Label any protest you don't like an "illegal protest". Then as long as there's less than one such protest every 30 days, it's not "permanent"... Yet it is.
Honking a horn carries very little penalty but is massively annoying if done in front of the PM's house. Parking your truck infront of a border crossing is similarly not very penalized, yet killing 25% of the trade between two countries is very damaging to the gov't.
The real reason we never saw these measures before is because of how brutally effective they are while being entirely non-violent.
As of this post, 36,116 and not millions of people died of COVID in Canada, and the removal of vaccine mandates / mask mandates are inline with the recommendations of the Chief Public Health Officer. The people were pretty much protesting to get Trudeau to follow the medical recommendations of the Health Officer.
In most countries where masks and vaccine mandates have been eliminated, infections have gone down. Denmark's peak was the last day of restrictions.
While that is a lot, it's far fewer from the number of people who have died from COVID.
It seems like you're over-dosing on misinformation.