“China eats weird animals disease”

Ontario needs to “reassess the value” of the COVID-19 vaccine passport system in the coming weeks to decide if it should be ended, the province’s top doctor says.

Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Kieran Moore made the comment on Thursday, saying while the COVID-19 vaccine offers significant protection against severe disease, two doses doesn’t do much to limit the spread of transmission.

“The vaccine isn’t providing significant benefit at two doses against the risk of transmission, as compared to someone unvaccinated,” Moore said. “We have to reassess the value of the passports in the coming weeks and months.”

Mayor John Tory is expressing concerns that a planned trucker protest against vaccine mandates at Queen’s Park this weekend could restrict access to nearby hospitals and “drive customers away” from businesses that only recently reopened.

A flyer circulating on social media suggests that a “Convoy for Freedom” demonstration will take place at Queen’s Park, beginning at 12 p.m. on Saturday.

While details about the demonstration are limited, organizers are encouraging supporters to gather at one of seven meeting points across the GTA before departing for the legislature.

Trudeau’s government has tried everything — except, you know, actually talking to the truckers

Canada’s Liberal government is getting frustrated. They’ve tried everything and still the Freedom Convoy is camped out in front of the Canadian Parliament, honking horns, blasting music, dancing in the streets, playing hockey, handing out free food — and refusing to go home.

Well, they’ve tried almost everything — except, you know, actually talking to the truckers. From the very beginning, Justin Trudeau made it clear that the government was not going to engage with the protesters. As thousands of trucks from all over Canada began converging on Ottawa last week, the thrice-vaccinated Trudeau announced that he had been exposed to Covid and had to isolate, even though he was testing negative. Subsequently, on January 31, he said he had tested positive and would continue isolating. The world collectively rolled its eyes.

It may be the second-largest ever Canadian fundraising effort on the site, but GoFundMe has stopped taking in or paying out Freedom Convoy donations.

Organizers of the campaign that has brought in more than $10 million now have hired a legal team to protect truckers from being frozen out of money raised for them.

The Department of National Defence says dozens of Canadian Armed Forces members who refused to get vaccinated have now been kicked out of the military.

Release proceedings have started for hundreds of others facing the same fate, unless they roll up their sleeves for the COVID-19 shot.

A retired police chief and self-described Reagan Republican with decades of public service, Leonard Moty checked all the boxes to represent his community in one of California’s most conservative counties.

But on Tuesday, voters ousted Moty, handing control of the Shasta county board of supervisors to a group aligned with local militia members. The election followed nearly two years of threats and increasing hostility toward the longtime supervisor and his moderate colleagues in response to pandemic health restrictions.

OTTAWA, Feb 3 (Reuters) – The Canadian government has no plans to send in troops to deal with a vaccine mandate protest by truckers that has brought traffic in central Ottawa to a halt, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said on Thursday.

More than 200 trucks and other vehicles have been blockading downtown roads in the nation’s capital since last Friday in what is an unprecedented protest by Canadian standards.

The city’s police chief, under fire for a passive response by officers, on Wednesday said using the military was an option.

Ottawa’s mayor is calling on several Conservative MPs and a senator from Saskatchewan to apologize for praising the anti-vaccine mandate protest that has brought the capital’s downtown to a standstill for close to a week.

A photo shows MPs Warren Steinley, Kevin Waugh, Andrew Scheer, Fraser Tolmie, Rosemarie Falk and Sen. Denise Batters grinning — some giving the thumbs-up — in front of one of the protest trucks, which have been barricading roads and honking horns in the city almost non-stop since Saturday.

It wasn’t the most confidence-inspiring of news conferences.

On the sixth straight day of the protest that has immobilized the core of the nation’s capital and harassed local residents, Ottawa officials still gave nothing approaching a timeline of when this all might come to an end.

“I can’t give you a definitive, ‘It’s one day, it’s two days. It’s one week, it’s two weeks,'” police Chief Peter Sloly told council members during a public briefing Wednesday afternoon.

No sense of an end date isn’t what anyone wanted to hear. Even more disturbing, the chief floated the unsettling idea that policing alone won’t end this mess.

A cynic might conclude the CBC is floating trial balloons for the powers that be on the best way to implement a Happy Face Laurentian end to the uppity truckers protest.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the federal government is working with the Ottawa police to put an end to the ongoing trucker protest in the nation’s capital as officials brace for a resurgence in demonstrators in the downtown core this coming weekend.

“We will continue to work with law enforcement agencies to ensure that people are protected and to ensure that this protest, which is now becoming illegal, does come to an end,” Trudeau said in French in the House of Commons on Wednesday, when asked what the federal government is doing to remove truckers from downtown Ottawa as the demonstration stretches into its sixth day.

Ottawa police expect ‘Freedom Convoy’ protest to grow this weekend

Ottawa police say they’re anticipating the “Freedom Convoy” protest that has snarled traffic and filled downtown Ottawa with relentless noise to grow again this weekend as more demonstrators return and that policing may not bring the protest to an end.

“The intelligence that we’re seeing currently is that we will continue to see the convoy attempt to hold what they have,” said deputy chief Steve Bell at a technical briefing on Wednesday. “Expect to see increased vehicular traffic Saturday and through weekend, decreasing Monday.”

Alberta RCMP have clarified reports that officers had been assaulted Tuesday at a protesters’ blockade near the Coutts border crossing, saying that while there were dangerous incidents, no assaults on police had been reported.

The information from police seems to contradict a statement Alberta Premier Jason Kenney made Tuesday while updating media on the tense situation in Coutts, where a blockade of vehicles has snarled traffic since Saturday in a protest against vaccine mandates.

HMA

The kids in school who used to call out at the end of the day, “Teacher, teacher, you forgot to assign homework!”, are now in charge in politics and government.

And being good little rule-followers, they are reluctant to ease up and give individuals back the control that so many Canadians willing relinquished early in the pandemic.