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Okay, you guys win.

No more masks. No more vaccinations. No more social distancing. No more vaccine passports.

Get rid of ’em all. You win.

Whether you’re a freedomer up in Ottawa, with your kids tucked beside some Jerry cans of diesel in the cab of your truck, or if you’re a Liberal backbencher nobody has heard of before and who decided to speak up only after concluding you’re unlikely to ever be in cabinet, you win. We give up.

Just forget what millions of doctors and nurses have been saying about COVID-19 — about how transmissible it is, how it’s a shape-shifter virus, one that requires us to accept that it can’t be beaten overnight.

About how it is so deadly — killing at least six million people so far — and how it has made more than 400 million people really, really sick.

Forget about all that. Forget, too, that the real experts — not the ones on Twitter with a Viking for a profile picture, and the name “Freedom” followed by a lot of numbers — sound scared, really scared, that we are pretending that the war against COVID is won.

When it isn’t, and when it has killed at least 35,000 men, women and children in Canada so far — the equivalent of the entire population of Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, or Grand Prairie, Alberta, where the governments just lifted basic pandemic protections.

Forget about all that. Forget, as well, what it does to you when you get it — which you still really, really could. The chances of which are greater than ever before, because we’re apparently getting rid of masks and vaccines and mandates.

There’s three stages to it, really, when you get COVID.

Sandra Pearce is an American respiratory specialist. She’s been on the front lines of caring for patients with COVID since the beginning.

Here’s what she says you can expect.

In the first stage, Pearce says symptoms range from mild to severe — and can include fever, chills, cough, shortness of breath, fatigue, muscle or body aches, headache, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, congestion, runny nose, nausea or vomiting, and diarrhea.

Half the time, she says, people are asymptomatic, meaning they are spreading the disease without even knowing it.

In the second stage, the virus has crept into your lungs, freedom fighters, and it causes pneumonia. That’s when you will have trouble breathing, chest pain and even confusion.

“When you’re constantly coughing and can’t take deep breaths, your oxygen level can decrease,” Pearce says.

At this stage, she’s seen a lot of people who can’t even walk across the room without getting winded. COVID is starting to kill them.

Stage three is the worst, of course, but all those truckers and nobody MPs in Ottawa know better.

In stage three, Sandra Pearce says, your body starts to shut down. This is the stage when your lungs go into what is called a hyperinflammatory response, which usually leads to sepsis and total organ failure. It’s ugly. It’s painful.

Often, in this stage, they’ll put you on a ventilator because you can’t breathe on your own anymore. Sometimes they’ll stick a tube through your rib cage, because too much pressure has built up in your lungs.

“This is when we call your family because it may be the last time you’re able to talk to them,” Sandra Pearce says.

She adds: “I’ve cried. It’s hard to watch when they are close to the end.”

But those folks up in Ottawa — waving Confederate flags and swastikas, and blaring their horns all day and all night, and pissing on the War Memorial — they know better than experts like Sandra Pearce. They say it’s a hoax, or it’s overblown, or it’s Justin Trudeau’s way of controlling all of us for a Great Reset or One World Government. Something like that.

So they’ve won. Because they’re afraid to get a little needle. Because they don’t like a little bit of inconvenience. Because they are disinterested in treating the lives of friends and family with reverence. Even though life should always be revered.

So, you’ve won. Get rid of the masks. Get rid of vaccines. Get rid of the things we know help to protect us and those we love. Get rid of all of that.

And when you are in an intensive care unit in a hospital somewhere, drowning in your own bodily fluids, gasping your final breath, someone like Sandra Pierce will be looking down on you. And she will be crying.

But me? I won’t be.

— Warren Kinsella was chief of staff to a federal minister of health

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Ottawa has declared a state of emergency. Police are parading in riot gear. Laws are being broken. Protesters are being arrested.

Does any of that mean anything?

Not really. Not until governments and police make the decision to do something significant and real. And, so far, all that is significant and real is the unravelling of the career of Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly. He’s been an unmitigated disaster.

