Ontario Withdraws More Corona Measures and Cancels Vaccination Pass

The Canadian province of Ontario wants to cancel the vaccination pass as of March 1 as part of the phasing out of the corona measures. In addition, from Thursday the maximum numbers of people in, for example, restaurants or cafes will be increased and expanded at events outside.

 

According to Prime Minister Doug Ford, the fight against the coronavirus is going well in the province. That is why, according to him, the basic measures can now be removed faster than had been anticipated. Ontario is home to nearly 40 percent of Canadians. There have been blockades from opponents of corona measures for some time.

In several provinces, the authorities have already announced that they will be phasing out the corona measures. They emphasized that this is separate from the massive protests against corona measures. Meanwhile, they have said the measures have proved ineffective against the apparently less dangerous omikron variant of the coronavirus. The Canadians have to learn to live with that, is the message.

Since mid-January, there have been protests across the country led by truck drivers. They gathered in front of the parliament building at the end of January. However, there are still blockades from protesters in the country, especially blockades of crucial border crossings with the US.

Therefore, Canadian federal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau wants to give his government and the police more power to break the protests in the provinces. He wants to do that with a special emergency law that has never been used against protesters. The emergency law, also known as the “War Measures Act,” was promulgated only once during peacetime amid a crisis surrounding separatist terrorists in Québec in the late 1970s. Justin’s father, Pierre Trudeau, was Prime Minister at the time.