A Sidebar On Programming Languages

I’ve been around software a good long time now. Yesterday, I came across the following tirade about C that I want to address a few things about.  

“C Isn’t A Programming Language Any More”

I’m not going to go through the details of the author’s complaints and attempt to rebut them because there are several very fundamental issues in the assumptions being made that are more about the realities of software and hardware as it has evolved over the last <mumble> years. 

First, the headline itself annoys me, because it misses the point entirely.  C remains a programming language - and it has all of the hallmarks of one:  a defined syntax, semantics, and expected behaviours. C isn’t defined by the presence or absence of specific libraries, although a (more or less) standardized set of libraries eventually did evolve, and by the 1980s there was a fairly well defined “C Standard Library”.  

You can have all the complaints you want about the C libraries as they have evolved, but none of those complaints change the validity of C as a programming language. Most of the complaints about C in the article really focus on two areas:  the evolution of fundamental types in C, and the state of the C libraries. 

I want to point a few things out here. C has been around a long time, and its origins are actually quite specialized. It was created as the language to write what would become the first version of the UNIX operating system in. 

This fact is important.  At its core, C is a systems programming language.  It’s meant to be “one step above the hardware”, and it’s really damn good at it. The semantics of the first versions of C were tightly coupled to the hardware architecture that was emerging at Digital Equipment Corporation - and if you want to understand that, spend a little quality time learning about the PDP-11, an architecture that influenced processor design to this day.  (* For the yabbut crowd, I’m fully aware that the first version of UNIX was written for a PDP-10 - but that’s a story for another day *)

All of that takes place in the mid-late 1960s. 

Yes, a lot of C back then had “Implementation Dependent” in the definition from the outset - because actual implementations of C had to account for all sorts of very specific processor quirks - oddball word sizes - the idea of 8/16/32/64 bit words being standard is pretty recent -  different memory hardware architectures, and so on. So, C was always pretty loosely defined so that someone making a C compiler for a given processor could legitimately do so and have a reasonable expectation of being able to bend the core parts so that it worked for their needs. 

By the time ANSI started to define a standard for C in the 1980s, most processors were using 8/16/32 bit word sizes, and that got baked into the first ANSI standards. 64 bit designs were a fair ways off, so they sort of waved their hands at the subject and said “yeah, here’s a path to 64 bit types”, but it wasn’t particularly clear, and wouldn’t be until the emergence of the DEC Alpha chip in the 90s.  Even then, the DEC version of C left it a bit loose, and things didn’t really settle down until AMD released its 64 bit extension to the Intel architecture. 

Then there are the runtime libraries. The so-called Application Binary Interface (ABI).  The evolution of those is even more complex - in part because they spawned out of the development of UNIX, and UNIX needs drove them for decades.  Early ports of the standard libraries to MS-DOS and Windows were haphazard affairs at best, and then there were Microsoft’s own attempts to create their own versions (anyone else remember WinSock? *shudders*).  

Throughout time, the various libraries have changed and evolved, been ported across an enormous number of platforms - both hardware and software. That’s damned hard work to do, and inevitably introduces variation and complexity. I remember in the 90s porting a major application suite to HP-UX, and discovering that HP had badly botched their memory management infrastructure. Likewise, the release of Solaris in the mid-late 90s was a boondoggle of screwed up implementation issues in some very fundamental libraries. 

Bear in mind, both HP and Sun had excellent teams of developers working on their platform, and they still released some utterly appalling bugs into the wild. Porting complex software across platforms is damned hard work, and it’s even harder when you start playing around with changing fundamentals of the hardware architecture like machine word size. 

For better or worse, the “standard libraries” associated with C and UNIX have evolved over time, and sometimes that evolution has been messy (as it is in nature …).  There are parts of things that are ugly, and they probably could do with a major cleanup.  But undertaking such a cleanup isn’t easy either. You have to be willing to say what you’re willing to shed support for, and you have to be prepared to be ruthless when doing so.  

