Latest news with #FreedomConvoy
National Post
5 hours ago
- Politics
- National Post
Chris Selley: Angst over flying the Canadian flag was pure media invention
One of the stupidest arguments to emerge during Canada's pandemic experience was the idea that by flying the Canadian flag, the Freedom Convoy types had ruined the Canadian flag for everyone else. And that Canadians, as a result, were hesitant to display the flag lest they be thought of as anti-vaxxers, COVID-deniers or outright Nazis. Article content It's not true, and the idea was completely absurd. If you're driving through, say, Vermont and see the stars and stripes flying on someone's front lawn, do you assume they supported the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol? When you see the St. George's Cross waved at an English soccer game, do you assume the flag-waver supports the English Defence League? When you see the French tricolour do you instantly think of Marine Le Pen and the far-right Front National? Article content Article content You don't, because that would be stupid. People advancing causes that they feel to be of national importance tend to deploy national flags. Rarely are those causes universally supported. Few causes are. Article content Article content At the time I ascribed the narrative mostly to COVID-induced hysteria. The Globe and Mail's and Toronto Star's comment pages always reflect a somewhat, shall we say, limited perspective on Canadian society. But the pandemic trapped opinion writers behind their keyboards and in their online echo chambers more than ever before. It was febrile. People across the political spectrum went just a bit nuts, and I don't exclude myself. But with the pandemic behind us, with the keyboard class mostly resigned-to-happy with how it went (better than America is all that really counts, right?) I was a bit surprised to see this narrative exhumed, dressed up in a Hawaiian shirt and dragged around town for Canada Day in triumph. The narrative: We have our flag back! Article content Article content 'The dissidents stole our flag,' Gary Mason wrote in the Globe. 'They flew our flag from their trucks. They hung it over their encampments. By the end, many Canadians associated the red-and-white Maple Leaf with the so-called Freedom Convoy. Article content Article content 'For a long time after, whenever you saw a truck going down the street bearing a Canadian flag, you likely thought: Freedom Convoy lover,' wrote Mason. 'Many of us were afraid to hang a flag outside our home on Canada Day for fear of being associated with the bunch who had occupied our capital and tried to bully our government.' Article content The flag 'is no longer languishing on the extreme right to the exclusion of everyone else,' Martin Regg Cohn wrote in the Star. 'The Maple Leaf has become a totem in a titanic struggle against tariffs and hegemony, aggression and subjugation. Canadians are rallying to the flag, which has become emblematic not of extremism but an existential struggle against external threats.' Article content 'Canadians reclaim Maple Leaf flag amid Trump threats,' was CTV's Canada Day headline. 'Flying the flag is no longer raising the same sorts of suspicions that the person displaying it harbours sympathies for right-wing causes,' University of Guelph history professor Matthew Hayday told the network.
CBC
4 days ago
- Politics
- CBC
What does Canada mean to you in 2025? These people shared their perspective
From poutine, maple syrup and beaver tails to mountains, prairies and the sea, people around the world have some fairly defined ideas of what "Canada" is — if they think about it at all. But within Canada, pride and identity have shifted over time, whether it was after the discovery of unmarked graves at residential schools or through the displays of the Canadian flag and talk over rights during the Freedom Convoy. This year saw a resurgence in Canadian pride as people got their " elbows up," bought Canadian products and pushed back against U.S. President Donald Trump's musings about Canada becoming a 51st State and tariff threats. Then there was a federal election — a fast and furious campaign that ended with some frustrated western Canadians talking about separation. It's led many to feel like there's a national existential crisis amid the ongoing effort to understand the values that define our nation. CBC First Person is exploring what makes residents and citizens from all backgrounds feel rooted in this country as we approach Canada Day. Read some of the perspectives shared from people all across the country. I'm a proud Québécois. Moving to Alberta helped me feel even more Canadian Thomas Aguinaga's parents didn't speak a word of each other's languages when they met, but their children grew up bilingual and both Canadian and Québécois. Aguinaga writes about how he learned to appreciate both elements of the Canadian identity and the idea of compromise after his time living in Alberta. Read more. I didn't know what it meant to be Canadian until I saw a photograph that opened my eyes When the photo of a drowned Syrian boy began circulating, Cape Breton's Clare Currie felt deeply moved to help. She saw the people of her beautiful but underresourced island mobilize in a big way to welcome newcomers to Canada. Read more.
