A Few Thoughts On The "Freedom Convoy" Protests

I'm not going to spend a great deal of time reviewing the chronology and activities of this "protest" - it's all been documented to death in the media.  What I want to do today is consider what this event really is/was about.  

As with the "Yellow Vest Convoy" a couple of years ago, this started out with a small band of loudmouth malcontents making a fuss over something they either didn't understand, or couldn't be bothered to understand. As their rhetoric escalated, the inevitable collection of hangers-on and opportunists popped up and started to take their places in the choir.

In this case, we got a not-so-delightful collection of really terrible people joining the protest group, and they got even worse quite quickly. By the time the first waves of the Convoy were leaving their home provinces, it was quite clear that various white supremacist groups had joined the convoy, and the rhetoric was shifting from ugly to violent. 

At the outset, I think most people expected a noisy weekend in Ottawa, which would then disperse relatively quietly.  Had that actually been what happened, I think most Canadians would shrug and get on with their lives. 

That isn't what happened. Instead, the "protestors" dug in, and basically occupied downtown Ottawa.  They set up several supply and logistics camps and continued their protest at the expense of the citizens of Ottawa who live and work in the downtown. The demands morphed. Yes, there was a contingent yammering on about vaccines and mandates, but some much uglier stuff started emerging. Racists started adding their twist to the messaging, people were being harassed for wearing masks in public places, the Prime Minister was threatened, and so on.

In parallel with this shift, there are several concerning developments that emerged, and they need to be paid close attention to. 

First is the money supporting the convoy.  Fundraisers on both GoFundMe, and GiveSendGo, both racked up donations in the $10M range.  That's an astonishing amount of money to raise in less than a month for an event taking place in Canada. Even the Conservative Party of Canada's annual fundraising machine only raises that amount every 3 months (and they have what is widely acknowledged to be one of the most effective fundraising machines in Canada).  For a single fundraiser to raise that kind of money in less than a month is both shocking and suspicious. Eventually, it came out that a lot of money had flowed into those fundraisers from the US and elsewhere abroad. 

Then the organizers let drop that they were also receiving significant funds via cryptocurrency transfers.  The amounts involved there are not known to the public, but that's in part because at this point cryptocurrency remains what amounts to an unregulated financial instrument, and there is no requirement for reporting and monitoring it the way that we track other financial transactions. 

The financing of this "protest" is a giant red flag. There are clearly actors at play here who are engaging directly. Politely, this is 'foreign interference' - and we need to understand the scope, intent, and actors involved. 

The second aspect of this "protest" is the pivot from "protesting vaccine mandates" to various occupation tactics:  ranging from blockading major border crossings to so-called "bear hug" demonstrations like slow-rolling through major transportation thoroughfares in cities like Calgary. These are all well coordinated, clearly well funded, events. They are also events which are being used to test out tactics which will be used later to intimidate people. 

Third in my list is the actions of various politicians in giving this "protest" air.  In particular, we have numerous high profile CPC politicians meeting with the "protestors", as well as giving the entire enterprise profile in their social media feeds. Whether it has been Pierre Poilievre's full throated support of the "truckers", or numerous other MPs wandering amongst the protesters handing out coffee and having their pictures taken with swastikas in the background, there can be no question that the federal conservatives have supported this from the beginning.  

The conservative premiers have all, without exception, dutifully done exactly nothing to curb these demonstrations until they became a potential political liability. Jason Kenney has been particularly awful in dog-whistling to the protestors at the same time as he tries desperately to save his political hide in a leadership review later this spring.  Then we get Ford, who sat on both hands quite firmly until blockades at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor threatened to bring the auto industry to its knees.  Moe in Saskatchewan has been madly trying to keep up with Kenney's pandering, delivering inconsistent to awful messaging, and so on. 

To be abundantly clear, our conservative politicians have seen this as a "political opportunity", with statements as blatant as Candice Bergen's comments to former CPC leader O'Toole: "Let's make it Trudeau's problem".  

This isn't an accident.  This is the conservatives playing stupid games - and the people who pay the price for it will be you and I. It has long been mused that "If conservatives decide they can't win at the ballot box, they will not abandon conservatism, they will abandon democracy". The movement itself has decided that the time to abandon democracy has come, and what is happening in Canada right now stems from the Jan 6, 2021 assault on the US legislature.  

I don't know if you remember, but the "Jan 6" attack on the legislature also was going to have parallel attacks on various state legislatures. Those kind of fizzled out and didn't really happen, but they form a basis for what we are now experiencing in Canada.  

The main protest formed a beachhead at the Federal Parliament, and then dug in and created a couple of base camps that serve out coordination and logistics support.  From there, protestors were able to make themselves very hard to remove from Ottawa without actual military intervention as well as to use various social media networks to coordinate with groups elsewhere and attack the economy by blockading key border crossings.

Jan 6 attempted a simple, direct assault on the legislature - it failed in its stated goal, but it did show that it was relatively easy to rile up a big enough mob to overwhelm normal security measures. The occupation of Ottawa leveraged that success, and used it to set up an encampment from which logistics and communications could be executed. They used that to test numerous tactics - blockading borders, flooding 911 call systems, etc.  

It's the attack on the economy that's the major expansion of tactics here. In the past, as political movements shift from politics to terrorism, they have tended to engage in tactics such as bombing, but that doesn't do much more than create a protracted violent conflict. However, in today's world, it's a far more effective tactic to block the borders up, in part because the economies of Canada and the USA are so intertwined.  Make no mistake - this tactic will be used again. 

The particular failure of civil authorities - in particular the police - to shut these "protests" down after their first weekend is an issue that needs to be examined in much more depth. As is the apparent complicity between various conservative premiers and these protestors. While political self-interest is always a part of the calculations, the responsibility of politicians is not merely to those that they agree with, but to the well-being of all. The right to protest does not grant anyone the unfettered right to fuck up other people's lives for an extended period of time. 

There are already those who argue that this represents the rise of a "police state", where the police themselves decide what they are (or are not) willing to do. There is merit to this perspective, but I think it's far more important to acknowledge the similarities with the rise of fascist governments in 1930s Europe. The parallels are disturbing to say the least, frightening in many other dimensions. 

The Federal Government needs to launch a full scale investigation into these events.  That investigation has to look not only at the actions of the protestors, but it must pull back the curtain on the backers as well.  The full capabilities of CSIS/CSEC to track things through the cybersphere will be essential, as will collaboration with aligned agencies in the US, UK, Australia and elsewhere. It's easy to point at Putin and see him has the central puppet master, but I think at this stage we need to figure out the shape of the network that is actually doing things. That will lead us, almost inevitably to numerous very powerful, wealthy people who control things like newspapers and other media.  We must be prepared for that. 

We cannot simply look at this as "just a protest".  It isn't, and it never was. This has been a coordinated, funded attack on Canada, and Canada's government. It cannot be ignored.