Right now, we live in an era where “UNIX-like” systems architectures running on Intel processors are commonplace.  But even that is changing, with the dominance of ARM architecture in mobile devices (and creeping into desktops as well with Apple’s A and M series system chips).  

But, coming back to the complaints of the article I mentioned previously:  C still remains a programming language regardless of the state of the libraries.  That doesn’t change because the definition of the language is separate from the libraries.  C remains what it always has been - a relatively low level language intended for writing operating systems. It was never intended as a language for writing applications in.

Has the complexity of the libraries escalated over time?  Yes - of course it has.  Is that painful in places?  Yup. Of course it is.  I spent much of my software career migrating a major chunk of software across different OS platforms - it’s hard work.  Yes, it’s frustrating at times when functionality changes, or when you discover that what you expected things to do isn’t what they actually do.  Get over it - we’re a long ways from having programming languages that are completely independent of the hardware and OS platforms - if that’s even possible.  

I suspect that you won’t get a “clean break” re-design anytime soon.  Even if an astoundingly perfect new hardware architecture were to emerge tomorrow, and require huge changes to actually work, the fact remains that the existing libraries still form a foundation of expectations that programmers are used to, and likely as not, that new chip would soon find the current libraries ported to it.  Inertia is a hell of a thing. 

Pierre’s Libertarian Economy

So, putative CPC leadership front runner Pierre Poilievre wants to rejig our economy and monetary policy to use cryptocurrency. In Poilievre’s mind, central banks have “too much power”, and expanding the role of cryptocurrency and blockchain technology in our monetary system would start to break that power down. 

In particular, Poilievre keeps claiming that the quantitative easing policy was equivalent to “printing money” to finance the government.  This isn’t really the case, but it’s an easy, pithy thing for him to say, and a lot of people simply don’t understand enough about government finances and the interacting systems in the markets that are involved, so they will gravitate towards his simplistic explanations. 

The most recent arguments are that somehow cryptocurrency can be a hedge against inflation. There are certainly lots of cryptocurrency advocates that argue that in fact cryptocurrencies can act as a hedge against inflation.  However, we have to recognize that in order to act as a hedge against inflation, cryptocurrencies have to maintain a general valuation that is ahead of the pattern of inflation. The problem here is that cryptocurrencies have been incredibly volatile for the last several years, so the argument of any one cryptocurrency - or even all of them - being an effective hedge against inflation. 

Then we come to an interesting problem with crypto:  vulnerability. Because blockchains are highly distributed, they are highly vulnerable to hacks - and unfortunately, it can be weeks before somebody notices. In so many ways, crypto returns us to the proverbial days of the “Wild West”.  The potential for this to make crypto theft an avenue for attacking a rival nations’ finances really should make us all nervous. 

Lastly, we should take a long look at El Salvador’s experiment with making cryptocurrency part of its national money policy. To call it a disaster is a kind description. At this stage in the development of this technology, I don’t believe that there is sufficient expertise in policy or in securing the technology domain to make it safe to incorporate into the money policy of a nation. 

Chilling Words

Ever since Putin started massing troops along Ukraine’s eastern border, I’ve been wondering exactly what Russia’s objectives really were. 

Put aside the propaganda from Russia about Ukraine posing some kind of threat, and one is left wondering exactly what Putin’s goals are in invading Ukraine. Russia’s claim is that Ukraine hasn’t lived up to its commitments in the Minsk Protocol. I’m not really close enough to what’s going on to assess that, but that seems to me rather a contrived excuse at best. 

Putin’s foreign policy has long struck me as being filled with barbs intended to re-ignite the Cold War that formed much of Putin’s early career. He’s made a number of feints in that direction, the most blatant in my opinion was the annexation of Crimea, but there have been others. 

The military picture in this case bears paying attention to. As part of the former Soviet Union, Ukraine forms part of the border buffer between what was Soviet Russia and its arch rival Western Europe. It is entirely possible that Putin’s current goal is to re-establish the boundaries of the old Soviet Union by once again occupying a line of states that run from the Baltic Sea to the Black Sea, and operating them as puppet governments.

