Although the winter 2022 truckers’ protest against Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s punitive vaccine mandates shook Canada down to its mukluks, it no longer dominates the headlines. Still, it remains in public consciousness. Prominent protest members were recently convicted or are still on trial. Its implications are still with us, and its long-term effects may well be seismic.
The Freedom Convoy traversed the country from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to the nation’s capital in Ottawa to protest the biggest experiment ever in authoritarian rule over Canadians—COVID lockdowns and, particularly, the vaccines. The truckers and their fellow convoy travelers demanded the attention of a disgraceful prime minister, the abolition of vaccine mandates, and the restoration of the tenets of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which have been so abused by the prime minister, his cabinet, his bought-and-paid-for media mercenaries, and his penchant judiciary.
Writing in C2C Journal, Gwyn Morgan reviews the origins of the event:
Just as the provinces were ending restrictions on the unvaccinated, the Prime Minister proclaimed that returning unvaccinated truckers would be required to quarantine, a condition that would be impossible to meet.
After two years of dutifully serving their country, Morgan writes, “the truckers were to be thrown out of work—cast aside like unneeded accoutrements.”
In reaction to official disregard amounting to scorn, vast columns of rigs and trucks “drove along thousands of kilometres of wintery roads to converge upon the nation’s capital to protest in front of its Parliament buildings. The atmosphere was peaceful, even celebratory.” Nevertheless, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau refused to meet with the blue-collar truckers, whom he slandered as vandals, racists, misogynists, antisemites, and more, before finally invoking the never-before-used Emergencies Act (successor to the almost-never-used War Measures Act) to crush the protesters.
Contrast Trudeau’s feckless and unconscionable behavior with the Trump-Vance Presidential ticket in the U.S., which was solidly “behind the lifeblood of our supply chain,” which transports 70 percent of goods moving within the United States.
Three years since Trudeau’s crackdown, little has changed in Canada. Coming to the defense of trucker Jay Vanderwier, who had parked his rig during the protest where police had directed him and who later submitted peacefully to an arrest done unnecessarily at gunpoint, but who was still convicted of two criminal counts of mischief by a pliable, Liberal-friendly judiciary, former Conservative MP Derek Sloan contrasted his treatment with that accorded to other protesters, especially First Nations officials
...Trudeau would gladly meet them, take a knee, drop the flag to half-mast for months on end, issue endless apologies, and more. But when these honest, hard-working Canadians came to Ottawa, he showed nothing but contempt. Through his cabinet, he tried to paint them as violent extremists and seditionists.
Though less famous than protesters Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, or Pat King, Vanderwier—like other equally unsung protesters—was just as committed, put just as much at risk, and suffered similarly.
To properly understand the truckers’ opposition to the Trudeau Liberals’ vaccine mandate, we need to look at Canada’s beginnings. The British North America Act of 1867 (later renamed the Constitution Act) recognized a self-governing Dominion comprising a rump Quebec and Ontario and the Maritime provinces of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. What was known as Rupert’s Land, still unabsorbed, covered the vast extent of the interior landmass, including what later became Manitoba (1870) and Saskatchewan (1905). Alberta (1905) was carved out from both Rupert’s Land and the adjacent North-Western Territory.
The administrative core of the new country, however, was found in the center-east, with its capital in the backwater town of Bytown (renamed Ottawa in 1855), which sat at the apex of the “Laurentian elite“ triangle with Montreal and Toronto. It remains Canada’s administrative, political, and financial power center to this day. As Herb Pinder makes clear in the Western Standard, it both consists of and represents an aggregation of federal Liberals, Quebec, the bilingual federal civil service, much of corporate Canada, media acolytes (including the CBC, the Globe, and most other subsidized publications), academics, intellectuals, the Supreme Court, and the Senate.
To understand in yet greater detail the gravamen of the truckers’ protest, one must return specifically to the period between 1869 and 1885. These years saw the Red River Rebellion and the subsequent North-West Rebellion, studied in meticulous, close-packed detail in George Stanley’s magisterial The Birth of Western Canada: A History of the Riel Rebellions and Tom Flanagan’s illuminating essay in The Dorchester Review.
When the newly installed Canadian federal government took formal control of Rupert’s Land in 1870, it did not consult with the indigenous Métis, aka the Bois-Brûlé population (children of the union between First Nations women and French and English trappers). Under the leadership of Louis Riel, local resentment at being passed over eventually led to a Métis uprising, resulting in the formation of a provisional government for purposes of negotiation with Ottawa regarding the terms of entry into the Canadian Confederation.
This initiative did not work out well, and the Métis did not flourish under the new dispensation. Over time, a large proportion of Métis lost title to their land, which ultimately contributed to the bloody North-West Resistance of 1885, culminating in the total victory of the federal government, a string of executions including that of Riel, and the further deterioration of relations between the Prairie West and central Canada, which continues to this day. There were, of course, atrocities on both sides, but there is no doubt that the Métis—and the West—got the short end of the stick.
This is how we need to understand the truckers’ massive 2022 protest. Nominally, it was a form of domestic resistance against the vaccine mandates that crippled their health and their livelihoods, as it did the nation in large. But it is fundamentally an expression of the greater historical context of Eastern political, legislative and market domination of the Western provinces and the determined response of a long misprized, undervalued and misrepresented sector of the nation, rising up against the metaphorical equivalent of the federal government’s oppression of the Métis, the federal assertion of determined control of the region, and its 1885 land grab.
The truckers’ response to the federal usurpation of plenary authority under cover of a pandemic was, in the last analysis, an attempt to right the political, economic, and administrative balance between Eastern and Western Canada. Laurentian hegemony had to be cut down to size, and though it appeared that the federal power had once again—as in the 1885 hecatomb of the Prairie rebels—won the day, routing the truckers, confiscating vehicles, freezing bank accounts, imprisoning its leaders and mobilizing the legacy media to blanket the nation with lies, the aftermath was an awakened and defiant Western Canada and a gradual vindication of the Truckers’ bravery and suffering in an honorable and democratic cause.
The germ of the issue, then, goes back to the unequal founding of Canada at Confederation, to the Prairie provinces’ long struggle for due constitutional recognition and the political equality of their citizens, and the economic parity of which it has been grievously and consistently despoiled by anti-oil-and-gas pipelines and the garnisheeing of its treasury. It is now culminating in manifestations like the Freedom Convoy and its consequences, namely, the Alberta Sovereignty Act and the Saskatchewan First Act.
The truckers may yet have saved the country from its downward spiral and helped to create the just and equitable Canada that it should have been from the beginning. This is the issue that the country is now confronting. It was a long road from Prince Rupert to Ottawa, but a road, as it turns out, that had to be traveled.