What Makes the Freedom Convoy Different
Why is the Freedom Convoy Different from Other Protests?
If the independent truckers and farmers who have parked in the streets of Ottawa, and effectively blockaded several border crossings into Canada have done nothing else, they have certainly succeeded in uniting politicians, public officials, the press, the Twitterati and the enlightened elite of Canada in an ecstasy of contempt and foaming disdain that is almost without precedent in Canada’s history.
Journalists and politicians seem incapable of talking about the protesters
without dissolving into a litany of adjectives, pejorative and unflattering
comparison with
Nazis
and the Ku Klux Klan, which is objectively unfair – given the fact that
none of the protesters have anything whatever to say about race, and that
over 60 percent of truck drivers in Canada are Punjabi.
Nevertheless, the People who Matter in Canada really don’t like the Freedom
Convoy. When faced with a mass protest of Black Lives Matter advocates in
June of 2020, over an event that happened in another country, Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau expressed his support and literally knelt before
the mob. This time, it’s different: he
described
the Freedom Convoy protestors as a “Small fringe minority of people with
unacceptable views who don’t represent Canadians”, and promised a severe
response by all levels of law enforcement. “There is no place in our
country for threats, violence or hatred”, Trudeau
continued
.
The press responded in spirit, attempting to link the protesters to white
nationalist groups, and comparing them to “Jan. 6 Insurrectionists” and
Trump supporters in the
United States
. This in turn caused the government to erect hoardings and barriers around
the parliament buildings – something they did not do during the Black Lives
Matter protests, even while cities burned in the United States.
The Premiere of Ontario, Doug Ford declared a
state of emergency
in Ontario, threatening protesters with fines of $100,000 and a year in
jail. The Ontario government has also interfered in fund-raising by the
group, seizing or freezing millions of dollars in donations repeatedly.
The Ontario Provincial Police have started combing through social media
posts on Facebook and Twitter, and apparently are
visiting people at their homes
if they “like” the organizers’ pages or show support for the event.
Offenders are presented with a flyer entitled “Your right to peaceful
protest”, along with a sizable dose of intimidation.
This hasn’t happened before.
During other recent protests, downtown businesses in Ottawa remained open.
Starbucks even printed Black Lives Matter t-shirts for their employees.
Canada’s big unions published statements of
support
for BLM, and politicians fell all over themselves expressing
support
for the protesters.
But this protest is different. Starbucks is shuttered, like most downtown
businesses, (though they haven’t bothered to put plywood over their windows
this time). Instead of supporting the organizers, Canada’s big public
service unions issued a joint condemnation of the
protest
, stating “We have seen right-wing extremists spreading messages filled
with racism and intolerance, flying the Nazi and Confederate flags,
alongside other symbols of violence and hate. We have seen organizers not
only demand the end of all public health rules, but also call for the
overthrow of our democratically elected government.”
All of those statements are part of a narrative that emerged among
journalists and the Twitterati almost immediately after the protest
started, but it’s a narrative that doesn’t reflect reality. A masked
protester showed up among the crowd with a Confederate flag, and was
promptly confronted and shamed by the protesters, who didn’t want him
there. Many of the protester’s vehicles sported “F*ck Trudeau” flags, but
contempt for politicians is hardly new in any democratic country, and is
generally not considered seditious, nor as a call to overthrow the
government.
The fact is, incidents like these are commonplace at any protest. Protests
are interesting and they happen outdoors, so by their very nature attract a
certain detritus of homeless people, trouble makers and drug users; the
bored and indolent, and the just plain weird people who inhabit the
forgotten corners of any city. In the past, journalists have never tried to
pretend that these people are representative of the protest or its
organizers, which is why this seems so unfair.
Journalists
repeatedly
talk
about how “intimidating” the protesters are, but that characterisation
doesn’t stand up very well to direct observation. There are no masked youth
with umbrellas and gas masks. There isn’t even much in the way of shouting
or slogans. If anything, the most striking characteristic of this protest
is how – ordinary the protesters are. There is little to distinguish the
protesters from tourists except the fact of their being there.
So why is the Freedom Convoy being handled so differently from
demonstrations by other groups in the past?
