Fury Road

What’s behind the convoy of angry truckers wreaking havoc in Canada? Parker Donham on things not being what they may seem—and why Trump-style populism doesn’t work north of the 49th parallel. Fury Road What’s behind the convoy of angry truckers wreaking havoc in Canada? Parker Donham on things not being what they may seem—and why Trump-style populism doesn’t work north of the 49th parallel. A Canadian cross-country protest morphed into vitriol and criminality this past week, after truck drivers from Western Canada embarked on a “Freedom Convoy” eastward to Ottawa in late January. The convoy opposes a law that went into effect on January 22, mandating proof of vaccination for truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. But as the demonstration moved across the country, some protesters started to display U.S. Confederate and Nazi flags. Others defaced Canadian national monuments and harassed workers at a soup kitchen for the homeless, with more than a dozen police investigations now underway. Others still have blocked a busy border crossing between Alberta and the United States since January 29 or continue to block main streets in downtown Ottawa, where businesses have closed since January 27. These scenes defy longstanding perceptions, within the country and globally, of Canada as a place of civility and order. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has said that the demonstrators represent only a “small fringe minority,” noting that 90 percent of Canadian truckers are fully vaccinated. The outrage of the protests has, meanwhile, conspicuously resembled the style of right-wing populism represented in the U.S. by Donald Trump. Ottawa’s police chief [says]( that a “significant element” of the convoy’s participants are actually from the U.S., while the Canadian Trucking Alliance claims that many of them “do not have a connection to the trucking industry.” What’s going on here? Parker Donham lives in Kempt Head, Nova Scotia, and worked as a journalist in Canada for more than 30 years, including for 15 years as a co-host of a weekly public-affairs program on the CBC television network. To Donham, the convoy is rooted more in regional idiosyncrasies and pandemic fatigue than in an ascendent, pan-Canadian right-wing populism—though a growing nationwide antipathy toward Trudeau, the leader of the Liberal Party, is playing a role. Canada doesn’t suffer from the deep partisan polarization of the U.S., Donham says, and Trump-style populism remains marginal, despite the country’s voters being split nearly evenly between liberals and conservatives. If Trump ran for national office in Canada, Donham says, he’d be rejected by a resounding majority. ——— Michael Bluhm: Who’s protesting and why? Parker Donham: Canada is a big, diverse country with a range of cultures. We Canadians tend to think of Alberta as a Texas North, with an economy and culture driven by the extraction of oil—and the most environmentally unsustainable oil in the world, in the form of the tar sands. Nothing about the cavalcade suggests that it reflects anything other than a largely region-based group of people who are sympathetic to Trump and right-wing populism. That said, we’re meanwhile wrapping up the second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, getting into the third year, and it’s frustrating for everybody. I find it enormously frustrating. About 50 years ago, a Boston University sociologist, Edgar Z. Friedenberg, moved to Canada and took up a position at Dalhousie University in Halifax. He wrote a book called Deference to Authority: The Case of Canada. I have always thought that phrase captured something quite significant about Canada—most particularly about Atlantic Canada, the four provinces closest to the Atlantic Ocean. If you look at compliance rates and the percentage of people who want pandemic restrictions to continue, they’re way higher in Atlantic Canada than in other parts of Canada. But there’s been a shift even here. With omicron, we’re faced with a more widespread but apparently milder variant. It seems to have peaked and be receding, so a lot of people are anxious to get their lives back to something more like normal. That’s what you’re seeing. Bluhm: How do the people participating in this in the convoy—and does Canada’s Conservative Party—connect to the [broad, right-wing, populist movement]( that’s elected disruptive leaders worldwide? Donham: The Conservative caucus in Parliament has members who’re very right-wing, and very much in sync with Trumpian views, but also elements of what used to be called the Progressive Conservative Party—we sometimes referred to them as Red Tories. That group has shrunk, and Canadians are more polarized now than we were. Erin O’Toole, the Conservative leader who lost a vote of confidence on February 1, had to walk a fine line—and he wasn’t able to do that very successfully. A reasonable Republican in the U.S. is faced with the problem of having to win a primary: If they sound too reasonable, they’ll lose the primary. There’s some of that going on here. There’s even some of it in Atlantic Canada—maybe with 10 percent support among conservative voters—whereas in Alberta, it’s more like 50 percent. That element exists in Canada, but it’s far from dominant. Bluhm: What’s driving that element? Donham: Let me start by saying what’s not driving it. There are three significant television news networks in Canada: CBC, CTV, and Global. There’s no Fox, let alone One America News Network, or anything like them. Efforts to found such a network in Canada have failed quickly and decisively. There just isn’t much of a market. On the other hand, it’s very easy to watch Fox News from Canada. Most cable subscribers have access to it. A lot of what’s driving populism in Canada right now is traceable to two years of putting up with pandemic frustration, and now we’re vaxxed and boosted: Let’s go. Even Anthony Fauci is saying, If you’re double-vaxxed and boosted, you can probably relax a little. [Advertisement]( Advertisement More from Parker Donham at The Signal: “The right-wing populism you see in the trucker convoy is very much a regional phenomenon. The heartland of right-wing Canada is Alberta, but it stretches into parts of British Columbia, much of Manitoba, and Saskatchewan. The Prairie Provinces are definitely more conservative, and more amenable populism, than the rest of the country. The four provinces in Atlantic Canada—Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland—are the poor sisters of Canada. We are sometimes referred to as have-nots. The former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper referred to us as having a culture of defeat. We’ve been beneficiaries of very generous social programs for many years.” “I’m mindful of the things James Fallows has written about off-the-radar America, where people at the local level, regardless of their political affiliations, still manage to cooperate on a lot of issues, and civic life seems quite robust. That’s true here. There may be a variety of different views on national politics or public-health issues, but when it comes to organizing to get the potholes filled, and the search-and-rescue funded, there’s widespread support across the board, and people work together.” “There’s a significant number of Canadians who are quite conservative. Many of them, though not all, fit with a kind of Trump-style, right-wing populism. But Harper, who was Canada’s last Conservative prime minister, was far from a populist. He was very buttoned-down—an extremely careful technocrat. It’s important not to assume, just because 1,000 or whatever number of cars and trucks descended on Ottawa, that there’s some revolution afoot. When you’re within that group, it may be easy to imagine you’re part of a revolution—but I don’t see one.” ——— This Week [We Meet Again]( How are the U.S. and Europe thinking about the Russian threat in Ukraine? Anatol Lieven on how Vladimir Putin could be reviving NATO. [Beijing Opera]( Just how extensively is China manipulating information in the world? Sarah Cook on the government’s 2022 playbook for censorship, surveillance, propaganda, and disinformation. ——— ——— [The Signal]( is a digital publication exploring key questions in democratic life and the human world, sustained entirely by readers like you. To support The Signal and for full access: This email address is unmonitored; please send questions or comments [here](mailto:mail@thesgnl.com) To advertise with The Signal: advertise@thesgnl.com Add us to your [address book](mailto:newsletters@thesgnl.email) © 2022 The Signal The Signal | 717 N St. NW, Ste. One, Washington, DC 20011 [Unsubscribe {EMAIL}]( [Constant Contact Data Notice]( Sent by newsletters@thesgnl.email