For a short-lived movement that was panned as an extremist fringe by the Trudeau government and the mainstream press, it left quite a legacy.
For a short-lived movement that was panned as an extremist fringe by the Trudeau government and the mainstream press, it left quite a legacy.
T he Canadian trucker convoy that arrived in Ottawa to protest the nation’s pandemic mandates at the end of January is all but gone, its participants arrested or cleared out by a militarized police force that descended on the city just over a week ago. But the movement nevertheless can claim a remarkable slate of political victories at home and a role in having inspired copycat anti-mandate protests across the West.
The self-described “Freedom Convoy” began in earnest on January 29, when hundreds of trucks from across Canada converged on Parliament Hill in the capital. What started as a truckers’ protest against vaccine mandates quickly evolved into a mass protest against pandemic restrictions writ large, with thousands of Canadians flocking to Ottawa to join the demonstrations. For 21 days, a makeshift community of anti-mandate protesters held prayer services and dance parties, and served free food and drink from tents and hastily built encampments. There were a handful of alleged instances of vandalism, and offshoots in other parts of the country were rightly criticized for blockading trade routes. But by and large, the movement was remarkably peaceful, particularly in light of its decentralized and largely spontaneous nature.
The Freedom Convoy leaves Ottawa with a number of material wins under its belt. Five Canadian provinces — Ontario, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island — opted to drop their vaccine mandates in the midst of the protests. Alberta dropped its school mask requirement. At the federal level, the Canadian government relaxed its border pandemic restrictions — the initial source of the truckers’ ire. Many Covid mandates remain in place, of course, but the eased pandemic rules mark an extraordinary victory for a relatively short-lived movement that was panned as an extremist fringe by both the Trudeau government and the mainstream press.
Some critics of the convoy have dismissed the idea that the truckers were the cause of these dismantled mandates. “Most provinces were already planning to roll back restrictions as the Omicron wave flattened,” University of Calgary professor Matt McManus argued on Twitter. Last week, the Canadian Globe and Mail editorial board wrote that “the reason the provinces are relaxing the rules now is because people got vaccinated, not because a handful of anti-vaxxers are soaking in hot tubs in front of Parliament Hill.” (The trucker convoy wasn’t actually anti-vax — it was anti-mandate — but its members did, in fact, have a hot tub. Considering the frigid weather, that was just good planning.)
But others aren’t so sure. “I think the convoy was an important factor,” Maxime Bernier, the leader of the right-wing People’s Party of Canada (PPC) and an outspoken supporter of the convoy, told me. “These politicians told us they were going to end the mandates way before the convoy, but didn’t. Taking an example, Doug Ford, the premier of Ontario, said in December, ‘this is my plan to end all these mandates by February.’ And that wasn’t the case. So I believe that the truckers [pushed him to end the mandates].”
Bernier also argues that public opinion shifted against Covid restrictions during the Freedom Convoy. The actual numbers are a little blurry — there hasn’t been much polling on public opinion about vaccine mandates since the first week of the protests — but “pandemic fatigue” does seem to be growing alongside the anti-mandate movement. In a February 11 Ipsos poll, nearly half of Canadians said they “may not agree with everything the people who have taken part in the truck protests in Ottawa have said, but their frustration is legitimate and worthy of our sympathy.” U.S. News reported amid the protests, “Justin Trudeau’s support of vaccine mandates in fighting COVID-19 helped him win re-election five months ago, but now he looks increasingly isolated as restrictions are being lifted around the world.” That, too, is reflected in the polls, as the paper noted: “The Trudeau government’s approval rating fell six percentage points between Jan. 12, before the protests began, and Feb. 8, while they were ongoing.”
In this sense, the convoy’s greatest achievement was the marked shift in momentum in the lifting of the country’s Covid restrictions. Any way you look at it, the protest movement they sparked has had an outsized effect on Canadian politics. Left-wing politicians and journalists have been quick to point out that polls showed a persistent skepticism of the movement among a majority of Canadians. But even if the Freedom Convoy was unpopular — and as recent years have shown, public-opinion polling can be a fickle and uncertain tool for diagnosing public mood — that would make its accomplishments all the more impressive. As the truckers made their way to Ottawa, Trudeau snidely dismissed them as “a small fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” But it was that same “small fringe minority” that arguably effected a six-point drop in the prime minister’s approval rating.
