, I'll also try to clarify what I meant about taxes, and why what you're advocating for precisely leads to the consequences you claim not to support:
A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations. There's no real economic benefit to spending that extra money, and that money needs to come from somewhere. It could come from debt or printing money, but that leads to inflation. Inflation makes everyone poorer; it makes it harder to afford basic necessities like housing and food, almost inevitably leading to some degree of starvation and homelessness. It could come from reallocating money that the government spends on programs elsewhere - but those programs generally exist for a reason, usually to help the people in the most dire of straits, and cutting funding to those programs is going to hurt those people - often leading to, you guessed it, consequences like starvation and homelessness. Or it could come from raising taxes - on the poor and middle class, which is awful, because generally speaking those people need that money (and guess what happens when people don't have money they need); or on the rich, which is probably the least awful option, Laffer curve be damned, but is also the least likely to happen, and is still wholly unnecessary. And of course: this ignores what was mentioned above, which is that there's no amount of money the government could throw at hospitals to let them instantaneously increase their capacity 50x over, because the staff literally doesn't exist. So it's an inevitability that the unvaccinated are clogging our hospitals, leading people to die due to treatable conditions.
That you consider giving up body autonomy "almost no cost" is what's simply insane.
It's not a sliding scale where $X of savings for Y% of personal choice. It's a black and white line that involves someone else, whether elected or appointed, deciding that you must inject this into your body for the good of society.
> I understand you're arguing from a principle: you think that, no matter how costly it is for society for someone to be unvaccinated, no matter how ridiculous their reasons are for being unvaccinated, we still cannot punish anyone for it any way.
Damn right.
> There's literally no practical fact that could change your mind on that - it could be the case that unless everyone got vaccinated the Earth would explode and all our souls would be subject to infinite torment, and you'd still insist Trucker Joe has the right not to get vaccinated and cast all of humanity into eternal damnation.
The only people that think the world is going to end if Trucker Joe does not get vaccinated are the same triple vaxed ones that are still wearing masks outdoors.
> A COVID hospitalization costs the government something like 1000x more than a round of COVID vaccinations...
That doesn't matter and claiming that you could use the same money for $PULL_HEARTSTRINGS does not make the argument any more valid.
People who give up individual freedoms to save a buck will end both enslaved and penniless.
None whatsoever.
I’m ok with hospitals having to do work, if they’re overwhelmed I’m ok with the government having to support them in various ways.
Now with these protests, causing even more incredibly severe economic harms they've demurred from criticizing the protestors.
What is the correct amount of economic harm in your view? What are the terms under which a protest should be allowed by a government?
Regardless, I agree that the emergencies act is overkill. I think the Canadian government should sit down with the protestors and come up with a plan that alleviates the situation. I don't think a police vs protestor clash in the streets is going to end well for anyone.
“You need to get vaccinated, or you can’t work in cross border trucking or go to restaurants for a year or two” is an infinitely smaller ask than “give up control of your land to us, also your drinking water is poison”
Comparing privileged truckers to Canadian indigenous people is chalk and cheese.
As for pay, I’m seeing wages of $85K + bennies advertised around here. That’s not a bad wage.
Very privileged.
This isn't the war measures act. It is a response specifically targeted to situations like this.
"I hope the response is a protest escalation"
That's neat. I hope that every protester that misused a privilege of their CDL lose their truck license, lose insurance, have their bank accounts locked, and face enormous fines. I guess we have differing hopes.
Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
"Not my country"
Oh gosh, what a surprise...
And then, of course, a comparison with completely irrelevant other events that most of us also found reprehensible.
I hate when the protests appear on HN because it makes me realize how terrible "right wing" so many on here are (not conservative -- I'm conservative -- but rather a particularly...stupid and angry version that now parades as right wing in the US), and how absolutely reprehensible opinions are. A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
Like forcing people out of their job for refusing a vaccine?
Disclaimer: I'm vaccinated and I encourage everyone to do it. But no one should have to under threat to their livelihood, especially given the absurd logical inconsistencies of the mandate rules.
Before vaccination was politicized in the US (bizarrely, I must say, through mechanisms that I find absolutely baffling), many jobs had mandatory vaccinations. Most healthcare setting have mandatory yearly flu vaccinations, for instance. The military has a whole plethora of mandatory vaccinations, including some pretty crazy ones. And of course schools, daycare, etc have forced vaccinations.
Suddenly it's a big issue. Ask yourself why.
And for what it's worth, I've been against mandates since omicron made it evident that they were no longer useful. I have zero tolerance for these protests, though, and would like to see them absolutely stomped.
