On the menu today: The Canadian trucker protests starts to have serious consequences on this side of the border; the fights over vaccine mandates are looking less like a public-health exercise and more like a battle of wills over who can force the other side to blink; why Canada couldn’t make its own vaccines; and Kamala Harris heads to Munich to reassure Europeans she and the rest of the Biden administration can keep Ukraine’s borders intact.
Maybe Those Vaccine Mandates Aren’t Worth It, Eh?
When we use the term, “border crisis” now, we have to specify which border:
The Ontario government is preparing a series of measures in an effort to break the logjam at the Ambassador Bridge and reopen the most important trade link between Canada and the U.S., according to two sources with direct knowledge of the plans.
Premier Doug Ford intends to get tough with the protesters, one source said. In addition to hefty fines and the possible confiscation of vehicles, the sources said the province is also looking at its options for suspending commercial licences. . . .
Protesters, sympathetic to the anti-government, anti-mandate blockades in Ottawa, have now barricaded three border crossings in Ontario, Alberta and Manitoba. The protests have disrupted supply chains, forced factories to slash production, and are putting Canada’s reputation as a trading country at risk.
The border blockades are also causing economic pain in the U.S., with at least one automaker cancelling shifts in Michigan. Governor Gretchen Whitmer said the bridge barricade was also risking the state’s economy and the White House said it could disrupt agricultural exports to Canada.
A fourth protest is planned for the Peace Bridge on Saturday, that route connects Fort Erie, Ont., to Buffalo. Pennie Fay, one of the organizers of that protest, said her group has no plans to blockade the bridge but she doesn’t know if others will.
More than a quarter of all U.S.–Canada trade crosses the Ambassador Bridge each year. And the blockage is starting to have big effects on Michigan automakers:
In the case of General Motors, it is chartering cargo planes to fly parts stuck at Canada’s border over the Detroit River and into the U.S. to keep a critical truck plant going. GM and Ford Motor Co. confirmed the bridge blockade has disrupted production of new vehicles and engines at some of their plants Wednesday and Thursday.
Before we go any further, note that the Canadian Trucking Alliance estimates that about 10 percent of the 120,000 Canadian truckers who cross the border are not vaccinated.
So, roughly 90 percent of Canadian truckers working these international routes are vaccinated, and this dispute over the mandate is still turning into a country-paralyzing showdown? In the name of Gordie Howe, just declare a victory, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! Is forcing these 12,000 truckers to do something they adamantly refuse to do really worth all this?
The right-of-center party up in Canada is starting to get impatient, telling the protesters that they’ve made their point, and that it’s time to get the economy moving again:
After publicly supporting the anti-vaccine mandate activists protesting in Ottawa in recent weeks, interim Conservative leader Candice Bergen said Thursday it’s time for the convoy and other protesters blocking two major border crossings to end their demonstrations and go home. Bergen, who has called the convoy a “passionate, patriotic and peaceful” group of Canadians concerned about freedom at a time of COVID restrictions, said the protesters have made their point to parliamentarians and the Conservative Party will take up their fight in the House of Commons instead.
Times are so unusual that the Ambassador Bridge blockage has made staunch Iraq War opponent Matt Yglesias go full “neocon”:
If a truck driver doesn’t want to drive a truck then that’s great. If he wants to block a road in Ottawa, then that’s bad but not my business. If he wants to block a bridge to the USA and disrupt our auto industry, we should send the Marines to reopen the bridge.
No blood for maple syrup, man! I’m sure somewhere right now, someone named Cheney is writing a memo contending that the Quebecois will “greet us as libérateurs.”
South of the border, New York City is now enforcing its vaccine mandate and appears set to fire as many as 3,000 city employees today:
The Adams administration is poised to dismiss up to 3,000 municipal workers on Friday for refusing to get vaccinated against the coronavirus, in what could be the nation’s most drastic example of a work force reduction tied to a vaccine requirement. The mandate, put in place by Mr. Adams’s predecessor, Bill de Blasio, has been effective: About 95 percent of the city’s 370,000 workers have received at least one dose of the vaccine, an increase from 84 percent when the mandate was first announced in October.
The city says that dismissing the 3,000 workers will have no effect on city services because these workers “have been on unpaid leave for months.” I look at that statement and ask, wait, if these employees have been on unpaid leave for months and there has been no noticeable effect on city services . . . why would you replace them? Clearly, we didn’t need them in those jobs in the first place!