Much of the movement’s success owed to its fun, welcoming atmosphere. As I wrote from on the ground in Ottawa, “there’s an easy-going, happy-warrior feeling to it; music emanates from speakers in different encampments, free food and coffee is served out of makeshift booths, and truckers pray the Lord’s Prayer — in English and French — every evening at 7 p.m.” The weekends, in particular, were a 48-hour dance party, complete with a DJ booth and alcohol.
It’s no wonder that so many of the protesters I saw in Ottawa were young. In the same February 11 Ipsos poll that showed just under half of Canadians supporting the Freedom Convoy, a full 61 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 34 — by far the highest of any age group — said that protester frustration was “legitimate and worthy of our sympathy.” The movement’s youthful spirit was both a statement and a strategy, reasserting the Canadian people’s liberty while attracting thousands of young like-minded protesters from across the country.
“I came down here because I believe in what they’re doing,” Nikita, a student at the University of Ottawa, told me. “I’ve been telling people who don’t believe in it to come out and see what’s happening here for themselves.” Nikita, whose parents immigrated to Canada from the Soviet Union, is vaccinated himself. He was at the convoy because he was “sick of” the “division” caused by the mandates. “Just give people the choice — I don’t understand what the big problem is here,” he said. “Like okay, you don’t have to agree with their choice. But you can still get vaccinated if they don’t mandate it.”
Veni, Vidi, . . . Vici?
The Ottawa convoy was not above criticism, but its successes offer a playbook for citizens who share the movement’s exasperation with the pandemic state across the West. On the ground, the protest’s atmosphere helped sustain and energize its participants throughout the three weeks of its existence. But on a political level, the movement’s ability to remain focused and rational in its demands — and to marginalize its more outlandish and conspiratorial elements — contributed to the broader shift in energy it effected on the national stage. “What we are asking is for these leaders, Trudeau and all these premiers, to follow the science,” Bernier told me. “They told us that a long time ago — ‘follow the science.’ There’s no science to keeping these vaccine passports and the discrimination and segregation in our society. Just follow the science — follow the logic and the common sense. That’s what the truckers are asking.”
This eminently reasonable message made it difficult for the Left’s “extremism” smears to stick. The convoy, affectionately dubbed “the Republic of Honkistan” by its supporters, did not espouse racism or the use of violence. Most of the protesters, like most of the Canadian population, were white. But there was a healthy contingent of nonwhites, too, including a section of the encampments run by Sikh truckers who served traditional Sikh food to protesters. Black and indigenous protesters gave speeches on the main stage. Hazel, a black woman from Toronto sporting a Ron DeSantis hat, told me that her mother had spent three years in a Kenyan prison for fighting colonial rule. “Now I feel like I’m carrying her torch,” she said.
All of this helped put a human face on the costs of pandemic mandates. Many protesters I talked to had been fired for refusing to show their vaccination papers. One gym owner at the protest told me he lost his business because of lockdowns. “I had just over 100 members, and at each lockdown we lost like a quarter,” he said. “And then after the last one, everyone’s like, ‘we’re just staying online.’” The hand-made signs posted around the encampments were often bittersweet. These are some of the messages they bore: “I lost my best friend to suicide. My heart aches every day. I’m here advocating in her memory.” “These mandates are causing a mental health crisis that needs to be addressed.” “We missed our granddaughter’s birth due to mandates. We missed the first 9 months of her life due to propaganda-induced family division.” One showed a picture of the sign-maker’s smiling ten-year-old daughter in January 2020: “This is my joyful, happy & outgoing daughter . . . my everything,” it read. The next picture, from November 2021, showed the daughter’s arm with self-inflicted cuts, with the message: “This is also my daughter . . . traumatized, broken, lost & defeated . . . my everything. Mandates & lockdowns did this to her.”
The cognitive dissonance between the Trudeau government’s allegations about the Freedom Convoy and the reality on the ground made the prime minister’s rhetoric look foolish and desperate. That came to a head on February 16, when Trudeau accused a Jewish MP, a member of the Conservative Party, of “standing with people who wave swastikas,” causing the entire Tory side of the House of Commons to erupt in outrage. (“I’ve never seen such shameful and dishonorable remarks coming from this prime minister,” one Conservative MP responded. “There are members of this Conservative caucus who are the descendants of victims of the Holocaust.”)
