I’m not 100 percent against occupations. They are often effective ways of protesting. In particular when truckers, miners, and other blue collar workers, who have access to big machinery and who are used to hard work get involved, they tend to be very effective protesters. You see this most often in France, where truckers routinely shut down roads.
Protests are about causing inconvenience to someone, about getting in their face. A protest which doesn’t do so, isn’t effective. There was a time when they were, but that time is now generations ago, because our modern elites don’t care about protests that don’t scare or hurt them.
The truckers have a right to protest, but it’s not a protest I am in political sympathy with, as I don’t have a problem with vaccine mandates. It should also be noted that the majority of Canadians support vaccine mandates. Of course, just because a majority agree with you doesn’t mean you’re right. A majority of Americans opposed Martin Luther King, after all.
What is interesting about the trucker occupation is how cooperative the police have been, especially in Ottawa, where the Chief let them into the core, let them set up supply camps and logistics. The truckers deliberately disabled some vehicles to make it harder to re-open the streets and remove them. In Toronto, the police did keep the truckers away from a few key areas: some hospitals (one of which, actually, I’ll spend time at on Monday), and the capital, but they did let them occupy a fair chunk of important downtown real-estate.
Vancouver’s is the most interesting case, because while the police didn’t do much, by the time the convoy rolled into Vancouver civilians had seen what was up, and counter protesters blocked the convoys over and over again as best they could.
The convoys then, are non-city people coming to the city to protest, and they aren’t generally welcomed by those who live in these urban cores, most of whom don’t agree with the truckers and are the ones inconvenienced.
As noted, the police really haven’t done much, though that’s beginning to change in Ottawa. Few arrests, no impounding vehicles, etc…, outside of Quebec, where the province has simply sent in the vehicle inspectors (truckers hate vehicle inspectors) and made a point of photographing all the plates. I’m familiar with how left-wing protests are treated in Canada, and I am confident in saying that if this was some First Nations or anti-poverty protesters, they’d have been broken up already with however much violence the cops felt like using (probably a lot) and thrown in prison, with their vehicles already impounded.
Certainly, Canadian police have done so for protests that caused a lot less inconvenience than occupying the capital city and the largest city in Canada’s core.
So, fairly obviously, the police are in a fair bit of sympathy with the truckers, and that includes the leadership. The Chief of Ottawa police has been, in fact, co-operative.
The final thing to note here is that the money from this appears to have largely come from the United States, not from Canada, and so does the ideology. Canadian traditions are a lot less about, “can’t tell me to not make my fellow citizens sick,” than the USA. Canada is the “Peace, Order, and Good Government” country. In general, the right-wing in Canada has been very badly affected by US-based ideology, going from being Red Tories to folks who think Trump was pretty good, actually.
Americans still have an idealized idea of what Canada is like. The truth is that we have a much smaller population than the US, and a much smaller economy, and all our trends are moving in the same direction as the US: more and more neoliberalism, more and more right-wing “populism.”
Inequality has grown worse for generations, and this has left us vulnerable to right-wing agitation in ways we really weren’t in the past — because the social contract has been broken in the same general ways as in the US and most of the West. The difference is solely that we started from a better place, but in the province of Alberta, for example, the government is doing their best to move towards privatized medicine and gutting Medicare, in very much the same way as Britain has.
With the center solidly neoliberal, even as they pretend to be liberals, and with the left primarily concerned with identity politics, the hard-core of the left’s old power used to be people like truckers and miners and farmers, and they have slipped over to the right, even though their material interests largely aren’t served there. But the right panders to them culturally, while the center thinks they’re uneducated louts and the left despises them as socially backwards.
And so we have the trucker protests. Truckers have power because they have heavy machinery, and they’re using it. Many of them are sincere and think they are doing the right thing, for the right reasons. Most Canadians don’t agree, but the police are sympathetic, the Premier of Ontario’s daughter is with the protesters in Ottawa (because he’s a right-winger rather similar to Trump), and, after all, neoliberal politicians like Trudeau really want to reopen and aren’t entirely opposed to the truckers’ demands, though they are wedded to vaccines.
Societies are subject to revolution when an elite faction wants it, the enforcer class is unwilling to defend the status quo, and there is a significant popular faction who want change. All three are generally necessary.
If I were among Canada’s current rulers, I’d be worried, not by the left, but by the right. The left doesn’t have an elite faction supporting it or the complicity of at least some police. The right, even if most Canadians don’t agree, does.
Update: The Ottawa police have begun to choke off supplies. Hearing right-wingers squeal about how police seizing gasoline and food is illegal and wrong is very precious, since I don’t remember any of them complaining about it when police seized the property of homeless people who were causing a lot less trouble.