I'm curious what your answer is. To me its obvious: people don't trust these vaccines (or these authorities) the way that they have trusted other vaccines with much longer histories of use.
The next why is a hairier question that a lot of people will have different answers for, but it all stems from that lack of trust.
Politicization and tribalism, obviously.
> people don't trust these vaccines
There are traditional anti-vaxxers of the "my body is my temple" ilk: Organic food, often vegan or vegetarian, against all vaccines and with an often bizarre notion of what is a "chemical" or not. Usually super fit. No one is surprised when these people are against COVID vaccines as it's consistent with everything else they stand for.
But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7. Often very unhealthy. They've never had the slightest concern or attention for any vaccine or medication, including novel, experimental medications (including those which they'll eagerly accept when they get COVID). New vaccines like the HPV vaccine, or yearly flu vaccine changes that have whatever random assortment of other ingredients, have never been of any concern or earned even a moment of their concern.
But suddenly they have very specific thoughts about this vaccine? Come on. And if it's the scary "changes your DNA" (but actually doesn't) bit, there are alternative, less effective more traditional vaccines which they also refuse.
It's tribalism. Early on their group ("conservatives") took some positions about responding to COVID -- anti-masking, anti-lockdowns, etc -- and that cemented into positions that somehow morphed into being anti-vaccine (basically anti anything seen as controlling or responding to COVID), despite there being literally nothing from a values or political perspective that would explain it (indeed, there are loads of classic conservative tenets that would directly oppose this anti-vax position). Then loads of people realized they could grift off of exploiting this divide, politicians -- most of whom are vaccinated -- saw an opening to pander, etc.
It is baffling and needs to be studied in depth. Tens to hundreds of millions of people could self-destructively be turned against something simply because they saw it as outside their tribe and messaging.
You're making some pretty specific assertions here that your whole rant seems to hinge on. Source?
As to your demand for a "source" -- as if there's a scientific paper I can cite -- there are zero rational people who can read what I wrote and seriously question it, beyond weak HN trolls who have nothing.
It's uncomfortable for sure, though: Knowing that one's entire position about complex topics (vaccines, AGW, etc) is dictated by tribalism is pretty embarrassing when one really thinks about it. Particularly if one has blanketed it in lots of ridiculous rationalizations and explanations -- a legacy of nonsense -- carefully curating their YouTube channels of disinformation.
[Gestures broadly at everything]
> You wrote a lot of text attacking a certain type of person
I "attacked" no one. If you feel an attack in it, you really need to reflect on why that makes you feel persecuted. Why a political demographic with zero historic interest in vaccines suddenly feels very opinionated about it is fascinating and disturbing.
I made a broad societal observation -- a plainly evident observation -- about tribalism overriding rational thought. And it's important to note that tribalism cuts all ways, and there are many cases of the "left" polarizing around something that is in no way a liberal or leftist value specifically because it's the tribal position.
> But there is a whole new army of anti-vaxxers who don't care what they eat, vape, smoke, or whether they or their children are standing in a plume of diesel exhaust 24/7.
So not to speak for the other poster, but I think another way to phrase their comment would be: what makes you believe this army exists? How many of them have you personally interacted with vs saw in some form of infotainment?
I ask because your description sounds like the kind of political cartoon you'd see in a news rag, and might be bolstered by that guy you remember from highschool or that crazy uncle that you can't stand. But I don't think its plainly evident that these people actually exist in great numbers.
I strongly believe what you're saying about tribalism. I just think your comment is another example of it.
I remember seeing the roots of this in the early 2000s after the discredited Wakefield study. It was so bizarre.
5x more likely to die while unvaccinated than vaccinated.
Side effects of getting covid are significantly worse than any real reported side effects as well. Which at this point you will get covid if you haven't had it already.
All the sick people piling up in the hospital ruins care for others who are in ER for other reasons, this isn't about control, it's about doing whats best for everyone.
We've had vaccine mandates for decades at this point, if it wasn't for the Fox News & the Murdoch Cinematic Universe this would really be a non-issue.
Yeah. Ruining people's lives is a weird desire that somehow became very popular in recent years among the same people who usually criticized punitive justice.
> Sign petitions. Make a new political party. Lobby. Do a campaign. But if you try to force your political will through force -- which parking large trucks throughout cities and on border crossings is -- you have crossed a line and need to be reigned in.
