The truckers protest in Ottawa is out of hand

My apologies.  I think this is where I saw the use of the word alien, which I falsely accused cindosha of using.

On another note, it's completely unacceptable for an elected official and the 3rd ranking member of the minority party in the House to use this word.

At much much lower numbers.

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/16/canada-trucker-distancing-protests/

Canadian truck drivers distance themselves from ‘Freedom Convoy’ protests

In just a matter of weeks, Canadian truck drivers protesting coronavirus vaccine mandates became the unexpected darlings of the global right wing.
Republican politicians showered the truckers, who descended on the Canadian capital, with praise. Copycat convoys gathered from New Zealand to France.
The protests against U.S. and Canadian regulations barring unvaccinated truck drivers from crossing the border began Jan. 28 — and soon attracted a range of anti-government activists, far-right figures and opponents of pandemic restrictions more broadly
But even as the vocal group of truckers, known as the “Freedom Convoy,” grabbed the world’s attention, many of Canada’s truck drivers were scrambling to distance themselves from the movement, which they view as radical and fringe.

In their view, the protesters’ actions — including shutting down cross-border trade and laying siege to the capital — have hurt rather than helped drivers in the industry, and failed to advance the labor issues most truckers care about. They point out that only a small percentage of Canadian truckers have joined the demonstrations, and the vast majority of drivers are already vaccinated, according to trucking associations and Canadian authorities.

“There is a vocal minority, which is trying to steal the headlines, but a silent majority has actually been working day and night,” said Manan Gupta, publisher of Road Today, a Canadian magazine for South Asian truckers. About a third of Canada’s roughly 180,000 tractor-trailer drivers are immigrants, according to the most recent survey, in 2016.
The protests have caused long delays at the border and forced drivers to take lengthy detours. Such disruptions are “not received well” by truckers who are not participating in the convoy, Gupta said, adding that “they are the ones keeping our supply chain intact and running.”

What is the Emergencies Act, which Canada invoked in response to Canada’s trucker protests?
“These illegal blockades have had a detrimental impact on our members and customers’ businesses. These have also had a very significant negative impact upon our professional driving community,” the president of the Canadian Trucking Alliance, Stephen Laskowski, said in a statement Monday.

The roadblocks hampered trade with the United States and forced American auto companies to scale back production, prompting the White House to call last week for the swift reopening of transportation routes.

Canadian police cleared the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge, a vital border crossing linking Detroit to Windsor, Ontario, on Sunday night. And on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the country’s Emergencies Act, which grants the government sweeping powers to respond to national emergencies. The Canadian Trucking Alliance came out in support of the move.
Some of the convoy’s most visible leaders aren’t even truckers. And at the demonstrations, Confederate flags and pro-Trump signs have mingled alongside the Canadian maple leaf emblem. Money has also poured in from donors in the United States.

James Bauder is one prominent figure and leader of the fringe group Canada Unity, which is well known for peddling conspiracy theories. Action4Canada, which sent vehicles and members to join the convoy, also promotes on its website the unfounded claim that Bill Gates wants to use the vaccine to implant microchips in humans.
“They are using our name in the wrong place and the wrong time,” said Ajay Singh Toor, spokesman for Canada’s West Coast Trucking Association. “It’s not a trucker convoy anymore.”
As a result, the convoy’s demands run the gamut from the removal of all public health measures to Trudeau’s ouster. Teamsters Canada, a union that represents 15,000 long-haul truck drivers, called the convoy a “despicable display of hate lead by the political Right and shamefully encouraged by elected conservative politicians.”

The movement “does not reflect the values of Teamsters Canada, nor the vast majority of our members, and in fact has served to delegitimize the real concerns of most truck drivers today,” the union said in a statement last week.
Issues such as wage theft, bad roads and a lack of restrooms are far more pressing issues for most truckers than vaccine mandates, trucking associations say. But convoy protesters haven’t raised them.
Manbir Bharj drives a crane truck in Ontario and says that the vaccine mandates imposed by the U.S. and Canadian governments on truckers were “fair” because they helped mitigate the spread of the virus.
“This is why the virus is spreading and mutating into different variants — because people don’t know how to follow” rules, Bharj said.
Some worry that the damage to the industry may be hard to reverse. The convoy threatens to exacerbate a labor shortage that already plagued Canadian trucking before the coronavirus hit, Gupta said. About 23,000 truck driver jobs need to be filled, according to a January report by Trucking HR Canada.

