In the latest victory for the Canadian anti-mandate movement, Ontario premier Doug Ford has announced that he is moving to drop the province’s proof-of-vaccination requirements on March 1. “We can’t stay in this position forever,” he said at a press conference today. “We’ve got to learn to live with this and get on with our lives. I bet if I asked every single person in this room, ‘Do you want these damn masks, or do you want them off?’ They want them off. They want to get back to normal. They want to be able to go for dinner with their families.”
Ford, a member of the Conservative Party, joins his fellow premiers in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island in rolling back or abolishing pandemic mandates in recent weeks. The moves come at a time when anti-mandate protests in the country are gaining steam, spurred on by the trucker convoy that has settled in Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Ford’s recent announcement is particularly consequential, given that Ottawa is in his jurisdiction.
On the ground in Ottawa, protesters tell me that their goal is to end all of the country’s pandemic mandates. Particularly for the unvaccinated population, Canada’s vaccine requirements were an onerous burden. “We were literally prisoners in our own country,” Kristy Ford-Gariepy, an unvaccinated Ontarian at the protest, told me. “We can’t go to the cinema. We can’t go to the gym. We can’t even go to Walmart or Costco. We literally can’t do anything.”
But it’s worth noting, too, that the protests are about more than vaccination status — they’re about resisting the government’s ability to mandate something like vaccines as a prerequisite for participation in public life. “Once you lose your rights — your rights to your own body — there’s nothing that can stop them,” said Hugo Baril, an Ontario asbestos worker who was fired from his job for being unvaccinated.