Signing petitions and lobbying is a privilege of people with power. Neither the US nor France became a republic by signing petitions. Those are, of course, extremes, but those events are the basis of the liberal democracy, so it is quite ridiculous to dismiss everything beyond petitions and parties as crossing a line. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 wasn't enacted because someone signed a petition either. In fact, the protests were widely unpopular among people (https://imgur.com/4GYbaDt). Gene Sharp, a political scientists that studied nonviolent struggle, described in his book (http://www.aeinstein.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/TARA.pdf ) 198 methods of nonviolent actions, and they include far more possibilities than meek petitions.
>A sort of "look someone previously in a different country and a completely different event tore stuff down so let them go wild in another country to own the libs". Just garbage takes that should be embarrassing to the speaker.
And there is a vicious cycle where people are trying to one-up garbage takes by coming up with more and more ridiculous responses to each other.
Singular.
At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either, though I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
>At no point were fire and police “afraid” to go places in the city either
The police abandoned the 3rd precinct station which was burned down later that night. How's that for being afraid to be in a place?
There were plenty of stories of fire trucks not going places for security reasons, and eventually firemen had national guard escorts. I don't know what that is besides "being afraid" to go places in the city.
>>“We were faced with these fail fail fail options,” Mr. Frey (Minneapolis mayor) said. “We were literally having to choose between preventing additional looting, protecting a precinct and providing escorts to firefighters to put out fires. There was no way we could do all three.”
>Damage in Minneapolis was mostly confined to a singular street.
A main street which crossed the cities, miles long. And damage wasn't at all confined there. There were several hot spots around the cities.
>I can imagine you may have been watching certain “news” coverage that may have claimed that.
Well, here's the New York Times backing up my claims.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/03/us/minneapolis-government...
They completely abandoned a police precinct which was promptly burned down [0]. Pretty safe to say they were afraid to stay at their own building!
0: https://www.twincities.com/2020/05/28/minneapolis-police-aba...
Whether the response is authoritarian depends on how it is enforced. The police have basically failed to enforce any law on the occupiers on parliament hill (I live here). If the local enforcement had happened preemptively and as per the law, the situation wouldn't have escalated as far as it has done.
For what it's worth: no he didn't, he got 50.3% of the vote[1]. We don't directly elect prime ministers in Canada.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papineau_(electoral_district)#...
Governments chosen by a first-past-the-post system can barely be considered democratically legitimate, if at all.
That's unlikely to be true, because there would be way more viable parties. Maybe you would indeed have a supermajority of left-of-center parties but you can't conclude that they'd all have the same Covid restriction policies as the current ones.
Ranked choice (any form, not just IRV) voting systems without proportional allocation (whether multimember districts with STV, mixed member proportional, or party-list proportional, or something else) do not significantly increase the number of viable parties.
On the other hand, I'm amazed that 5% of the population voted for the People's Party of Canada -- a party which had no hope of winning. This absolutely split the vote on the right enough to make the CPC lose seats.
https://globalnews.ca/news/8212872/canada-election-conservat...
> I don’t like governments elected on Tuesday. I’d prefer Wednesday.
FPTP vs. good election systems is not a trivial distinction like this, so your analogy is invalid.
If people could vote as they truly wanted without fear of throwing away their votes, the center would almost certainly move.
As to the back and forth between two major parties, that's hardly surprising. I'm not sure that indicates much in terms of what people actually want.
Systems with ranked choice or similar measures to encourage smaller parties end up with a similar situation, but with less stability. Since those parties appeal to narrower bands of society, they are unable to form a government. Eventually they are forced into coalition, which brings them to the same place as the major parties in FPTP: compromise. Yet, since coalitions are inherently more fragile than parties, you get less stability, and less institutional pressure on individuals in government and cabinet to represent wider interests.
Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
I don’t think this is true outside the English-speaking countries. Most “Western” countries are in Europe and have systems with some degree of proportionality where coalition governments are the norm.
> Your comparison to North Korea casts doubt on your sense of proportion.
It was an intentionally extreme comparison to show that “operates according to the rules” is not sufficient for a system to count as democratic. Of course Canada is much closer to counting as a liberal democracy than North Korea is, but for reasons other than “it operates according to its own internal rules”.
Perhaps a better analogy would have been Hong Kong a few years ago (before the situation there became worse and things became more directly controlled by the central Chinese state). Hong Kong has never been a democracy by any reasonable definition, but did have robust rule of law and liberal rights, despite elections being basically rigged due to the functional constituencies system.
The the proposal of the convoy occupiers is that their organization picks a committee to run the country. That's a significantly less legitimate government with absolutely no claim at a mandate.