As the nation’s capital, Ottawa sees a more or less constant parade of
protests in front of the parliament buildings. An unending litany of
demands marches across Peace Park: “Save the Whales”, “End the Tar Sands
NOW”, “Stop Big Oil”, “Free Palestine”, “Save the Unborn”, “My Body, My
Choice”. Unless there is an underlying threat of violence, as there
certainly was during the Black Lives Matter protests, which took place
against a background of riots all across the United States, nobody cares –
certainly not the People who Matter.
The Freedom Convoy protesters have not been violent. They haven’t
threatened violence. They have blockaded border crossings, and that has a
significance all its own, but it’s the protest in Ottawa that has excited
the most attention, and the most contempt, and I find that curious.
The protesters in Ottawa haven’t done much except honk their horns and take
up space. So why does this protest, above all others, excite this weird
cocktail of existential panic and visceral disgust among the politicians,
journalists, pundits and Blue Checkmarks of the world?
This Time it’s Personal
This protest is functionally distinct from most of the protests seen in
Ottawa. Most protests tend not to be about things the government actually
does, or even can do. They’re not to blame for the problem, and there’s no
political cost to appearing sympathetic: Free Palestine? Sure, why not?
We’ll be sure to take that up with the Israeli Prime Minister the next time
he asks us for advice. The oil sands are bad? We agree. Those big oil
companies sure are terrible. Residential schools were bad? Absolutely.
Those 19th century bastards sure had the wrong idea about
educating indigenous people.
This protest is aimed squarely at ending a specific policy enacted by this government. The protesters are angry with specific
individuals inside the parliament buildings they’re parked in front of.
They want the government to end what has been an ongoing project of
claiming new powers and exerting new controls over the population.
They want the government to stop doing something the government wants to
do. That’s a no-no.
Universal vaccination is not just a policy of our current government – it’s the policy of government. For the past two years, responding to
the COVID pandemic has been the reason citied to justify every action the
government takes.
The government of Canada appears to have every intention of continuing
their program of vaccine mandates, passports, and booster shots for the
foreseeable future. They have committed to purchasing
more doses
of COVID vaccines than any other country in the world, and have secured,
depending on the source,
between 9 and 11 per citizen. For the most part, we’ve only consumed the
first two doses. That’s a big hill to climb down from.
In fact, a sweeping and illiberal response has been the defining feature of
this pandemic, and has resulted in more hardship than the illness itself,
(which was bad enough, in all conscience). For the first time in the
history of mankind, governments sought to stop the spread of disease by
quarantining the healthy. This started with a two-week voluntary lockdown
to “Flatten the Curve”, and evolved into a series of increasingly arbitrary
lockdowns, soft-lockdowns, closures of public spaces, curfews, limits on
where and when people could shop, and restrictions on travel.
The more ambitious among the global elite saw this pandemic as their
opportunity for a “great reset” and as a chance to transform society in a
new, globalist utopian image. Canada’s own Prime Minister talked about
“Building back better”, and called the pandemic an “
opportunity for a reset
”. Journalists and pundits were quick to assure the Canadian public that
the Prime Minister didn’t mean to appear to mean what they though he meant,
but the actions of his government since then would seem to belie that, as
Canada has embarked on a project of global welfare, inflationary spending,
dramatically increased immigration, and a disturbing trend toward increased
restrictions on civil rights, freedom, and mobility – all in the name of
public health.
Public health officials, who two years ago couldn’t have convinced 6 people
to show up for a Zoom call became overnight celebrities who were now
featured on almost daily TV broadcasts and flanked by their own personal
sign-language interpreters as they made frequent, and often conflicting
declarations of new health mandates.
In the meantime, Canada’s police forces did irredeemable damage to their
social contract with the public – transitioning smoothly from law
enforcement to the enforcement of compliance with proclamations, mandates,
and “emergency health orders”.
None of this was secured through legislation or tested in parliamentary
debate. Officials, great and small and at all levels of government simply
started issuing proclamations, and the police demonstrated that some of
them at least were happy to
SWAT uppity pastors
,
handcuff senior citizens
,
knock down 12-year-old children for playing in the park
, or
Taser teenage boys for playing hockey
– all in the name of “public health”.
