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Canadian pollster Innovative Research Group conducted an online survey with a random sample of members of its national research panel and additional respondents from Dynata, an online sampling company. The trends reflect that such surveys can be accurate, but the method prevents calculating a margin of error.
Barely a quarter of respondents approve of the way the government led by Justin Trudeau has handled the truck convoy protest against mandates and restrictions due to COVID-19.
A previous Angus Reid Institute poll released on January 31 reflected that 54% of Canadians favor ending the pandemic restrictions. This is an increase of 15 points over a similar poll conducted two weeks earlier in which 40% favored ending the mandates.
The IRG poll found that only 24% of respondents approve of the government’s response to the truckers, 34% disapprove and the remaining 42% neither approve nor disapprove. The demonstration began as a protest against the Canadian government’s mandate that truck drivers crossing the Canada-U.S. border be vaccinated against COVID-19.
The truth is that the roads, the streets and the polls are beginning to show that the majority of Canadians agree with those protesting, while those who support the Prime Minister’s point of view are fast approaching being the true “fringe minority.”
The IRG poll also indicates that 60% of Canadians follow the latest news of the protest. Discriminating between those who have sought to learn about the movement and those who have not paid attention to the news, it concludes that support for the truckers exceeds 50% among the informed and is only 14% among the uninformed.
In summary, only 1 in 4 Canadians support Trudeau’s response to the growing protest against his COVID-19 mandates, more than half of Canadians want an end to the mandates, and the more informed people are about the protests, the more they support an end to the regime of restrictions.
This is to be expected. Fear can lead people to give up their freedom in exchange for illusory security, but the terror of COVID-19 was unsustainable. Despite intense propaganda to maintain it, the mere existence of free speech – even with the censorship efforts of big media, social media companies, governments and transnational agencies – threatened to impose common sense again from the outset.
The U.S., with a federal system in which states came up with different responses and applied different models of pandemic management, has exposed the failure of Draconian mandates and closures in states such as New York and California. It has also shown that a more flexible and free-flowing approach such as Florida’s has not only affected the economy less, but has been more effective on the health front.
Meanwhile, in Stockholm on January 3, Prime Minister Magdalena Andersson declared that “the time has come to open Sweden up again” and that “although the pandemic is not over, it has entered a completely new phase”, so “restrictions are abandoned as of February 9, and at the same time we urge all employers who have staff working at home to plan a gradual return to the workplace.”
So in Sweden, as shortly before in Denmark, the government begins to assume the “unacceptable view” of the “marginal minority” as its own, dealing a mortal blow to the flimsy legitimacy of ineffective mandates.
Guillermo Rodríguez is a professor of Political Economy in the extension area of the Faculty of Economic and Administrative Sciences at Universidad Monteávila, in Caracas. A researcher at the Juan de Mariana Center and author of several books // Guillermo es profesor de Economía Política en el área de extensión de la Facultad de Ciencias Económicas y Administrativas de la Universidad Monteávila, en Caracas, investigador en el Centro Juan de Mariana y autor de varios libros