David Menzies examines Vancouver’s February 5th Freedom Convoy protests, where counter-protesters allegedly used violence—like drum assaults and blocking traffic with children—while media outlets like CBC falsely linked convoy supporters to white supremacy without evidence. He contrasts this with La Crete, Alberta (35% vaccination), which avoided lockdowns due to community testing and faith-based adherence, proving mandates aren’t necessary for safety. Meanwhile, Ottawa businesses, including Tim Hortons, closed voluntarily despite 100,000 peaceful protesters, citing unfounded fears over financial losses, though open restaurants saw record sales. Menzies argues media bias and government-aligned narratives stifle dissent, while La Crete’s success exposes the irrationality of fear-driven closures as a pandemic strategy. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome to Rebel Roundup, ladies and gentlemen, and the rest of you, in which we look back at some of the very best commentaries of the week about your favorite Rebels.
I'm your host, David Menzies.
Well, there were dueling demonstrations in Vancouver last Saturday.
In one corner, there were the members of the Freedom Convoy and their supporters.
In the other corner were the antifa types who actually support lockdowns.
Try to guess which group was civil and which group was profane.
Drea Humphrey has the scoop.
You Guys Are Making This Not Peaceful00:15:17
Now, the pandemic is over in Little La Crete, situated in northwest Alberta.
And a major reason why it's over is that the people of La Crete ignored the advice of health bureaucrats.
Say what?
Sheila Gunreed will have all the nitty-gritty details.
And letters, we get your letters, we get them every minute of every day.
And you had plenty to say about the fact that 90% of downtown Ottawa restaurants were closed last weekend out of fear that the Freedom Convoy demonstrators made for a health and safety concern.
Well, guess what?
Those restaurants that did remain open racked up record sales without suffering any incidents whatsoever.
So much for the fake news narrative that demonstrators are to blame for certain downtown Ottawa businesses taking a financial hit.
It's actually a self-inflicted wound.
Those are your rebels.
Now let's round them up.
Racists.
My supreme rebels, dude.
Sir, were you just assaulted by this individual?
What happened?
She banged her drum in my head, calling me white supremacist.
You're assaulting people, kicking vehicles, and they're just trying to go to a parking lot.
Why don't you guys have a significant thing?
You guys are making this not peaceful.
Let this guy go.
Hi, guys.
How are you?
Oh, Kevin.
How are you?
Oh!
Kept on.
Oh, that's not very nice.
F-Races Mad they are they They think they care about hospitals, but this person can't even keep two meters away from me.
Like, under centimeters is hard to understand.
But yeah, so yeah, that's a good thing.
Second of all, look at this double standard.
They are crybabies who are like, oh, honking is like audio terrorism.
But then there were like a few minutes ago, there's more people, and they were provoking, honking, and then they were cheering it.
Convoys for Freedom are taking place across the country, and you're going to get fact-based reports from Rebel News because our boots are on the ground at convoyreports.com.
I'm Drea Humphrey.
I'm covering what went down February 5th in Vancouver's Freedom Convoy, and I'm actually just in front of some counter-protesters who are here to protest the individuals who routinely in Vancouver's freedom movement have always been peaceful.
So you're not going to want to miss this report and you're not going to want to miss any of them at convoyreports.com.
Also, if you're new to Rebel News, you should know we rely on people like you to bring you the other side of the story so you can also support the cost for our journalism across the country, including at Parliament in Ottawa, by donating what you would like there at convoyreports.com.
All right, so it looks like we're at the checkpoint where counter-protesters are here to protest the protesters of the freedom convoy.
If you don't know that the freedom movement in the lower mainland has been going on for nearly two years, it's always been peaceful.
There's signs about white supremacy.
No one seems to want to be talking.
I'll just read what they are gathering here for according to their posts on Reddit.
Goal one is to show the convoy that there are lots of people in the city who will loudly oppose them and their message.
When I tried to ask what they think their message is, I stand with health care workers.
Okay, what about the health care workers who are in the convoy?
Do you stand with them?
I'm not talking to you.
Okay.
