90% of truckers are vaccinated, which isn't very far off from Canadians in general. The numbers aren't hard to find. Neither are the confederate flags, swastikas, and pro-Trump signs. It feels disingenuous to dismiss these criticisms as the usual slander of political opponents when they haven't been hiding their beliefs.
Yeah but even if 'only' 10% of truckers would be put out of work due to a vaccine mandate, does it matter that it's a minority? Health care workers seems a bit easier to understand in terms of needing to be vaccinated: you are around sickness all the time anyhow, and that risk needs to be minimized since people are coming to you literally in order to get well, rather than to get sick. But for truckers it seems almost arbitrary. And I have a hard time believing that all these rules are necessary for safety; governments with authoritarian tendencies are always looking for ways to flex their muscles. It seems inevitable: hand someone a gun, and a recurring thought becomes "when should I use this?"
As it happens I know a few anti-vaxx people, they're mostly nice, mild mannered people of a conservative disposition. They have their own reasons for not wanting it (which I think is an error on their part) but it's a far cry from what the Canadian media keeps putting out, that anti-vaxxers are racists and bad people. That being said, if there was a very important reason to be double-vaxxed as of summer 2021, I think the weight of that has, if anything, gone down. Not that vaccination is useless, but the differences between the vaxxed and unvaxxed is much lower than it was, especially (as ScottF has pointed out) the unvaxxed have actually had covid once or twice, which the legal systems in North America are not tracking at all. You'd think if you're going to actually fire someone over it you might want to verify whether in fact they have the equivalent immunity that you do. But this notion that if you walk into an establishment where everyone is vaccinated you're "safe" or "protected" is a big lie being told to the public. You can get covid in such a place just as easily as anywhere else.
At this point in time it seems bizarrely illogical to start excluding people. If anything I would have thought 6 months ago would have been a more sensible time to do so, if one was going to do it at all.
About the trucker movement itself, putting aside whether you think they are really truckers, or really Canadians, or really homo sapiens for that matter, compare this to the BLM list of demands and I think it should become apparent that negotiation with this position is much, much easier than it would have been with BLM, and also more reasonable. BLM wanted, among other things, defunding the police, slavery reparations, and a host of other race-related points that no one was in a position to just grant even if they wanted to. Some city mayor could not offer slavery reparations no matter how sympathetic they were to the cause, and defunding the police is not even a policy suggestion, it's just a mantra which as we've seen seems mostly devoid of content other than to be an anti-police message. But for the truckers basically they want this rule repealed, which would be extremely easy to do: you could just repeal the rule. And unlike BLM, they are directly appealing to the body that actually made the rule: both appropriate and feasible. You might not want the government to agree to their demands, but their demands are highly specific and uncomplicated: don't make us do this. They are actually requesting the government do nothing, which is really easy to do. BLM was asking for all kinds of active behaviors on the part of government, police, the populace, you name it. They wanted a systemic revolution, and for other people to change everyone for them. Maybe what they wanted was good, maybe not, but they were asking for massive change. The truckers are asking for literally one rule to be voided, one which IMO probably should be. So why, again, would it be problematic to negotiate in good faith with them? Oh yeah, because it would be admitting that maybe their policy is controversial, which authoritarians would never, ever do.
