What We Learned from Canadian Truckers

Protests started on January 22nd, when a convoy of Canadian truckers began the drive to Ottawa. They objected to the new vaccine mandate that was required of anyone crossing the border from Canada into the United States. Since setting up a blockade in Canada’s capital and issuing a series of demands to the Canadian government, the protestors have faced arrest, police brutality, the confiscation of property and freezing of bank accounts by the government, and more.

As the conflict comes to a close, Americans should take notice and come away with three main lessons to be learned.

The media is not your friend.

From the very start of the convoy and subsequent blockade, left-leaning media demonized the workers upon whom we all rely for the delivery of basic goods. NPR claimed that “extremist groups are at the core of the movement,” and numerous outlets such as Politico and Snopes cherry-picked photos of protestors carrying Confederate and Nazi flags. One such carrier of a Confederate flag was questioned and told to leave by other protestors, who suspected he was a provocateur.

Despite this faulty narrative, the media continued to paint the truckers as a fringe, but dangerous, minority. “In Canada, as worldwide, opposition to pandemic rules is strongly associated with the political right, and especially its more populist wings, which thrive on backlash to institutions and experts,” wrote The New York Times. Slate claimed that “the energy behind this movement is fueled in large part by conspiracy theorists and extremists, as well as from dark money that is flooding crowdfunding websites.” An op-ed in The Washington Post attempted to tie the demands of the truckers to racial themes: “The notion of ‘freedom’ was historically and remains intertwined with Whiteness…The belief that one’s entitlement to freedom is a key component of White supremacy.”

The media has chosen to stand against the working class of Canada; to them, even the word “freedom” is a symbol of oppression that needs to be dismantled. They have established whose side they are on – and it isn’t the side of everyday citizens. Batya Ungar-Sargon, an editor for Newsweek who has written extensively about the media’s turn on the working class, summarized the situation perfectly when she tweeted, “It’s pretty amazing that liberal elites started out by smearing the striking truckers as fascists—and ended up cheering on actual fascistic measures against them. They called the truckers a threat to democracy—then cheered when their civil liberties were stolen from them.”

Liberty is an unacceptable price to pay for so-called safety.

The emergency powers enacted by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and upheld by Parliament gave police the ability to declare certain areas no-go zones and to freeze bank accounts and seize assets of the truckers. One of the protest’s leaders, Tamara Lich, was arrested on February 17th and subsequently denied bail. To justify this decision, Ontario Court Justice Julie Bourgeois told Lich, “Your detention is necessary for the protection and safety of the public.”

But what is this protection and safety from? There is no evidence that the “freedom convoy” engaged in any type of violence (unless you consider blockades and honking horns violent). In fact, USA Today fact checked the claim “There have been no burned buildings or injuries at the ‘100,000 truck convoy’ in Canada” as “partly false,” but their fact check itself contained no evidence of violent or dangerous activity outside of vague claims of “potential crimes associated with the convoy, and…reports of property damage.”

Furthermore, it is difficult to assign any purpose to the retribution enacted on the protestors, other than teaching them a disproportionate lesson. A tweet from Ottawa’s official account for by-laws and regulatory material warned the truckers that their pets could be confiscated from their homes if the government deemed it appropriate. What possible purpose does this serve? As Ungar-Sargon pointed out, Justin Trudeau justified the stealing away of civil liberties based on questionable definitions of protection and safety – and Parliament went along with it. History is not on the side of those who sacrifice the freedoms of society to achieve the “safety” for the elite class.

The right to peaceful protest is crucial to democracy.

According to the New York Post, Canadian police have used pepper spray and stun grenades, along with riding through crowds on horses, to clear the protestors from the roads. Video footage showed the mounted police knocking at least two individuals to the ground, and a journalist from Rebel News claimed to have been shot at point-blank range by a tear gas canister from the police.

The Ottawa Police Twitter account tweeted, “PROTESTORS: We told you to leave. We gave you time to leave. We were slow and methodical, yet you were assaultive and aggressive with officers and the horses. Based on your behaviour, we are responding by including helmets and batons for our safety.” Meanwhile, National Review reported what that “response” has been: “Police smashed the windows of RVs and trucks, breaking in to remove protesters holed up inside and searching the cars afterwards. Protesters were beaten and pepper sprayed…”

It is moments like these when Americans should cling to the principles of the First Amendment – and there is a reason it’s the first. The freedoms of religion, speech, assembly, press, and petition are crucial to the rights of the people, and the moment they are stripped away, there is no going back. Americans on both the Left and the Right must recognize the Constitutional right to peacefully protest – whether those protests are anti-vaccine or Black Lives Matter.

The last protestors have been cleared from Ottawa, and Trudeau has revoked his emergency powers. The “freedom convoy” is over, but the precedent has been set, and the lessons learned must not be forgotten.