Right in the centre - Examining facts

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Published on Friday, February 25, 2022

By Ken Waddell

Neepawa Banner & Press

It is frustrating when people don’t get the facts straight. I am the first to admit that I  have made errors, lots of them. Throughout the past few weeks, a number of errors have been committed in both speech and print.

Our prime minister, Justin Trudeau, has labelled the unvaccinated as misogynists and racists, making them enemies of the state. Very few truckers are unvaccinated misogynists and racists. With the increased use of  the term misogynist, many people have had to look up the meaning. A misogynist is a person who dislikes, despises, or is strongly prejudiced against women. The label “enemies of the state” is a pretty long stretch too. Isn’t it ironic that Trudeau would call truckers “misogynists and racists” and accuse them of misusing funds when, not that long ago, he turfed Judy Wilson Raybold from his cabinet? She wouldn’t help him cover up alleged corruption and misuse of funds. In case anyone missed the irony, Wilson is a woman and a member of a racial minority group.

In a more mundane sense, it is annoying to hear other words tossed about carelessly. Repeatedly, the Ottawa trucker convoy/protest was covered mostly by the $1.3 billion subsidized CBC. They got  a lot of things wrong. And you know all those jerry cans of “gas” people were hauling around as reported endlessly on CBC.  For the most part, it wasn’t gas, big rig trucks burn diesel, not gas.

Then on the weekend, a breathless reporter was trying to describe the famous Chateau Laurier Hotel in an attempt to explain where the action of the day was going on. He said, “In the  background, you can see the spears on the corners of the building.” They are not spears, those high pointy  things on the corners of the hotel are “spires”, not spears. Then he said. “You can see the bronze roofs.” Wrong again, the Chateau Laurier roof, and many other buildings in Ottawa, are sheeted with copper. Copper roofs attain a green patina with age.  It is not bronze.

Those latter examples could be called petty mistakes, but if a reporter can’t be trusted with the trivial, how can they trusted with the larger issues?

Trudeau is not a Nazi, as some protesters claimed.  That’s a label that is thrown around all too loosely and tends to sell short the sufferings of those who actually suffered under the real Nazis.

While Trudeau is not a Nazi, it may be fair to call him a communist sympathizer. He has, in his own words, admired the Chinese communist dictatorship. His father, mother and he have all admired Fidel Castro, one of the most avowed communists of the 20th century. Most communist sympathizers realize they can’t make Canada a communist country, but they sure can try to turn it into a socialist state.

Trudeau is a globalist and socialist and every step in his agenda is to convert Canada to socialism. That way, elites can keep power. We should all know by now that elites, especially government elites, are much smarter than the rest of us. We know that because they remind us of that every day. They believe we need to eliminate any private health care, discourage incentive, control the resources, the land and the people and set the table for a socialist feast.

Capitalism is not without its faults. The level of CEO compensation at companies, banks and crown corporations is obscene. The people at the head of such organizations slant the table so they can stay in their positions by way of monopoly. It’s almost impossible to start a bank, so guess what, the existing banks have a monopoly. It’s really tough to start any company because of red tape, that long list of often unnecessary rules that claim to protect the consumer, but in fact, only harm the people in the long run.

After all the trucks go home and  the protests fade away or shift to anther issue, one thing remains.

This protest, in spite of all the words, be they misused or not, is about freedom and rights.

The central issue in question in this recent situation is mandatory vaccination. While the evidence seems to show that rates of sickness, hospitalization and deaths due to C-19 are reduced with vaccinations, the vaccine is not completely effective. Given those severe possibilities, it is not right to insist on compulsory vaccinations. If a government, a company or an individual insists on people under their control be vaccinated, it is also on the heads of those insisting when bad things happen. That in itself should be enough to make us all realize that no matter how enticing “mandatory” seems to be, it is a dangerous path to travel to try and enforce.

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this column are the writer’s personal views and are not to be taken as being the view of the Banner & Press staff.