This winter, as the Ottawa occupation wore on, many comrades of mine focused on the ways in which the participants in Canada’s Freedom Convoy were, in every way, handled differently than participants in protests I have much more actively supported, like the Shut Down Canada campaign in support of the Wet’suwet’en’s efforts to stop Royal Dutch Shell’s pipeline to Kitimat.
My friends on the Left very legitimately pointed out that, until the federal government proclaimed emergency powers legislation, the disorderly extended tailgate party the truckers and their supporters staged received an anemic response from law enforcement.
Not only was there no real attempt to fine, tow or arrest truckers for violating federal, provincial or municipal ordinances already on the books dealing with road blockages and illegal camping and parking but the normal tool for dealing with protesters on the left, the court injunction, was never utilized. Normally, logging and pipeline protests are shut down through the abuse of court orders, where the government backs a corporation in seeking a court order to prohibit “John Doe, Jane Doe and Persons Unknown” from doing something that hinders business or mobility.
These court orders are ubiquitous if you are a left-wing protester and have, if you are Indigenous, come packaged with escalating levels of police brutality and extra-legal property destruction. Furthermore, breaching a court order has no maximum sentence; technically, the courts can sentence you to death still, because the courts have ruled that parliament cannot abridge their sentencing power for the defiance of their orders.
This appears to have been driven by the social and class adjacency of the police to the truckers and a sense of identification police rarely if ever experience with Indigenous neo-traditionalists and environmentalists.
Consequently, progressives were absolutely correct in stating that, when it came to law enforcement, the protesters were treated with kid gloves.
But Canada’s political class and media elite are in no way trucker-adjacent and so, there was a way in which the protest was also treated with a severity with few precedents in spheres other than law enforcement, some of which I have already written on at length, and some of which I will recap here.
First, it must be understood that organized convoys comprising a mix of big rigs and pickup trucks incrementally forming up along a set of predetermined routes through a series of industrial towns in rural areas were already a phenomenon in Western Canada before 2022 began. These convoys, which began regularly converging on Vancouver, Victoria, Edmonton and Calgary in the late 2010s were political in the sense that they were animated by a set of grievances organized around the participants’ identities as politically conservative rural industrial workers. The trucks and their occupants often had signage denouncing NDP politicians, carbon taxes, and similar fare, with mask mandates and vaccine passports added to the mix as the convoys entered the 20s.
The fact that the protests were more about saying “we are here. We demand to be recognized as an important constituency of people,” than about protesting a single issue was one of the excuses news media used to engage in what amounted to an organized blackout of these protests. When the protests were covered, they were more likely to show up in traffic reports rather than news reports. But I view it as real journalistic malpractice that protests comprising hundreds, sometimes thousands of vehicles and persons were essentially ignored, based on the flimsy excuse that they lacked coherent demands. Indeed, the absence of clear demands should have made these all the more worthy of investigation.
While this kind of “we are here and feel unheard,” convoy has not traditionally been a common kind of protest in Canadian history, it has a long and noble tradition south of the Rio Grande. Since the 1830s, groups of Indigenous and mestizo (the equivalent of Métis) in the Hispanic world have periodically converged on capitals in large numbers carrying the tools of their trade, often machetes and hoes rather than big rigs, pickup trucks and rifles, and simply occupy Guatemala City or Mexico City with many interconnected grievances but no clear demands. And then, after a time, heading home, satisfied or not, leaving a bunch of property damage in their wake.
Western Canada’s de facto media blackout of these mass mobilizations with unclear, organic and evolving systems of leadership made it easier for national media to characterize the “freedom convoy” as both unprecedented and impossible to understand.
This kind of tabula rasa gave the establishment legacy media greater scope to cast the protest in a negative light by attributing to the main body of protesters whatever the most absurd, extreme or unflattering view was that they could find. This was especially odious when a small minority of protesters arrived with Confederate flags and were told by the majority to either ditch the flags or go home. When this organic, democratic pressure succeeded, no mention was made of the sudden and equally rapid disappearance of Confederate flags from the protest. Instead of telling a story of the democratic, anti-racist spirit of the mobilization, media simply continued to show images of the flags and claim that it was all but the official flag of the protest.
The swastika, similarly, had faced immediate, grassroots organic resistance from most protesters, when it appeared on poorly drawn protest art placing it next to upside-down maple leafs with words suggesting that Canada had been taken over by Nazis. Instead of suggesting that this was an unsophisticated and extreme comparison, news media chose to offer their own exegesis of the protest signs claiming that the protesters were anti-Canada and pro-Nazi. Following this smear, grassroots participants worked effectively to get these signs to disappear too; but the media kept showing old footage.
As with any mass mobilization, like the Occupy movement of the late 00s, no matter who calls together a large group of unaffiliated activists and suddenly mobilized regular folks, the question of who the leadership is grows unclear over time. Again, news media were relentlessly agenda-driven in platforming the most extreme, the most unhinged, the most incoherent people who claimed the mantle of leadership as the occupation dragged on.
Instead of seeking out the most articulate people with the best arguments, as media sometimes do for environmental or Indigenous sovereignty protests, establishment media did the opposite here, trolling for “free men on the land” with whom to conduct interviews.
When protesters were falsely associated with local people unrelated to the protest attempting to burn down a local apartment building, media were quick to circulate unconfirmed suspicions and most did not correct these smears when municipal police and fire officials conclusively pronounced that the attempted arson was unrelated to the protest.