Trudeau’s flailing messaging added to the broader controversy surrounding his decision to invoke sweeping emergency powers in response to the protests, unilaterally freezing bank accounts and persecuting private citizens who donated to the Freedom Convoy. It also galvanized the famously moderate and conflict-averse Conservative Party, whose leaders were initially reluctant to support the convoy. The Tories rallied to the cause of resisting Trudeau’s increasingly authoritarian crackdown on the protests, voting as a bloc against the emergency powers and challenging the prime minister in fiery standoffs in the House of Commons.
The Truckers and Us
Why does the Ottawa convoy matter? Beyond its political achievements, the movement’s power lay in its simple rejection of the pandemic mindset that has become embedded in many technocratic circles. In an era of lockdowns and nanny-state Fauci-ism, the Freedom Convoy’s defiant joy was an open revolt against the dreary vision of life on offer from an army of experts, bureaucrats who insist that a “return to normal” is impossible. The truckers were relentlessly, unequivocally, unapologetically free. And their protest was an invitation for any who wish to join them.
Since the Canadian truckers arrived in Ottawa, similar convoys have popped up across the West: Inspired by the original Freedom Convoy, truckers have mobilized in the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Australia, New Zealand, Israel, Slovakia, Finland, and many more. American truckers are set to converge on Washington, D.C., in time for President Biden’s State of the Union address on March 1.
These grassroots anti-mandate movements may be able to emulate Ottawa’s successes while also learning from its mistakes. Even as the easygoing atmosphere played an important role in the protest’s success, it also grew increasingly directionless and disorganized toward the end. As the convoy expanded into a festival of sorts, replete with bouncy castles, hot tubs, and costumed mascots, it began to lose its political potency. So long as the encampments represented a justifiable political protest in front of Parliament, the Trudeau government was reluctant to move against it; but once its festive atmosphere eclipsed its political objectives, the crackdown began in earnest. A serious country simply does not allow a prolonged open-air dance party in front of its government buildings. “They were loud, but they . . . were no longer saying what they wanted clearly,” my frustrated Nigerian Uber driver told me on my way to the Ottawa airport. “And once you’re not saying what you want clearly, you’re not being heard.”
In a way, however, the disproportionate police response to the protest also validated the reason for the convoy in the first place. The striking visual of armored trucks, officers perched on rooftops, and a phalanx of police in riot gear moving into the encampments galvanized a righteous indignation in many corners of Canadian politics. It also exposed the authoritarian nature of the pandemic state; all government diktats, ultimately, are enforced at the point of a gun.
But more insidious than any police misconduct is the Trudeau government’s weaponization of emergency powers. Not only did Trudeau unilaterally freeze more than 200 bank accounts under the pretense of fighting the protests; his government froze the bank accounts of those who donated to the convoy. The government was clear about the intent of this shock-and-awe campaign: The justice minister openly boasted that donors “should be worried” about their accounts being frozen. And in fact, at least one woman was fired from her job in the Ontario government for donating $100, and a single mother working a minimum-wage job alleged that her account was frozen for donating $50 when the convoy was still legal.
As the Canadian lawyer Aaron Wudrick pointed out, the Trudeau government also ordered banks, online payment processors, and digital assets to “report personal information on the vaguest of criteria: any ‘designated person’ for whom there are ‘reasonable grounds to suspect’ of an offense.” There was “no minimum financial threshold” to the order, “meaning that individuals whose sole connection to the protest is sending, say, $50 to an online fundraiser could be swept up in this unprecedented crackdown.” Most insidiously, despite the prime minister’s subsequent cancellation of the emergency powers, his government is still quietly moving to make its expanded financial surveillance powers permanent. When I reached out to inquire about the topic earlier this week, the deputy prime minister’s office confirmed that “the government is committed to making crowdfunding platforms and payment service providers” report transactions to a state surveillance agency “on a permanent basis.”
That kind of authoritarianism, sanctioned and justified in the name of public health and safety, is the ultimate enemy that the Canadian truckers were fighting. Americans should not be so naïve as to think that similar crackdowns can’t happen here; we’re already beginning to see U.S. banks and payment processors target accounts for political reasons. The battle lines are clear — the Ottawa convoy just helped us see them.