That's fine.
You know who's a healthcare worker?
Perb.
Yeah, I'm a health care worker.
Hi, how are you guys?
Good.
So you gotta protect health care.
What's that sign about?
Just protecting health care workers.
Are they at risk right now?
Yes.
From everyone who comes in and demands expectations higher than their vaccine status.
Okay, so keep health care workers safe.
Yes, I know.
By vaccinating.
That's it.
That's all.
What about the health care workers who are not vaccinated or don't want to disclose their personal information?
I'm not interested in saying anymore.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
Hi, guys.
How are you?
Oh, Kevin.
How are you?
Oh!
Oh, that's not very nice.
F-racist.
Yes, thank you.
Do you think everybody who opposes mandates is a white supremacist?
What's the definition of fascism?
Do you think freedom is racist?
You guys are such garbage.
That's not very nice.
I have no idea why you always see horrible, horrible news are we.
Well, how about we talk about that?
Why are my reports horrible?
Your news organization is not even a news organization.
That's not true.
We are a news organization.
You are propaganda.
Nobody respects you.
Tell me something that we've said that's not factual.
Get that thing out of my face.
Well, riddle me this, folks.
How do you know that you are observing a leftist demonstration?
Oh, that's easy peasy.
First, there is the overwhelming amount of profanity.
I guess the strategy here is if you have nothing tangible to say, well, then just drop F-bombs.
And secondly, there is the inability of these dingbats to explain with facts what it is they stand for, which makes them frustrated, which leads to yet more profanity.
So sad, isn't it?
And joining me now for more on this story is our BC correspondent, Drea Humphrey.
How you doing there, Drea?
I'm good.
Now that I'm away from that report, I'm good.
Oh, man, unbelievable.
You know, Drea, Canadians have been told by Justin Trudeau and his heinous henchmen in the mainstream media that the Freedom Convoy truckers and their supporters, well, they're just a bunch of vile haters.
But it seems to me that it's the pro-lockdown antifa types who are the true deplorables here.
What gives?
Well, you're exactly right.
And I think Rebel News has done such a great job of having our boots on the ground so that could be exposed, but it's definitely the opposite.
And when you look at the proportions of size of who's who and where the anger and hate and in some cases violence is coming through, I mean, there is no comparison.
You have this small group of counter-protesters and Tifa-like people who are just ready and very quick to anger and ready to put up some sort of fight that isn't peaceful.
Yeah, it's amazing.
They go by the slogan, love Trump's hate, but if you don't agree with their position, they hate you and might even resort to violence to express themselves.
Absolutely astonishing.
Drea, I want to talk about a couple of the double standards that we see at play, not just with the protests in BC, but right across our great dominion.
First of all, it was only two years ago where we had rail blockades costing the Canadian economy billions and billions of dollars.
It went on for weeks and weeks on end.
I saw no outrage from the government.
The mainstream media, it seemed to me, were cheering on the block haters.
Why is it so much different when you see the trucker convoy blockades?
Well, and in fact, they're not really even blockades.
They're peaceful protests compared to what we saw just two years ago.
Well, you know, that's a good question.
I certainly can't get in the minds of the people pushing the propaganda, but I think it really comes down to what is the approved narrative right now.
Anything the government says, that's basically all you're allowed to verbalize and make public, or you're going to be censored or vilified, labeled in some way or another.
And it doesn't even matter your profession, whether you're a doctor, a scientist, a journalist, just trying to inform the public, that is what you're up against when you say something that counters the government narrative, which is starting to change.
We're seeing some change in that area.
Indeed.
And the other double standard, Drea, I don't know this for a 100% fact, but I would gamble I'm right on this.
I would wager that those vulgar protesters that you encountered that were denouncing the trucker convoy and calling on law enforcement to shut it down and get these people out of town.
I bet you these are the same folks that were protesting to defund the police a couple of summers ago.
And now suddenly, well, I guess the police are useful as being the armed hired muscle to get people with a contrarian opinion out of the city.
What are your thoughts?
Well, you know, that's something I'm looking into.