So, what happens if — as many usually peace-loving Ottawans clearly want — the cops start swinging batons and cracking heads?

Ten points to consider, mainly drawn from the recent post-riot, post-occupation experience of American police forces.

The Americans remind us that the key thing is preparation — by police, by government, by the relevant authorities. This clearly didn’t happen in Ottawa.

Preparation isn’t something — it’s everything. The key is always to have police tactical plans well-thought-out — and well before the protest starts. Ottawa cops simply didn’t do that.

Training exercises help cops. They help to protect people, too — those exercising their constitutional rights, civilians who live in the protest zones, and the officers themselves. And in Ottawa, as noted, that didn’t happen either.

Ten points.

1) Dozens of U.S. studies show us that a lack of adequate planning and preparation causes the police to be reactive, rather than proactive. The American experience has repeatedly shown the need for planning, logistics, training, and police command-and-control supervision. Given the chaos and criminality reigning in the nation’s capital, it’s obvious that the police have lost control.

2) Escalation by police usually leads to more confrontations and violence. It just does. Putting police in military-style gear is usually how escalation happens. And militarization — dressing up like combat troops, basically — is usually a big mistake. It puts otherwise peaceful protesters on edge and often makes them combative. De-escalation keeps everyone — protesters and police — safer.

3) Any law enforcement response to an occupation situation has to be measured and proportionate, and take steps to avoid — even accidentally — heightening tensions and making things a lot worse. In Ottawa, it very much looks like too little response is about to become too much response.

4) So, proportionality: Police need to tailor that response to the actions and mood of the crowd, and should always try to avoid increasing tensions by using more gear and equipment than necessary. British police have found that mixing with rowdy soccer fans in non-military attire works well.

5) Police agencies need to always, always clearly and unambiguously communicate the thresholds for arrest. They need to give warnings to demonstrators when they breaking the law and about to be arrested. And arrests, of course, should only happen where there is probable cause that a crime has been committed. That itself is the law.

6) A protest is not a riot. But neither is an occupation a garden-variety protest. Police know what to do in riots. The Occupy Movement, which I wrote a book about, showed the need for different tactics in occupation situations. Behaviour of protesters is almost always determined by how they are treated by police.

7) Police need to meet with the protest leadership, regularly. Listen, empathize. Take down the temperature however and whenever possible. This is what the Americans call the Madison Method, and it works. Now, because demonstrations may be spontaneous and groups may not have identified leaders, cops should use social media for outreach and communication. Has Ottawa done that? Doesn’t look like it.

8) Some protesters believe that violence is morally defensible. Those people need to be quickly identified and detained and thereafter prosecuted. At the same time, reaching out to the majority who are always nervous about confrontation and violence is essential. Police need to keep those people from siding with the radicals. Isolate and remove the hotheads.

9) That means this: Police often treat all protesters the same, but they just shouldn’t. They should be trained to differentiate between peaceful protesters and violent troublemakers. That can be hard to do when there’s chaos. But it has to be done.

10) Intelligence is key. Lack of good intel leads to policing problems — poor coordination, inconsistency and confusion. Which almost always ends in violence. Good intel in Ottawa was non-existent, or next to nothing.

Ottawa is at a proverbial crossroads. More chaos and bloody violence is one road. The other road is de-escalation and a peaceful end to an illegal occupation.

It’s not a consideration for the police, but it is for the civilians who oversee them: Leaders need to step up here, more than they have.

Leaders — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, the chief of police — can meet with protest leaders. They should. It won’t resolve everything, but it will give the protesters the feeling they’ve achieved something, and it may hasten their departure. It may lead to a peaceful conclusion, too.

Ottawa needs that. Now.

— Warren Kinsella is a former police reporter. His book about the Occupy Movement, Fight the Right, has been reissued by Random House.

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Comments (5)

Winning.

Because, when you strip away all of the finery and the rhetoric, that is always the prime objective in democratic politics. Winning.

Winning, so that you get power. And when you have power, you have the ability to get things done. And that’s when you can turn your ideas into reality — when, one hopes, you can better people’s lives, and create a better future for all.

