You mentioned specifically restrictions on lunch. Do you just mean that there are more office workers eating lunch because it is during the day? Or were the vaccine passport rules different depending on what meal or time of day?

It was just an example - in most places the vaccine passports were required for any sit down service where you have a server (not fast food or to go orders)

Quebec did impose curfews, and overall had the strictest restrictions by a long way. Around the time of the protests there were plans to tax or fine the unvaccinated and big box retailers were already restricting access to all parts of the store save for the pharmacy.

I guess what I'm not getting here is this: the rage about the "everyone that went too far" doesn't seem to have extended to the people who actually did that. By which I mean our provincial governments, with their ad hoc dubious and last minute irrational responses. Specifically, Doug Ford who seems to have suffered not a bit in terms of support but enacted the most draconian of COVID restrictions and lockdowns, all at the last minute and after numbers were skyrocketing, not before...

Meanwhile Trudeau did what... airports and borders. The feds influence here was not high. ArriveCAN was a debacle, obviously. But the trucker thing was US initiated.

I don't think there's anything the feds could have done to head this off. They couldn't make the trucker vax thing not happen, not with Biden insisting on it. They had no control over what was happening in workplaces and schools across the country. Their biggest fault, I think, was being weak -- which the opposition took advantage of to create mayhem and try to bring the govt down.

That the people organizing the protest were in part former oil industry lobbyists and had previously been involved in climate change denying anti-carbon tax protests should also make one pause about what the motivations might be and where the money might be coming from, as well?

Regardless, I think we agree: by January with Omicron showing that it would transmit like crazy regardless of vaccine, mandates everywhere should have been dropped.

The protests in Ottawa and the two border crossings ballooned from just being about the trucker mandates (which really didn't impact that many people, since trucking industry reps reported rates of vaccination in line with the general population) to being an all-out protest against restrictions in general. I did see several protests in BC, including at the legislature.

What the federal government could have at least tried, in my opinion, was to be humble and release the tension. Trudeau's sanctimoniousness manifested itself too strongly and only escalated the situation, which he had seen coming earlier in the year by calling mandates "divisive" - presumably before polling numbers showed that Canadians are mostly a compliant bunch who didn't have much time for tinfoil hat types (research by UBC and VCH later showed that those already disadvantaged, such as the homeless, were vaccinated at a lower rate than the general population and disproportionately impacted by mandates. I'd love to link citations here but finding 2-3+ year old studies and articles is painful) Instead, several of Trudeau's statements at this time, including "do we tolerate these people" became rallying cries for the populists.

Ok: what could the feds do to release tension, concretely? They had no ability to undo any mandates, since 90% of them came from the provinces, not the feds. Likewise, the trucker thing was coming from the US.

I guess they could have maybe done some changes in tone -- but they may also have been seen by the population as giving into what were frankly seen by most as fringe radicals.

And finally, the actual leaders of the convoy would not have been interested. This wasn't their first rodeo. They wanted to bring the govt down, and not because of COVID but because of everything -- they had previously been in Ottawa trying to pull a similar thing around "pipelines" and carbon tax.