“These protests, these blockages, they’re not creating a positive workplace for anybody who wants to embrace trucking,” Gupta said.
Matthew Marchand is a tanker-trailer driver from Ottawa who transports liquid bulk chemicals between Canada and the United States. He is vaccinated but wasn’t fully supportive of the mandate, which he said didn’t really give truckers a “true choice.”
“But how [the protesters] are going about it, to me, is not acceptable,” he said. “The negative reputation that they’ve created for us isn’t going to do us any favors with the public’s perception of our industry. We already have a hard enough time as it is.”

Driver Ted McNeill told CityNews Toronto last week that he had to take a five-hour detour to deliver a truckload of food into Canada.
He had a similar message for the protesting truckers: “Stop it. You’re making us look bad.”
Miriam Berger and Amanda Coletta in Ottawa contributed to this report.

Try this.

It has pictures! So maybe you can understand it a little better. 

mollycoddle  That is a made in Canada solution. 

Canadians have been peace-keepers in major world situations, such as Iraq, Ukraine and Syria.  

The blockade in Ottawa might be winding down, too. Estimates are down to 360 trucks compared to an estimated 4,000 at the height. Hopefully it ends as peacefully as the border crossings.

www.npr.org/2022/02/16/1081293032/tensions-rise-in-ottawa-as-police-warn-truckers-to-leave

Regardless of differing opinion the people here on this board ALSO deserve to be treated with dignity and respect. But you have no problem calling them trolls and sealions and bullying them. All efforts to dehumanize someone simply because you don't agree with them, or like the facts they bring to the board.
You are selective with your outrage and only selectively treating deserving people with the dignity and respect you demand from and for others. 



 
And yet it didn't bother you in the least any time someone is attempting to run someone else off the board for no HONEST reason other than they have a different opinion. 



Speaking of lying liars who lie... 1. I DO contribute elsewhere on this board. 2. Even IF i didn't, who cares when you only object to that idea from people you disagree with. There are people on "your side" that absolutely do not contribute anywhere but politics and I don't see you complaining about them.
So your argument there is not even close to a "good faith" argument.



Try harder then. 

I also apologized for falsely accusing you of that and explained where the word came from in this thread.  And yes, it absolutely is a derogatory word.  There is a huge difference between calling them migrants, refugees, unauthorized migrants or undocumented refugees and your choice of words.  All of those words refer to them as people and are more dignified and respectful.  Your choice of words is not respectful or dignified and dehumanizes people.  I hope you will read this, maybe if you won't listen to what we are trying to tell you, you will listen to someone else

www.seattletimes.com/opinion/why-no-one-should-call-undocumented-immigrants-illegals/

Outside of being legally misleading, the term “illegal” has become incredibly dangerous because of how dehumanizing it is.

So much of that crucial sense of humanity is lost when people refer to them as “illegals.” When people refer to undocumented immigrants as “illegals,” they stop seeing them as humans and start seeing them as criminals that have inherently harmed society. People start to believe that an undocumented immigrant’s very existence is illegal.

That is exactly why Americans must retire the use of “illegal” in reference to undocumented immigrants. The term is not just offensive, in just the past year it has been used to rationalize injustice, inhumane treatment, and, at times, death. As a result, it is a term that should be viewed as a slur.

Unfortunately, the word “illegal” is powerful and resonates with a base of people that is looking for an explanation for America’s shortcomings, so news organizations and politicians use it with almost no ensuing outrage.

We seem to have just accepted that a huge group of people can use the term with absolutely no recourse. If we are ever going to systematically treat immigrants humanely or make coherent immigration policy, we need to get everyone to acknowledge that no one’s existence is illegal, and that will take true character.

I'm getting worked up because words matter.  And calling them illegal is not OK.  I don't know how many times we can say it or different ways to say it.  Illegal migrant or illegal refugee is not OK either.  Using the term illegal makes them the enemies or criminals and dehumanizes them.  Regardless of their legal status, everyone here in the States has rights. They have the right to be treated with dignity and respect.  They also have the right to medical care, to attend school  and in some states, to get a drivers license for work.  They are protected by federal wage laws and are entitled to due process, and the right to a court hearing on their immigration status.  They are people fleeing violence, drug cartels and terrible conditions in their home countries.  They want the same thing that many of us do - to keep their children safe and to give them a better life.  They are hard working and do many of the jobs American citizens are not willing to do.  They would not be here without authorization if they had better options.  It's not a s simple as just follow the laws and come here legally. Do you have any idea how challenging that process is?  It's nearly impossible.