Throughout all of this, the citizens of Canada were assured that this would
all end and that life would “get back to normal” once vaccines were widely
available and sufficient people were vaccinated to ensure “herd immunity”.
But that didn’t happen. The 70 percent of citizens required for herd
immunity became 80 percent, then 90, and then “herd immunity” – or any kind
of immunity failed to be mentioned at all. When it became clear that merely
being vaccinated didn’t prevent you from getting sick, citizens were told
that they made you less likely to get sick. Then they were told that the
vaccine wouldn’t make you less likely to get sick, but you would be less
likely to get dangerously sick.
When vaccinated people still ended up in the hospital, the Prime Minister
declared that this was a “Pandemic of the Unvaccinated”, and that the
fearfulness and selfishness of these people was to blame for the misfortune
of the vaccinated.
It’s at this point that the government started to meet real opposition to
their project of universal vaccination and vaccine passports. By now,
there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that these COVID vaccines are neither
perfectly safe, nor particularly effective. Even people who have been
vaccinated have started to wonder why it’s so important to force people to
take them.
As critics of this protest point out, vaccines are still not mandatory in
Canada. You can choose not to take them. You simply can’t cross the border,
or travel on planes or trains, or go to most public venues, or eat at
restaurants if you don’t. In many cases, those who refuse to take the
vaccine soon find themselves unemployed as well. I’m one of them, and there
are many people in the same situation.
The freedom Convoy were incited to protest because of the federal
government’s mandate requiring truck drivers to show a vaccine passport in
order to cross the Canada – US border. Since most of Canada’s trade is with
the United States, most of our trucking goes across that border. If the
mandate isn’t lifted, they’re out of work.
If they had focused only on that particular rule, the government might have
been willing to deal with them – at least superficially. But they got
greedy. They want the government to end all vaccine and mask mandates, and
to end its programme of vaccine passports. They want freedom.
The problem is that not just Prime Minister Trudeau, but public officials
and politicians at all levels have fully committed to this project. They
have invested all of their political capital into their management of the
pandemic. If they abandon the principal of mandated health, then they must
inevitably abandon the entire project of reshaping society and “building
back better”.
What has completely mystified me is the fact the first instinct of
virtually all opposition politicians has been to criminalize these
demonstrators and demand that their protest be snuffed out, instead of
recognizing the unprecedented opportunity to capitalize on it, shake hands,
kiss babies, and effectively steal a march on the next election. This shows
that either they are in ideological lockstep with the government, or
they’re just really bad at being politicians.
Canadian politicians and public health officials at all levels of
government have presided over two of the most miserable years in Canada’s
history since the Great Depression. COVID-19 may have been a dangerous
disease, but their response to it has resulted in economic chaos and
misery. Instead of focusing on treating the sick, all of their public
health policy has centered on controlling the healthy. Politically, they’ve
painted themselves into a corner, and they now have no easy way to retreat
without looking like failures.
For politicians and public officials, that makes this protest an
existential threat. If the truckers and farmers in Ottawa win on any front,
the politicians lose. Generally, politicians don’t care all that much about
protests, but this time, it’s personal.
If the truckers win, the politicians will have to fight for their political
lives. Their smarter opponents might be emboldened to ask if their
leadership has actually done anything to make people happy or healthy.
If the truckers win, public health officials won’t get to be on TV anymore,
and they might even lose their personal sign language interpreters.
If the truckers win, the police will be faced with confronting, and trying
to repair the damage they’ve done to their relationship with the community.
If the truckers win, the People who Matter will lose. This can’t be allowed
to happen.
Starbelly Sneetches
The fact that most politicians and public officials are unhappy with this
protest is easy enough to understand. What’s a little harder to understand
is the degree of contempt and invective directed against them by people who
have much less to lose. Typically, the protest is depicted in opinion
pieces with accompanying editorial cartoons showing the protestors waving
Nazi and Confederate flags standing next to trucks labelled “disinformation
and extremism”.