And then there was the debate around the Emergencies Act. While the government could perfectly easily have used the laws already on the books prohibiting illegal parking, blocking public roads, illegal camping and the like, they chose not to. They similarly eschewed their normal tactic of assisting private businesses, like the one that owns and runs the Ambassador Bridge, which was blocked later in the protest, with obtaining court injunctions. Instead, the government waited for the saner, more employable members of the protest to begin heading home before announcing that it required emergency powers.
No media or government rhetoric against pipeline or logging protesters that I can recall ever labeled my comrades and me as “traitors,” suggested we were “committing treason.” While we have also been called “terrorists” by government and media, that is typically for acts of sabotage and not for simply being physically present at the wrong place and time. Many in government and the Fourth Estate began comparing the protest to the January 6th, 2021 violent coup attempt in the United States and reasoned that because some protesters had called for the Governor General to fire the government if it would not resign that, by dint of saying the elected government was illegitimate, they were, simply by calling for its removal, committing an act of treason and perhaps deserved life imprisonment for doing so.
I have been part of a number of organizations that have called for the government to resign and for the Governor-General to step in and form a new one if it would not. In fact, I recall being part of a large crowd in Nathan Philips Square in Toronto in 2008 that listened to Stephane Dion who proposed to lead such an alternative government. I do not recall any news media or government MPs accusing our organic mass-mobilizations during the Prorogation Crisis of being seditious mobs suborning treason.
But, for me, the most disquieting aspect of the coverage was the use of the terms “invade” and “invader.” The truckers had “invaded” Ottawa and would not leave. It was therefore necessary to respond with emergency war powers. While there was also a set of complaints about “foreign money,” being donated to the convoy, the “invasion” rhetoric was weirdly unconnected to this.
And there was one final major grievance against the convoy that I found especially disquieting: the anger that its members were proudly flying Canadian flags. Rather than seeing the proud and prominent display of the Maple Leaf as a sign of the truckers’ patriotism or loyalty, media began to suggest that the convoy had irreparably tainted the flag and had done something underhanded by appropriating it.
Citizens of a country had exercised their constitutional mobility rights to visit their own capital and had, upon arrival, flown their own flag. This, in the minds of the establishment and its friends in the media constituted “terrorism,” an “invasion,” “sedition,” “treason!”
Over the decades, my environmentalist and Indigenous neo-traditionalist comrades and I have been subject to a lot of media attacks and unfair coverage but nothing like this. But I nevertheless began to feel like I had heard this kind of language, this shape of discourse before. And then I put my finger on it: it was the language of the Anglo establishment press and politicians had used against Louis Riel and the Métis during the Manitoba Crisis and the Northwest Rebellion.
Riel, as rehearsed earlier in this series, was no Joseph Brant. He and his followers did not seek to create a separate, independent state, equal to Canada under the Crown. Their objectives were larger: they demanded co-ownership of the Canadian project. They did not seek treaty rights as Indigenous people but rather the co-equal control of Canada’s land tenure and ownership system, as Christians, as Catholics, and, most troublingly as Canadians.
Canadians progressives and their allies in the Laurentian elite have long been captured by a theory of diversity I have characterized as “neo-Ottomanism,” expressed in British imperial terms in the nineteenth century as “a place for everyone and everyone in [their] place.” Their vision of diversity is one of carefully policed cultural boundaries separating self-governing, racially transparent, culturally distinct communities, a vision that situates Indigenous people outside the Canadian project and non-status and non-neotraditionalist (i.e. the Christian majority) Indigenous and Métis people outside Indigeneity.
As with the Northwest Rebellions of the nineteenth century, many of those who participated in the convoy were not Indigenous by blood but were, instead, part of a larger Métis-influenced regional culture, similar to that of Alaska, West Virginia and the national US “migrant worker” culture of the 1920s. And like those rebellions, the convoy lacked coherent, stable demands because its central message was simple, “we co-own the Canadian project.” Canadian progressives and the Laurentian elite are rhetorically supportive of “self-government” projects, in part because they undermine Louis Riel-style politics.
What did not just offend but what threatened Canada’s political class more deeply about the protest than anything was its lack of “racial transparency” and its participants’ insistence that the Maple Leaf and the national project it represents belonged as much to each of them as it does to Justin Trudeau and his ilk.
What freaked out this nation’s elite was being faced with an emergent sectional nationalist movement, from Terrace to Timmins, that paired the power of the Maple Leaf with the power of the pan-Indigenous medicine wheel in its iconography. Such a movement, should it fully awaken and coalesce, should it become fully self-conscious, could offer the most serious challenge to the increasingly white guilt-centred, tone-deaf, histrionic ancestor-blaming nationalism being hawked by the likes of Trudeau. And that is why its participants had to be tarred as racists, Nazis, traitors and terrorists, not because of their demands but because of the nascent possibility of a different vision of Canada that they represent.
For those of you who think that I am romanticizing the incoherent mob that arrived in the nation’s capital and didn’t clean up after itself very well, I ask you to suspend judgement until you read the next part of my analysis. Because the forces that are reawakening the spirit of the Northwest Rebellion are anything but benign. The ghost of Louis Riel is driving the biggest rig at the head of the convoy, with a medicine wheel painted on one side and a maple leaf on the other but someone else entirely has pumped the gas into its tank.
