The difference between huge trucker protests and huge population protests is that truckers can bring daily business to a halt with road blockades, and no product gets delivered, including food. Truckers have lots of leverage here if they stick with the protest and don’t cave. Basically they have Trudeau and gov’t entities by the b*lls.
Political context ... we just had an election in October. There was one new party (PPC) running on a clear anti-mandate platform and it got about 5 per cent of the votes, elected no MPs. The so-called Conservative Party lost a small amount of its previous number of seats but have taken a very ambiguous position, sometimes pro mandate, sometimes against, just hoping the government will fall and there will be another election (the Liberals have a minority and need the support of the socialist NDP to remain in government).
The government is likely to figure that the protest movement, while surprisingly large, is basically the entire committed support base of the PPC so they have no voice in parliament, if they just do nothing and stay out of sight, maybe it will be so cold that the people will give up and go home (there are other protests underway in other places mostly near border crossings or provincial capitals).
Another course the government might take is to say, well we sympathize but this is mostly a provincial matter, take your convoys to the provincial capitals, and see if you can convince them to end the mandates. In fact, whatever is going on behind the scenes, in theory the ten provinces could just end the mandates in days or weeks and the federal government would go along with it. Our rules and regulations are imposed provincially, other than the border crossing situation which is a federal responsibility but partly depends also on U.S. government policy.
If our federal government said okay we will go along and have an open border, truckers would still have to follow U.S. regulations when on the U.S. side of the border.
I don’t know how this is going to end up. It does seem to me that a lot of small business people and libertarians are active in this protest and not all of them were supporters of the PPC in the election, but not enough of them are Conservatives to affect that party’s ambiguous stand. A few of their MPs have spoken in support, the party leadership just say they support the general principle. That becomes a motherhood question because just about everyone across the spectrum is tired of the situation and hope it goes away this year, but a majority probably wait for “experts” to declare the pandemic over, and of course experts are mostly leftists so ...
the question returns to home base, what is this really all about? Globalist control, disguised angst about climate emergency so-called, a Chinese power play of some kind? I think it is mostly about making money for big corporations and billionaires who are then happy to reward the political class with generous donations and perks. The media in Canada are totally bought off by the government through an elaborate system of tax credits, grants and easy payback loans. They are nothing more than a Canadian version of Pravda back in the day. If you think the U.S. media are bad, they are nothing compared to this bunch. There isn’t one real conservative who ever appears on live television, just a couple of pretend ones who are there to lose arguments in an amiable fashion.