It’s possible, that those are his goals, but somehow I think it’s far more pernicious. On the news this morning, the Soviet Foreign Minister was quoted as saying “Russia won’t stop until the Western threat is removed” (I’m paraphrasing here - it was on the radio).  This is classic Cold War rhetoric - but it sheds a glimmer of light on Russia’s unstated goals here. 

It’s far more likely in my opinion that this is a “war of honour” in Putin’s mind. It’s the fight to re-establish Russia’s “greatness” on the world stage after the humiliation of the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1980s.  If this is true, then the only way this ends is when Putin either breaks NATO, or Putin’s ambitions exceed what his oligarch allies can support.

Alberta To Waste Taxpayer $ on Frivolous Lawsuit

So, yesterday, Jason Kenney announced that Alberta was going to sue the Federal Government for "trampling on provincial jurisdiction" with the Emergency Measures Act ... all of a few days after the Alberta government actually petitioned the Federal Government for assistance. 

Now, what I want to discuss here isn't the nitty-gritty of the legal position the province is taking, or how it's own actions undermine the credibility of their actions - that will be a discussion in a later post once the dust has settled, and I have some time to spend actually dissecting the arguments involved and the various bits of law.  Today I want to talk about the politics of Kenney's maneuvers and what a lot of this really represents. 

Kenney is a political creature first and foremost. In other words everything that he does is filtered through a political lens. Absolutely nothing he does is done "in good faith" - if he doesn't see a political gain in it, he won't do it. So why file a lawsuit that has little chance of success, and rationally makes little sense? 

Let's look at the political landscape that Kenney sees, and try to understand how his actions (or lack of them) are designed to play to a political audience. 

In Alberta, Kenney faces a dire political situation. His polling numbers - both personally and politically have tanked. He's being outpaced by the NDP that he defeated in 2019. Even in typically hardline conservative ridings, polling has shifted from "Deep Blue" (would vote conservative regardless) to "Swinging Orange". Discontent within both the caucus and the broader UCP as a whole has triggered a Leadership Review this spring.

For Kenney personally, the situation in Alberta looks quite dire. Federally, it's a somewhat different picture. The current Liberal government is a minority government, making it vulnerable to attack on any number of procedural tracks. The LPC's numbers are fairly flat, and the CPC is in the midst of a leadership campaign having just given Erin O'Toole the boot. Leadership campaigns are often good for a few points of support in polling. 

On top of that, with Canada emerging (hopefully) from a 2 year long pandemic, the government's finances are in a shambles, the world's economy is being hammered by supply chain issues and inflation at levels not seen in decades. To put it kindly, there is ample opportunity for the opposition parties to go after the governing Liberals.

So, what does the political calculation look like for Kenney? 

First, let's recognize that the Alberta Government took a very soft approach to the border blockade at Coutts - allowing a relatively small contingent of malcontents to close the border down for almost 3 full weeks, costing the Alberta and Canadian economy millions each day, and feeding inflation further - increasing the cost of goods and services to most Albertans.  Government MLAs showed up at the blockade (with seemingly no consequences afterwards), even when the government ministers were starting to actually condemn the blockade (after 2 weeks of utter silence...).  

There were also talk of secret "back channel" negotiations with the Alberta government about ending the blockade. Although the reality is that the blockade didn't end until the RCMP moved in, and arrested 13 of the protestors on weapons and conspiracy charges ... an event which happened on the same day that the Federal Government invoked the powers in the Emergency Measures Act.

For those that remember, Kenney made a big deal about "stopping blockades of critical infrastructure" with Bill 1 - The Critical Infrastructure Defence Act back in 2019/2020.  Yet, when it comes to this blockade of what is unquestionably a critical border crossing for Alberta, his government did nothing. They sat on their collective hands and did nothing except wag their fingers in the direction of the protestors.