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Jacinda Ardern's unexamined life
For 24 days in February 2022 protesters occupied the grounds of New Zealand's parliament. They were mimicking the trucker 'Freedom Convoy' that had ground Canada's capital city to a standstill earlier that year in defiance over Covid-19 vaccine mandates. In Wellington, protesters were outraged about New Zealand's own vaccine mandate, but there was also palpable rage over 'masks, the media, the UN, communism and the government', recalls Jacinda Ardern, who was prime minister at the time. 'They blocked off streets and erected makeshift toilets. A few ripped masks off the faces of commuters.' The protesters also had signs. 'I saw the American flags, the Trump flags, the swastikas,' writes Ardern, in her new memoir A Different Kind of Power. 'I saw my own image, with a Hitler moustache, a monocle and 'Dictator of the Year' emblazoned above my face. I saw the gallows, complete with a noose, which people said had been erected for me.' Such a scene would have been unimaginable five years earlier, when Ardern, as a newly installed leader of her Labour Party, rode a wave of 'Jacindamania' to become, at 37, the youngest female head of government in the world. She then bested her previous electoral performance in October 2020, months into the pandemic, by securing New Zealand's first majority government in 24 years. Yet the adulation and support that had once buoyed her premiership eventually curdled, so much so that by the time she resigned as prime minister, in January 2023, her net approval rating in the country had plummeted to just 15. As Ardern presents it, she was always a reluctant politician. Growing up in small towns on New Zealand's North Island, she was often surrounded by grinding poverty, particularly in Murupara, a small, remote forestry town the family moved to when Ardern's father, a police officer, was offered a job there. In an interview as a new MP, a reporter asked her when she first became political and, thinking of the town's economic struggles, Ardern responded, 'I became political because I lived in Murupara.' Despite this, Ardern describes her own childhood as happy. The Arderns were Mormons and, growing up, Jacinda was devoted to the religion. Going door-knocking for the church in her youth laid the foundation for political canvassing: 'I was already starting to prepare for a role I could never imagine holding.' It wasn't until she was in her twenties and had already started working as an adviser in the Labour Party that she began to interrogate her faith. She believed politics was the surest way to bring about positive change to people's lives, but she was increasingly confronted with tenets of her faith that ran counter to her liberal progressive 'values' – particularly regarding same-sex unions. At first, she would simply 'compartmentalise', mentally separating the clashing realities of her religion and her political beliefs, but as she got older and her career in politics progressed, she found that often difficult to do. She eventually left the church, a decision her family accepted gracefully. Ardern's rise in front-line politics might have been embarked upon reluctantly, but it was rapid. She had moved to London and was working as an adviser in Tony Blair's Cabinet Office when a former colleague called to convince her to return to New Zealand to run as an MP herself. She entered parliament the following year, but she was doubtful about her abilities. 'If there was any place that being a sensitive overthinker was going to trouble me, it would be here,' she thought at the time. Yet Ardern became determined to turn her weakness into a political strength – to make her lack of cynicism and her empathy the defining features of her politics. Her uncertainty over becoming prime minister in 2017 – after a surprise surge in support allowed her Labour Party to form a coalition government with the populist New Zealand First party and the Greens – had less to do with any nagging feelings of imposter syndrome and more to do with the fact that she was a few weeks pregnant. She was nervous about how the public would respond to a prime minister taking maternity leave, and her initial scans were clandestine affairs, carefully orchestrated and kept secret from even her security detail. A physician friend of a friend, who would meet with her in his clinic after hours, used the code name Kilgore Trout, a character from Kurt Vonnegut's novels, on all of her medical paperwork. When she finally did announce her pregnancy to the public, she was overwhelmed by support from New Zealanders and the world. While Ardern writes movingly about the private struggles of becoming a mother for the first time while also leading a government, publicly the perception was again one of strength: when Ardern brought three-month-old Neve to a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York, she was celebrated as a trailblazer. Apart from the Covid pandemic, the defining event of Ardern's premiership was the Christchurch mosque shooting. On a Friday afternoon in March 2019, a 28-year-old man, recently arrived from Australia, walked into the Al Noor Mosque armed with several semi-automatic weapons and opened fire, livestreaming the attack on Facebook. He then made his way to Linwood Islamic Centre and once again started shooting. He was stopped by police while on his way to a third mosque. In total, 51 were killed, dozens more were injured. Ardern's response to the attack – which included swiftly banning semi-automatic guns and a public address in which she said of the victims: 'They are us. The person who has perpetuated this violence against us is not' – burnished her reputation at home and abroad as a compassionate leader. