The key lesson of Ottawa’s siege might be that it’s difficult to get populist, anti-democratic anger to leave once you’ve invited it in and allowed it to get comfortable.
It may have been inevitable (or at least foreseeable) that some kind of tumult would result from the imposition of vaccine mandates. In 1885, compulsory vaccination in Montreal to deal with a smallpox outbreak caused a riot. In 1919, loud public opposition scuttled an attempt to implement compulsory vaccination against smallpox in Toronto.
A century later, the vast majority of Canadians have trusted public health officials enough to get vaccinated against COVID-19. There is
