You know what I mean. Much like how your hands move to the nearby bowl of potato chips without thinking my brain cycles through unresolvable annoying topics.
This is year 3 of not being able to go on our tropical holiday and this winter has been brutal. A month-long spell of weather so cold that outdoor activities were out of the question. Like many, I am done with this pandemic. We've limited travel to heading out to the coast for family emergencies and running to Edmonton for service appointments then coming right back home. I need to put on my selfish hat (and mask🙄) and get out in the community and do things...except I really don't want to run into convoy supporters and if I do any kind of group activity, that's likely to happen.
And speaking of convoys - what the actual f*ck is their problem. Vaccines were mandated for Federally regulated industries ages ago and trucking got an exemption that expired. Still, they can work across Canada unless the companies they want to access require vaccination. This would be horribly discriminatory if the vaccines weren't widely tested before being provided for free from a bunch of places you don't have to have an appointment to get. Booster, whatever. I really don't like getting sick so I'll take it. Other countries want me to be vaccinated to visit - okay, it's your health system. I could be sympathetic to anti-maskers - it does feel awkward to be the one out of step - but I have yet to hear news reports of insisting people wear masks to the point of assault but I do see videos of non-mask wearers spitting on people and trying to remove masks from people wearing them. From the start (in the mid 2020s) it's seemed like people being thwarted who are not used to being told no.
This thing with Trudeau is just irrational. He's a leader in a recently elected minority government. During a pandemic, as a responsible employer, the Feds are reducing health risks by requiring vaccines - just like a lot of large companies. He got a vaccine supply and distributed it. He's mostly followed the recommendations of PHAC (mostly because wildly changing test requirements is...wild and quarantining was lax) and really left provinces to themselves when doing their pandemic response and vaccination distribution. There's been no Federally mandated lockdowns - all there have been is essential travel recommendations with no questioning of what people decide is essential. No mass testing like Hong Kong no lockdowns like China, just gradual lessening of quarantine and testing on arrival. I know this is mentally difficult - see the third year of not traveling thing - but in spite of hyperbole, this is not forever.
Finally the Emergencies Act. From the start, the CPC and their provincial counterparts wanted to provoke the Feds into doing something that could be used in the next election and I think they wanted it to echo the FLQ crisis and G7 head bashing. But it didn't. After weeks of having their lives further interrupted by the squatters, Ottawans got to see overwhelming numbers of law enforcement move stoically to contain their tormenters. Yep, that's my take. I can't imagine having people from another town set up a block party in my neighbourhood while the police look the other way. The Act has a limited term and any actions will be scrutinized by people hostile to invoking the act.
One reason I'm writing this is to force myself to check into background elements to ensure I'm being fair. I have a CPC MLA. Other than donating to the convoy, which according to its memorandum had the secondary aim of overturning an election, and decrying gun control the last thing she wrote about was to defend fertilizer use by farmers as part of resisting climate change initiatives. I agree that there metrics have to be reasonably set but, we've seen under Conservative-led (CPC, UCP, PC) government, it's a lot of talk and encouragement of making things worse by kicking the can down the road.
Anyway, hopefully just writing it down will get everything out of my system. I think Canada's governmental COVID response was pretty good. Individuals got support, we had pretty decent movement and not huge swaths of deaths although there were some - it's a pandemic after all. I have to admit, I hope the Emergencies Act spawns some better financial laws that prevent money laundering and tax dodging so the Feds can focus on things like affordable housing in major centers and inflation.
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