That’s what it’s all about: Winning. Simple.

To win in Canada, you need to attract the support of a majority. That’s how it is in any democracy. Majority rules.

So, these are the things we know about the Canadian majority — things that have been irrefutably, indisputably, inarguably shown to be true in election after election after election. Six things.

One: The majority in Canada dislike extremism. When given the choice, Canadian voters will always favor the middle path, between the extremes on the Left and the Right. That may be a bit less exciting, but that’s where you will always find them: in the unexciting middle.

Two: The majority of voters in this country don’t like ideology at the expense of common sense. Unlike America, where bumper-sticker politics increasingly dominates, Canadian voters still prefer moderation. And they intensely dislike doctrinaire ideologues and polemicists.

Three: The majority of Canadians do not hate government. During the pandemic, they have accepted the notion that no other entity — not the private sector, not organized labor, not wealthy individuals — can acquire vaccines and PPE better than governments, or organize society to survive a deadly global pandemic. God knows the governments are imperfect, but Canadians just don’t object to government in the way that Americans do. The results are shown in our respective COVID body counts.

Four: The majority of voters in this country are not fussed about social issues. Not anymore. After same-sex marriages happened, after women won the right to control their own bodies, voters noted that society did not collapse. We did not descend into anarchy. Life went on.

Five: The Canadian majority favors tolerance and diversity — for the simple reason that we are now a much more diverse country. We are no longer the white, Anglo-Saxon redoubt that we were mere decades ago. The majority of Canadians prefer political leaders who are like them — diverse, and favoring diversity.

Sixth and final point: The majority of Canadian voters will always vote for the common good over dominance by the rich and powerful. They do not venerate billionaires in the way that Americans do. They believe in the wisdom and the durability of everyday people, not mega-rich blowhards who have never had to worry about paying the rent or mortgage.

Now, some of you may not like what the majority prefers. That’s fine. In a democracy, nobody wins every argument.

But if you’re a sentient being, you know that it’s the truth. You know what the reality is in Canadian politics, too. The majority rules, and the majority favor driving in the middle of the road, not in the ditches. You don’t get far when you’re in the ditch.

You also know where I’m going with all this, so some of you are already readying yourselves to say the predictable stuff: That Conservatives shouldn’t ever listen to Jean Chretien‘s former special assistant. That, if we get a real conservative as leader, we’ll win.

Listen to me or don’t. That’s up to you. But I’m actually motivated by the same thing you are: We both believe Canadian democracy needs the Conservative Party of Canada to get its damn act together. Here’s why.

At the present time, our federal government is led by a man who has engaged in casual corruption, more than once. We are led by a man who has repeatedly engaged in parlor-room racism. A man who professes to be a feminist, and then was credibly accused of sexual assault, by a victim whose allegations have never been refuted. Any one of those things is disqualifying, to me.

This writer may have worked on many Liberal campaigns in the past, but I believe that the Trudeau Liberal Party is tired and old and venal. They need some time in opposition to reform and renew. Desperately.

That won’t ever happen until the Conservative Party gets its act together. And that particularly won’t happen if the Conservative Party continues to embrace leaders and policies who are opposed by the majority of Canadians.

And that won’t happen as long as Conservatives put hard-right ideology ahead of winning elections, either.

Because, you know, there’s a name for those who favor ideology over anything else. Those who prefer purity over compromise. Those who favor confrontation over consensus.

We call them losers.

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The problem with the Conservative Party of Canada is that it is the Conservative Parties of Canada.

That’s the real dilemma facing the Official Opposition. That’s the real reason they ousted Erin O’Toole as leader. And that’s why they are unlikely to win any elections anytime soon.

The Conservative Party of Canada isn’t singular. It’s plural. It is literally two political visions — one Western-based, rural and angry. The other: central Canadian, urban and progressive.

They weren’t always like that.   But now they are just that: two warring factions pretending to be one political alternative — the Reform one, and the Progressive Conservative one.   Two siblings living under the same roof, hating each other, resenting each other, unable to agree on anything.

