I genuinely believe that without the 2022 Trucker protests, Canada would have still dragged out ridiculous COVID measures into late 2022, and maybe even 2023.
As a Canadian, living in Quebec, the sheer rhetoric against the unvaccinated, and the "public polling" totally in favor of every rights-restricting measure the governments here enacted, alongside the courts basically rubber stamping it all, was incredibly strong in January 2022.
Quebec literally had a curfew that ended in late January, 2022, and it was replaced with more places requiring vaxpasses (including large stores like WalMart or Costco). They were also wanting an "unvaxxed" tax. On the federal level, the Trudeau government was proposing an interprovincial trucker vax mandate, requiring vaccination for truckers to cross provincial borders (a major cause of the 2022 Trucker protests). The federal government was fully aware only somewhere between 30-50% of truckers were vaccinated before the protests, and were willing to implode the Canadian economy further to force more people to get vaccinated or lose their jobs.
Canada only ended the requirement for vaccination for flights, trains, and ferries in late June 2022.
The problem is how so many people were seemingly okay with this. Even some members of my family sheepishly aren't bothered by being under useless, pointless curfews for almost a year, because "hurr durr we don't go out late much anymore."
