I’ve been reluctant to write anything until now about the Canadian truckers’ protest because things - initially the trucks themselves - were moving fast. Much of what I write here will likely prove to be dated or irrelevant within just a few days.
Canadians, being Canadian, have dutifully followed mandates for almost two years now. With little known about the threat intially presented by Sars-COV-2, the lockdown response to the first wave seemed entirely necessary and reasonable. But with “two weeks to flatten the curve” extending into an indefinite state of emergency (declared or not), growing numbers are tiring of constant media fear porn, as more of their social life, business, travel and education is gobbled up by surveillance capitalism’s “new normal.”
Virtual living has become more of a norm for vaccinated and unvaccinated alike. Even believers of the narrative feel bludgeoned by Zoom meetings, distance learning, and the raft of real-world idiocies met with publicly, right down to the kabuki theatre of muffled, masked exchanges with baristas behind plexiglass at the local coffee shop.
A January 31 poll by Angus Reid found 54% of Canadians want an end to restrictions and allow people to self-isolate if they’re at risk. This is a 14 percentage point increase from just a few weeks earlier. As for the truckers convoy:
A year into this mess, a promise of freedom was dangled from the vax passports. Yet life of the average person and their family is still complicated and compromised past the point of all reason by COVID mandates.
The pandemic was a giant booster shot to virtuality, with trillions of dollars flowing to the tech sector. And for politicians, it had the ancillary benefit of making them even more unreachable to their constituents. But for those who aren’t part of the .001 percent it’s been psychologically brutalizing, with overdose deaths exceeding COVID deaths eight times over in years of life lost (YLL) in my province alone in 2020. Globally, the lockdown cure of the first waves appears to have been worse than the disease.
Unmasked, face-to-face communication and hugs in public places are more fixtures of sitcoms and movies than daily life. Handshakes have already gone the way of whalebone corsets and horse buggies. Worst of all are the fractures between friends and families over vaccinations and passports, leveraged by the Prime Minister himself.
With strangers and friends implicitly perceived as a potential bioterrorists, and health safety perversely sought in a comforting cocoon of Netflix n’ chill, the lives of many have come to feel less social, less tactile, and less real.
The truckers, most of them twice-vaccinated, saw the writing on the wall with Prime Minister Trudeau’s increasingly volatile rhetoric, targeting the millions of Canadians who insist on bodily autonomy. Even with the variant Omicron selection-pressured into mRNA vaccine dodgeball and reduced lethality, there’s been no such evolution in the fear-based rhetoric from the PM and public health officials. This, more than anything else, has exposed Canadian health policy to COVID as the very definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting different results.
Cratering Support
Support for COVID mandates is cratering across the world. In the past few days, Norway, Finland, Sweden, Switzerland and Ireland announced they are dropping most to all COVID mandates, joining Denmark and South Africa (kinda big news, you’d think you wouldn’t have to hunt for it). Here in Canada, the province of Saskatchewan will soon be elmininating all restrictions, including proof-of-vaccination requirements for public places.
Yet just days ago, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino insisted in Parliament that “vaccines are the gateway to freedom.” This equation of personal liberty with an indefinite schedule of no-exemption experimental injections is precisely what the truckers are rejecting.
Just as the vaccines afford only limited protection from COVID (and more scientific data is coming out weekly that questions their safety as well as their efficacy), the Canadian government offers only limited protection to civil freedoms, which come with a best-before date attached to the next booster rollout.
Ottawa has orders in for 400 million vaccine shots, right through to 2024. With no end in sight to mandates in most provinces, Canadian truckers decided it was time for things to get real. And I haven’t seen anything more real lately than clips of massive rigs vectoring for the seat of power. I believe it’s this sheer physicality that’s captured the minds and hearts of so many citizens labouring through the country’s long, dark lockdown of the soul.
Thousands waved flags and cheered from overpasses and roadsides as the kilometres-long “Freedom Convoy 2022” roared across the Canadian Shield. “This is the first time in two years I’ve felt optimistic, and proud to be a Canadian,” said one woman fighting back tears in a Youtube video on the convoy, echoing the feelings of so many.
Although anti-mandates crowd have had past freedom rallies with surprisingly large turnouts, they were mostly limited to sharing memes and censored/marginalized scientific findings on social media. The truckers have reversed the equation in a real-world display of working class power. They upgraded the digital dissent of ones and zeros into a material display of rigs and heroes. In effect, they galvanized a wider, silent majority of Canadians who now feel emboldened to stand with what the PM called a “small fringe minority” and say, ‘enough.’
