How the Convoy Protest and Covid intersect with wokeness

Freedom Truckers Take Their Message To Ottawa

“Billboard” Chris Elston with some very attractive people at the Convoy Protest in Ottawa on Saturday

Sunday, January 30, 2022

By Corrie Mooney

Woke Watch Canada is a big-tent group of concerned teachers, parents, school admin and citizens who seek to identify and speak out against divisive woke radicalism in our schools and  culture.  We come from a variety of political backgrounds and know that resistance to wokeness can be found from conservatives all the way to the far left. As such, we have been laser focussed on wokeness and have generally avoided other political topics.  We have found that our priority needs to be to spread awareness of wokeness, and we don’t want to alienate potential supporters. 

With the Convoy Protest in Ottawa, this is becoming increasingly difficult to do. 

Although the fundamental purpose of the Convoy is to protest COVID related mandates, it has become about much more than just this.   From calls to restrict freedom of expression, to the causes behind the fear among so many of our fellow citizens, it has now crossed well into territory where we can - and should - weigh in.  

Freedom of Expression

During Covid, many of the fundamental rights of Canadians have been curtailed.  The ability of many to make a living has been jeopardized or destroyed, especially for those not able to work from home and owners of small businesses.  Covid is a serious illness and some emergency health measures were required, and, at least initially, authorities did not know what they could do about a disease that they knew little of.   Canadians accepted measures such as mask mandates, shutdowns, and self-isolation as what they had to do, even if in rare cases they grumbled about them.   Then experimental vaccines became available in an astonishing amount of time.  To do this minor miracle, a number of regulatory measures were bypassed, and approvals of these vaccines were expedited.  

Irrespective of whether or not you think the mandates should be in place today and remain there, you must concede that it is every Canadians’ right to question them, and question them openly.  One of the main purposes of freedom of expression is to act as a check on abuse of power.  We are living in a time where many are not respectful of citizen’s rights, who feel that their cause supersedes such concerns.  This includes multi-national corporations, but also - definitely - the Woke.    

The protest tells our governments that most Canadians aren’t going to put up with these mandates and restrictions on their freedom a moment longer than they need to.  It tells them, finally, that there is a limit.

Tiptoeing to Totalitarianism

We know that the woke are fundamentaly totalitarian.  They seek power and control of speech because they want to control what we think.  They see structural oppression in potentially anything.   This is an inescapable consequence of their ideology.  Their tactics are new – they are almost never violent, indeed they avoid almost any sort of direct confrontation.   They are passive aggressive in the extreme and they are remarkably patient and persistent.  

Covid, for them was a significant opportunity.  They have spent the last few decades marching slowly through our institutions, and recruiting a generation of fearful youth into their camp.  They have hidden behind unquestionable virtues.  In a different day or age, when our body politic was healthily democratic and rights respecting, we could trust our governments enough to let go of the special powers they held when it was time to do so.   Pierre Trudeau was vocally indignant about applying the War Measures Act in 1970.  His son is not showing the same reticence, and there is the snake of wokeness in the garden.  

Safetyism

The concept of safetyism is introduced in the book The Coddling of the American Mind by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  Safetyism is not just an excessive demand for safety, but also a demand for emotional safety. This has been growing as a cultural phenomenon with the rise of iGen – the generation of kids born since 1995.   Professors at Universities first started noticing unreasonable demands for emotional security from their undergrads in around 2013.  The causes for it are complicated, but suffice it to say iGen are now very much a part of the body politic.  Their ideas are permeating throughout the left and into our institutions.   You can hear hints of it when adults talk like children to each other, or when politicians talk down to the public. 

Covid has been a nightmare for people unable to assess risks accurately.  Uncertainty at the beginning of the pandemic (when the Case Fatality Rate appeared to be over 3%) and the continuing media frenzy has not helped.  A Gallop Poll conducted south of the border in September quantified Americans fear of hospitalization from Covid.

Source: https://news.gallup.com/opinion/gallup/354938/adults-estimates-covid-hospitalization-risk.aspx

Thus, crudely, Americans were exaggerating the risk of hospitalization from Covid (which is between one and five per cent for the unvaccinated) by a factor of ten.   Given the cultural differences between the countries, it can be assumed that this is worse in Canada.    

Covid restrictions are not being driven purely by rational, science based policies, but in large part by political decisions reacting to opinion polls.     Politicians are simply giving the people what they want, and what most of them want is emotional safety.

Thus the Convoy Protest is challenging safetyism’s narrative.   It is effectively forcing politicians to reassess risks and to include other impacts on society in their calculus.  It is no coincidence that Ontario’s Chief Medical Officer, Dr. Kieran Moore said this on the Thursday before the Convoy’s arrival in Ottawa:

We're trying to reduce our risk, but we cannot eliminate the risk in every aspect of our lives. We have to have a balanced approach as a society against this threat… We've let our lives be controlled for the last two years, in a significant amount of fear, and now we're gonna have to change some of that thinking… we have to look at the mental, the physical, the social, the economic and the educational impacts that this virus has had on our children and our businesses, and learn from the last two years that sometimes we were too cautious.

It’s likely that many politicians want to ease off on Covid restriction.  They needed an excuse to do so, and that excuse is one of the largest protests in Canadian history. 

It doesn’t matter what you believe about Covid restrictions, it doesn’t matter if you change your mind, the Convoy protest is a healthy and essential component of Canada’s body politic.  It is a healthy and a long waited for piece in the battle against wokeism, and the underlying forces that feed it.