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. 

Mill on Liberty: speaking on the ‘freedom convoy’ of anti-vaxxers (selections)

The object of this essay is to assert one very simple principle, as entitled to govern absolutely the dealings of society with the individual in the way of compulsion and control, whether the means used be physical force in the form of legal penalties or the moral coercion of public opinion.  That principle is that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.  That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.  He cannot rightfully be compelled to do or forbear because it will be better for him to do so, because it will make him happier, because, in the opinion of others, to do so would be wise or even right.  These are good reasons for remonstrating with him, or reasoning with him, or persuading him, or entreating him, but not for compelling him or visiting him with any evil in case he do otherwise.  To justify that, the conduct from which it is desired to deter him must be calculated to produce evil to someone else.  The only part of the conduct for which he is amenable to society is that which concerns others.  In the part which merely concerns himself, his independence is, of right, absolute.  Over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign.[1]

***

What, then, is the rightful limit to the sovereignty of the individual over himself?  Where does the authority of society begin?  How much of human life should be assigned to individuality, and how much to society?

Each will receive its proper share if each has that which more particularly concerns it.  To individuality should belong the part of life in which it is chiefly the individual that is interested; to society, the part which chiefly interest society.

Though society is not founded on a contract, and though no good purpose is answered by inventing a contract in order to deduce social obligations from it, everyone who receives the protection of society owes a return for the benefit, and the fact of living in society renders it indispensable that each should be bound to observe a certain line of conduct towards the rest.  This conduct consists, first, in not injuring the interests of one another, or rather certain interests which, either by express legal provision or by tacit understanding, ought to be considered as rights; and secondly, in each person’s bearing his share (to be fixed on some equitable principle) of the labours and sacrifices incurred for defending the society or its members from injury or molestation.  These conditions society is justified in enforcing at all costs to those who endeavor to withhold fulfillment.  Nor is this all that society may do.  The acts of an individual may be hurtful to others or wanting in due consideration for their welfare, without going to the length of violating their constitutional rights.  The offender may be justly punished by opinion, though not by law.  As soon as any part of a person’s conduct affects prejudicially the interests of others, society has jurisdiction over it, and the question whether the general welfare will or will not be promoted by interfering with it becomes open to discussion.  But there is no room for entertaining any such question when a person’s conduct affects the interests of no person besides himself, or needs not affect them unless they like (all the persons concerned being of full age and the ordinary amount of understanding).  In all such cases, there should be perfect freedom, legal and social, to do the action and stand the consequences.[2]

***

Whenever, in short, there is definite damage, or definite risk of damage, either to an individual or to the public, the case is taken out of the province of liberty and placed in that of morality or law.[3]

 

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

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[1] John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Toronto: Penguin, 1985), pp. 68, 69. Emphasis added.  See Chapter I.

[2] Ibid., pp. 141,142.  See the beginning of Chapter IV.

[3] Ibid., p. 149.  Chapter IV.

Tagore on Nationalism in India

Once again I draw your attention to the difficulties India has had to encounter and her struggle to overcome them. Her problem was the problem of the world in miniature. India is too vast in its area and too diverse in its races. It is many countries packed in one geographical receptacle. It is just the opposite of what Europe truly is, namely, one country made into many. Thus Europe in its culture and growth has had the advantage of the strength of the many as well as the strength of the one. India, on the contrary, being naturally many, yet adventitiously one, has all along suffered from the looseness of its diversity and the feebleness of its unity. A true unity is like a round globe, it rolls on, carrying its burden easily; but diversity is a many-cornered thing which has to be dragged and pushed with all force. Be it said to the credit of India that this diversity was not her own creation; she has had to accept it as a fact from the beginning of her history. In America and Australia, Europe has simplified her problem by almost exterminating the original population. Even in the present age this spirit of extermination is making itself manifest, in the inhospitable shutting out of aliens, by those who themselves were aliens in the lands they now occupy. But India tolerated difference of races from the first, and that spirit of toleration has acted all through her history.

Her caste system is the outcome of this spirit of toleration. For India has all along been trying experiments in evolving a social unity within which all the different peoples could be held together, while fully enjoying the freedom of maintaining their own differences. The tie has been as loose as possible, yet as close as the circumstances permitted. This has produced something like a United States of a social federation, whose common name is Hinduism.

India had felt that diversity of races there must be and should be, whatever may be its drawback, and you can never coerce nature into your narrow limits of convenience without paying one day very dearly for it. In this India was right; but what she failed to realize was that in human beings differences are not like the physical barriers of mountains, fixed for ever—they are fluid with life's flow, they are changing their courses and their shapes and volume.

Therefore in her caste regulations India recognized differences, but not the mutability which is the law of life. In trying to avoid collisions she set up boundaries of immovable walls, thus giving to her numerous races the negative benefit of peace and order but not the positive opportunity of expansion and movement. She accepted nature where it produces diversity, but ignored it where it uses that diversity for its world-game of infinite permutations and combinations. She treated life in all truth where it is manifold, but insulted it where it is ever moving. Therefore Life departed from her social system and in its place she is worshipping with all ceremony the magnificent cage of countless compartments that she has manufactured….

However, what Western observers fail to discern is that in her caste system India in all seriousness accepted her responsibility to solve the race problem in such a manner as to avoid all friction, and yet to afford each race freedom within its boundaries. Let us admit India has not in this achieved a full measure of success. But this you must also concede, that the West, being more favourably situated as to homogeneity of races, has never given her attention to this problem, and whenever confronted with it she has tried to make it easy by ignoring it altogether. And this is the source of her anti-Asiatic agitations for depriving aliens of their right to earn their honest living on these shores. In most of your colonies you only admit them on condition of their accepting the menial position of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Either you shut your doors against the aliens or reduce them into slavery. And this is your solution of the problem of race-conflict. Whatever may be its merits you will have to admit that it does not spring from the higher impulses of civilization, but from the lower passions of greed and hatred. 

You say this is human nature—and India also thought she knew human nature when she strongly barricaded her race distinctions by the fixed barriers of social gradations. But we have found out to our cost that human nature is not what it seems, but what it is in truth; which is in its infinite possibilities. And when we in our blindness insult humanity for its ragged appearance it sheds its disguise to disclose to us that we have insulted our God. The degradation which we cast upon others in our pride or self-interest degrades our own humanity—and this is the punishment which is most terrible, because we do not detect it till it is too late.[1]

Tagore, Nationalism (1917)

 

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[1] Rabindranath Tagore, Nationalism (New York: MacMillan, 1918), pp. 114-119. First published in 1917.  Available as a Project Gutenberg eBook from which the above text is excerpted.  Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.  He was the first non-European to win a Nobel Prize.