Erin O’Toole made many mistakes.   That’s clear.   

But ignoring the civil war within Canada’s conservative movement wasn’t one of them.   In fact, O’Toole regularly attempted to be on both sides of the civil war — on carbon taxes, on vaccinations, on assault weapons, on social issues.   On everything.

His big mistake was that he was up and down like a toilet seat.   He tried to make everyone happy, and thereby ended up making everyone unhappy.   Just this week, we saw yet more evidence of that.

First, he said he wasn’t going to meet with the Omniconvoy truckers.   Then he said he would.   Then he condemned them for desecrating the War Memorial.   At the end of it, you couldn’t be certain if he wanted to arrest the truckers, or drive a rig onto the Hill himself.

His predecessor, Andrew Scheer, made the same mistake. He’d profess to be a tolerant, diverse, modern conservative – and then he’d sit down for an interview with Faith Goldy, who the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Brith has termed a “white supremacist,” quote unquote.

Under former prime minister Stephen Harper, the modern-era Conservative Party was two parties, too. Harper — being the guy who brought together the warring conservative factions with Peter MacKay (more on him in a moment) — knew that he was the father of two siblings who hated each other’s guts.

Not so subtly, he’d signal which side he favoured — expelling MPs who tried to reignite the abortion and gay marriage debate.   Spending like a proverbial sailor during the great global financial crash of 2008-2009.   Reaching a residential school settlement with Indigenous victims.

But occasionally, he’d throw a bone to the troglodyte faction, to keep them in line: stuff like the “barbaric practices” hotline (which cost them power and should still serve as a lesson they still haven’t learned).

But mainly, Harper kept the two conservative parties in line with fear.   Members of his caucus were afraid of him.   They knew he was smarter and more strategic than they were, and they knew what would happen to them if they got out of line.

Erin O’Toole didn’t inspire fear.   He inspired contempt and derision.   

He was, as I liked to say, remarkably unremarkable.   We never knew what his passion was.   We never got to see what was inside his heart, in his gut.   He tried to be all things to all people, and ended up being nothing at all.  

Where does the Conservative Party go from here?   

I suspect they’ll reject urban, moderate, experienced choices like MacKay — who was always a better choice than O’Toole — and embrace anger.   They’ll go with one of the Opposition MPs who are good at opposition, but you can’t ever picture in government.   As prime minister.

As he packs up at Stornoway, O’Toole can comfort himself with one thing: it was never going to work out.

Because the one party you ran to lead, Mr. O’Toole?

It’s two parties.

— Kinsella was special assistant to Jean Chretien

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Let’s do a recap, shall we?

People partying on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

People defacing the statue of Terry Fox.

People breaking into the Shepherds of Good Hope to take food that was being prepared for poor people.

People assaulting and abusing reporters who were there to cover the protest. People assaulting and abusing homeless people.

People blocking ambulance crews, apparently leading to at least one preventable trauma patient’s death.

People urinating and defecating all over the place — urinating on the War Memorial, defecating on the property of a family displaying the Pride flag.

People threatening teenagers at fast food places because the teenagers politely asked them to wear a mask.

People parking wherever they want, and screaming at passersby, and having drinking parties around the clock.

And, of course, people displaying swastikas and Confederate flags and calls for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to be assassinated.

That’s just some of the stuff that went on in Ottawa this weekend. That’s based on what I have seen with my own eyes, or from uncontradicted news reports by organizations like this one.

It happened. It’s real. And it’s been condemned by everyone from a Liberal prime minister to a Progressive Conservative Ontario premier.

Oh, by the by, don’t start telling us in the media how to do our damn job. Our job is not to provide sunny ways reports about the majority of people at the protest obeying the law.

That’s not news. People are supposed to obey the law. Obeying the law and acting like a civilized human being is not news, ever.

But when someone holds up a Nazi flag near Parliament, and thousands of other people don’t do a damn thing about it? That’s news.

As for the suggestion that we are on the Trudeau government’s payroll? That’s more than laughable. That’s a lie of Nazi-like proportions, frankly. A big one.