I'm investigating.
That incident you saw wasn't the only sort of very aggressive.
There were a lot of assaults.
And I'm just kind of taking in information on what happened so far.
The people I did call on social media.
Hey, if you saw any type of violence or whatever, let me know.
So far, it's been all counter protests that kind of have the same vibe as what you see in that report.
So where exactly they're coming from, I think it's a mixture.
If you read the social media or sort of the Reddit thread that kind of brought them there, there was sort of, you know, other people who are kind of like, yay, they fell for the lie that for some reason this convoy is going to be against healthcare workers.
So they came there thinking they were, you know, helping healthcare workers, you know, being a hero.
And I think some of them, if you look in the background, were a little shocked at what was happening.
There was maybe one or two level head people.
I think we interviewed one of those women.
So they're kind of like, what's going on?
But the protester who did, you know, hit the man on the head and stop the traffic and was with two children because that's a good idea to put your children in front of moving vehicles.
You know, there were some patches on that person that I also noticed happened to be in the same patch that's on the meeting.
If you recall, the Ottawa teacher who sort of suggested bringing up arms against the freedom protesters.
One of the people in that Zoom meeting does a thumbs up when that teacher says that, and it's the same patch.
So, you know, who are these people?
What do they stand for?
And it's definitely something that should be looked into.
And, you know, Drea, the other thing, too, is that I spent four days in Ottawa going back to last weekend.
I went to the Ambassador Bridge earlier this week at the Detroit-Windsor border.
And when I wade into the crowd, what becomes evident is that these are real salt of the earth people.
They're law-abiding citizens.
A lot of them are the working class.
They're not the elites.
They're not bureaucrats or government officials, et cetera.
And they're waving.
I've never seen so many Canadian flags in Ottawa, including Dominion Day celebrations.
And yet what we get from the Justin Shudder Liberals and the mainstream media is a demonization of these people, vilification.
I'm trying to understand, and I'm sure that that was happening in Vancouver.
What is the strategy?
What is the end goal to depict these people as something they clearly are not?
Well, again, it's to silent the message.
And when you look at how it's happening again, if we look at the report that we're talking about here, CBC was there.
They were there.
And they went around and they, you know, they interviewed.
And then there was this father who had his child on his shoulders.
And he said, you know, oh, this is not about freedom.
This is about white supremacy.
And you could just see, it was like, okay, got it.
You know, eight days, eight hours a day is done.
They packed up and things started getting crazy.
And they didn't stay around to actually cover the madness that unfolded.
And they left after they got their bit.
So you have, you know, this percentage of people that are seeing it.
And I don't know if it starts to become like, because that's what people see, that's what people start to be comfortable saying.
But if you look at polls and things like that, you can see that the majority of Canadians do agree with the message of the trucker convoy, which is to end COVID-19 mandates.
So it's just this, I think that a lot of it has to do with the propaganda that's going around.
And when people see a politician or even a journalist from the CBC or something say something with a straight face, I think they automatically assume that that must be true.
Like if Trudeau labels people in this way, it has to be truth or based on truth because they wouldn't say that in front of the whole world to see if it wasn't.
So I think people just think because it's such a brazen message, it just has to be reality.
Yeah, let's face facts here, Drea.
The prime minister has lied through his teeth about this.
He's called them a fringe element.
Going back to what you said earlier about the percentage of people that support these trucker protests, it's actually a greater percentage than those who voted for the Trudeau Liberals last September.
So again, you know, if you're getting your facts from the government, if you're getting your facts from the mainstream media, I think you're being duped.
Last question.
What do you see happening in Vancouver in the days and weeks ahead?
These trucker convoy protests are spreading all over the country, Drea.
What do you see happening on the ground in your territory?
Well, absolutely.
There is another convoy being started.
It's actually already in the making.
Another Way Forward00:15:20
Matt and I went out there and looked.
They got the Porta Potty set up and there was just a few people, but their big day is being planned for Saturday to start.
And that's by the 176 trucker crossing, you know, towards the lower mainland.
So it looks like something's going to be happening there.