On the Coutts blockade, it's pretty clear that Kenney saw this as an opportunity to poke the Federal Government in the eye with a stick. If he had any interest in doing his job as a Premier of a province, the lifespan of the Coutts blockade would have been measured in days not weeks. His thinking likely had far more to do with his hatred for Justin Trudeau and the Liberals than the affairs of Alberta. 

Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, Kenney's government has appeared to be balky and inconsistent. One day trying to appease the libertarian faction that refuses to believe there's a real threat even as hospitals fill up to the breaking point, the next being forced by public outcry to take action to mitigate things. Then lifting restrictions too soon, and triggering the next major wave of illness and death.  

Then there's the rebellion brewing throughout his party, with a significant percentage of riding associations pushing to move the leadership review up in the most recent dust-up in caucus.  Of course that was quelled by the party executive refusing to act on it, and more recently moving to displace uncooperative constituency association boards with more compliant leadership. 

Right now, Kenney is bleeding in the water politically.  His caucus is pissed off with him over numerous matters, and there have been several attempted revolts. The membership of his party is pissed off with him, and most importantly, the public at large is pissed off with him. 

Kenney is one of those people that has to have an adversary that he can attack. Without an adversary, he's lost and really quite unable to unify people around a cause, and tends to become his own adversary. This lawsuit gambit is nothing more than attempting to direct focus away from his agenda and mismanagement of Alberta. He's chosen his default opponent - a Prime Minister whom he hates reflexively because the conservatives have spent decades vilifying the name 'Trudeau'. 

The odds of this lawsuit going anywhere substantive, or even presenting an interesting opportunity to review Federal - Provincial jurisdiction in the midst of an emergency are practically nil. This is never going to be more than a prop that he uses at the lectern to quell the dissent in his party.  

On The Emergency Measures Act

If you've been paying attention at all, you are aware that the Federal Government has invoked the Emergency Measures Act to deal with the "Convoy". In this writer's opinion, this decision came a week late, and let me explain why. 

First, as much as the organizers have tried to make a carnival atmosphere around this protest - bouncy castles, hot tubs, bbq's etc to be found everywhere in the occupation zone, that is little more than a façade cover for what's really going on.  

Second, this is no ordinary protest where a bunch of people get pissed off about an issue and go and hold a rally on the steps of the Parliament buildings. Those protests have a pattern of organization and attendance that seldom lasts more than a few days at most. 

Structurally, there are several elements of this "protest" that indicate it is something else entirely. These range from blockading streets with heavy trucks to create what amounts to an occupation zone, setting up what are clearly military-styled bases for logistics and supply, coordinating actions with other units of occupation which had set themselves up at border crossings, and using sophisticated processes to raise funds to sustain the protest. 

These are major differentiators that show us that a level of organization and planning not normally associated with peaceful protest is at play here. I'm not saying that organization and planning don't happen with other protests.  It certainly does. However, it doesn't normally include this level of sophistication. 

We are already finding that there are connections among these protestors that are very concerning. Connections to white nationalist groups that want to start what they call a "race war" to found their bizarre idea of a white homeland (Vanilla ISIS anybody?).  Now, I'm not saying that the majority of the protestors _are_ connected to these various groups and movements.  I suspect most of them are what I would call "useful idiots" who got sucked into the emotional high of participating in something big.  They're being used by the core organizers as "cannon fodder".  They will bear the brunt of direct enforcement in the form of fines and criminal charges for harassment, property damage, and whatever other offences are happening within the occupation zone. 

However, let's not kid ourselves about the core organization of this "protest".  Their goal was never about "ending vaccine mandates" - that was merely a pretext.  The "MOU" that came out as they were driving into Ottawa made it quite clear that the goals had shifted to the overthrow of the government similar to that attempted in the Jan 6, 2021 assault on the US legislative buildings. 

