"why is the country SO divided?"

It isn't. The problem with with most of the media is their insistence on treating both sides of any conflict as holding equally valid opinions and acting as though each side balances out the other, that both sides have roughly equal support among the public and every story is about a two-horse race. 

Which, speaking as someone who has worked in the mainstream - even conservative - media for about 30 years now, is horseshit. Hear me fellow scribes, you do not owe the Nazis equal time -- that just gives them validation that they do not deserve. The idiotic freedumb clownvoys that have plagued Canada in the last month are a classic example. These dumbasses do not represent a significant portion of the public. Something like 90 per cent of Canadians are vaccinated, that argument was settled months ago. These knuckleheads, like the Trump coup idiots, have just been lied to and catered to  and told what wonderful handsome stud heroes they are by people intent on picking their pockets for so long that they have come to believe their shit doesn't stink and that they all have twelve-inch dicks and a constitutional right to be listened to and attention must be paid!

Back on planet Earth, however, every single poll comes back saying these dipshits are a tiny minority - at best ten per cent of the population. The problem is that they all vote for the same political party and are what you call motivated voters - they will show up to vote come hell or high water. So the conservative politicians feel a need to cater to them and encourage them to think they are not a tiny minority but brave rebels and patriots - see early description of people getting their pockets picked.

To sum up, I guess my point is when you hear a politician talk about how "terribly divided" the country is over these truck-nut protests, keep one hand on your wallet and don't believe a word of what they say. The country is not divided. We are very much united in believing in vaccines and public health measure and the tiny minority of malcontents, bigots, fabulists and anti-government freaks that get on TV because they are screaming from the rooftops that Justin Trudeau is either Fidel Castro's son or a transdimensional space lizard who want to turn your pets gay, can go pound sand.