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Notes -
Criminal code, environmental regulations, and border control (import/export) are all federal. Those are really powerful policy levers, especially because the former and latter effectively dictate how provinces run their economies; inter-provincial trade is not a driver of provincial economies to the same magnitude Canada-US trade is.
Anyway, since the current balance of political power in Canada tends to favor the economically-unproductive resource-poor parts of the country (as in, every province east of Ontario, though Quebec is a special case), the economically-productive ones tend to get real pissed off when they start going to culture war.
Like imposing that border restriction was- if the US border control had the same functional effect (and I agree that it did- most truckers were vaccinated anyway), then imposing a symmetric one was unequivocally "because fuck you". And in this light, it's also noteworthy that the places the protestors overwhelmingly came from have had effectively zero political representation in the Federal government since 2019 (the Liberal party has approximately zero seats west of Toronto, and because there are no votes but party line votes in Canada when it comes to anything of real consequence, this functionally equates to "entirely shut out of government").
As such, I believe that the fixation on the Federal government for political ills (and the protests worked against Provincial governments anyway- AB and SK lifted their restrictions more or less as the protest began) was and continues to be the correct choice.
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