The best we can do is look at opinion polls, which suggest that most people want to get rid of most Covid restrictions, but also don’t support the trucker protest.
OTOH in a Presidential system you get no such opportunity to get the public’s opinion. You have to wait until the end of terms (congressional or presidential or both).
If a majority of Members of Parliament vote yes on a no-confidence vote, that will trigger an election. Otherwise the prime minister chooses when an election will happen, within 5 years. If the government is a minority, it is likely it will call an election within a year or two if they're confident they could get a majority (this happened last year). Otherwise, with a majority government, they tend to wait longer before calling an election.
> At the federal level, a vote of no confidence is a motion presented by a member of the House of Commons that explicitly states the House has no confidence in the incumbent government.[3] The government may also declare any bill or motion to be a question of confidence.
Major bills like budgets are automatically confidence votes as well. I think you need to get into the parliamentary minutiae to understand when other votes could cause an election.
However, there was still an election.
Canada got vaccine way after the US because they simply wouldn’t help companies pay for R&D and secure orders earlier, like the US did. So while you could get a walk-in vaccine at Wallmart here in America people were waiting in line for weeks for a chance at an appointment in Canada.
Imagine how many lives it could have saved instead had they just put that money toward getting vaccines earlier.
https://toronto.citynews.ca/2022/02/12/two-thirds-of-canadia...
The current approach seems to be a lot more mild than what the public would accept.
Here's one about "unruly protesters" (quote from the article) shutting down two grocery stores: https://ottawacitizen.com/news/unruly-protesters-prompt-earl...
Here's one about a restaurant deciding to close, and stay closed, due to an assault of and racial epithets directed at employees: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/ottawa/moo-shu-ice-cream-empl...
https://globalnews.ca/news/8618494/alberta-coutts-border-pro...
Convoy protesters break through Surrey RCMP barricade with military-style vehicle
https://bc.ctvnews.ca/convoy-protesters-break-through-surrey...
There's also another supposed hate hoax: https://twitter.com/jonkay/status/1490439304224686082
The fact that such a "violent" protest requires so many hoaxes to justify the characterization should help you triangulate the truth.
What about X or Y is not a valid response to this argument. You can have no public opinion on antifa or BLM in another country to have the opinion that activity in your own community is not okay. We can compare this to BLM or antifa, but we can also compare BLM or antifa to the Arab spring or French revolution to say that they’re relatively peaceful too.
The fact is this entire thing has been horribly covered by the media.
There are a lot of groups and factions involved in the protest. The main leadership group is organized (and fundraised) by Canada Unity, and their original demands were to overthrow the democratically elected government to install themselves as government and rule through the senate and governer general. You can look that up in their original MOU on the way back machine.
The means of the protest was to park heavy equipment and harass the citizens of downtown Ottawa (via keeping them awake 24/7 with train horns, arguably a form of warfare) until the federal government capitulated to demands. This is essentially the “I’m not touching you, but my hand is directly in front of your face” form of harassment. Later that evolved into blocking border crossings, which is explicitly illegal and explicitly under the criminal code listed as not an acceptable form of protest.
The complications of this issue are confounded by the fact that more than half the donated funds are foreign funds to a protest that was deemed an illegal action.
I personally support the spirit of the protest (i.e. the vaccines should be optional for most jobs and the vaccine mandate should be relaxed) but not the tools they are using, in particular blocking a vital bridge and the honking shenanigans.
I personally have no problem in expressing a nuanced point of view or accepting that I got something wrong. Truth is a very elusive concept. And I rather learn than argue.
The person I was replying to however is aggressively partisan in his opinions. And while it's true that my comment wasn't a proper rebuttal, it does address his lack of credibility for arguing a one sided view of the world.
Sauce?
The only reason for the act is because of the illegal blockades which is affecting essential services, goods and livelihood of local business and citizens.
A peaceful protest cannot hold people hostage by blocking their access to essential services and goods, and trapping them in.
If the protest stopped doing that, then it's fine to continue as long as it wants.
You can't have a very small minority get its way by simply holding others hostage to their services and goods. The point of a protest is to be heard and get people to consider your cause, not to consider your demands through extraction.
You're only including direct physical violence as part of your "not peaceful" definition. But blocking major road arteries and bridges that are essential to the economy and to bringing in/out services and goods to the people of Ontario is also an act that a peaceful protest wouldn't do.
I'm very pro-protest by the way. Including for people I disagree with. A few broken windows, some small contained fires in trash cans, and just the general side effects of having a thousand+ people in a small city space all protesting I'm absolutely okay with, even a few little breakout fights, I still would consider that a peaceful protest.
