Thread by @DavidAnber

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The last two years have been very much about what kind of country we want to live in, and about what the role of government should be.

Are we supposed to live in a country where government attempts to be the solution to problems?

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Or do we want to live in a country where government secures rights for its citizens and fosters the environment to allow people to pursue their own destiny?

COVID 19 presented challenges. It made people very scared. & so the government pursued a course which could only make sense to people who were very scared.

As many said at the outset, we cannot allow the “cure” to be worse than the disease. What ensued however was exactly that.

Two weeks to slow the spread was a reasonable solution if & only if drastic government action was limited to that. Instead, however, it was the first of a seamless web of measures which pretended to “keep us safe”. In reality, it has been a series of liberty-infringing jokes.

The false narrative of “masks keep other people safe” was then born.

The kind of country we should live in is one in which apparently healthy people arent forced to muzzle their face. We now know that these mask mandates did precious little &have impacted peoples mental health.

Kids were the ones who suffered (and continue to suffer) the most losing out on a normal childhood. Lost social interaction; lost education; lost activities. Lost time. Time being such a precious and scare commodity for children.

And everywhere we look, the data show that the spread of COVID went up & down in seasonal waves irrespective of the theatre of measures that went on.

But at least we have a vaccine that for most people reduces the fraction of a percent risk of COVID to a fraction of a fraction.

But again, in keeping with the overreach of government, targets of 60 and 70 and 80 and 90 and 100 percent vaccinated have not been enough. And then it happened; the sacrosanct principle that “nobody can tell me what I put in my body” went out the window.

This too is not the country we should want to live in. Even if the vaccine did prevent the spread of COVID effectively, it should be nobody’s business except for the individual advised by their own doctor. Whether that person’s decision is reasonable, or unreasonable.

Nevertheless, the more the data showed that the vaccines did little to slow the spread (& may actually increase it) the governments we allowed to have so much power only intensified their assault on the rights of people. In doing so they turned the citizens on each other.

And so the only tool people had available to them was the ability to protest in a highly visible manner. And that’s what we saw when thousands of people flocked to Ottawa with millions more supporting them from coast to coast to coast.

The protests in Ottawa have never been a blockade or an occupation. And while I don’t endorse the extreme use of loud air horns there is no evidence the honking went late into the night and all night. It was a noisy but entirely peaceful protest.

And so we so we saw politicians and personalities in the media who had predicted it would be Canada’s “January 6” were wrong. So what did they do? They pointed out (and likely planted) the 2 or 3 evil flags amidst a sea of thousands of Canadian flags and what they stand for.

They made up “harassment” and false narratives of abuse at shelters. Businesses that remained open thrived. Those that shut down unnecessarily, blamed the protesters. All the while, politicians like @JustinTrudeau fanned the fires of division.

And so came the Emergencies Act which has taken away due process from people who are losing their money, their mortgages and their lives. And the police keep claiming that protesting in any way is prohibited even though the regulations under the Emergencies Act say otherwise.

This brings us to today; a dark day for Canada. It’s Canada’s Feb18; where rights & lives were literally trampled by riot police on horseback. The ability to protest peacefully has been crushed & this will only continue into the weekend as the state-sponsored violence escalates.

We need a “great reset” but not the kind of which #Trudeau speaks. We need to get back to basics; a government that secures rights for its citizens and allows them to pursue their own destiny. If we don’t have such a reset, the government control is only going to increase.

Now is the time for Canadians to see Justin Trudeau for who he is: an incompetent, vindictive head of government who needs to be democratically fired at the next opportunity. And, politicians at other levels who don’t want to restore rights to Canadians, should be the next to go.

This decade has gotten off to a terrible start. The time is now for Canadians to rally around values that unite us all including freedom of speech and a diversity of ideas; the virtues of hard work, and personal responsibility: not government imposed responsibility.

The media need to go back to holding the government to account for the benefit of the people and not holding people accountable for the benefit of government. For it is the media who have been most responsible for perpetuating the fear and false narratives underlying everything.

But despite what today stands for and how we got there these last two years, I have hope that starting with the protests in Ottawa we are starting the process of getting back on track. I am optimistic that we will learn from this and come together, even if not in the coming week.

We will get through this as a stronger Canada.