Rallies may not have sent the right message

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 04/09/2021 (1587 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

“I am proud my country supports the democratic right to peaceful protest. However, some of today’s protests disrupted safe access to health-care facilities.”

— Vancouver Island Health president and CEO Kathy MacNeil, who also said health-care workers were verbally abused on their way to and from work on Wednesday. There was at least one case of physical assault.

“It’s plain just ignorant behaviour. Stay away from the hospital.”

— Nanaimo Mayor Leonard Krog. RCMP told media that a nurse reported a protester spat at her during a large protest in front of the Nanaimo Regional General Hospital.

“It’s really hard to grasp why any group of people would be protesting outside of hospitals, where we have vulnerable people coming in to seek medical care,”

— Dr. Amit Arya at Toronto’s Kensington Health, who has endured several months of online harassment and hate mail because of his pro-vaccine stance.

“I had a patient who has gone through a lot recently. She had cancer surgery and is undergoing radiation therapy and is not doing well. She finished her hemodialysis treatment and she wasn’t doing well and she had to make her way through that crowd to get home and she was scared.”

— Daniel Schaefer, a registered nurse at Kelowna General Hospital

“I left the hospital and had to walk through this (protest) to get to my car to go home after yet another crazy day at work, only to be yelled at, sworn at, had people in my face belittling me because I was wearing my mask until I got past the throngs of people.”

— Kelowna RN Terry Teite

“It’s a real slap in the face to the people that experienced it, the people that died, got sick. The front-line workers, like myself, we got a bit of PTSD from all this. It was real. It was really, really bad … That feeling of helplessness trying to help these people. And those folks outside the Health Sciences Centre — it’s so disrespectful.”

— A St. Boniface Hospital nurse, who spent time working in the COVID-19 unit 

“The media has twisted what we’re doing and edited what we’re doing. We’re about freedom right across the country. We’re about medical transparency.”

— Canadian Frontline Nurses spokesperson Cindy MacDonald

 

Earlier this week, more than 100 people in Brandon joined a nationwide protest against mandatory vaccinations in workplaces that was organized by a group called Canadian Frontline Nurses.

As the Sun reported, the protesters, some carrying signs reading “We support your right to choose” and “Why stop at vaccine mandates?” and few wearing masks, walked a route outside the Brandon Regional Health Centre and down Victoria Avenue.

The Brandon rally was remarkably respectful and nonviolent — the kind of demonstration that most of our residents have been accustomed to over the years as people exercise their right to peaceful protest in our community.

Unfortunately, the Brandon version seemed unique in that regard. As you can read in the quotes above, there were several other such protests around the country where nurses were verbally abused, patients were prevented or delayed from accessing hospitals, and passersby were intimidated by the actions of those marching, shouting and carrying signs.

Protests are a public expression of dissent and disapproval, a way for people in a free society to make their voices heard about a given idea or government action. Such demonstrations are meant to draw public and media attention in order to influence those decisions and ideas. And depending on the size of those rallies, they can and (sometimes) do have an effect.

They rely on the power of persuasion — there has to be some solid reason for people to consider what they’re saying, to give them the benefit of the doubt. And much can be gleaned from how demonstrators carry themselves as well.

It’s worth reminding readers that Canadian Frontline Nurses is a fringe group operated by four Ontario nurses, two of whom —  neonatal ICU nurse Kristen Nagle from London, Ont., and Sarah Choujounian, a registered practical nurse from Toronto — are under investigation by the College of Nurses of Ontario, according to a CBC report.

These two previously took part in a rally on the steps of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., last January that was organized by a group called Global Frontline Nurses, which has made conspiratorial claims about “COVID fraud” and about how hospitals misrepresent the coronavirus pandemic.

Suffice to say, Canadian Frontline Nurses doesn’t speak for the Manitoba Nurses Union, nor does the group seem to have the best interests of Canadian patients at heart.

If the organizers were the thoughtful, conscientious caregivers they claim to be, they would not have created a national rally outside of Canadian hospitals, where our most vulnerable citizens go for medical aid.

The quotes above have not been twisted by media, but rather stand as the thoughts and feelings of health-care workers and leaders who witnessed these rallies.

It would seem the organizers’ arguments were less than persuasive, even among those they purport to represent.