“China eats weird animals disease”

One of Britain’s top scientists is to be interviewed under oath by the US Congress over concerns that he was at the centre of a cover-up about the origins of Covid, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Sir Jeremy Farrar was among a group of scientists who initially claimed the coronavirus could have been man-made in a lab in the Chinese city Wuhan, where the pandemic began.

But after discussions with US officials and other leading scientists in February 2020, he changed his position, dismissing suggestions that the virus was made in a lab as a conspiracy theory.

Canadians have done as they were told during the pandemic. They lined up for shots until the country had one of the developed world’s best vaccination rates, they endured some of North America’s longest lockdowns, and they’ve complied with a wide assortment of curfews and quarantines.

But even in a society known for its civility and deference to authority, many are reaching their limit.

More than 1,200 people have now signed a petition calling for the resignation of Police Chief Peter Sloly and Mayor Jim Watson over handling of the trucker convoy.

“Ottawa is under siege and occupied by an unlawful group under the banner Freedom Convoy 2022. Despite the illegality, danger, and impact of having our nation’s capital taken from us, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson and Ottawa Chief of Police Peter Sloly refuse to take action and have refused an offer of help from the RCMP.

“Citizens of our beautiful capital have become hostage to an extremist movement. Join in making it clear this is unacceptable and disgusting.”

Sometimes it’s what you don’t do, rather than what you are authorized to do, that keeps a potential nightmare from ever waking up.

This was on display Saturday. And Toronto set the standard of how to keep something with the potential to blow up from doing just that. While tempers continue to flare with civic leaders in Ottawa over the truckers protest, Toronto’s mayor and police chief set a different tone here.

Think they sent enough cops? #TaxDollarsHardAtWork#TruckersConvoy2022 #TorontoConvoy #ThankATrucker pic.twitter.com/pvkCunbqkF

— JV ⚡️ (@JV_crypto) February 6, 2022

Trucker convoy: Ottawa ‘under siege’ amid ‘nation-wide insurrection,’ officials say

The nation’s capital is a city “under siege” by the trucker convoy that has dug in over the past nine days amid what the chair of the police services board called a “nation-wide insurrection.”

“We are on day eight of this occupation. Our city is under siege. This group is emboldened by the lack of enforcement by every level of government,” said Diane Deans, chair of the board.

“This group is a threat to our democracy. What we’re seeing is bigger than just a City of Ottawa problem. This is a nation-wide insurrection. This is madness. We need a concrete plan to put an end to this.”

The new measures announced by the chief of Ottawa police against truck convoy protesters are those used by oppressive regimes around the world, says a lawyer representing organizers of the Freedom Convoy protesting COVID-19 mandates in Ottawa.

“He effectively announced that he is going to be taking away Canadians’ charter right of peaceful assembly and freedom of expression,” Keith Wilson, a lawyer with the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), said in a video on Feb. 4.

Free speech has been one of the chief casualties of the pandemic.

So we’re finally seeing a genuine, bottom-up, working-class revolution. In Canada, and increasingly in the United States, truckers and others are refusing to follow government orders, telling the powerful that, in a popular lefty formulation, if there’s no justice, there’s no peace.

Naturally, the left hates it.

For more than a century, lefties have talked about such a revolt. But if you really paid attention, the actual role of the working class in their working-class revolution was not to call the shots — it was to do what it was told by the “intellectual vanguard” of the left.