This newspaper has relentlessly documented the failings of Justin Trudeau‘s government. And this writer, to be blunt, does more to bring about the end of the Trudeau government — in a single afternoon — than most of you would do in 10 lifetimes.

So, take some responsibility, folks. If you were there, or you supported those who were there — and if you are in any way honest — you know that this weekend looked really, really ugly to a lot of regular, unaffiliated voters. Normal people. Not just so-called Lefties.

Now, most of the protesters were not there because of vaccines. They were there to oppose Justin Trudeau‘s government. That’s fine. I oppose it, too.

But here’s the problem, Trudeau critics: The people you have now alienated are the people you needed to reach.

Since you are not going to dethrone him with some nutbar manifesto removing all elected Members of Parliament, and then creating a whackadoodle regime where we are governed by an unelected Governor General and some unelected senators. That is crazy. It is insane.

No, if you are going to remove Justin Trudeau, you needed to reach other voters, folks. You need to make those voters less enthusiastic about him. In an election.

But this weekend‘s events in Ottawa didn’t do that. This weekend‘s events did the exact opposite. This weekend’s events turned many, many normal people off.

Until someone comes up with an alternative, we live in a democracy. To win in a democracy, you need to win over the majority.

You didn’t do that, trucker fans. You did the opposite.

And, along the way, you have re-elected Justin Trudeau.

Good job.

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Anger.

Because let’s all agree that this weekend’s big trucker protest in Ottawa isn’t about anything else. It just isn’t.

Oh, sure, some claim that it’s about vaccinations. But that’s a lot of crap. The governments of Canada and the United States decided, jointly, to require truckers to be vaccinated against COVID-19.

And most truckers already are. And the trucker associations support that. Big deal, suck it up. It’s a little needle. It’s not like the truckers are being asked to donate a kidney or something.

It’s not some diabolical Liberal Party conspiracy, either. Trust me: The Trudeau Liberals couldn’t organize a decent conspiracy if their lives depended on it.

No, the vaccination requirement is the product of an actual bilateral agreement between Canada and the United States. That’s it. It’s a law, basically.

A so-called vaccination mandate was therefore never what this was about. It was, and is, about anger.

Anger is upon the land. And not just with some truckers, either.

Two years ago this week, a man was admitted to Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto. He had a form of pneumonia the doctors and nurses had never seen before.

And so began the upending of all of our lives. So began the biggest political, economic, cultural and personal disruption of our collective lifetimes.

All of us — including Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who initially said it might be over in “weeks,” and President Donald Trump, who said it would be over by the spring — figured it would be finished with us before now. It wasn’t just Trudeau and Trump: Most of us believed we’d be back to normal by now, too.

Well, we’re not. Obviously. And that’s why so many are angry. Angry at the media, angry at governments, angry at politicians, angry at our neighbours. Angry at everything and everyone.

Someone came up with a poll this week. The poll said that only 10% of Canadians are happy. Ninety per cent aren’t. And, within that 90%, many are deeply pissed off.

It isn’t just an ideological thing, either. The anger is found on both sides of the political spectrum. Left and right.

To be sure, the convoy descending on Ottawa this weekend is mainly a conservative populist uprising.

Because they can’t help themselves, and because they are always so pathetically desperate to latch onto every whackadoodle populist movement that comes down the pike, a gaggle of Conservative politicians (and media) have hitched their proverbial wagons to the convoy. It’s their latest political pet rock.

I will wager, right here and right now, that these Tory MPs will come to profoundly regret getting cozy with kooks. I’ve been writing about the white supremacists and neo-Nazis who make up Canada’s far right for more than three decades.

Just as they did with the United We Roll protest that converged on Parliament Hill in February 2019, the far-right jerks are working overtime to insinuate themselves into this weekend’s events. They want a piece of the action.

Why? Because they see millions of dollars raised on GoFundMe. Because they see thousands of angry potential recruits. Because they see a public relations bonanza.

