This was the scene in downtown Vancouver one year ago today.
Some background. In winter last year, the “Freedom Convoy”protesting COVID-19 mandates vectored from west to east across Canada, growing to 70 km in length. Prime Minister Trudeau had disparaged the truckers as representing a “small fringe minority” holding “unacceptable views,” and said protesters demonstrating against him were “anti-vaxxer mobs” launching “racist, misogynistic attacks.” He skipped town with a convenient case of COVID-19 (some say it was actually COWARD-19) just prior to the truckers’ arrival on January 28, and so avoided a ground assault of hot tubs, impromptu hockey games, and bouncy castles on Parliament Hill.
The Canadian press stayed focused on the scene in Ottawa, yet there were massive shows of support for the convoy in cities and towns across Canada. This went largely unacknowledged and unrecorded by the fourth estate.
One such scene of solidarity occurred downtown Vancouver on Feb. 5. I’d never witnessed such a gigantic outpouring of positivity in a demonstration before (the closest thing I can recall is the celebratory street theatre during the opening days of the 1999 WTO protest in Seattle). Thousands of flag-waving men, women and children, white, brown and black, had gathered in a mass expression of patriotic people power, as honking cars and trucks decorated with maple leafs (and signs inviting Trudeau to perform an impossible feat of self-penetration) did a downtown loop.
For Branch Covidians, the maple leaf began to take on worrisome connotations of far-right agitation, because it had been so enthustically embraced by…freedummers. The Canadian flag had actually become a suspect symbol. This was perhaps the strangest cultural inversion ever seen in this country.
With a little help from the Canuck press, of course. Rumours and fabrications circulated that the Freedom Convoy was being financed by shadowy US interests, and that the protesting truckers were were terrorists in all but name. Hilariously, some news outlets even suggested the hidden hand of Putin. All these claims were later exposed as front page fever dreams.
In testimony at the Emergency Act Inquiry nearly a year later, the director of the intelligence service CSIS said he advised the government the convoy presented no security threat and wasn’t supported by foreign state interference. The intelligence chief of Ontario Provincial Police Intelligence told the inquiry he saw no ‘credible’ threat of extremist violence from the truckers.
Trudeau pulled the switch on the Emergency Act anyway, on Feb. 14.
The Canadian government, emboldened with arbitrary banana republic powers, took to freezing trucker bank accounts, and instructed strongarm tactics in the streets of Ottawa. The authoritarian overreach had the world wondering what the hell happened to the liberal democracy of Canada.
There was change in the air. Earlier in February, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland and Ireland had dropped most of their mandates. Was this cross-border volte face a pre-emptive move to deflate a global virus on wheels? The timing is certainly suggestive, with European truckers gearing up to follow the Canadian example.
Post-convoy in Canada, one province after another eased up on mandates. And for his part, Prime Minister Trudeau never revisited the discriminatory, divisive language he’d used to demonize millions of Canadians.
I remember feeling the energy of the people in the streets that day in Vancouver and thinking, ‘my God, they’ve lost control of the narrative.’ They being politicians, health bureaucrats, and their media accomplices in flogging junk science and totalitarian diktats.
Though the overall nightmare of the biosecurity state is still present, with its pandemic treaties, experimental gene therapies, smart city grids and digital currency, there is a lesson here in peaceful people power from last year. The truckers put their shoulders to the wheel of history - and moved it.
One Year Ago Today