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.

About That Convoy ... Protest ... Whatever

As we speak a bunch of anti-mask/vaxx/generally pissed off with govt types are clogging things up in Ottawa. 

Frankly, this is a bunch of loudmouth idiots who have fallen down the rabbit hole of QAnon / MAGA conspiracy thinking egged on by a bunch of grifters who have managed to hoover up a considerable amount of money. 

What these people "think" is going on with the pandemic is so far removed from any reality that it renders their ideas irrelevant. They seem to think that governments can "just wave the pandemic away". Of course, no virus pays attention to the politics of the day - and the money behind this protest know that too. 

At the end of the day, this is a test run of the next iteration of the "Ragey Right" that started with the emergence of the Tea Party in the US. I see these people as little different than Hitler's so-called "brownshirts" in the 1930s. Loud, violent, and basically willing to stoop towards violence in order to intimidate the rest of the country into quiet compliance with them.  

The Tea Party fizzled out in the US - becoming a rump faction within the GOP (although like the SoCons in the CPC, it's an influential rump). The most recent incarnation in the US is the MAGA thing, which ultimately culminated in the Jan 6, 2021 insurrection. The two "convoy protests" in Canada have been more oriented around perfecting the money side of the picture.  

This isn't going away, but make no mistake about how it is being driven by the same apparatus that drives Rebel Media, CPC fundraising, and so on. It's all about getting people upset enough that they will donate money to it, regardless of whether that money actually goes to the "outrage issue of the day" or not. 

Kenney Is On The Right Track?

So, according to Ken Boessenkool,  we should congratulate Jason Kenney for "being on the right track".

I get it - Ken's a conservative organizer, and he's going to think that Klein's tenure was some kind of high point.  It wasn't, and I think we all know that - we've spent that 15 odd years since Klein stepped down cleaning up the mess that he made.  There's a whole lot more to good government than just "balancing" the fiscal books.  

So, what does he think Kenney is winning on? 

Ah yes ... the old conservative saw about "cutting spending". In Alberta politics especially, this is held as some kind truism.  The government is always "wasting money", or "we're spending too much".  

The logic usually goes something along the lines of "OMG, govt spending is increasing at a rate greater than inflation!" (or inflation plus population growth ... or whatever other axis you want to use). Therefore, the automatic assumption is that we are spending too much. The problem with this logic exists in multiple axis of consideration that our conservative friends almost never seem to address in their arguments. 

For example, the most basic of business case analyses - cost / benefit - is almost never present. In pure business terms of course, cost/benefit analysis is purely a matter of $.  If I spend $X on a project, and it comes back with $Y in revenue, is Y > X.  (Yes - I'm simplifying here).  We don't even get that far with government spending analysis done by conservatives. 

When we talk about analyzing government programs, it's even more complex.  The costs and benefits of any program may well not be easily measured. For example, lets look at what is commonly called welfare.  It looks like a straight up cost sink. The government puts $X into the program, and gets nothing back out, right?  Wrong. That $X put into the program has impacts all over the place. It reduces homelessness, it reduces petty crime (B&E, shoplifting, etc) because recipients are no longer desperate for the basic resources to survive, it reduces healthcare costs because mysteriously, people actually have the money needed to eat, so they aren't showing up at emergency with conditions exacerbated by malnutrition, etc. 

The benefits of government spending are hard to quantify sometimes.  That doesn't mean we shouldn't do so.  

The value of a funded and functional healthcare system vastly outweighs the costs - even when it is a large proportion of the government's spending. People who aren't worried about whether they can afford to get sick or not are more willing to take economic chances - like starting a new business.  Businesses benefit because suddenly they don't have to provide hugely expensive healthcare insurance plans for their staff (call that one an undeclared payroll tax). Large scale investment also looks at whether people are willing to move to a place - and healthcare is near the top of most people's agendas - for good reason. Likewise, a funded and functional education system is hugely important, and should not be used as a political football as Kenney has done in Alberta. The benefits vastly outweigh the costs, but those benefits are 20 years down the road. 

Needless to say, I have never seen a conservative talk about these benefits in any kind of reasonable way, or what we may be giving up by focusing on "balanced budgets".  

The other side of that same coin is the revenue picture. Alberta's revenue picture has been abysmal since before Klein. Our governments have insisted that a PST or HST is absolutely off the table, and there are frequent bragging sessions about having the lowest tax rates in the country. They paper the fiscal holes with one-time royalty dollars that should be flowing into the Heritage Savings Trust Fund.  (Getty quit putting money in there in the 80s).  Again, it's cheap populist politics in Alberta to say that raising taxes is unnecessary - just tighten the belt a bit further. Conservative politicians seem utterly oblivious to the fact that the revenue side of the picture also needs to be considered, and it is not reasonable to hold the line at unrealistically low tax rates. 

