Chris Blattman: evaluation

Transcript context

…You’re Canadian. Who predicted the Ottawa truckers convoy? What is it they saw that other people did not? Well, I don’t know if anyone predicted it. I would say most Canadians — because I don’t think it’s nearly as polarized a place, although I haven’t lived there in something like 20, almost 25 years — recognize that there’s a strong conservative and anti-establishment sentiment in the country, slightly fewer than in the United States but not dramatically different. Then, my distant view is that, because there are very few ICU beds, and because of the particular nature of the system — and for some reason they didn’t invest in them over the last two years — the government has to be super cautious and really had to crack down harder than in the United States, where we have many, many more ICU beds. They may have just overstepped what people were willing to tolerate. I don’t think people were surprised at the movement. I think they might have been surprised that it emerged in this raucous, amateurish, violent way, and some of the weirdness at the fringes was extra weird for Canada. Why didn’t the Ottawa police just arrest the truckers? And as a follow-up to that, how much is the decision to arrest like the decision to fight?…

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