And a lot of it is actually, you know, not necessarily truckers at this point.
It's just citizens who are ready to go and stay there overnight and convoy and wait it out.
And then I'm also hearing about more people going to Ottawa for British Columbia.
So that's happening too.
I don't know if you're hearing that out where you are as well, but there's a lot of people who are like, okay, well, if the police are going to, you know, go hard on them, then we need to be there to support them and show that.
It's not even just the people who are there.
There's a lot more Canadians rooting for this peaceful protest to have these mandates ended.
Well, Drea, I know you will cover what's to follow.
Stay safe.
Don't let those vulgar people on the left get you down.
They're despicable.
And I think when you start using profanity, you've lost the debate.
You know, when you do an ad hominem attack, you've lost the debate.
So you're winning, they're losing.
And it's so nice to see that caught on camera.
Have a wonderful weekend, my friend.
You too.
Bye, everyone.
And that was Drea Humphrey in Vancouver.
Keep it here, folks.
more of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
It is long overdue.
It's about a little town in northern Alberta that proves there was always another way forward, always another way to deal with COVID-19 that didn't involve closing our businesses and shuttering ourselves away from society in our homes like hermits.
There was always another way to deal with this like a community like Albertans.
Now, the community I'm talking about is La Crete, Alberta, population 3,500, 700 kilometers northwest of the capital city.
A 14-hour round trip to the seat of government in this province.
And I think, I think that's what might have saved them.
That and their ability to stick together no matter what.
I think that comes with being so far away from civilization.
You have to lean on each other.
You have to have a stronger sense of community and a stronger tie to your neighbor when help and resources are not necessarily right around the corner.
La Crete's also the Mennonite capital of the North.
And if I know anything about my Anabaptist friends and neighbors, they love to stick together.
A sense of community is part of their religion.
And because of their strong ties to their faith, they see a moral obligation in opposing government mandates when those dictates run afoul of biblical teaching.
But not everybody in La Crete is a Mennonite.
For example, La Crete is home to a sister church of Edmonton's Lockdown Resisting Grace Life Church.
Grace Bible Fellowship, headed up by the very kind Pastor Mike Hovland, has that same Christian worldview as his brothers and sisters in Christ over at Grace Life Church.
These Christians feel a moral obligation to honor the laws of God over the laws of man when the laws of man conflict with those of God.
For these folks, they say they're commanded to meet in person, unrestricted every week.
They cannot forsake in-person fellowship.
So it should have come as absolutely no surprise from the very beginning that when lockdowns and business closures and church restrictions came to Alberta, little La Crete, well, they just carried on the way they always have.
And now I thought at the time about going up to visit this miraculous little town where life just went on as normal, but I didn't think they needed all the attention.
What they were doing, well, it was truly wonderful, but I didn't want them to become a spectacle wherein suddenly the locker downers called for the hammer of government to smash down on La Crete.
So I let them be and I watched with awe as something fascinating and beautiful played out far away from the prying eyes of the lockdown mainstream media.
La Crete never locked down.
They never forced businesses closed.
They never forced masks.
They never restricted their churches.
They never forced people to separate from friends and family.
They never canceled holidays.
And unlike other communities, the local government and the local Chamber of Commerce was completely on board with the decision of the citizens to live the way they wanted.
Now in the county, Mackenzie County, a stretch of land larger than New Brunswick, where La Crete is located, only 35% of the population is fully vaccinated to COVID-19.
Because to live your life in La Crete, you didn't have to get vaccinated.
So La Crete serves as a snapshot of people who would actually make the choice freely to be vaccinated if they weren't coerced by the government.
This is another reason why La Crete is so important.
It shows where people are really at once you remove the force of the state.
At the beginning of the pandemic, when La Crete didn't lock down, the media was kind of mad.
They treated La Crete like a bunch of religious weirdos, these backwards people at the end of the road.
And I think the media watched with a little bit of hope for, and I told you so, a catastrophic disease event to unfold and La Crete to prove their points about lockdowns and vaccines.
But that never happened.
