Why We Care About the Canadian Truckers
And what it means for America's future.
By signaling he will invoke the Emergencies Act, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau this week will try to convince his cabinet of his intention to regain control of his national capital and put down the weeks-long revolt of Canada’s working class.
Demanding an end to the state’s Covid tyranny, these tens of thousands of truckers arrived from the mountains and the plains and from the suburbs. They were joined on their routes by cheering Canadians on street corners and on highways, bundled up in heavy winter coats and carrying signs.
Once they arrived in Ottawa, they packed the streets with their vehicles, and transformed the capital city into a festival of freedom, with political speeches, dancing and a massive show of solidarity with people of all backgrounds rebelling against ineffective Covid mandates, masks and lockdowns.
As another show of their determination and power, truckers and their supporters had, for a time, sealed access to the Ambassador Bridge linking Ontario to Michigan, the transit point of a quarter of trade between the United States and Canada. Tucker Carlson–who’s been an invaluable American voice on the protests–called it, correctly, the most successful peaceful human rights protest in a generation.
As the Ottawa police failed to disperse the truckers and their supporters, the media pressured a pathetic-looking Trudeau–who’d fled the city to hide in a still-undisclosed location–to crack down on the Freedom Convoy. The Emergencies Act would be a major escalation, allowing the government to take a degree of power reserved for wartime or for serious emergencies and disasters.
Trudeau himself, together with state-controlled (or elite-sympathetic) media, tried to prepare the ground for this unprecedented move by slandering the Freedom Convoy and its supporters for weeks as racists, white supremacists and fascists.
As nobody has been able to point to violence committed by the truckers or their supporters, the media beclowned itself with unhinged agitprop like, “The parallels between the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and domestic violence” in the Ottawa Citizen. “A refrain we’re seeing from convoy participants and supporters is that this protest is 'non-violent,’” writes Kaitlin Geiger-Bardswich of Women’s Shelters Canada. “That song and dance is all too familiar to the many women across the country who have experienced domestic abuse.”
Clearly, these people are taking it all very badly. For the transnational elite class, the explosion of patriotism in the Freedom Convoy has been shocking and terrifying. After decades of mass immigration and soft, managerial socialism, they’d thought they’d succeeded in emptying the contents of the old Canadian identity completely.
For these people, Canada was nothing more or less than the state itself, and the massive constellation of nonprofits, media outlets, tech companies, NGOs, and government contractors who shared the same concerns, prejudices and fashionable opinions. By the time the Truedeau government came around, they could barely answer the question, “what is Canada?” without gauzy platitudes designed to not alienate any possible interest group.
Suddenly, though, the protests revealed people standing in the bitter cold, waving maple leaf flags and–finally–taking to heart the national anthem’s exhortation to God to, “keep our land glorious and free.” The protests dislodged a patriotism in the nearly invisible part of Canada that had, apparently, been dormant for decades. No wonder Trudeau referred to these people as a “fringe minority”; they hadn’t been visible in any metropolitan centers or bougie ski villages.
“These Truckers want to overthrow the government,” they bleat on television, invoking the specter of January 6th “insurrectionists” in America in order to justify whatever coming violent, severe and punitive measures they can come up with to stop the peaceful protests. Of course, overthrowing the government means something far different–and pretty unremarkable–in a parliamentary system. Or, at least, it should for Canadian audiences.
Why Canadian politicians and broadcasters are using this kind of language is an indication of how closely tied this class is with their American counterparts; they can only understand themselves in one way: as fierce guardians of an enlightened, scientifically-run bureaucratic state that works for them and punishes their hateful, bigoted enemies.
For anyone paying attention to politics since 2016, all this seems unremarkable–proceeding along the most important current fault lines in American domestic politics, even if they are somewhat misunderstood: the working class vs the laptop class; social media vs corporate media; messy freedom vs ordered security.
And so, far south of that northern border, American conservatives have been glued to social media, thrilling to the heroic defiance of the Canadian Truckers and their supporters. As we cheer this freedom movement in Canada, we look for similar signs of defiance and resolve in our fellow countrymen. Why not us? Where are our guys? Will it be left to our terminally nice Canadian neighbors to stand up?
Of course, it’s not surprising that we care so much, and that the story has riveted us. Canada is our nearby and friendly neighbor; it isn’t a world and a thousand years of culture away, like Afghanistan. And unlike Ukraine and Russia–old, weird civilizations with so much experience with past traumas, tyrannies, and famines–Canadians are really like us, if only more famously mild-mannered.
Even more, however, the drama of Canada’s Freedom Convoy points toward the direction of future global conflicts, and America’s place in them.
I often used to say that, “Democrats don’t have foreign enemies; they have foreigners who remind them of domestic enemies.” But maybe this formulation is outdated; it’s now true for Republicans, too. In the category of non-state actors, the defiant, freedom-loving Canadian Truckers have taken their place as right-wing folk heroes. Unsurprisingly, they’re considerably less bloody than past left-wing foreign folk heroes, like Palestinian or Sanenista rebels.
I’ve written for years about the growing partisanship in America, and the unbridgeable ideological divide that will, at some point, result in the collapse of the United States or–if we’re very lucky–a National Divorce. One of the symptoms or manifestations of this divide is in foreign affairs: as we no longer have a single, American narrative about the countries or foreign movements we dislike or support, there’s no coherent foreign policy that’s possible.
Of course, this disagreement about the other is born from the shattered consensus about the kind of country we are, or even the kind of civilization we are.
Americans on the Right have grown to realize that the routine maintenance of America’s national interests, traditionally understood, do little but bolster the hold the elite, woke, laptop class have on the government and the nation’s society at large. The priorities of this class–embodied by ceaseless military propaganda about trans rights, “white supremacy,” diversity, equity and inclusion–seem to have swallowed the old understanding of national interests whole.
“This is America now,” the woke Biden administration might proclaim and, looking around the culture and corporate media, it’s hard to conclude that that appraisal isn’t largely true.
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