No, I didn't miss that at all. I read it and it does NOT dismiss the fact that this...

...is a completely untrue statement. 

You don't think Trump would have done that if he was president then? Nobody could get just go in and get a shot until April of 2021.  They were being meted out to whoever the government thought was the most important people to get them first...They were not released nationwide for everyone until April 19th


www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid-19-vaccine-developments-in-2021

Then rephrase it.

dumpster don did have a plan but it was viewed as flawed and Kamala Harris was correct when she said there was no national strategy or plan for vaccinations.

From PolitiFact…. link

“Trump vaccine plan left logistics to states, but it did exist

The Trump administration planned to get the vaccines developed and then send them to locations chosen by states. States wrote their own plans, and they were responsible for setting up places to get vaccines into Americans’ arms.

The Trump administration’s approach was flawed, experts said, because it failed to adequately communicate about the anticipated number of doses and the rollout.

The Biden administration plans more federal involvement in getting vaccines into arms, including setting up 100 FEMA sites nationwide.”


Leaving it up to the states to do their own thing during a pandemic that affected every state was not only a mistake but a dereliction of duty by the President of the United States.

There are certainly things that should be up to the individuals states to do their own thing but not something like this pandemic.  From the very beginning the handling of the pandemic should have been handled by the Feds and not what individual states wanted to or not to do.  And we are still feeling the affects of trump’s incompetence.  It was trump’s incompetence that has made it harder for the Biden Administration.  

Now you can agree with this or not, that is entirely up to you.

I had to look up who Moncef Slaoui was.  He was a trump appointee to head “Operation Warp Speed” who was recently fired from a company board for sexual harassment allegations.  Yup, typical kind of guy trump surrounded himself with. Not sure he’s the kind of guy we should listen to.  And let’s be honest here the truth telling record of former trump appointees hasn’t been too good.  

Anyway back to the subject at hand.

As to trump’s national strategy, what was it?  

Because IMO this recap does not show a “national strategy”, but it does show him punting and making it an “individual state” strategy unless you think by him punting that is his “national “ strategy.   Because if you do then you and I have different idea of what a national strategy is.  

In my world a national strategy is the Feds set the guidelines for all states so they are all on the same page.  Because IMO that is the ONLY way to effectively  fight something like this virus.  And trump and his administration didn’t come anywhere close to doing that.  So IMO Kamala Harris was correct.  And ultimately it made it harder for the Biden Administration to do what they needed to do to corral this virus.  In other words a “strategy “ does not mean a “national strategy”.

And I agree, the topic shouldn’t have been trump has no strategy, but it should have trump’s strategy sucks big time.

“The Trump administration planned to get the vaccines developed and then send them to locations chosen by states. States wrote their own plans, and they were responsible for setting up places to get vaccines into Americans’ arms.

The Trump administration’s approach was flawed, experts said, because it failed to adequately communicate about the anticipated number of doses and the rollout.

The Biden administration plans more federal involvement in getting vaccines into arms, including setting up 100 FEMA sites nationwide.”

www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/02/17/canada-freedom-convoy-ottawa-protest/

Ottawa police presence grows as interim chief vows ‘imminent’ action to ‘take back’ city from ‘Freedom Convoy’ protesters

Officers will enforce a plan to remove anyone who refuses to leave, Bell said. “You will be hearing and seeing these actions in the coming days.”
Police on Wednesday handed demonstrators fliers in English and French telling them to leave or face arrest. They warned that participants who are convicted of crimes could be barred from entering the United States. They handed out leaflets to protesters again Thursday morning.

“Today’s the day we are all under the impression we are going to get arrested,” said 23-year-old Justin Aiello. “We are okay with that, as it’s for a good cause. … We are going to have a good time in prison.”

“Some protesters came to Ottawa to express their frustration and fatigue with public health measures. That’s their right,” he said. “But the illegal blockades and occupations are not. They have to stop.”
Officials say the Emergencies Act gives police the authority to declare areas including Parliament and critical infrastructure off-limits for protests that “breach the peace.”
Banks have started to freeze accounts linked to protesters as part of the Emergencies Act, after the Royal Canadian Mounted Police provided them with a list of names.