So, will Mr. Kenney's polling fortunes improve on a wave of "good economic news"?  Probably.  But nobody should be fooled into thinking that he is in any way capable of, or willing to, understand the value of government spending.  

Bill C4 - Conversion Therapy Passed - Now What?

To my surprise, Bill C4 made it through parliament in record time.  Personally, I think this is a good thing.  However, I also know that Social Conservatives and Gender Critical factions will ally with each other to challenge the legislation in the courts.  

I suspect there was an agreement drawn up in the CPC caucus to allow the bill through with a minimal amount of fuss because they have finally figured out that pushing attitudes that go back to the 1950s probably isn't going over well with Canadian voters.  In a minority parliament, the last thing a party that has lost 3 elections in succession wants is to be tainted again with various members engaging in bozo eruption moments over a hobby horse issue.  

However, let's put political strategy aside and take a look at the likely avenues of attack that will be used in the courts to argue that Bill C-4 is either too broad, or overly intrusive into the lives of Canadians.  

Conversion Therapy and Affirmative Therapy

Now that the LPC government has tabled Bill C-4, it's probably a good time to examine the two terms that are inevitably going to be argued about the most with this legislation.  Specifically, I want to talk about the terms "Conversion Therapy" and "Affirmative Therapy".  

I will be doing this primarily through the lens of mental health therapy, although in the coming debate over Bill C-4, you can expect that to get conflated with medical interventions such as surgeries or hormone therapies.  The relationship between mental health and medical interventions is a separate matter that will be addressed in another article. 

There Is No Such Thing As A "True Conservative"

In his column for yesterday's National Post, John Robson opines that the problems that Jason Kenney and Erin O'Toole are having with the electorate are because they aren't being "Real Conservatives" (or "Conservative Enough").  

No, Mr. Robson, that isn't it at all. Perhaps it's escaped your notice in the last couple of decades, but conservatism has changed, and the evidence of that change exists in many places. The selection of leaders like Kenney, Scheer, and O'Toole are evidence of that change. The change started decades ago, and it solidified when Harper engineered his take-over of the PCs and Canadian Alliance parties to form the current CPC.

Yet, every time a conservative runs headlong into the reality that they aren't winning, writers like Mr. Robson start opining that it's really because the politician isn't "a true conservative".  I don't know what this "true conservative" looks like, and frankly I suspect that such an animal doesn't really exist. 

Why do I say this? Because the claim itself rests upon a 'No True Scotsman' fallacy. Writers who make this claim are blinding themselves to the reality that is unfolding around them. Today's Conservatism is no longer some semi-idealized version of a politics that was opined into existence in the 19th century. It has changed.

Conservatives chose to rally around Harper, Kenney, Ford, and more recently O'Toole ... and frankly voters are turning their backs on this brand of populist, deceitful conservatism for good reason.  

Kenney has been sliding in the polls for at least the last year. Why? Because once in power he showed us who he really is with arrogance, condescension, and lies. He has earned the ire of voters in Alberta for a bunch of reasons - but he is very much the face of today's populist conservatism. 

O'Toole came out swinging in the election, and in some ways did far better than expected.  But - and it's a big but - he lost ground in the key province of Ontario. Since losing to Trudeau in 2015, the CPC has all but undone the gains made in Ontario that helped the party win in 2006. What was it that caused them to lose in 2015? Harper dropping the veil and showing us the ugly side of the CPC - whether that was an elitist view of citizenship, or the overt racism of the campaign (Old Stock Canadians, Barbaric Cultural Practices Hotline, etc.).  

You see, these, are the values that conservatism has come to hold in Canada. Language like "Traditional Social Values" no longer means what guys like Robson seem to think it does.  It has become code-speak for a miserable combination of elitism and bigotry drawn from the worst elements of the 19th century British Empire. Fiscal probity, something conservatives have long claimed to be the natural proponents of, has become coded language for letting the wealthy off from paying their fair share towards the nation, and throws in a side helping of corporate greed.  

Conservatism today isn't what Robson thinks it is, and the fix isn't for "Kenney and O'Toole to act more like conservatives" - they are what conservatism has become. 

Figure out what conservatism should be, and find a way to that place. Don't insult Canadians' intelligence by telling us that the worst leaders of the movement "just need to act better".  The movement needs to change. 

Prognostications On The War In The UCP

 The UCP in Alberta is at war with itself, and the war has broken into the open just before their Annual General Meeting (AGM).  

What’s the fight over? No less than Jason Kenney himself. 

