Almost no one, least of all Canadians, expected that something like this could happen in our country. A year ago, I packed up my childhood bedroom and hauled my belongings across the border to begin my college education in the United States. Three days before my set departure date, I watched in shock, horror, and despair as the events of January 6, 2021 unfolded. Worried for my safety, relatives and friends reached out in concern, telling me it was not too late to stay home, and asking if I really wanted to move to a country in chaos. Now, a year later, I sit in my dorm room and watch an eerily similar scene unfold. This time, though, it is not playing out in the United States. It is happening in the streets of my hometown.
The Canadian Freedom Convoy, as it calls itself, has taken the world by surprise. Most Canadians thought we were immune to the “Americanisms”—excessive distrust in government, xenophobia, rugged individualism, and susceptibility to misinformation—that lead to this kind of populist protest. The fact that a Canadian movement could mobilize similar anti-vaccine protests across the world seemed outside the realm of possibility to most of us. And that is just the problem.
We think of ourselves as a progressive, neighborly group of people who would do almost anything to uphold peace and respect our communal responsibilities. In many ways, all of that is true. I grew up in a Canada that was kind, open, and incredibly diverse, one that made it relatively easy for me to explore my identity, live the way I wanted to live, and have the rights and freedoms every human being should be entitled to.
Regardless, Canada is not politically infallible, and that most Canadians believe it to be so is arguably what led to this kind of mass uprising in the first place. Perhaps the reason we are in this predicament is that we have been ignoring the signs of people who feel slighted and left behind by the economic, social, and political turmoil of the past two years and the 21st century in general.
What is happening in Canada is not about vaccines—that much is obvious. The Canadian Trucking Alliance said in a recent statement that “the vast majority” of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, and even as many provinces are announcing ease-ups on vaccine mandates, the protests continue. The truckers themselves have made it clear that, while vaccine mandates are the symptom, the root cause of their strife is a perceived assault on their freedoms and way of life (if the name Freedom Convoy was not already clear). But, the movement is also barely about freedom.
The “freedom” to which the protesters are tying their movement is an interpretation of freedom in its most abject form, one which permits blowing airhorns day and night in downtown Ottawa and blocking key transportation routes for days on end. As other writers have pointed out, protesting with the bulk of eighteen-wheeler truck rigs behind you is very different from engaging in an unarmed march through the streets.
The freedom the truckers seem to want is one that resembles more closely the Hobbesian state of nature in which each individual is left completely to their own devices, taking from others as they please or see fit with no external judge of morality—all in the name of preserving self-interest. But rather than enriching human life, this state-of-nature freedom was only described by Hobbes as making it “nasty, brutish and short.” This kind of freedom resembles anarchy more than anything, and it sits in direct contrast to the Lockean ideals of freedom that have guided most Western political thought.
Canada’s own Charter of Rights and Freedoms—the one the truckers seem to think they are defending—is inspired by that Lockean model. In Locke’s line of thinking, we are only free when we are not bound to the arbitrary will of another. As a result, we enter into social contracts and submit ourselves to governments not as a restriction on our rights, but with the understanding that some rules are necessary to facilitate our movement safely through society without the constant fear of the unbound will of those around us. We agree, for example, not to smoke in certain public places, not to physically harm others, and to charge those who commit crimes like theft and assault.
The freedom argument, too, looks shaky considering that the protest has been attended by Nazis and white supremacists, supported by authoritarian apologist Tucker Carlson of Fox News, and championed by many of the same people who organized America’s January 6 riot. While attendees of the protest argue that the white supremacist contingent of the movement was small and asked to leave upon their arrival, it certainly says a lot that such individuals were attracted to the Freedom Convoy in the first place.
This kind of protest—one that wreaks havoc on fellow citizens and is supported by white nationalists—has no place in Canada. Yet, it has sprung up in the country nonetheless.
What is going on is what we have seen play out since the beginning of President Trump’s campaign through his election in 2016. It is a response by a group of Canadians who feel disenfranchised from mainstream politics. The protests are steeped in the same fears expressed by the people fueling the Trump movement: fears of being left behind by globalization, of a lack of opportunity, of a perceived encroachment on personal freedoms by a state that, in the opinion of the protestors, appears to steal from the poor to give to the rich.
In a 2017 article, professors Jeff Colgan and Robert Keohane argued that the liberal world order has failed those it promised to help. It has expanded the deep pockets of elites but constricted opportunities for working-class families, particularly those who had not earned college degrees. Many of these fears and inequalities have been exploited by an internet landscape that serves as a breeding ground for misinformation and that has been shown to exacerbate extremism.
This claim is not a new one. After Donald Trump won in 2016, largely by flipping the Midwestern manufacturing states that people thought would stay blue forever, many political analysts came to the conclusion that the failings of neoliberalism have given rise to a rightward shift in Western politics. It is also a phenomenon Canadians seemed to think we were exempt from. After all, in the wake of 2016, the joke among American Democrats was that everyone should “move to Canada,” as if the problems of the United States could not manifest themselves north of the border as well. As it turns out, they can.
A 2021 report from StatsCan showed that, upon investigating the income changes over time of groups of Canadians born between the 1960s and 1980s, intergenerational income mobility––the increase in income from one generation to the next––has declined. While income inequality in Canada is less severe than that in the United States, it is still growing. The coronavirus pandemic hasn’t helped quell Canadian disparities and discontents. For example, a study from the Bank of Canada noted that the effects of higher unemployment, as have been seen during the pandemic, “can disproportionately affect young and poor households.” Furthermore, a recent peer-reviewed study from the Canadian Medical Association revealed that the communities hit hardest by disease were low income Canadians, essential workers, and immigrants. In other words, even the burden of disease itself fell disproportionately on those who already lacked socioeconomic leverage before the pandemic.
This kind of fear and anger is the kind most often exploited by populist leaders. Some Canadian politicians already have. Maxime Bernier, for example, split off from the mainstream branch of the Conservative party to form his own far-right People’s Party of Canada, one that campaigns against multiculturalism and immigration and has been dubbed by observers as one of the first signs of Canada’s right-wing populist movement. This kind of cultivation of the far-right in the West is far from unheard of; many of the poster children of advanced liberal democracy have seen their own powerful far-right, authoritarian parties emerge. Look, for example, at the rise of the AfD in Germany, Vox in Spain, the Law and Justice party of Poland, or Austria’s Freedom Party.
Promisingly, most Canadians do disapprove of the Freedom Convoy, a sign that—at least for now—scare tactics and violent protest will not prevail in the country.
But, rather than pretending that our reputation for niceness and respectable politics can shelter us from the worst effects of populism forever, Canada must remember that its democracy is not to be taken for granted. Canadians need to see the Freedom Convoy as a warning that much worse could be in store if we do not take this as a chance to examine our current political culture and understand why it has come to this. While Trudeau has condemned the Freedom Convoy and must continue to do so, the aftermath of the protest must also include some introspection on the part of his government. The country must examine the divides, inequalities, and disenfranchisement that drove the truckers to the streets in the first place.
We are not immune to the forces that led to President Trump in the United States, Bolsonaro in Brazil, and Brexit in the UK. If the Freedom Convoy is showing us anything, it is that it can happen here too. The political forces of the American right that have swept the globe exist in Canada, too, and Canadians need to confront them head-on rather than pretend that they do not exist. If we fail to do so, I worry that the Canada I left when I packed up for college will not be there when I get back.