Canada Trucker Protest: Trudeau’s Class Conflict

When you look up at Canada and see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs — suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s all happened before.

Truckers have done this before. Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main interstate into paralysis.

About the Author

Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is a senior writer at National Review Online.

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When you look up at Canada and see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs — suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s all happened before.

Truckers have done this before. Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main interstate into paralysis.