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Kelowna-Lake Country MP says bad apples shouldn't taint message of convoy protests

MP slams protest coverage

Kelowna - Lake Country Conservative MP Tracy Gray says the bad behaviour of a few should not outweigh the overall message of the protests that happened this weekend in Ottawa.

Gray says she walked the streets of the nation's capital over the weekend speaking with protest participants, who were from “all walks of life.”

“Over half of the people I spoke with openly told me they were double vaccinated, and for many of them this was their first ever protest, but they felt it was time Canada had a path out of this pandemic,” she said in a Facebook post.

She said she heard frustrations over decisions made by the government that are impacting livelihoods and pocketbooks and people who were "simply tired and after doing everything the government asked of them, and seeing no change."

She said the national media has done a poor job properly reporting on the protests. "What I heard and what I saw was quite unlike the descriptions being painted," she said.

“Of course, in any protest of tens of thousands of people, you’re going to get a few people who do and say unacceptable things — and those individuals need to be held accountable,” Gray said.

She said she “strongly denounces” the actions of people who “defaced a Terry Fox statue, danced on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, carried symbols of hate and harassed workers at a soup kitchen.”

“But we shouldn’t let the few outweigh the message that thousands of Canadians travelled to deliver to the government,” she continued, while calling on the federal government to “stop their divisiveness, and finally get Canada on the path of economic recovery and living with COVID-19, just as other countries are.”

The Canada Unity group that is the main organizer of the convoy is demanding an end to all COVID-19 restrictions, including vaccine mandates and public health orders, most of which are imposed by provincial governments.

The federal government, however, has announced it will mandate that workers in all federally regulated sectors — air, rail, road, and marine transportation, pipelines, banks, postal and courier services — will have to be vaccinated. That policy would impact 955,000 Canadians.



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