Globe and Mail columnist Andrew Coyne was pretty okay with Black Lives
Matter during their protest,
tweeting
“If Black lives truly matter in Canada, an apology for slavery is only a
first step”. (There has never been slavery in Canada.) In contrast, the
Freedom Convoy had him
clutching his pearls
in a recent broadcast, denouncing the protesters as “anti-social yobs with
delusions of grandeur.”
There’s a lot of this kind of talk lately. Politicians find the Freedom
Convoy protestors a threat, while pundits and journalists view them as
repugnant.
There has been an accelerating trend to a kind of low tribalism in the
growing cultural divide over the past few years. It’s partly a class thing.
People who talk a lot about freedom tend to be distressingly blue collar in
a meshback cap and dogs-in-the-pickup kind of way. But this tribalism has
more to do with the unfortunate tendency to equate politics with morality.
There’s increasingly little room for people to disagree on one issue while
accommodating their opponents on other issues. Politics have become dogma.
The progressive left are especially vulnerable to this. People who disagree
with them are not merely wrong: they’re evil. They’re moral failures who
can be labelled and dismissed. People who disagree with the idea of
transition therapy for kids are transphobic. People who complain about the
high taxes on fuel do so because they don’t care about the environment.
Those who demand freedom of speech do so only because they want to spread
hate. Those who fear government overreach are “insurrectionists”.
To them, anyone who doesn’t share their world view in full is part of an
amorphous, almost wholly imaginary “other” who in the
words
of our Prime Minister “Don’t believe in science and are very often
misogynistic and racist.”
This “othering” of the political opposition is a very disturbing trend, and
one that will likely continue, because there’s a certain guilty pleasure in
feeling good about yourself while identifying a group of people that you
can hate with the approval of your conscience.
Journalists and pundits like Mr. Coyne have been indulging more than a
little in the Pharisee’s prayer lately (“I thank thee, Lord that I am not
as other men”). To them, the Freedom Convoy are not just wrong, they’re
morally corrupt, and stupid as well. Like Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches, the
Twitterati have bellies with stars, while the truckers and farmers have no
stars on thars.
To the People that Matter, the Freedom Convoy are simply the wrong tribe.
They clearly don’t support the great project of “building back better”, and
worse, they’re the wrong class. These are unrepentantly working class
people who at least superficially look like the sort of people who voted
for Donald Trump in the United States.
All of this could be forgiven, or at least dismissed if not for one
problem: they are being heard. These are not the sort of people who are
supposed to attract attention or win hearts and minds. These are the people
who in the natural order of things bring the coffee and sandwiches to the
town hall while the People who Matter give speeches – and then stack up the
chairs afterward.
Yet these people and their supporters have repeatedly thwarted the
government at all levels. They have captured the attention of the world.
They have raised millions of dollars – only to have it taken from them, and
then done it again. Having had their donations seized not once, but twice,
they are raising millions of dollars for a third time. You can’t do this
without a substantial degree of grass-roots support.
Most big protests and demonstrations take place during the summer, because
people don’t want to show up when it’s cold outside. It’s the middle of
February, and the streets are thronging with supporters every day.
This drives the People who Matter crazy, because they’re being
outmaneuvered by a bunch of nobodies with “unacceptable views”. But they
don’t understand what they’re up against. These are not indolent students
and professional indigents murdering time by protesting for a few days over
the summer holiday. These are farmers and small business owners who were
under pressure even before the protest began.
Independent truckers were already under threat from relentless vertical
integration by the big box retailers who increasingly operate their own
fleets; by the exploitation of foreign workers to undercut operator rates;
and by the remorseless increase of fuel prices and carbon taxes.
The drivers at this protest understand that their survival was in doubt to
begin with, and that they certainly won’t survive the punitive measures
promised by the Ontario government.
They are joined by restauranteurs and other small business owners who have
been squeezed to the brink of ruin by an unending sequence of arbitrary and
punitive lockdowns and restrictions for the past two years; and by farmers
who are being throttled by punitive carbon taxes.
These are highly organized entrepreneurs who have been trained to adapt by
surviving two years of exceptional adversity. These are also people with
very little left to lose, and everything to gain from standing firm in
their protest.
These aren’t important people, but from the degree of support they have
inspired, it’s clear that to a lot of equally ordinary Canadians, they are
people who matter very much indeed.