Blocking major roads using heavy machinery with no alternate route that can meet the needs of the local population, that goes beyond peaceful in my opinion.
P.S.: I've also watched live streams, I always do, I've seen BLM protests first hand for example, and all media always exaggerate a protest, so I'm the last person who'd believe the headlines at first. In this case though, I know even the truckers probably don't think it's that big a deal that they have their trucks blocking roads, but given the already stretched crisis of the Pandemic, the second order effects on supply is a big deal. Please keep protesting, but don't block those major roads. Move to smaller roads even if you want.
They know what's coming, when they decided to block those roads, they knew they didn't leave people a choice, they are cutting off a supply line, this is beyond protest, it's an attempt to say, if you want your supply back, do what we want. I'm sorry, that's beyond: We won't stop voicing our concerns and expressing our rights to protest.
https://www.go2hr.ca/legal/strikes-lockouts-picketing-and-re...
The boat ended up being named 'boaty mcboatface'
I don't know how much I take stock in online polls especially made by partisan sources.
Huffington post did an online poll about who would win the 2016 presidential election. Hillary Clinton received around 99% of the votes.
“ The poll was conducted Feb. 9 and 10, 2022 among a random selection of 1,506 Canadian adults who are Maru Voice Canada panelists and is accurate within +/- 2.5 per cent, 19 times out of 20.”
It’s right there in the linked article.
The pro-liberty move is to get rid of the occupiers.
This is the last real protest in Canada. Next time, these "emergency" powers will either be immediate or these new powers are just new permanent government powers.
2/3rds the citizens will practically be demanding that this never happens again.
A lesson in why Ben Franklin said that democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
On the scope of major protests in the last several decades in western democracies, this one definitely is about as close to the “peaceful” extreme as any have been.
As a society, we should also strive for fairness in our rhetoric. It betrays our credibility to describe a riot which leaves a city in ashes as “mostly peaceful protest” simply because we agree with the cause and then to characterize these protests as “violent” because we don’t agree with them.
> Two-thirds of Canadians support military force to end Ottawa protests
I suspect that if Trudeau enforces Ottawa laws (which the police haven't), then stands down, this won't hurt public perception.
The posters here decrying this as authoritarian don't understand anything about Canadian law, experience, or mindset and are going by what they're fed by their individual media source of choice. The War Measures Act invocation by Pierre Trudeau was one of the most singularly divisive moments (some would argue it was necessary, some would argue the opposite) in Canadian history, and made parliament realize they needed to rein in the Prime Minister's powers.
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/08/us/politics/new-york-mask...
Lets look at San Francisco. I'm going to get my stats right from the San Francisco Police Department.
Homocide - Down 20%
Rape - Down 23.8%
Robbery - Down 20.7%
Assault - Down 8.8%
Human Trafficking - Down 83.3%
Burglary - Down 45.4%
Motor Vehicle Theft - Down 6%
Arson - Down 7.9%
Larceny Theft - Up 12.8%
Year over year the only type of crime that is up is Larceny Theft, and most of that is shoplifting. Everything else is down, and some of it by significant margins. There is no real basis for this "crime wave" people keep talking about. That pressure is really just right wing propaganda.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crime-data/crim...
Quick Edit: When I published this the stats were only current to February 6th, but they were updated after I posted with data up to the 13th. So my numbers above are going to be slightly off, but you can confirm them by changing the timeframe to end on the 6th.
Some "right wing propaganda" from the NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/18/briefing/crime-surge-homi...
And WaPo: https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/01/21/homicide-ra...
And The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/sep/28/san-francisc...
Later edit: This chart [1] taken from said article maybe will clarify some of the ongoing discussions.
[1] https://archive.fo/78rGz/270f56724e7a40242b6639537e4183aea3b...
The idea that larceny (petty) theft doesn't matter is also a big reason why you think there's no crime wave. Petty theft is the crime most often encountered by everyday citizens. People don't like having their property stolen. I don't know why you refuse to acknowledge that.
Underreporting has always been an issue with crime data [1], but the change in the Larceny rate doesn't seem like it's caused by an increase in underreporting. The change in reported Larceny from 2020 seems fairly correlated with COVID restrictions.
Here is the monthly Y/Y change in Larceny Theft Reported incidents for SF, for each month in 2020 vs. 2019:
Jan: +15.7% Feb: +5.4% March: -28.7% (SF Shelter In Place) April: -47.1% May: -45.6% June: -48.9% July: -51.8% August: -50.1% September: -54.5% October: -54.9% November: -39.2% December: -46.7%
Larceny did go up in 2021, especially at the end of the year when COVID restrictions started to lift, but is still down ~20% relative to 2019. Other crimes went up in 2020, but then decreased or flattened in 2021.