Looking a little closer at this protest on the ground, it shows a disturbing shift. First, on the surface it looks a bit like the "Yellow Vest Convoy" a couple of years ago (complete with some of the same figures central to organizing it).  However, it also shifts in some very concerning ways.  First, while the the Yellow Vest Convoy certainly used heavy trucks as a symbol, this protest shifted to using them essentially as modern day siege warfare tools. Setting up logistics and supply bases at the edges of what became the occupation zone in downtown Ottawa is another hint of the emergence of a paramilitary/military mindset entering the picture. While they created a "carnival like" atmosphere in the occupation zone, they have actually engaged in a form of psychological warfare by using their vehicle horns to create a non-stop noise zone. 

Then there is quite a rogues gallery of people connected to organizing this "protest" (Seriously - read that article). They all hang out on the political far right, and move even further right when opportunity arises, but what's notable to me is the range of skillsets that they bring to the table. I do not think that is accidental, nor do I think that the connections to elected politicians are accidental. 

Then there is the funding for this thing. People started getting suspicious when the campaign on GoFundMe raised nearly $10M.  Let's be clear here - $10M is not chump change, and the GoFundMe campaign racked that up in weeks.  The quarterly donations to the CPC don't reach that kind of number even when they're doing well. When it shifted to a less well known Christian Evangelical fundraising site called "GiveSendGo", nearly $8M was raised in even less time. A data leak following a hack of GiveSendGo has made it possible to start building a picture of where this money is coming from.  Then the protest organization shifted to the much more shadowy world of cryptocurrency.  

Now ... does this sound like a "perfectly normal peaceful protest" to you?  Because to me, there's a ton of red flags going up here that say there are actors involved whose intentions are anything but. 

The Federal Government allowed this protest to go for a long time (3+ weeks) before moving to invoke emergency powers, and really this happened in large part because the US started pressuring over the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge (in particular) as a result of the economic impact of shutting down the automotive trade sector. 

Fair enough.  At 3 weeks in, there had been little to no attempt on the part of the conservative-led provinces to intervene in the protest and start to restore order. Premier Ford in Ontario eventually did declare a state of emergency, but even then refused to ask the Federal Government to assist with intervention. 

I suspect that the conservative politicians in Canada saw this as a golden opportunity to force Trudeau's hand into using the Emergency Measures Act.  So they quietly let Canada burn, and did virtually nothing. They were likely hoping that in doing so, the Federal Government would move with the military, and they would have all sorts of nasty video of the military moving in to quell the protests.  

Does this meet the standard set out in the Emergency Measures Act? While the Canadian Civil Liberties Association thinks it's a massive overreach, I think there is more than ample evidence that shows this goes beyond normal levels of civil protest and disobedience and has moved into being an attack on Canada itself. When the protestors themselves publish a document essentially demanding the duly elected government resign en masse, we have to consider that there is a reasonable probability that this protest represents a much more significant threat to Canada and its government than appears on the surface. 

I suspect that as investigators start digging into the financial and organizational structures behind this, they are going to find a lot of very ugly things connecting this "protest" to some of the darker corners of conservative political activism, and it will likely as not be very problematic for some very highly placed conservative organizers - both in Canada and abroad. Conservatism is one thing, fascists are another matter altogether - and aligning with fascists is a danger to all of us.

Lastly, as a nation, Canada cannot justifiably allow a part, or the whole, of a city to be held under siege for any length of time. It has a duty to its citizens in such matters that requires action. The failure of local and provincial authorities to act on this threat effectively earlier made it a federal problem. The investigation into what happened needs to inspect not only the actions and organization of the protestors, but the actions (or lack thereof) of police, municipal authorities, and provincial governments as well.  Those who were willingly complicit in this debacle must be held to account - regardless of how prominent they are, or the public positions they may hold. 

In the meantime, we get to watch the CPC attempt to play "gotcha" politics with Trudeau in the House of Commons, while they madly scramble in the backrooms to destroy the evidence connecting them to the protest itself. 

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.