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe By the time the pandemic arrived on New Zealand's shores, the country still trusted Ardern. Her coalition government embraced a zero-Covid strategy, attempting to eradicate the virus completely – this meant an initial strict lockdown and the complete closure of the borders. That strategy worked at first: New Zealand had the lowest death toll out of all OECD countries, while schools remained largely open and hospitals weren't overwhelmed. Public support for Ardern was so strong that Labour won a landslide election in October 2020, allowing her to form a majority government. Yet by the time Covid's more slippery variants appeared, the strategy's effectiveness started to falter – longer and longer lockdowns were required, including one in Auckland that lasted 107 days. By the time the vaccine was rolled out in New Zealand, much of the solidarity in the country had evaporated. Hostility – toward restrictions, toward vaccines, and most of all, toward Ardern herself – took hold. Threats of violence and death against the prime minister and her family surged each year as the pandemic dragged on. Yet few of these details make it into Ardern's account, who writes vaguely about unspecified regrets. 'I still think about this time so often,' she writes of the protest outside parliament, 'not just the occupation, but the two years that preceded it, those long days and impossible choices.' While it's certainly likely that she has spent a long time dwelling on those regrets and impossible choices – overthinker that she is – she doesn't detail what mistakes she thinks she made or share what lessons she took away from this period. Bafflingly, Ardern devotes more pages to her relationship with Prince William over the years than she gives to an entire year of her premiership during the pandemic; 2021, with its variants and lockdowns and increasing radicalisation, is covered in just a page and a half. Why? Is she once again compartmentalising? This was clearly a monumental time for her; she resigned as prime minister in January 2023, before the end of her term. It's clear that Ardern is intent on forging on with her brand of compassionate leadership – it's the throughline of her book, the subject of a documentary about her time in office, Prime Minister, that was also released this year, as well as the focus of her fellowship at Harvard (she and her family have lived in Boston since mid 2023). But she doesn't reckon with the fact that, while more empathetic leadership is a worthy goal, far more people would prefer effective leadership. Ardern made a global name for herself by embodying the former and there's clearly potential for her to capitalise on that momentum outside New Zealand. When it comes to the latter, however, it's hard to argue that Ardern had much lasting success. Her government failed to make a dent in child poverty, despite it being an animating issue of her politics; many of the reforms she implemented while in office to tackle New Zealand's housing crisis were reversed by the next government. This also goes unmentioned in A Different Kind of Power. The most generous interpretation is that she – like many incumbents around the world who were punished at the ballot box once the pandemic waned – is still reckoning with the many 'hard, imperfect' decisions that may have triggered the backlash against her. A much less generous interpretation is that she simply doesn't see the value in publicly grappling with failure. Perhaps she is now satisfied with being a symbol of a type of politics, rather than continuing on with the hard graft of actual politics. A Different Kind of Power Jacinda Ardern Macmillan, 352pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops Related [See also:
Hamilton Spectator
21-06-2025
- Politics
- Hamilton Spectator
‘Rage' survey shows the politician Canadians are most angry about
Justin Trudeau leaving the stage has eased the rage. And credit Donald Trump with giving Canadian politicians a bump. That's the suggestion from Pollara Strategic Insights' latest 'Rage Index' poll . Since the firm's last such survey in November , Canadians' anger toward the federal government has plunged 18 percentage points and there was a 10 percentage point drop in frustration with various provincial governments. 'One of the main theories on this is Trudeau himself was obviously a focal point of a lot of anger in Canada. We haven't done the poll since he left as prime minister,' said Dan Arnold, Pollara's chief strategy officer. Trudeau governed from 2015 until being succeeded in March by Prime Minister Mark Carney, who then kept the Liberals in power by securing a minority government in the April federal election. 