I think you may have a point about Larceny being encountered more, especially with foot traffic + tourism way down in many SF neighborhoods. I'm not sure how exactly to use Open Table reservations as a proxy for that, so it's hard to say whether it's relatively up or relatively down.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/20/facts-about...
Why would petty theft and robbery be divided by population? My risk of getting my bike stolen is 0 or my phone taken at gunpoint if I stay inside my home. It is non-zero if I go out. And it increases the longer I stay out. So measuring crime per person-hour of going out makes intuitive sense. Restaurant reservations is merely an imperfect proxy for this.
> Straw man. Everyone knows that all crime creates anguish for the victim and is to be avoided. If a person compares the effects of the pandemic to the opportunity of types of crimes, it doesn't mean they love the idea of larceny. Come on. Better faith in arguing please
Except the causation for these crimes is lax prosecution caused by 1) DAs who are politically motivated and 2) Prop 47 / similar regulations in other states. Unemployment is at record lows and there's a record worker shortage driving up wages. You cannot possibly claim the "effects of the pandemic" are causing increased property crime when unemployment has been so low for so long.
> Better faith in arguing please
Ironic, coming from a 15 minute old account whose only comment is this response.
It just means I couldn't let it go how hand-wavy your comment was. Sometimes you don't want to sit on the sidelines and watch others get hand-waved at
At the end of the day isn't that all you can do? File a report and hope for recovery? Is the complaint that you need to go to the station to file a report? That was already the reality for so many people. The police don't go to every neighborhood. Some neighborhoods, it's self-serve.
The prediction was that next people would use the evidence that there are fewer crimes being reported as proof that nothing is wrong. This does seem very much like what we are seeing here.
According to the SFPD link above, homicides in SF rose from 48 to 56 over the entire year 2021 vs 2020.
So given how flawed that premise was to begin with, I don't think an explanation is needed for why your overall point is disingenuous at best.
People trying to hype up the crime thing deliberately ignore these sources because, as you can see, it allows them to make up as much crime as they can imagine and base their argument on that.
Infact from my own experience in Seattle area and the auto enthusiast groups I'm in, we've definitely seen an uptick in car prowling, smashed windows, cat thefts and outright vehicle/trailer thefts.
Motor Vehicle Theft is now up by 0.3%.
I see clips of train robberies in LA like this https://edition.cnn.com/videos/business/2022/01/14/train-the...
And then I have to ask myself how is that possible in modern society? Train robberies seem shocking enough that they HAVE to be indicative of a broader crime wave. Is there something about the US context that I am missing?
>According to the source, the number of patrolling officers has been cut from 50 to 60 agents to eight, which the worker thinks has led to an increase in train robberies.
It's possible because Union Pacific thinks they can get taxpayers to pay for their security, and they can funnel more profits to their shareholders.
There definitely has been a surge of crime after the pandemic.
You think most Canadians support the illegal blockade? Really? Evidence please.
If Trudeau opened debate weeks ago I wonder where we would be today.
> Whataboutism or whataboutery (as in "what about…?") is a variant of the tu quoque logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument.
I think it's worth reading the page - the definition is:
> Whataboutism ... is a ... logical fallacy, which attempts to discredit an opponent's position by charging hypocrisy without directly refuting or disproving the argument
You've charged hypocrisy, I don't see a direct refutation of the argument. Given that, it seems like this situation exactly fits the definition of 'whataboutism'?
There was nothing to debate - the convoy does not have a cohesive message. Some of them are sovereign citizens. Some of them want the government to be dissolved. Some of them want some weird QAnon stuff. The only thing that unites them is shitting in the streets and driving around waving flags and honking.
Trudeau just looks weak at this point, and for a prime minister that got in because of his good looks and his dad's popularity it's not a good omen.
The ones protesting are either uber-libertarians (and possibly also "sovereign citizens"), dis-educated, or have some sort of mental/emotional shortcoming where they will resist any sort of directive given to them even if it goes in their in their interest.
Sometimes people will lash out anyone who gives a helpful order because they feel like they're losing control.
Heavy equipment tow operators have recieved threats of violence, which is why at least some of them have not helped.
This isn't "truckers" protesting, this is the radical fringe.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/01/28/canada-truck...
It is perfectly possible to be pro-vaccine and anti-mandate, because the case for mandates makes no scientific sense. Forcing the vaccines on people will create more anti-vaxxers, not fewer! The whole thing is completely counterproductive.