There is a long-delayed echo from the past in this. The bourgeois stenographers of the corporate communications class are loathe to position working class men (mostly but not exclusively white) as heroic for any reason. But when shit gets real and things start looking physically dangerous, big men get called upon.
That said, the truckers are hardly without without female leadership, as demonstrated here by Tamara Lich, “the spark who lit this fire” and the leader of the Freedom Convoy 2022 movement.
So here we are now with GoFundMe absconding with nine million of the 10 million plus of Canadian supporters’ money for the truckers. As of Friday, the truckers had organized another financial support avenue through GiveSendGo. GoFundMe’s decision will likely only energize the movement further (convoy supporter Elon Musk could drop $10 million just looking for pocket change). The truckers are more likely to be flush than flushed, and have no intention of leaving Ottawa until Trudeau reverses course on the vaccine mandates. The PM has signalled no intention of dialogue, of course. The immovable objects are up against the irrefutable farce.
Reaping the Whirlwind
The Freedom Convoy trucks parked near Parliament Hill represent a blockade, though more of the narrative than anything else. (The organizers have insisted on nonviolence from the beginning, and say are in contact with police to ensure that safety of truckers, police and other citizens remain a priority - see above.) It’s also a genuine bottom-up uprising, with Canadian farmers joining in to support the truckers.
A spontaneous grassroots uprising of working class dissent is one of the biggest nightmares a government can face. (When authorities placed for tow trucks to remove vehicles briefly blocking the border at Coutts, Alberta, the local towing company refused.) Once you pop open the Alladin’s Lamp of widespread working class protest, it can be hard as hell to get the big, burly genie back in. Responding with state violence may expose support in other areas. Ottawa police have signaled they won’t act on a political matter, and last Wednesday a spokesperson for Defence Minister Anita Anand told CBC News the Canadian Armed Forces have no plans to get involved in law enforcement situations in Ottawa. That sounds like the CAF bouncing the ball back to the PMO.
Trudeau weighed in the next day: “One has to be very, very cautious before deploying military forces in situations engaging Canadians. It is not something that anyone should enter in lightly. But as of now, there have been no requests, and that is not in the cards right now."
I wouldn’t put it past Justin to pull the military trigger, just as his Prime Minister father did with the War Measures Act during the 1970 FLQ crisis in Quebec. Though it seems very unlikely for army brass or even rank and file to resist orders, it would be a calculated risk nonetheless.
As a friend observed the other day, American conservatives romantically attach gun ownership to civil liberties, even though the state has always had access to far superior firepower. In contrast, Canadian truckers have brilliantly challenged the Trudeau government peacefully with their own rigs. It’s a puzzler for a leader in hiding. When Justin’s dad unlocked the War Measures Act nationwide, he was stuck with that perennial Canadian military challenge: which coast gets the tank?
More seriously, Ottawa can’t repel all incoming trucks without closing off food supplies and other products from entering the city. And stopping each truck to question drivers would mean traffic snarls compounding the trucker scene near Parliament.
Through his inflammatory, divisive language against law-abiding Canadians, Trudeau stupidly called upon the God of Unintended Consequences. More protestors are expected in Ottawa for the weekend, with Toronto targeted by a convoy of its own. The Freedom Convoy movement is now going international, with European truckers organizing to converge on Brussels. It appears our PM has unleashed a diesel-powered, worldwide whirlwind.
Oh well, he promised to unite Canada when he got elected. And now he’s uniting the world!
This is the most nonlinear moment I’ve ever seen in my nation. Things could get ugly very soon, with Frank Zappa’s prophecy playing out in full view:
The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.
Australians, Austrians and Germans have already had a pretty good glimpse of the bricks.
However, with the truckers leading the way, we may be seeing a global eruption of people power the world hasn’t seen for years, signalling to the prosperous few they are outnumbered and outflanked by the restless many. This may well be the moment when the globalists pull back the curtains and go full totalitarian. Or it could be the moment when they slink out of the theatre to rethink their 2030 agenda. Given that Sweden, Norway, Finland and Switzerland and Ireland have simultaneously bowed out of mandates, I suspect the latter may already be underway. Time - perhaps as a little as a week or two - will tell. Things are getting real, and it’s the truckers who are getting it.
A very timely and excellent summation of where we are at , because now is the moment to push the agenda , send this article to those friends and family members that you’ve stopped talking covid with , no sitting on the fence anymore , we have to get the play it safers and hiding out going along with crowd to come down on the side of our working class heros……I’m severely disappointed in the so-called left for not doing so
Also I am curious why NDP has not taken a stand on this and Jagmeet is siding with Trudeau. Have they not always proported to support the working class and unions?