Make no mistake about it, the UCP was formed to be a vehicle for Kenney to ride to power and control the province with. For that party to now be looking seriously at kicking Kenney to the curb is somewhat astonishing, but here we are. As of yesterday, some 22 Riding Associations (RA) had signed on to a letter demanding a leadership review ASAP, and more are expected to follow suit, a number which meets the threshold in the Party Constitution to force the matter.  

What are Kenney’s options? 

I see a handful of scenarios for Kenney: 

Scenario 1:  He Tries To Hang On

Kenney sees himself as an invincible campaigner.  It’s possible that he thinks he holds enough cards that he can persuade the bulk of the active party membership to endorse his leadership.  This would, in some ways, be the best possible path for Kenney’s public image - if he can survive a leadership review at this time, he comes out looking like a much more dangerous foe to his opponents both within the party and outside of it.   

Scenario 2:  The Leadership Review Happens, Kenney Is Booted

More likely, given what we’ve seen so far, is that enough of the party is either pissed off about “COVID Restrictions” (rural ridings), or are panicking about the upcoming 2023 election (urban ridings), that Kenney comes to be seen as a liability.  

 With Brian Jean once again stalking around the leadership discussion, one might imagine that this is a far more likely outcome for a governing party whose polling numbers are at all-time lows, and whose leader is increasingly seen as a small, petulant man unwilling to do the right things by anyone except his own interests. 

Scenario 3:  An Agreement With Party Brass

Kenney might make an agreement with party brass to hang on until just before the planned spring leadership review. If he doesn’t think he can win that with a sufficient fraction of the party support, then he “goes for a walk in the snow” and announces his retirement from Alberta politics. 

Given Kenney’s ego, this scenario seems unlikely, but it might occur if Party Brass initiates it and manages to convince Kenney to do something that will allow the party to continue on afterwards. 

Scenario 4:  Nuclear Option

Kenney’s last option is basically “nuclear”.  He walks to the Lieutenant Governor’s residence, and asks for the dissolution of the legislature, triggering an immediate election. 

He has already threatened to do this to keep an increasingly unruly caucus in line, and doing it right now would likely blow the party apart. He knows he would lose the election, but this would be an act of political revenge on those who dared oppose him. Remember, this party was built around Kenney in the first place, and I suspect he sees it very much as “his party”.  That makes it quite likely that he’ll be willing to play the “if I can’t have it, nobody can” card.  

The consequences would be grim for the party, because Kenney would likely as not refuse to sign the nomination papers for anyone who has dared challenge him, forcing them to run as independents or not run at all. 

It would put the party itself in a “come from behind” situation, and one that given current polling would practically hand the election to the NDP.  

Either way, the next few days will be very interesting, as Kenney will be fighting for his political life, and frankly may well see it as “I’ve got nothing to lose”. 

Outcomes

The first 3 scenarios don’t trigger anything immediate for Albertans.  At most we get a sideshow spectacle as the UCP attempts to hold itself together during a leadership race.  Now, I don’t think the UCP is truly “united” - mostly because it is made up of the same constituencies as the Federal CPC, and unlike Harper, Kenney lacks the leadership skills and character needed to “bring them together” and foster cooperation.  Part of that arises from being so clearly a member of the SoCon faction - anything he does there is subject to accusations within the party that he’s favouring that faction over others. That means a snap leadership race is probably going to inflame divisions, not heal them.  

The last scenario is by far the “bloodiest” politically.  It will blow the conservative movement in Alberta apart and set it back for at least a decade electorally.  The UCP is unlikely to survive a snap election call.  Even if Kenney believes he can win the vote, the party won’t survive. Voters would rightly look at this as a cynical political maneuver by Kenney, and likely as not would punish him at the ballot box.  New candidates that are unknowns because he refused to sign nomination papers for incumbents won’t be easily elected, no matter how “amazing” a campaign Kenney executes - especially in urban Alberta, where the level of disaffection has clearly hit party support the hardest. 

The UCP would likely fracture into 3 major subgroups:  urban conservatives (mostly fiscal hawks, I suspect), rural conservatives (predominantly libertarian), and social conservatives. If Kenney thinks that he’s got a problem “herding cats” now, it’s nothing on what will happen when those 3 groups start squabbling over control of the UCP corpse.  

What Happens To Kenney? 

Quite frankly, I think Kenney’s days as an elected politician are over.  He won’t return to elected politics for at least 2 full election cycles - his brand is tarnished by a series of avoidable, unnecessary mistakes - ranging from simply being petulant and petty with the Federal government to being seen as unlikeable and arrogant.  He might be a “tireless campaigner”, but his ability to portray himself as “oh so reasonable” has been badly damaged in voters’ minds both provincially and federally. 

Expect to see a defeated Jason Kenney join Harper and Associates, becoming an “advisor” to whoever replaces Erin O’Toole in Ottawa.