Mandates make the remaining crazy people look more visibly crazy, but they were going to be there either way.
> People want things to go back to normal
The biggest problem is that people who defend the coercion believe that a higher vaccination rate will somehow end the pandemic. In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
It's the vaccinated who are driving the pandemic, and have been driving it the past few months. But all the blame is being heaped on the unvaccinated.
The Omicron wave will burn out, as waves do. The pandemic will end, as pandemics do. And the vaccination rate won't make one iota of difference in the long run.
> In Ontario, today, the majority of ICU cases, hospital cases, and cases cases are among the vaccinated.
Looking at https://covid-19.ontario.ca/data/hospitalizations right now, the population of the ICU is 117 unvaccinated, 15 partially vaccinated, 150 fully vaccinated. Over 90% of Ontarians age 12+ are vaccinated. This says to me that the unvaccinated 10% of the population is making up over 40% of the ICU cases. While what you've said may be technically accurate, I think it's basically saying "most people are vaccinated" and the numbers suggest unvaccinated people are hugely more likely to end up in the ICU.
Am I misunderstanding the numbers? Or are we working off different numbers?
But the strain on the healthcare system and the pandemic as a whole is driven by total numbers, not relative numbers. The majority of cases are among the vaccinated, therefore vaccine mandates won't end the pandemic. But people who argue for the mandates argue as if it was a "pandemic of the unvaccinated", and that's simply not true.
Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates? If so, do you think the moment it passed 50/50 in terms of ICU beds (or other similar stat) was the appropriate time to repeal them? Or what should the "trigger" have been?
Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area. This still seems like "too many unvaccinated people in the ICU" to me, even though they're not the majority. I can definitely empathize with it becoming a judgement call now though, and on that I agree. At some point someone is making a decision about the magic number, and I'm not sold on the current government's strategy there.
Only if it's targeted. The people ending up at the ICU skew older and many of them are probably retired. But the issue that spawned the trucker protest is vaccine mandates for the truckers, who as a group are probably a lot younger than the people who are currently occupying ICUs in Canada due to covid.
Age is the single most important factor when it comes to determining the personal risk of covid. A healthy unvaccinated child is ~1000x less likely to have a bad outcome compared to a vaccinated 80-year-old. But this is completely ignored when it comes to the mandates, the mandates are the same whether you're a 20-year-old trucker or a 60-year-old trucker, even though forcing 20-year-olds to get vaccinated is completely useless from a public health standpoint.
The second most important factor is natural immunity, because it is stronger and longer-lasting than vaccinated immunity. Again, completely ignored. Forcing people with natural immunity to get vaccinated makes zero sense.
> Do you think it was ever appropriate to have any mandates?
No, never.
If the vaccines had been more effective and actually stopped transmission, we wouldn't be having this Omicron wave, so we wouldn't have lots of people in the ICUs in the first place, which is the current reason for the mandates. The main reason so many people are still unvaccinated is because they've made their own risk assessment and decided they're fine with not getting vaccinated.
If the virus had been deadlier, vaccination rates would have been higher anyway, because fewer people would have decided to take the risk to stay unvaccinated. If the virus had been less deadly, we would have had a lower vaccination rate, but also even less people in the ICUs.
No matter which parameter you hypothetically imagine to be different, we would probably have landed in a collective societal risk assessment that would have produced the same results anyway.
> Given the 40:60 ratio of ICU cases and the 10:90 split of unvax/vax, I think here it's a pretty grey area.
I don't have this data for Canada, but here's the current ICU utilization in the US: https://protect-public.hhs.gov/pages/hospital-utilization
Right now that page shows ~78% total utilization, and a ~20% covid utilization. So one in four ICU patients are covid patients, which sounds like a lot. But if you could magically force-vaccinate everyone, and assuming there's a 50/50 split among vaccinated/unvaccinated in the US as well, that means you would reduce total utilization from ~78% to ~68%.
How the hell does it make sense to violate people's bodily autonomy, to force them or coerce them to get vaccinated, to increase people's distrust of government and public health, in order to have ~30% free ICU capacity instead of ~20%?
What the fuck? How about increasing ICU and hospital capacity instead?!? How about looking at the 3/4 of ICU patients that are there for something other than covid and see if there's any low-hanging fruit we can take care of there in order to reduce that number instead? Why would we curb people's freedoms and rights for a slight increase in potential ICU capacity? Why should ICU capacity decide whether or not people can go to a restaurant or not? That's a micro-managed technocratic bio-fascist dystopia! The healthcare system should serve the people, not the other way around!