Once again, it feels fair to ask if the current fights about vaccine mandates are really about protecting the health of those who haven’t gotten vaccinated, or whether it has now become a battle of wills between those in government and those who refuse to comply. The U.S. federal government’s mandate for its employees is currently blocked by a court order, but even before the order, the government was dragging its feet on any real discipline, with federal agencies announcing an intent to “first counsel employees who resisted vaccination rather than discipline or fire them.” Other big institutions, such as Starbucks and General Electric, decided that encouraging employees to get vaccinated and giving them time off to do so was sufficient.
As of this morning, 251 million Americans have had at least one shot of a Covid vaccine, which is up to 87.4 percent of American adults. There is some overlap with the 79 million Americans who have had Covid-19 — which is clearly an undercount, because people who test positive on a home test and never tell a doctor, hospital, or local health official don’t get added to the count.
Up in Canada, more than 32 million — 84 percent of the total population — has received one dose of a Covid vaccine and 78 percent is fully vaccinated. An astounding 88.3 percent of Canadians above age five have been vaccinated. Canada has had 3.1 million Covid cases total.
On either side of the border, the number of people who are at high risk of serious infection, unvaccinated, and who have no natural immunity are few and far between. Those people have heard all the arguments. If they’ve chosen to live with that risk, then they’re the ones who will live with the consequences. It is very sad when we hear about unvaccinated truckers who died from Covid-19, but people make erroneous judgments of risk all the time — from booze to driving too fast to free-solo climbing to swimming in extremely cold water. At some point, the rest of us have to say, “I wish you would make a different choice, but it’s your life. Good luck.”
And truckers spend most of their time alone, in their truck cabs. They’ve been self-isolating since before it was in style!
Our Michael Brendan Dougherty chuckles that we’re watching a major worker’s movement rising to power and the modern Left is horrified by it:
In the same way that a nonfeminist woman is degraded to the status of not a woman, or a racial minority with the wrong politics is accused of multiracial whiteness, workers taking political action that isn’t controlled by the Left are deemed not workers at all. Returning to their orthodox Marxist categories, they sniff that the majority of these workers own their rigs and are thus more like the middle class.
But I notice that the New York Times editorial board, while opposing the truckers, is a bit more nuanced in its assessment than you might expect:
We disagree with the protesters’ cause, but they have a right to be noisy and even disruptive. Protests are a necessary form of expression in a democratic society, particularly for those whose opinions do not command broad popular support. Governments have a responsibility to prevent violence by protesters, but they must be willing to accept some degree of disruption by those seeking to be heard. . . . The convoy has captured an underlying frustration in a broad swath of the Canadian public. . . . The [French] gilets jaunes, however, never found a cause with wide appeal. The Canadian truckers have, and their success in turning coronavirus restrictions into a rallying cry for the disaffected is what makes the Ottawa protest significant.
What price is Justin Trudeau willing to pay to force those truckers to bend to his will?
What price are the rest of us willing to pay to force those truckers to bend to his will?
I think you can argue that the pandemic restrictions have had a much harsher effect on Canadians than Americans; barring indoor gatherings has a bigger effect on the lives of people who live with long, cold winters. Canadian provinces were slower to reopen schools and quicker to shut them down again.
In Canada, the rollout of the vaccines was later and slower, at least at first. We in the United States tend to think of Canada as like us, just with more hockey fans and poutine and a Tim Horton’s doughnut shop on every corner instead of a Starbucks. But every once in a while, you find a glaring difference in our economies and industrial bases — and few were more glaring than the fact that Canada did not have any pharmaceutical-production facilities that could quickly be converted to produce Covid-19 vaccines — a result of what one member of a government task force called the “hollowing out” of the biopharmaceutical industry in the country over the past 25 years.
“The problem has been that governments are driven by short-term needs,” Alan Bernstein, president of a Canadian-based global research organization, told the Toronto Star. “In the absence of COVID-19, there was no obvious, immediate need to have a national vaccine facility. We were getting all the vaccines we needed; everything was fine. Now, we know there’s a problem.”
Canada started vaccinating its most vulnerable citizens shortly after the U.S. did in December 2020 — but because it was dependent upon imports, its vaccination process started much slower than the American one. Yukon and the Northwest Territories didn’t get any shots until December 28. Credit Canada for catching up fast once it had access to the shots, but I wonder if being dependent upon other countries to get out of the pandemic catastrophe left a lasting wound to some Canadians’ pride.
ADDENDUM: Over in the Daily Mail, I take a look at the oddity of Vice President Kamala Harris, having done nothing to help secure America’s borders, heading to Munich to assure Europe that the Biden administration can help protect Ukraine’s borders.