Tim Blair: Why workers are rising up against Covid restrictions

From Canberra to Canada’s capital city, workers are rising up against Covid-era rules and restrictions – all accompanied by a rousing soundtrack of truck horns, writes Tim Blair.

Dropped in on a restaurant last week to make a booking. A few steps in, I realised with a start that I’d forgotten to wear a mask.

But I needn’t have worried. The owner, chatting with a few diners, wasn’t wearing a mask either.

It was the same deal that night at the pizza joint. Down at the supermarket, shoppers now breeze by entrance QR codes without reaching for their phones.

“Not wearing a mask today, love?” one checkout lady asked a maskless female customer.

“Nah,” came the friendly reply. “Thought I’d be normal.”

A shopper scans a QR code in Sydney's CBD. Picture: Jason McCawley/Getty Images)

Australians have done all the right things during the pandemic. We’ve followed all the rules and guidelines from governments.

That explains our impressively high vaccination rates. But now we are done with all the rules, restrictions, delays and protocols.

We’ve held up our end of the bargain, and all we’re getting for it is more of the same. Which is why thousands of Australians marched through Canberra on Saturday.

“They claim we’re fringe dwellers, but look at all the people here. All they’re wanting is for this nonsense to end,” backbench MP George Christensen said in livestream commentary.

“We want our freedom back, we want these mandates to end, we want medical segregation to end, lockdowns, state border closures.”

George Christensen at the Canberra rally on Saturday.

It takes a lot to rouse Australia’s non-activist community, but two years of nonsense will evidently do it.

Many of those protesting in Canberra are workers, or would be if they had jobs. They’ve paid the cost of lockdowns while fortunate laptop-class folk have coasted.

The same is true internationally, and it’s led to the same reaction. The stereotype of Canadians being compliant and docile is now under review as a week-long trucker protest continues in the capital of Ottawa.

“We’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution,” law professor Glenn Reynolds wrote last week in the New York Post.

“In Canada, and increasingly in the US, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

“Naturally, the left hates it.

“For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the ‘intellectual vanguard’ of the left.”

Illustration: Terry Pontikos

This is true. Canadian PM Justin Trudeau was full of love for truck drivers when they knew their place.

“While many of us are working from home, there are others who aren’t able to do that — like the truck drivers who are working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked,” Trudeau tweeted in 2020.

“So when you can, please thank a trucker for everything they’re doing and help them however you can.”

But Trudeau changed his tune when a 70km convoy of truckers, furious about vaccine mandates and border restrictions, rolled into pretentious, artsy Ottawa, blasting their air horns all the while.

Suddenly, they became the enemy – vile, unspeakable brutes indulging in all manner of atrocities.

“Today in the House, members of parliament unanimously condemned the antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, homophobia, and transphobia that we’ve seen on display in Ottawa over the past number of days,” Trudeau tweeted from his undisclosed hiding place.

“Together, let’s keep working to make Canada more inclusive.”

Sure, pal. Make Canada more inclusive by excluding workers.

Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Picture: Dave Chan / AFP

Still, Canadians are following Trudeau’s earlier advice to help the truckers “however you can”. One group of women, all Polish immigrants, drove for hours through the snow last week to deliver thousands of Polish sausages, loaves of bread and doughnuts.

“We come from communist country and we came here because we didn’t want to have oppression. We wanted to live in a free country,” one of the women, Bernadette, explained.

“For last two years we’re living like prisoners. We are being told to stay at home, we’re told not to go to the restaurant, not to go to the church.”

Bernadette vowed to keep bringing food “until it ends”, which may not be any time soon. Besides friends, these protesters have funding. A GoFundMe account for the truckers raised $14m before the company’s woke overlords closed it down.

Interestingly, GoFundMe still hosts accounts for various Black Lives Matter groups, including some closely associated with murders, sexual assaults and property destruction.

No matter. GoFundMe is now returning trucker donations, and they’re being re-donated through Christian site GiveSendGo. As of yesterday, after being open for just a day or so, some $3m had been pledged to the Freedom Convoy.

There’s another important difference between these protesters and 2020’s Black Lives Matter crews. Instead of burning buildings down, the truck drivers and their supporters are building new ones.

Armed with lumber, tools and expertise, in a single afternoon they knocked together a soup kitchen in Ottawa’s Confederation Park. This was denounced by one caring leftist columnist as an “illegal shelter”.

Constant air horn concertos have led this trucker uprising to be dubbed “the great honkification of Ottawa”. But it’s bigger than the transport industry. During the weekend, farmers began turning up with tractors.

One of them carried this sign: “No truckers, no farmers, no food.”

They control the means of production, and they know it. This working-class revolution rocks.