Protest in Ottawa: Occupying Time on the ‘Freedom Convoy’ – and Canada’s Conservatives

The time has come to say what needs to be said on the ‘freedom convoy’ as the now week-long protest of anti-vaxxers in Ottawa continues.  I say: Enough.  And I ask: Is the Conservative Party of Canada not giving legitimacy to this aberrant form of populism? By mingling in the crowds, among them Andrew Scheer, former leader, and Pierre Poilievre (leader-in-waiting, who once drove me to the streets to protest against his so-called “Fair Elections Act” of 2014), the Party feeds the fringe.  Note the rhetoric: since the protest gained steam, Conservatives – notably the just jettisoned leader Erin O’Toole – have declared that “Canada is deeply divided” (thus echoing voices in America) and that “we must listen to all sides” (presumably that means, for example, the 10 percent unvaccinated in my province, British Columbia, where the convoy started).[1]  Thanks to the truckers’ protests now at Parliament Hill, residents of downtown Ottawa have been hearing the cacophony of blaring air horns for days and sleepless nights.  Given these noise violations, is this really a “peaceful” demonstration? Whose rights are being infringed upon, really?

Everyone in this free country has a right to protest.  But when equipped with transport rigs spouting diesel fumes in the nation's capital? Is this not the last hurrah of the chuck wagon mentality one finds in American westerns?  Is it a circling of the wagons against the rhetoric of postcolonialism? The Conservative Party seems to think that if truckers drape themselves with the Canadian flag that they must be “patriots”.  Never mind the presence of Confederate flags or the swastika. Apparently, this is only the fringe of the fringe, for whom excuses can be made, even by Canada’s so-called ‘National Newspaper’, the Globe and Mail in an editorial.  Never mind, as well, that the 10 million dollar crowdfunding donations through GoFundMe are at least in part derived from outside of Canada, including the United States, UK, Australia and Poland.  Indeed, Ottawa police have already spoken of a “significant element from the U.S. that has been involved in the funding, the organizing and the demonstrating.” Are Americans wrapping themselves up in the Canadian flag to escape detection as agents provocateurs?

On the other hand, our very own Conservative Party seems to emulate things American.  One commentator on CBC Radio’s The Current evoked the memory of Edmund Burke (everybody’s favourite conservative, even though he was a Whig – who crossed the floor), repeating the trope of how the Irish thinker attacked the French Revolution, but supported, to some degree, aspects of the American one, yet not war. (He also recognized the Atlantic Ocean as a barrier to Empire).[2] Clearly, Canada’s Conservative ‘movement’, such as it is, has forgotten its Loyalist pioneers, those faithful the Crown, who moved north of the border in droves in the wake of 1776.  Instead, Canadian anti-vaxxers and fellow Conservatives are today fighting for the American Revolution all over again.  Gone are the ‘organic’ Tories, figures like Benjamin Disraeli (whose surname speaks volumes), England’s Prime Minister when Sir John A. Macdonald established Canadian Confederation. Replaced by a populist stream, Harper’s mean-spirited tendencies towards a Hobbesian ‘Leviathan’ (with its implicit appeal to modernist ‘mass’ man) have met up with the likes of “buck-a-beer” Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who, wisely - for once - called this protest an “occupation”.  But some of Canada’s parliamentarians – and those in the media - have failed to stem the effects of pandering to the (mostly white) truck drivers who do not constitute the public interest by blocking Ottawa streets, intimidating or harassing pedestrians (masked or otherwise), forcing the closure of stores and shopping precincts, or defecating in snowbanks. 

That the protestors are white, as I mentioned, does not in - and of - itself constitute racism or racist behaviour (if your conscience can ignore the aforementioned activity which clearly is), but some Conservatives, by giving voice to this group, by uniting their political forces behind toxic anti-vax theology, only further distance the party from any thoughts of “diversity”.  They are not in any way broadening their electoral base towards the many in the middle.  Rather, they are only looking further to the Right, perhaps in a bid to squeeze out Maxime Bernier, former Conservative Party leadership contender, now the main force behind the People’s Party of Canada.  Diversity is actually a Romantic notion, and one finds it in the epigraph to John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), where Wilhelm von Humboldt is quoted at the beginning of this famous Essay.[3]  The genius of Romanticism is that it allows for both Liberal and Conservative thought: diversity can be liberal and conservative in imagination.  Picture in your mind a garden of many different flowers, and you have, at once, a variety of species blended into an organic setting.  Is not bio-diversity also considered a matter of self-preservation?  If progress exists, is it not vested in diverging from mono-mania? By rejecting these thoughts, and by courting an uprooted populist sameness, the Conservative Party of Canada commits itself to the sidelines of political opposition in Canada for the coming decade.

News flash: the protesters no longer have access to their GoFundMe monies, which must be returned or donated elsewhere to a charity.  The moral of my story: no protest is above the law, even if some of the mainstream media – and political class (with no class) – endorse it, or parts thereof.  Members of the Conservative Party gave this thing legs: time for it, too, to face consequences.

 

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[1] In the City of Vancouver, according to Mayor Kennedy Stewart, 95 percent of the population is vaccinated.

[2] David Bromwich, The Intellectual Life of Edmund Burke: From the Sublime and Beautiful to American Independence (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press/Belknap: 2014), p. 243.

[3] The epigraph reads (from Spheres and Duties of Government): “The grand, leading principle towards which every argument unfolded in these pages directly converges to the absolute and essential importance of human development in its richest diversity.”  See also the Introduction to J.S. Mill, On Liberty and other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. vii-xxvi.