With a whimper, eh
By 
Looks like playtime is over for now:
Police moved in to clear and arrest the remaining protesters near the busiest U.S.-Canadian border crossing on Sunday, ending a demonstration against COVID-19 restrictions that has hurt the economy of both nations even as they held back from a crackdown on a larger protest in the capital, Ottawa.
Local and national police formed a joint command center in Ottawa, where protests have paralyzed downtown, infuriated residents who are fed up with police inaction and turned up pressure on Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
The protests have reverberated across the country and beyond, with similar convoys in France, New Zealand and the Netherlands. The U.S. Department of Homeland Security warned that truck convoys may be in the works in the United States.
Windsor police said about 12 were peacefully arrested and seven vehicles were towed just after dawn near the Ambassador Bridge that links their city — and numerous Canadian automotive plants — with Detroit.
Real civil disobedience means a willingness to face legal consequences. It was always unlikely that very many of the anti-vaxx protestors would be committed enough — the “lockdowns” they’re allegedly protesting don’t exist in North America, and the idea that requirements to take vaccines is some kind of fundamental infringement on human liberty as about as old as Joe Biden’s inauguration — to keep going if actual consequences were on the table.
Although the border closing was disruptive, I think this was handled well — using arrests as a last rather than first resort. Needless to say, protestors that the authorities are less sympathetic with can’t expect to get the same treatment, but it would be better to level up than level down.
As Lindsay says, one key idea the truckers learned from MAGA is a strong conviction that they’re morally entitled to govern even if actual voters don’t agree:
Matt is deflecting from the specific demands of the truckers because their demands are crazy and embarrassing. Their opening position was that the recently reelected government should be overthrown by fiat of the Governor General.— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) February 13, 2022
Taibbi doesn’t care about what the truckers are doing to other working Canadians. Like the vaccinated Punjabi- and Bengali-Canadian truckers stranded on the US side of the border, or the auto workers who got sent home because there were no parts.— Lindsay Beyerstein (@beyerstein) February 13, 2022
They don’t want to be “heard”; they want to run everything even though most people disagree with them.