And then the media, with their bloodlust for a COVID catastrophe, left unsatiated in La Crete, they sort of left the town alone.
Until this past December when CBC tried to stoke division in the community, two months after the province of Alberta brought in a vaccine passport system, they say they never would.
CBC ran a story where they found somebody in town who wears a mask when he feels like it, which is all anybody ever wanted in the first place, the choice.
And CBC did interviews with Mennonite farmers who were skeptical of the government's $100 incentive to get vaccinated.
Now I'm old enough to remember when the media was supposed to be skeptical of the government, except here the media is skeptical of the public's skepticism of the government in this story.
Well, can you believe it, folks?
The pandemic is over in Little La Crete, situated in northwest Alberta.
But it seems so counterintuitive, doesn't it?
After all, this town ignored the edicts of health bureaucrats who insisted on people masking up and all that other stuff.
They also insisted that facilities should never be full capacity and so on and so on.
Indeed, if one were to believe it, the doom and gloom doctors would paint La Crit as a place that is destined to become a super spreader town given its lowest vaccination rate in the entire province.
But nothing could be further from the truth.
And with more on this story is our chief reporter herself, Sheila Gunn Reed.
How are you doing this today, Sheila?
I'm great, David.
Thanks for having me on the show.
It's always a pleasure.
Sheila, I got to tell you, I think that was one of your very best reports ever.
And the story of La Crite should be front page news, but of course, it won't be because it goes completely against the mainstream media narrative.
But here's the thing: when it comes to the science element of the, let's call it the La Crete miracle, what's the deal?
Why did this town do so well by ignoring the advice of the health bureaucrats?
You know, they did so well specifically because they are so far from the city.
So they're so far from the tattletales.
And you couldn't, I don't think, get local cops to enforce the mandates on them because they have to live and work in these communities.
So what saved them was just distance and a sense of community and they're tied to their faith, all those things that sort of make rural Alberta so great.
They just decided from the very beginning: no, we don't live here at the end of the road so that people in Edmonton can tell us how to live our lives.
And so they rejected the fear, they rejected the division, and they just carried on the way they always did.
And as I say in my report, the media was cheering for a catastrophe.
The catastrophe never came.
So then the media stopped paying attention to La Crete because they were counter to the narrative that the locker downers and the mainstream media and the politicians wanted everybody to believe.
And for them, what I think is most important about La Crete is with their 35% vaccination rate, I think that is the most accurate snapshot of how many people in this province would have gotten vaccinated if there weren't government coercion involved.
Because in La Crete, you could just choose to get vaccinated, but you didn't need to get vaccinated to watch your kids play hockey, to go to the gym, to participate in everyday life, to go out for a burger, whatever.
You didn't have to live that way.
So if you took coercion out of the equation, I think La Crite serves as a barometer of how many people would get vaccinated if they had the choice and not force.
You know what?
That's an excellent point, Sheila.
And I'd go even further.
Government coercion is one thing in terms of shutting down restaurants and arenas and movie theaters.
You can survive that.
I'm more concerned about the corporate coercion we've seen in the last several months, i.e., get the jabs or you lose your jobs.
Sheila, people have mortgages to pay.
They got to put groceries on the table.
When you are at risk of enduring what I call an economic death sentence, yeah, I bet you there's a huge percentage of people that took it simply because of that.
Your thoughts.
Again, La Crete got everything right in this respect when everybody else got everything wrong.
We've seen basically across the board chambers of commerce, which are supposed to be representative of the local economy, the small businessman.
We've seen the CFIB, the Canadian Federation of Independent Business, not stand up against any of this stuff.
All they've ever really asked for was a bailout.
They never resisted business closures or vaccine passports, anything like that.
They just thought, well, if the government's going to close us, they should pay us.
That's the opposite of independence.
So they might want to take that out of their name when you're reliant on the government for subsidies so you can keep your doors open.
But in La Crete, it was the Chamber of Commerce that facilitated the testing, that showed the world that there was another way.
Instead of Chamber of Commerce agreeing with the lockdowns, this Chamber of Commerce said, let's, we didn't lock down.
