Well, I suppose it was inevitable. Last Friday I felt a pain in my throat and began isolating immediately. I tested positive for Covid-19 on Monday night.
I’ve spent most of my isolation period in good health, simply trying to figure out how to fill a newspaper without being able to leave the office.
Being triple-vaccinated, my experience can be contrasted with two close friends of mine who also caught the virus at roughly the same time. They are double-vaccinated but not-yet boosted and tell me Omicron put them both in bed for several days. At least we all managed to avoid taking a hospital bed from someone enduring other serious medical problems.
While they didn’t prevent me from contracting coronavirus, the vaccines have definitely done their job in keeping it from getting any worse than a sore throat.
Stuck at home, I’ve largely entertained myself by watching the political pile-up the “Freedom Convoy” has become. After weeks of dressing up Terry Fox, desecrating the tomb of the unknown soldier and parading swastikas and other Nazi paraphernalia throughout Ottawa, the protesters have made it pretty clear they’re quite mad. As for concerns about overbearing government authority, the fact they freely travelled from all corners of the country and spent several maskless weeks playing street-hockey, constructing buildings and blasting horns at all hours of the day without any major consequences shows Covid-19 restrictions aren’t nearly as oppressive as they claim.
Ironically, this nationwide spectacle has shone a bright light on a frequently mentioned form of oppression experienced by many Canadians.
You really can’t find a more obvious example of how much of a double-standard exists in how people are treated in Canada based on their ethnicity than the difference between how police have handled this group of mostly-white people demanding the undemocratic removal of government versus how they’ve treated the Wet’suwet’en on unceded territory, or Indigenous sympathizers who blocked roadways in their support, or countless other examples.
For example, a protester rammed RCMP cruisers in Alberta and somehow wasn’t arrested. Jason Kenney, who specifically passed a law to stop demonstrators from blocking traffic after Indigenous groups tried it and once called Vladmir Putin’s forceful methods “instructive” when dealing with environmentalists, appears to giving in to the convoy-turned-blockade’s demands.
Compared to the ferocity shown towards many Indigenous protests, the extreme caution governments have maintained responding to this protest shows that putting down Indigenous dissent was never a matter of protecting the public — it was simply bullying people who had no one to stand up for them.
If police can show this much restraint now, they could have done so at any major protest in history up to this point.
This trucker tantrum has proven how ingrained systemic racism is in Canada, beyond all doubt.