'You don't see as many 'F—- Carney' flags as you did 'F—- Trudeau' flags,' said Arnold, referring to the profane banners that became commonplace around the time of the so-called ' Freedom Convoy ' protest in Ottawa three years ago. Overall, 37 per cent were angry with the federal government — down from 55 per cent in November — while 28 per cent were happy and 35 per cent were neutral. Similarly, 42 per cent were angry with their provincial government — compared with 52 per cent in the last poll — with 27 per cent happy and 31 per cent neutral. But 78 per cent of respondents were angry with the new U.S. president, who has launched a trade war against Canada, while eight per cent were happy and 14 per cent had no opinion. 'The other thing that's going on is that Donald Trump is a big source of anger. Trump has become a bit of a lightning rod of anger,' said Arnold. 'A lot of the frustrations that people would normally put on their Canadian political leaders have been redirected toward Trump,' he said. Using online panels, Pollara surveyed 3,400 people across the country May 16-20. While opt-in polls cannot be assigned a margin of error, for comparison purposes, a random sample of this size would have one of plus or minus 1.7 percentage points, 19 times out of 20. The firm found 49 per cent were unhappy with 'the types of changes happening in Canada,' an improvement on the 59 per cent finding last fall. Only 16 per cent were happy on that metric with 35 per cent neutral. But 40 per cent of respondents were happy with the results of the April 28 election while 34 per cent were unhappy and 26 per cent were neutral. About one-third — 32 per cent — were happy with Carney's new cabinet sworn in last month while 26 per cent were unhappy and 42 per cent had no opinion. However, 56 per cent are angry about the Canadian economy, a one percentage point uptick from November's poll, with only 14 per cent happy and 30 per cent were neutral. In that same vein, 38 per cent were unhappy with their own personal financial situation, up from 36 per cent in the last survey while 32 per cent were happy and 30 per cent were neutral. 'That's the one area where we don't see people feeling better,' noted Arnold. 'Actually, the anger level has gone up a little bit on things like the Canadian economy and personal finances — and that is absolutely because of the uncertainty that's going on right now,' the pollster said. 'We've seen unemployment figures starting to tick up and there's ... a lot of angst out there about what tariffs are going to mean and what this is going to have as an impact on Canada,' he said. 'So that is where we do see anger increasing. Trump himself is obviously catching a lot of the negative sentiment that otherwise would be going towards Canadian leaders. People are upset with the economy, but they're blaming it on Trump, instead of blaming it on Mark Carney or the provincial premiers right now.'
Toronto Sun
30-05-2025
- Politics
- Toronto Sun
Letters to the Editor, May 30, 2025
Friday letters Photo by Illustration / Toronto Sun PROTESTING PROTESTERS I can't even fathom why Toronto has allowed pro-Hamas rallies. And where are the politicians? If the LGBTQ or Black or Muslim communities were treated in this unfair and egregious way, the groups would never be allowed to continue their harassment that borders on terrorism. The Freedom Convoy organizers get arrested and vilified, but these people are allowed to spew their venomous hate with impunity. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account Farouk Mohammed Ajax (Canadian politicians and law enforcement are allowing it to happen) SHAMEFUL These protesters are aware that they can protest anywhere and anytime and with no repercussions because of our weak mayor and police chief, who, for some reason, are afraid to do anything about them. There is no excuse that they can come up with to justify letting these protesters tie up our streets. The public has a right to move around our city without being harassed. We need action now, not more excuses. Sylvia Saunders (These rallies have been a blight on the Canadian landscape for too long) TIME BOMB While everyone has their own opinions on the war in Gaza, the fact is that the Toronto Police who vowed to protect the marchers on the annual UJA walk were derelict in their duty. A man in a kaffiyeh had a grenade strapped to his pants. I'm sure it was fake. But what if it wasn't? And why wasn't he arrested for promoting hate? Why do the TPS repeatedly say one thing and do another? This was a dereliction of duty! Ilanna Sharon Mandel Toronto (We are left once again to wonder what the police were thinking) ANOTHER CAT-ASTROPHE The Panthers beat our Leafs in seven games, including one in overtime. They easily eliminated Tampa and they had no problem with Carolina. Despite how bad we played in Game 7, if the Panthers go on to win the Stanley Cup Final in less than seven games, does that make the Leafs the second-best team in the NHL? Don't give up hope, there is always next year. Mike Urquhart St. Davids, Ont. (And the year after that and the year after that and …) Crime Sunshine Girls Sunshine Girls Toronto Maple Leafs Toronto Raptors
