In Canada they just had protests that crippled the country, they just took food and the ability to bank or heat themselves from the protestors until they gave up. No change. Imagine if Trudeau had a gulag.

That was a few hundred people at best. Anyway, I can see that you believe strongly that protests don't work, I've been eyewitness to protests that did work and that changed the direction of a country (in fact, multiple countries) in a massive way.

Those instances are rare, but that's an existence proof that you can't deny (and there are, historically, more examples).

Note that the support for those Canadian protests amongst ordinary Canadians was minimal.

I'd assume support for those anti war protests in a time of war is probably lower than the support for the truckers in canada (which wasn't that low, 30-40% of the population). Does that make anti war protests in russia illegitimate ? Especially since appearing to undermine a war effort is usually universally despised once a war starts. Even the iraq war started with 90% of americans rallying behind bush and supported the war, so the legitimacy of the war itself does not seem to matter a lot.

> Does that make anti war protests in russia illegitimate ?

According to the Russian authorities, yes. According to me: those people are real heroes, right now it is far more dangerous to join such protests than when the numbers are higher, especially in places like Russia.

Virtually every Canadian province has dropped vaccine passports or is in the process of doing so. This was not the case before the protests began. While it's possible that this would have happened anyway (and not even the purview of the federal government), it seems likely that protests accelerated things.

Of course, I'm not sure there are many parallels here to the situation in Russia/Ukraine.