Canada’s political earthquake

You’ll likely see flags that say “F*** Trudeau,” referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, and you may even see one of the swastika-stamped Canadian flags that were floating around in the early days of the protest.

If you went there in the first couple of weeks, you would have heard nonstop, ear-piercing honking from the trucks and massive air horns at all hours of the day. For the sanity of Ottawa’s residents, a court injunction temporarily put a stop to that.

At the time of writing, people there whisper about when police will “make a move” to clear out the demonstrators. Nobody knows the answer — including, it seems, officers themselves. Ottawa’s police chief just resigned this week after nearly three weeks of occupation and growing fury from the city’s residents.

This week, Trudeau officially declared it an emergency, invoking new powers to seize bank accounts and stop supporters from crowdfunding donations to the protesters, which have streamed in from across Canada and the United States. The government wants, but has yet to assume, the power to compel tow-truck drivers to remove the trucks from the city.

In sum, the truckers have brought the capital city of a G-7 country to its knees, forced the resignation of its police chief, compelled the federal government to declare an emergency, halted up to $400 million in daily trade by shutting down a key border crossing for a week, and contributed to some serious political calamities for two of Canada’s leading center-right politicians.

What is it they want?

At the very least, their demands are straightforward. They want vaccine mandates for cross-border and domestic travel lifted, and they want all pandemic restrictions, such as mask mandates and store capacity limits, to be removed.

They are usually described as right-wing or conservative, but it’s a fool’s errand to apply conventional political branding to these protesters. They are eclectic and apathetic about parties.

“The truck drivers, the essential workers in grocery stores, nurses, some healthcare workers, all of these people came to the conclusion that the people who were making decisions, none of whom were particularly suffering, didn’t actually care about their suffering or their insecurity or their worries,” said Vitor Marciano, who is a longtime right-wing political organizer in Alberta.

The debate rages in Canada about how much the trucker protest represents mainstream antipathy for the pandemic restrictions and mandates or whether, as Trudeau has argued, they are a “fringe minority” that traffics in vaccine conspiracies and QAnon lunacy.

It’s true that swastikas have been spotted in the crowds, and we know of the history of violent rhetoric from some of the organizers of the protest. There have been Confederate flags flying on trucks, which is a truly bizarre statement in Canada.

But it’s also true that Canadians are increasingly fed up with the pandemic and are done with living under some of the strictest pandemic measures in the world.

Canadians are less supportive of the truckers’ means of protest than they are about the cause they represent: About half say they sympathize with the truckers’ frustration but don’t approve of their behavior, according to recent polling conducted by Public Square Research and Maru/Blue. A subsequent poll found that a third of Canadians are simply tired of the government telling them what to do.

Canada’s Conservative Party has been trying to reach this fed-up bloc of voters, while avoiding being sullied by the extreme elements in the protests. The former leader of the party, who lost his job earlier this month, told reporters he was meeting with people in the convoy but avoiding its leaders.

All of which raises a familiar question: Is this a protest — or a movement?

Marciano thinks the truckers portend the emergence of a new political force in the country, the populist wave belatedly making its way to Canada as workers finally realized they, too, risk being on the losing side of a class war. Yet that very cross-border commonality with other class protests in the West and around the world is cause for suspicion among the political class.

“So much of this stuff is getting missed by conservative thinkers nowadays, and conservative politicians,” said Marciano. “They view this populist thing that is springing up as a Trumpian thing, and they think Trump is distasteful. So, therefore, this is distasteful.”

Donald Trump was never popular in Canada, and Trudeau’s own approval ratings tended to rise when he was seen as standing up to the American president, during trade disputes, for example. But Trump activated new voters, and the pandemic has brought politics into the lives of people who have never bothered with it before — a tricky combination for much of Canada’s political spectrum.

“Trump tapped into a growing group of people who’ve never been involved in politics, who have all of a sudden realized that in the past, they didn’t care about politics, but politics cared about them,” said Marciano.

The unanswered question in Canada now is whether these demonstrations can find some meaningful political expression beyond protests.

In last year’s federal election, the People’s Party of Canada channeled voter frustration with the government’s handling of the pandemic, increasing the party’s vote share from 1.6% to nearly 5%, without winning any seats in Parliament.

But a tidal wave may be coming in Alberta, the country’s most conservative province, sometimes referred to as the Texas of Canada.

Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, perhaps the most conservative major politician in the country, won a landslide election in the province by uniting the feuding right-wing parties and promising to ditch the left-wing government’s carbon tax.

But Kenney’s experience shows it isn’t a simple left-right dynamic. It took Kenney more than three years to unite the Right and wrestle power from the Left, and he was rewarded with less than a year of relative stability before the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Now, he faces unrelenting attacks from both the urban, leftist New Democratic Party and the rural flank of his own party, which is made up of a raucous mixture of libertarianism and populism. Kenney has already booted two rural members for bashing the government on the pandemic measures, and other rural party members report an avalanche of emails and phone calls from constituents protesting the province’s mask and vaccine mandates and restrictions on businesses.

Two months from now, Kenney will face an extraordinary leadership review in which his own party members will determine his future. If he loses, the province will have a new premier. This would be like the Texas GOP single-handedly bringing down Gov. Greg Abbott and installing someone else in his place.

Kenney originally expressed support for the trucker protests, but he also realizes that these are the same people who will be descending on him in April, trying to remove him from his job.

“There will be an effort, obviously by many of the folks involved in these protests, who have perhaps never belonged to a party before, to show up at that special general meeting and to use it as a platform for their anger about COVID measures over the past two years,” Kenney told reporters at a news conference on Feb. 14. He has reassigned key advisers away from government work and toward the important job of saving his bacon.

If Kenney goes down, it won’t be the first hide the truckers have claimed. Earlier in the month, former Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole was ousted by his own party, at least partly driven by the trucker protests happening next to the Parliament buildings. O’Toole’s waffling on whether to support the truckers was political suicide for a leader who already had a reputation of flip-flopping.

During last year’s national election, Trudeau conducted daily media briefings in which he ripped anti-vaxxers and people skeptical of his government’s response to the pandemic. It was a classic wedge issue for the governing Liberals, tying the opposition Conservatives to fringe positions by, for example, muddying the water between people who oppose vaccine mandates and people who oppose the very idea of vaccinations.

But before Trudeau started castigating unvaccinated people on the campaign trail, he had offered a thoughtful objection to the idea of vaccine mandates.

“The idea of certificates of vaccination for domestic use to decide who can go to a concert or who can go to a particular restaurant or engage in certain activities does bring in questions of equity, questions of fairness,” Trudeau said at a news conference nearly a year ago, and months before the election rhetoric heated up. “We’re not discriminating and bringing in unfairness in the process at the same time.”

Something changed last summer, and the assumption that it was based on electoral politics was confirmed last week when one member of Trudeau’s team went rogue. Quebec Liberal MP Joël Lightbound said that on the eve of the election campaign, “a decision was made to wedge, to divide, and to stigmatize.” Lightbound said he was speaking out because he was worried that his own party’s behavior would harm people’s trust in government and the health authorities.

“It is time to stop dividing people, to stop pitting one part of the population against another,” Lightbound told reporters in Ottawa, while the trucker protest raged around him and just before provincial premiers started announcing, one by one, that many of the restrictions would soon be dropped.

By speaking up against his own party, he was either a prophetic voice in a country starting to heal or making one last plea for civility partially muffled by the unholy din of truck horns and pandemic fury. How this standoff ends will go a long way toward determining where the anger fueling it will go next.

Stuart Thomson is the editor-in-chief at the Hub and a former parliamentary reporter in Ottawa.