In his article today in The Star entitled "The Freedom Convoy occupation of Ottawa besmirched the Canadian flag", Mohamad Fakih writes: "The flag doesn’t just serve as an emblem of our country. It’s a symbol of who we are and who we aspire to be. Across our nation and around the world, it stands for something: for peace and prosperity; for diversity and inclusion. It represents a respect both for freedom and for the laws that protect it."
We agree on this point, Mohamad, even though you spend the rest of your article denigrating the super-majority of the nation: those working- and middle-class Canadians—the very same that hold this nation together, produce its goods, extract its resources, fight its wars, deliver its wares, staff its factories, and police its streets—who were disproportionately affected by the ruling elite's ridiculous, ineffective, and destructive health policies.
Despite invoking "inclusivity," when Mohamad talks about "who we are," he actually means the progressive, cosmopolitan elite. That 3% of the country that watches the CBC. The harpies in Ottawa who suggested horn-honking was terrorism or at the very least traumatic. The Path-Calgarians who think protest is loathsome in practice but lovely in theory. The Laurentian elite who rack up $100K in-flight bills at the taxpayers' expense. Not us bumpkins further afield.
Working-class Canadians coast-to-coast-to-coast got together both formally and informally to join or support the Freedom Convoy, started in earnest by truckers whose livelihoods had been jeopardized by the Trudeau regime's ridiculous Wuhan Virus policies. Y'know, the truckers who get the food and supplies to you day and night?
The Freedom Convoy recognized that divisive, dehumanizing, invasive, and coercive health policies were un-Canadian; that the cruelty and indifference exhibited by the elitist keyboard class, who enjoyed working remotely and saw no downside to making the lives outside their bubble miserable, should not be tolerated; and that medical apartheid was unpatriotic.
They were not simply aspiring to be [and for Canada to be] greater, but doing the leg work and making Canada greater. (Mohamad's rhetoric re: "aspiration" is here understandable granted all the armchair critics at The Star live in the virtual world where virtual signaling and intentions expressed on Twitter are good-enough, rather than in the real world that expects and demands more; where people are judged by execution and performance.)
Mohamad then goes on to peddle the same old lie that has everywhere been disproven: that the Freedom Convoy was politically, racially, or ethically homogenous, calling its constituents "far-right fanatics." He is echoing, like toadies do, the smears advanced by the Trudeau regime.
A protest that raised Canadian flags all along the Trans-Canada Highway had to have been "fringe." After all, if you disagree with a corrupt regime, what could you be otherwise?
The black-face-donning son of a former prime minister who'd ridden around on a motorcycle in nazi regalia (though his staunchest defenders would say it was merely a Prussian uniform) rushed to accuse the Freedom Convoy participants not only of racism and white supremacy, but nazism too. Do these patriots look like nazis to you, Mohamad et co?
There have been a number of similarly nasty lies spread by the state and its apparatchiks about the Freedom Convoy; lies said by people who do in fact besmirch, if not the flag, then their own profession.
There was no link between Ottawa arson and the Freedom Convoy, when in fact crime in the city center plummeted during the peaceful demonstrations.
There was however a leftist terrorist attack on Freedom Convoy protesters, but Mohamad and his ilk would have been keen to downplay or ignore that outright.
The Ottawa Police chief admitted there was no weapons charges against the Freedom Convoy, despite state media suggesting the opposite on numerous occasions.
In addition to a litany of other smears, now disproven, there is also the narrative fudging concerning unforgettable events and imagery particularly when the state sought to crush Canadian citizens with force because it feared their message was catching on. (Note: the state brought no such force to bear against BLM, Idle No More, or leftist protests of comparable volume and size. Trudeau's invocation of the Emergencies Act, which no law enforcement agency supported, was unprecedented).
When a handicapped Indigenous woman was trampled by horses, the media bent over backwards to suggest she had merely fallen; that the hooves hadn't struck her; that she had deserved it; etc. Perhaps she had struck the horse's hoof with her face! That would be assault on an officer, eh Mohamad? Talk about fringe fanatics.
Mohamad goes on to nearly break his back performing the mental gymnastics that lead him to suggest: "We already have the freedoms that this vocal throng claimed to want."
Yeah, partially, and only now because those protests that were impossible to ignore forced the hands of the authoritarians in Ottawa.
During the pandemic, the elderly were imprisoned and barred from seeing visitors. Those who refused not one but at least two ineffective, unproven, experimental, and in some cases deadly mRNA gene therapies (except in the case of the pregnancy-ending Pfizer jab where only one was initially required) were oftentimes fired, and everywhere barred from restaurants, service centers, stores, and even in some instances, grocery stores. Freedom to feed oneself seems a pretty interesting one to be denied, Mohamad.
What's more, churches and synagogues were shuttered. (Catholic masses, virtually uninterrupted for 20 centuries, continued during the Black Death, but not during a flu that was 99.8% survivable if contracted.) You couldn't attend your own father's funeral. You were forced to stay in your home. A generation of kids were stunted and systemically abused by a system designed to protect the wealthy gerontocracy. Masks were forced upon everyone, even though cloth masks don't work and heavy-duty masks were impossible to find.
Mohamad is dead wrong. Freedoms were at stake. A great reset was being foisted upon the peoples of the world. Canada was being tested. But for the Freedom Convoy, Canada might have failed that test and at a critical time too.
No, the Freedom Convoy did not besmirch the flag but revalue it. It reminded the world that Canadians aren't cowards accountable to their government but impressive citizens to whom their government is accountable; of the stock of those who'd taken Vimy when their allies had failed; a people with firsts and firsts in world sports and an arm in space; a people who'd been at war with Hitler long before America jumped into the fray and had fought for human rights the world over; a people who had taken the tenuous federation that great John A. MacDonald gifted us and united it with far more than rail.
The flag raised at the protests was a flag raised for a country that doesn't segregate based on vaccination status. It was a flag raised for a country where policy decisions don't exclusively buttress a fringe minority of elites. It was a flag raised for a country that, notwithstanding its eugenicist tendencies, supports human rights and dignity. It is a flag for the true north strong and free.
Let us for one minute consider who really has besmirched the flag. There are many contenders, from the leftists who think the flag racist to the academics who think patriotism backwards. But among the worst is Trudeau and the LPC.
Besides the fact that the Trudeau regime crushed a peaceful, multiracial, ideologically-diverse working-class protest...
the Trudeau regime also had federal buildings fly the flag at half mast for over a year (including on Canada Day) due to the mass-graves lie. The media and the progressive elite issued blood libel after blood libel, generalizing and conflating those great men and women who made the country great with a handful of loathsome abusers; calling our nation "genocidal". (It turns out the "mass graves" were cemeteries.)
Trudeau calls Canada a post-national state. That would mean the flag doesn't represent anything but some amorphous geography that has yet to be subsumed into some global union. A fringe view, no doubt.
While the mentally obese and the ideologically possessed in Ottawa and elsewhere despise our flag and the history that made it meaningful, it was the Freedom Convoy who re-associated it with freedom, inclusivity, love, and peace.