Not every conservative politician is playing with fire, however. Erin O’Toole isn’t. Some in his caucus may be turning a blind eye to the presence of extremists. O’Toole, to his credit, is refusing to be suckered into a meeting with them. He recalls that playing footsie with lunatics sank Andrew Scheer’s political career.

Justin Trudeau, however, is wrongly calling every trucker an extremist. That’s unfair and inaccurate. But it won’t hurt him with his base.

Will this weekend be Canada’s Jan. 6, 2021 equivalent of an assault on our seat of government? It could be. It might be.

Or will it be a peaceful and democratic protest of regular people who are just fed up? I hope so. I pray so.

Whichever way it goes, one fact is undeniable: This thing isn’t about vaccines.

It’s about anger.

— Warren Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s special assistant

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Now we know how we could have stopped the World Wars.

Just, you know, hold up a piece of paper with a hashtag on it. That would’ve stopped Hitler, big time. Boom. War’s over.

Oh, and make sure to look pretty serious. Don’t smile or anything. Bravely hold up that hashtag, don’t smirk, and make sure to get one of your taxpayer-subsidized staff to snap the historic picture just right.

That — plus the ultimate weapon of mass deterrence, #StandWithUkraine — will shut down Russia’s dictator, Vladimir Putin, every time. He won’t dare invade Ukraine now.

The Ukrainians will really appreciate your courage, too. They’ll stop scrambling to build bomb shelters, and they’ll stop frantically looking for safe places to send their children, and they’ll stop teaching terrified Ukrainians, too young and too old, how to carry a rifle.

They’ll pause, and remember the valour and fearlessness of Canadian Members of Parliament. How those MPs — Liberal, Conservative, New Democrat, it didn’t matter their party affiliation — dared to hold up a piece of paper with a hashtag on it, and stopped a war.

Liberal cabinet ministers Harjeet Singh, Mary Ng, Marco Mendicino . NDP MP Heather McPherson . Conservative MPs Marty Morantz and Cathay Wagantall . Remember those names, because those are the names that will live in history. The ones our children will talk about, for years to come.

They are the ones who stood up with a hashtag. So badass.

Because hashtags work better than any of the alternatives. Hashtags — those words we put up on Twitter, preceded by the symbol usually known as an “octothorpe” and “hash” — are far more effective than anything else these plucky Parliamentarians could have done.

You know, things Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said his country desperately needed from us. Like:

• Sanctions: As in sanctions against Russia’s vile potentate, and his cabal, before an invasion. Not after there’s an invasion.
• SWIFT: SWIFT is the international payment messaging system. Cut Russia off from SWIFT, and it will help to cripple their economy and their leaders.
• Weapons, arms: Specifically, send Ukraine anti-aircraft weapons, drones, air and coastal defence systems, Javelins, Stingers. And arms — and ammunition, and armed drones, long-range counter-artillery radar, electronic warfare capabilities, anti-ship capabilities, and anti-tank and naval mines. Failing that, access to NATO military stockpiles and intelligence. Immediately. Now.
• Shows of force: Send a message. Russia needs to see American and other NATO cargo aircraft landing every single day, offloading the stuff noted above. Keep showing military might until Putin turtles and returns his troops to their garrisons — far from Ukraine’s border.
• NATO: Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, then head of NATO, promised Ukraine would become part of the military alliance in 2008 — 13 years ago. Thirteen years later, that hasn’t happened, because member states were afraid of what Putin would do. Well, he’s about to invade anyway — so give Ukraine membership as a deterrent, for the love of God. Because an attack on one NATO member invites a response from all. Or should.

Those are the sorts of things Ukraine wants and needs from us. Those are the things Canada, and its allies, can do. Right now. No delay.

But, by all means, keep flashing those all-important hashtags on Twitter, Canadian Parliamentarians. And don’t worry that the cynics say it is juvenile, and puerile and pathetic. Don’t concern yourself with those (like, say, this writer) who think that Vladimir Putin is laughing at you, waving around a piece of paper, like modern-day Neville Chamberlains.

Because, really, Putin is laughing at you. For real.

Try to make that into a hashtag, boys and girls.

— Warren Kinsella was Jean Chretien’s special assistant

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