On Saturday, February 26, 2022, I was one of over 50 residents of our town who gathered together to give support to health-care responders who have worked tirelessly to tend to the sick in our community; to uphold the well-documented and irrefutable scientific truth that vaccines and wearing a mask mitigate the spread of COVID-19, saves lives and relieves suffering; and finally, to tell a different story about how freedom and social responsibility are intimately interwoven in a healthy and just society.
The first reaction by many (myself included) to the honking horns of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ was annoyance at the glib, fact-free conspiracies about the efficacy of vaccinations that have saved millions of lives, anger at the extremist rhetoric calling to overthrow the federal government, and resentment at seeing the Canadian flag used as a symbol of aggression and mindless nationalist sentiment. However, what began to emerge upon deeper reflection as the qathet CARES (Community Assembly for Responsibility) people gathered together was that openness to dialogue, democratic debate, compassion and respect for others (even those we vehemently disagree with) must, in the end, prevail because it is these latter virtues that finally enable us to realize a more peaceful, just and healthy world.
The moment we become more open to others we begin to understand the anger and frustration many people feel not just about vaccines or vaccine mandates, but the growing weariness they are experiencing with what appears to be a neverending pandemic, the frustration with rules and protocols that keep changing—and none of this even touches the rising costs of food, housing, gas and the growing debt and economic precarity that the COVID-19 pandemic has left in its wake.
Many in the ‘Freedom Convoy’ are neither hateful nor violent. Some do hold radical, far-right views, but many more simply want to be a part of a group that shares their doubts about vaccines and vaccine mandates and wishes to express outrage at being pressured by the government to either be vaccinated or pay an economic price. They see themselves as fighting on behalf of freedom and view prime minister Justin Trudeau and his government as despotic and authoritarian. We need not agree with any of these views to understand there is conviction behind them
Here, though, the words of former chief justice Beverley McLachlin bear repeating: “We live in a social matrix, where one person’s exercise of freedom may conflict with another person’s exercise of freedom. Section 1 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states this plainly. The charter gives Canadians a bundle of rights and freedoms. But it prefaces them with this caution – these rights and freedoms, precious as they are, are not absolute. Governments, it proclaims, can limit freedoms, provided the limits are ‘reasonable’ and can be ‘justified in a free and democratic society.’ The bottom line is that you can’t use your freedoms in a way that unreasonably conflicts with or affects the freedoms of other people. The freedoms guaranteed by the charter stop where they harm others. With freedom comes responsibility.”
In the face of a virus that has infected 500 million people and caused the death of over six million, masks, physical distancing and vaccine mandates are not irrational or freedom-destroying responses. What they underscore is the reality that in a pandemic we are all a fact of each other’s reality, and we, therefore, share some responsibility of care towards one another. That, finally, from my perspective, is the important story qathet CARES wants to tell.
Fred Guerin is a member of Climate Action Powell River, a teacher of philosophy at Vancouver Island University, and leads the monthly Philosopher’s Café.
