Are you thankful that you are a woman and have the right to vote and run for office? Are you thankful that you have the legal ability to get a safe abortion, even if you don’t want to or don’t have easy access? Are you thankful that you or your family members can be openly gay without facing legal persecution? Are you happy that you are able to choose which company you work for or that you have the right to start your own business? There are still inequalities and issues with carrying out these rights sometimes, but the structures are there for you to be able to call them out and advocate for change. You may not personally be affected by these rights, and you may not have experienced life without these helpful structures, but they mean wonders to those who would have a terrible life without them. I know I am happy that I can vote, and protest, and choose to have children or not. 

However, we often take these things for granted. Some of us have not yet experienced the feeling of helplessness that comes with rights being denied, or the feeling of rage that comes with government control of your body, or the fear of going out in public wearing a gay pride pin. How about the feeling of dread when your kids are taken from you to be shipped to a school that may kill them? Or maybe the pain that comes as your child dies during birth because you didn’t have access to healthcare that could have saved them or at least terminated them before this event. We have so many privileges and basic rights, even if they are more sound in principle than in practice, that make it so we usually don’t have to worry about these things happening to us. However, when these things do happen to us, we have the ability and the rights in place to allow us to do what we can to change things for future generations. 

This is happening right now with many issues, but there is significant division over which is more important. I am going to frame it in terms that show the relative significance of each issue when you look at it in a dynamic way. 

In 2020 and the few years before it, there were gatherings of Indigenous people on public roadways to protest the building of pipelines to carry oil through their land. They were met with resistance, and it eventually resulted in the creation of Bill 1 in Alberta. This is the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act, and it can be used to stop blockades, protests, or similar activities that the government says is harming essential infrastructure and causing public safety issues, social, environmental, and economic consequences. This bill made it so the Indigenous could no longer protest on public roadways, and it effectively allowed the government to put their concerns on the back burner. This should not have happened, and these people should have been heard.

In 2018, during the Pride parade in Edmonton, protesters halted the parade in the middle of it to bring light to their issues with uniformed police involvement in the event. The LGBT+ community has a long history of butting heads with police in the US and Canada, mainly because of the countries’ history of homophobia and discriminatory criminalization of deviant acts related to homosexuality. Now, gay marriage is legal in Canada and the US, and anti-discrimination laws are being put forward in most places in these two countries, but there are still some issues that affect the racialized and marginalized members of the queer community. One of these issues is police violence against racialized , particularly black and Indigenous, members of the community. These protesters stopped the parade to have their voices heard after other forms of communication failed, and there was backlash about it. Because of this social and political conflict, the 2019 parade was cancelled. This was another way that the people with larger amounts of power silence the voices of citizens who disagree with the mainstream. 

Fast-forward to 2022, when convoys begin happening country-wide to protest the vaccination mandates that the government has put in place for many workers, mainly sparked by their mistake of being unclear about those mandates affecting truckers. Unvaccinated or partially-vaccinated against COVID-19 truckers will be turned away at the border under the mandates that were not communicated clearly or with ample enough time for people to digest the information and comply. This sparked a reaction from Canada’s very large trucker community, for a lot of reasons. Many of the people involved in the protests are those who have already lost their jobs due to the pandemic or the mandates, those who see the injustices of this issue, and those who want life to go back to normal (which may be almost everyone). The tactics of these protests are simple; by blocking important routes and traversing the country, they can get the attention needed to get a meeting with the prime minister, Justin Trudeau, to lift the mandates and restore personal choice over medical procedures. That is their goal. However, only days after hearing of the convoy’s plans to meet and negotiate their wishes, Trudeau became a close contact to a COVID case and decided to self-isolate (which was not necessary according to Ontario public health measures at the time). Trudeau did not meet with the truckers, has not heard from them what their purposes are, and has instead tried to turn to precious emergency legislation to give him more power over the protesters. He did this after the Ontario Premier invoked provincial measures to give police the power to arrest members of the protest and fine them heavily. 

Now, there is controversy in Alberta about whether the premier, Jason Kenney, will invoke Bill 1 against the protesters near Coutts border crossing. Some Indigenous people have brought up the discriminatory use and creation of this bill, saying it is only used and was made to shut up the people that the government disagrees with (such as environmentalists). This puts the government in a tricky spot; if they do not invoke the Act against the truckers blocking the roads, they confirm that the issue being addressed by Indigenous people is something they don’t agree with and that they were discriminating; if they do invoke the Act, then they confirm that they do not agree with the actions of the truckers, and that the Act was only made to give more power over protesters who block public roads and disagree with them. This Act limits where people can go to protest injustice and may decrease the amount of attention they receive from the media and the government, meaning that they are more easily ignored.

The Pride parade backlash and cancellation, the use of legislation to stop Indigenous protesters, and the attempted use of emergency legislation to stop the truckers from being heard in the House of Commons all have to do with power. Right now, we are facing the height of power struggles. From COVID tensions within countries worldwide to international disputes, the anticipation and uncertainty are at an all-time high. The government and government-influenced organizations in all the above situations have exercised their self-obtained power to ignore the needs and wants of citizens and minority groups. They ignore intersectionality, they twist stories in the media to make these oppositional groups look bad, and they use their own long-held power to push away all challenges to their power. 

Prime Minister Trudeau has said in response to the truckers (before he enacted the emergency legislation) that it would be easier if they just went home. He has also threatened to freeze the bank accounts of those who continue to participate in the protests and blockades. Compounding this with the provincial measures that allow heavy fines of up to $100,000 and a year in prison, the amount of power the government is willing to exercise just to be able to ignore their citizens is kind of disproportionate to the real harm being done. 

Well, the narrative of the government during this whole pandemic has been that if we just do one more thing, if we comply one more time, we will go back to normal and have our rights and freedoms again. Two years into the pandemic, we can tell this has been largely misleading. Quite frankly, if the people participating in the stonewall riots had stopped when they were told, LGBT+ people would not be allowed to hold hands in the street without being arrested. If the black people who used white bathrooms and sat in white spots on buses had stopped so it would be “easier”, black people would still be subject to separation from whites in public and private spheres. If women had stayed at home instead of delivering a coffin to Justin Trudeau’s father’s doorstep, women would still be dying in large numbers from unsafe abortions or unhealthy childbirths. And, if the truckers give up now, this will be an instance in which the government succeeds in controlling citizens’ bodies and power relations. 

And, he shouldn’t need to worry about the truckers. They are just going to be there for two weeks to “flatten the curve” of injustice, and it will go back to normal if Trudeau just complies. (See what I did there?) A large number of people in these protests are not anti-vax, or far-right unreasonable people. The media simply chooses to focus on these people because they will get more views that are sparked out of hatred than out of happiness. The goal of these protests is to restore our right to choose what happens to our bodies.

In conclusion, all these issues are just as important is one another. If we don’t address climate change by becoming more sustainable, we will face significant disaster. If we have police domination, nobody will be safe from their biases and violence. And, if we don’t retain our rights to our bodies, our bodies won’t be ours anymore. If we stop ranking our issues in terms of personal importance, and instead begin to think of solutions that we can coordinate to solve all of them at once, we will actually find ways to achieve justice and equality among people. If we stop struggling to have power over others and switch the narrative, and instead begin working together under a model of equal power, oppression would eliminate itself. If we stop thinking in extremes and come up with solutions to satisfy all needs while maintaining sustainable lifestyles, we can actually be happy.

Credits to random people on the internet for the use of genius sarcasm in the second last paragraph. And, as always, keep thinking outside the box, and keep reading in between!