They came in their thousands – by the tens of thousands, if you believe them – belching diesel fumes and blasting air horns. The Freedom Convoy of big tractor-trailer rigs, semis, and private pickup trucks and vans converged on the Canadian capital of Ottawa from points as distant as Prince Rupert, BC on the Pacific coast, and Enfield, Nova Scotia on the Atlantic.
They were, they said, truckers fighting a tyrannical federal government on behalf of the Canadian people, whose public health policies and vaccine mandates had destroyed their livelihoods and stripped them of their rights. They were driving for freedom and, they have declared, they will remain in Ottawa, blocking roads and streets, gunning their engines and honking their horns at all hours of the day and night, and terrorizing citizens until they get their way.
A week after the they first took Ottawa hostage, however, it has become alarmingly clear that their agenda is much broader and more sinister than simply raising the restrictions that prevent unvaccinated truckers from plying their trade across Canada’s border with the United States, as they initially claimed. In any event, those restrictions, imposed by Washington and enforced by the US Customs and Immigration Service, are outside of Canada’s jurisdiction.
The proof of their broader aims can be seen in the Confederate and swastika flags that festoon many of the vehicles in the convoy. Canadian white nationalists and neo-Nazis have flocked to the truckers’ banner in significant numbers; whatever the political inclinations of the original participants in the convoy, all the evidence is that members of Canada’s far-right have enthusiastically joined the procession and regard it as an invaluable recruiting opportunity.
Neo-Nazis in the nation’s capital.
The spectacle highlights an ugly reality behind Canada’s fairytale global image as a progressive, tolerant, Nordic-style social democracy. “The Orange Order was our Ku Klux Klan, Bible Bill in Alberta was our Father Coughlin, we had Nazis in Quebec, white supremacy in Nova Scotia,” said Paul Olioff, a university administrator. “Friendly Canada is a myth.”
Reactionary and racist politics are never far from the surface in Canada. As the journalist and historian Julian Sher noted in White Hoods: Canada’s Ku Klux Klan, the Klan had a deeper footprint in western Canada in the 1920s than even in the American deep south, and even today Quebec nationalists revere the antisemitic Catholic cleric Lionel Groulx – who called for a boycott of Jewish businesses in the 1930s – as a guiding light of their movement. In 2019, the government of Quebec, whose flag displays the cross and the fleur de lys, the symbol commemorating the conversion of the Frankish king Clovis to Christianity, adopted a “secularism” law widely regarded as Islamophobic and antisemitic.
It has long bubbled below the surface of Canadian civility, only occasionally bursting into the light, as when Alberta teacher Jim Keegstra became infamous for teaching his Eckville students that the Holocaust was a hoax. Significantly, Stockwell Day, the leader of the Reform Party, the predecessor of today’s Conservatives, and better known for his homophobia and anti-Indigenous policies, never distanced himself from his old friend and Ekville neighbor Keegstra. Today, however, the Canadian right isn’t even dancing around the issue; they’re saying the quiet parts out loud. The People’s Party, founded by libertarian, white nationalist firebrand Maxime Bernier who left the Conservatives because he felt that it wasn’t reactionary enough, more than doubled its share of the popular vote in the last Canadian election.
Many Canadians regard the Freedom Convoy as a show of strength by a militant far-right movement with deep historical roots but now mobilized and inspired by the success of American Magaism. Tucker Carlson weighed-in last week, offering encouragement to the truckers, and accusing Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of being a “tyrant” for his broadly-popular COVID policies. The disgraced former American president Donald Trump offered his own praise and denounced the Liberal prime minister as a “far left lunatic who has destroyed Canada.”
A GoFundMe campaign in support of the convoy raised $11 million before the platform shut it down and froze the assets. Convoy supporters then migrated to GiveSendGo, which styles itself a “Christian Crowdfunding site made by Christians for Christians,” and which hosts campaigns for Christian nationalist and anti-choice organizations. The account raised more than $2 million over the weekend.
“A certain portion of the people up here also watch Fox Pseudo News,” Anthony Bonaparte, a Montreal-based political cartoonist said. “A certain portion of the people up here also hang on every word Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, and the other circus barkers have to say. That portion also thinks Donald Trump is the Second Coming, that January 6 was a good idea, and love the attention — and moral and financial support — they are now getting from their heroes in [the US]. Now that they have demonstrated how easy it is to bring a city to its knees, expect this siege technique to be added to the right wing’s post-election repertoire in case of a loss.”
The Canadian far-right is having a moment. “In terms of the country my son will inherit, I’m very worried,” Olioff said.
Yet, with hundreds of rigs still in Canada’s capital and settling in for an extended occupation, with no end in sight, many Canadians are more focused on the near-term problem: What can be done about the increasingly rowdy demonstrators blocking thoroughfares, making life miserable for Ottawa citizens, desecrating national monuments, and generally getting up to mischief?
“On-ramps to [Highway] 417 have been closed to locals and signs erected telling the ‘convoy’ where to go,” Ottawa resident Nicholas Wallace grumbled. “The Government is bending over backwards to accommodate these morons. I am sure they would do the same if it was a convoy of indigenous truckers come to protest 300 years of mistreatment,” he added sarcastically.
It is easy to contrast the Canadian government’s response to the truckers with the Wet’suwet’en pipeline blockade two years ago, and the standoff in Oka, Quebec, in 1990, and it does not cast the authorities in a flattering light. The Canadian government sent the Royal Canadian Mounted Police into Wet’suwet’en land in 2020, and mobilized the army against the Mohawk activists at Kanesatake and Kahnawake three decades ago, yet all Ottawa seems to have had for the truckers and their neo-Nazi allies is a wagging finger and tepid words of reproach. Prime Minister Trudeau has explicitly dismissed the possibility of using the military.
Allied demonstrations are sprouting in western Canada, the heartland of Canadian conservatism and a hotbed of the domestic brand of Magaism, and political rhetoric is becoming more strident by the day. The Conservative Party of Canada dumped its leader Erin O’Toole in a non-confidence vote last week. Although Tory knives had been out for the Leader of the Opposition since he led the party to defeat in last September’s election, the party’s right wing found O’Toole too conciliatory and insufficiently committed to far-right social conservatism, and the timing sends a clear message that the Conservatives are eager to “hitch their wagons to the convoy protest,” as the CBC had it.
Given the context, there are many ways that a military intervention could go sideways. Politics in Canada are no less polarized than south of the border, and aggravated by longstanding and deep-seated regional divisions and rivalries. A good many of the more radical convoy protesters are plainly spoiling for a fight, and looking for a provocation. So, the government position thus far has been to avoid confrontation, wait the truckers out, and hope that they just go away. In the interim, the citizens of Ottawa are blockaded in their own homes and the political life of Canada is prorogued indefinitely. More ominously, it is becoming clear that the convoy is not moving on any time soon and, in the meantime, is attracting attention and willing recruits to the far-right.
Something has to give and, with protesters now reportedly outnumbering the police in Canada’s capital, the mayor of Ottawa declared a state of emergency on Sunday. Ottawa Police began making arrests later in the day, and have announced a crackdown on parties providing material and financial support for the continued occupation. The tone of the right-wing rhetoric in social media, meanwhile, has become increasingly incendiary.
Whether Canadian authorities want a confrontation, one is certainly coming; indeed, it has been simmering below the surface of Canada’s polite society for decades.
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Photo courtesy of Global News