With the current dynamics of the disease though, authoritarian medical requirements are making much less sense over time. Vaccination doesn't really help curb transmission much and omicron is considerably less dangerous than previous variants. SARS2 was originally pretty near the threshold where government might not need to do anything forced and the new variant and ineffectiveness of the vaccine against is is pushing it further lower.
Do you think this protest is a more valid representation of Canadian democratic opinion than a federal election?
I think protesting is not only valid, but necessary to keep centralized powers from growing too complacent. The growth of freedom globally and the birth of democracy was not on the back of elections or playing by the rules defined by the class of people in centralized power.
and obviously Canada's democracy has begun to erode if their leader is calling for a state of emergency completely bypassing the democratic process using old laws meant only to be enacted in extreme circumstances...certainly not to punish protests that have at worst blocked major roads for days - all the critical roads of which have already been cleared.
That said, there is definitely something going wrong with a portion of Canadian society because they trust Rebel News and Infowars more than any legitimate media organisation. Getting to the root of it will be crucial in figuring out what went wrong.
> That, given that provinces are lifting COVID-19 restrictions and that Dr. Theresa Tam has said that all existing public health measures need to be "re-evaluated" so that we can "get back to some normalcy", the House call on the government to table a plan for the lifting of all federal mandates and restrictions, and to table that plan by February 28, 2022.
Just because you support the end of restrictions doesn't mean you should support people getting what they want through illegal methods. This is supposed to be a democracy.
Canada just had an election, and the people pro-vaccine and pro-mandates were elected.
Yes, durect democracy and being allowed to all vote on all issues is a nice dream, but for now the system is a representative democracy. And it's not okay to force things through keeping people hostage.
Would you be similarly supportive if 5000 people blocked essential infrastructure with big trucks everytime they want something?
In my opinion, if we were to see a really large gathering, of the kind that BLM saw, then if say, ok, it does seem there's a lot of people who really care about this so maybe have a direct referendum, but this one hasn't met the threshold in my opinion.
Direct democracy is 100% mob rule but no one really cares to read the Federalist Papers or the mountain of thought that was put into this at the start of the US.
Wtf, you want them to vote, and if trudeau wins the vote, you want him to resign? Really a heads i win tails you lose sort of plan.
Besides,its a minority government, trudeau doesn't have to put it up for a vote, if he was going to lose, the opposition would put it to a vote.
And that's ignoring that 95% of what they are protesting isn't even federal juridsiction and has nothing to do with trudeau. He wouldn't be able to interfere if he wanted to.
Plus a future variant is likely to be even less affected by vaccination status.
Do you know of any evidence that would support this hypothesis? Especially when talking about evolution over short periods of time (years, not centuries or millennia)?
An article in the Guardian published several months ago argued the opposite[0]; and while the Guardian is certainly no authority on scientific matters, and could well have its own narratives to push, their article suggests that this is not a well-known behaviour of pathogens.
Obviously it is no longer still this deadly.
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/about/qa/1918flupandemic.htm
With all the covid talk, it is hard to quickly find a good source for the theory and verification of the evolutionary dynamics of diseases I mentioned, but as can be seen with variants (and how Omicron clearly wiped out Delta by overcompeting it) evolution of viruses absolutely does not need thousands or millions of years.
Yes. I included thousands of years to accommodate the co-evolution of both the pathogen and the host, which, obviously, evolves at a much slower rate.
And since you mention how omicron wiped out delta, hadn't delta in its turn wiped out alpha, while being (I don't remember, was there a consensus on this?) a more dangerous variant?
SARS-COV-2 and its descendants seem to me somewhat uniquely qualified to pull this off as they're one of the few viruses that are asymptomatically spread, meaning you can be infected, pass the virus on, then die for all it cares.
The above however, is not reason for us as a species to endlessly pursue locking down and pushing for restrictive measures when we see the situation clearing up and the above not being the case. When the time comes restrictions will be removed (this was already being discussed in a bunch of places) and hopefully we can just get back to the normal worries of the day such as impending climate disaster and war.
Say what now? Which part of the act allows that? I skimmed through it and didn't see anything relevant.
He has a minority government. A weak one at that. If he really lost his mandate there would be a snap election already.
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> The act also allows for the military to be used as police, but several sources said that is not under active consideration.
Not a good look for Trudeau. This definitely looks like an authoritarian response to a loss of mandate. The protestors will dig in more, the response will become harsher, and the government will be in deeper trouble.