We didn't force any businesses to do anything.
Now let's see if we got it right.
Let's see if the science supports the decisions we made.
They're the ones that did this.
It wasn't just a citizens' initiative.
The Chamber of Commerce organized all of this, which makes them a complete and total anomaly in the entire country.
And their local government, same thing.
The local government said, we're not making anybody in La Crete live by the edicts of Edmonton or Ottawa.
We're the local government.
We'll decide what happens here.
And we are obligated to listen to the people who elected us.
So whereas all these other institutions all across the country failed to represent the people, in La Crete, the institutions we expect to represent people actually did the right thing.
And Sheila, let's talk about another institution, the mainstream media, which I think in this story achieved yet another despicable benchmark in terms of reporting that they weren't depicting this as a good news story.
There were so many tattletale COVID Karens saying, hey, look at this, look at this.
When there was nothing to look at, you know, Sheila, it's amazing.
Back in the day when you saw the credo of so many journalistic outfits, such as the Toronto Star, it was afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted.
It seems to be the opposite these days.
As you said in your piece, the media isn't skeptical of government anymore.
They're skeptical of people who are skeptical of the government.
What is driving this fear agenda?
Well, you know, it's, I just want to attribute it to laziness.
There's a lot of, I think, I call them the laptop class, the avocado and toast class.
A lot of them are journalists.
They kind of like not having to get up and go to work.
Do all your work by Zoom, tune into a press conference, ask a politician a question over Zoom.
You don't actually have to do very much anymore, which is good for us because we actually have journalists out in the field, which means that we have more eyeballs on our work than ever because the mainstream media is falling down on the job.
I think a lot of the mainstream media stoking this fear is because they just don't want to get back out there into the world and work.
I think a lot of it has to do with laziness.
But there was at some point a switch, as you point out, where the media went from holding the government to account on behalf of the people to holding the people to account on behalf of the government.
And that switch, while I think it was voluntary, it's being reinforced by government bailouts and subsidies.
In particular, the CBC.
They know who pays the bills.
Nobody watches them.
Nobody advertises on the CBC.
And I don't know how they're even selling advertising considering how few people actually watch them.
If I were a company looking to get eyeballs on my product, I'm not sure that I would be reaching out to the CBC and saying how much for an ad buy because it's a statistical rounding error of Canadians who actually watch that content.
So CBC, of course, enforces the government fear monger lockdown line because they work for the government at the end of the day and not for the people.
Yeah, I think you're right.
I think it is laziness.
I think it's a philosophy of don't bite the government hand that feeds them, especially in what is a sunset industry in terms of many aspects of the media these days, especially print.
I also think there's an ideological element at play here for sure.
Sheila, you know, we have so many progressive Marxists in the media, and that tells you all that you need to know.
Well, you know, we've got to wrap it here.
I want to urge our viewers, please go and watch Sheila's entire piece.
It is absolutely fantastic.
Glorious Opportunity Remained Open00:06:37
What happened to La Crete?
It should be a template for the world, actually, in terms of getting past this pandemic.
You consider the more than trillion dollars worth of damage that was done to the Canadian economy.
And what we saw in La Crite is the counterpoint where we didn't have to go through that torturous two years of lockdown mandate.
So, Sheila, a fantastic piece.
I know you're one that never puts avocado on your toast, probably back.
So, thank you and have a great weekend, my friend.
Thanks, David.
You too.
Great.
And that was Sheila Gunread, somewhere in the northern hinterland of Alberta.
Keep it here, folks.
More of Rebel Roundup to come right after this.
Well, folks, it looks like at the one week mark of the trucker protests, it could be that yet again more than 100,000 people are going to assemble here.
There are reports of another 200 to 300 more trucks coming in.
This city is jammed like I've never seen it.
And, you know, I couldn't help but notice the missed opportunity.
As my camera memoritu and I walked down towards Parliament Hill, restaurant after restaurant was closed up.
But why?
There is so much business to be had.
Here we are at the Tim Horns.
This place is usually packed during normal times.
It would be a lineup out the door if they decided to open up.
