American Greatness: "Despite the efforts of Canadian media to downplay and distort events in Ottawa, it is easy to see right through them. In the absence of genuine grievances, it would be impossible to convince thousands of people to act—people who are not, I should add, in the professional protesting class that forms an entire subset of Canadian society. These are not the laptop class but working people who live paycheck-to-paycheck and have families to feed. They cannot afford to take weeks off from whatever work remains to them and march around in minus 35-degree wind chills for frivolous reasons.
"In fact, many of the protesters have said they are themselves vaccinated, as have many of the thousands of ordinary citizens who, also in sub-zero temperatures, cheered the convoys on as they passed. But they have also said they are robustly for freedom of choice, not to mention the right of people to make a living. They are understandably less keen on policies that are manifestly worthless for halting COVID and have significant trade-offs and costs, including empty shelves in Canadian supermarkets....
"...A notable exception to the mendacity and pusillanimity of those in the Canadian opinion-forming classes is Conservative Member of Parliament Leslyn Lewis, who stood with the protesters, both literally and in spirit. As a black woman who immigrated to Canada from Jamaica, she not only marginally bests Trudeau on the racial and gender authenticity fronts, she is also one of the rare known vertebrates among Canadian politicians. Appropriating a tried and true leftist trope, she forcefully insisted that this is what democracy looks like, and the people in fact rule the government, not the other way around. She stood, in other words, with ordinary citizens who have their backs to the wall and are attempting to petition a willfully, characteristically, endlessly obtuse government for a redress of real, as opposed to phantasmagorical, grievances."