So why aren't they opening up?
Saw one restaurant after another closed.
There might be another 100,000 people on the street.
Here we are outside of Tim Horns.
There's a little pub down there.
They're closed.
Why are they closed when there's so much business to be had?
Well, you know, there's a lot of fear being spread on the news.
There's a lot of information that they decide to share.
And the thing is, they've created so much fear that people think we can't be here.
But if people came and actually saw the love and acceptance, there's no reason that these restaurants should be closed out of fear of what's happening.
Yeah, well, it is true.
It's a great time to be open.
I mean, Ottawa is set up for big events, right?
I mean, Canada Day, all that kind of stuff.
They're used to that, right?
And this is a big event.
Why wouldn't you be open to get the business?
It just, it makes sense.
But I don't know, you know, whatever's influencing them, it's not a good decision.
Absolutely.
Yes, it would be beneficial for everybody for them to be open.
We could warm up and they can have a great business.
So after two years of suffering due to COVID lockdowns, here is a glorious opportunity to make up for some lost revenue.
And instead, restaurants like Tim Hortons and so many others are leaving thousands on the table because they believe the government, they believe the mainstream media that the peaceful people here are thugs prone to violence and vandalism.
What a disgrace.
You know, there are so many angles when it comes to the Ottawa Freedom Convoy protests.
And one of those storylines is the supposed negative financial impact being inflicted on so many downtown Ottawa businesses because of the convoy.
But the question arises, who is really to blame for that fiscal pain?
Well, if you believe the mainstream media narrative, these businesses had to close due to health and safety concerns.
You know, the idea that the Freedom Convoy supporters are violent and prone to assault and vandalism.
That's fake news on steroids, folks.
And yet, about 90% of downtown Ottawa restaurants closed shop last weekend because they believed the hype.
That's too bad because the eateries that remained open had lineups of customers out the door.
And the demonstrators who patronized those eateries were brandishing wallets, not weapons.
Don't expect the likes of the CBC to report on that, however.
In any event, you had plenty to say about this missed opportunity for so many business people who bought into the fear factor, missing out on a jackpot in the process.
Greg M. writes, I'm quite certain that the businesses that chose to close will be receiving government checks for whatever arbitrary amounts the big thinkers on Parliament Hill decide.
And you can bet that they are fully aware of this.
It's going to end up being a paid vacation for the owners, but probably not for the minimum wage employees.
Well, you know, you might be right, Greg.
Hey, just put it on the taxpayer tab.
That seems to be the whiz-bang slogan of the liberals these days.
Besides, the budget will balance itself, right?
Terry W. writes, can't wait to hear the opened restaurants bragging of exceptional weekend business to those that remain closed.
Oh, believe me, Terry, those restaurants that remained open enjoyed record sales last weekend.
It's a simple supply and demand equation when there are some 100,000 people in the downtown core, but nine out of 10 restaurants close their doors for no good reason.
Well, that is a missed opportunity for those scaredy cats due to buying into a completely false fear factor.
How sad.
Martine MJT writes, imagine not opening during a once-in-a-lifetime business opportunity.
Cannot believe these businesses belong to individuals.
You know, you're right, Martine.
It's almost as if most of the downtown Ottawa restaurants are owned and operated by lazy government bureaucrats as opposed to hardworking entrepreneurs.
And Sketty Kosten writes, so why is the mayor squawking about the businesses being hurt by the protests?
Exactly, Skeddy.
Hey, those shuttered businesses are indeed hurting.
But here's the crux of the matter.
The hurting is a direct result of a self-inflicted wound.
Nobody ordered any businesses to close.
And the protesters were on their best behavior.
They just wanted to buy some grub or a hot beverage and get indoors for a bit to warm up.
Opportunity Cost00:00:20
Opportunity abounded and as the saying goes, it's one thing to look a gift horse in the mouth.
It's quite another thing to kick its teeth in.
Well, that wraps up another edition of Rebel Roundup.
Thanks so much for joining us.
See you next week.
And hey, folks, never forget: without risk, there can be no glory.