MARY ANASTASIA O’GRADY: What Canada’s Truckers Know: It’s no longer a liberal constitutional state. A coercive Ottawa rules over daily life.
The truckers, engaged largely in peaceful acts of civil disobedience, call themselves the Freedom Convoy. But they aren’t an organized group with a leader. Some set out from western Canada last month in opposition to a vaccine mandate. Along the way others joined the original pack in person, in spirit—and even in solidarity. On Feb. 8, the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. reported “the tow trucks operators on contract to the City of Ottawa [were] taking a hard pass on requests to haul vehicles out of protest areas, according to the city’s top public servant.”
Note that Mr. Trudeau didn’t say that blocking the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, is unacceptable. Rather, he declared truckers’ ideals beyond the pale.
Intolerance is ugly. But for Mr. Trudeau, who proudly backs Black Lives Matter, it’s OK in this case because it’s the politically correct variety: He’s denouncing the opinions of a bunch of yahoos.
Coming from a prime minister sitting atop a powerful administrative state, this goes a long way in explaining what has gone from a protest to a movement.
Polls suggest that most Canadians don’t support disturbing the peace or blocking international crossings. Yet a majority are sympathetic to the truckers’ mission, which is to end Covid-19 restrictions and mandates that they believe go beyond the proper power of the state.
A moving speech in November by former Royal Canadian Mounted Police Corporal Daniel Bulford, once assigned to Mr. Trudeau’s personal security detail, described the conflict between government Covid-19 orders and the oath Mounties take to defend Canadian liberty.
Mr. Trudeau likes to invoke “science.” Yet the virulence of the virus is waning, natural immunity is up, and by the prime minister’s own estimates some 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated. If there were ever any reasons for extraordinary government measures to protect public health, they too have faded.
On Tuesday Alberta Premier Jason Kenney lifted his province’s proof-of-vaccination requirements. “Now is the time to begin learning to live with Covid,” he said. “These restrictions have led to terrible division.” Saskatchewan did the same earlier last week, and Ontario has said it would move in a similar direction.
Meantime, Mr. Trudeau is claiming police powers as if the nation were in the grip of catastrophe. No wonder already simmering resentments about federal overreach have boiled over.
Trudeau, like rulers throughout the West, is too entitled, too arrogant, and most importantly too ignorant of history to understand the risks he’s running.
Plus:
Mr. Pardy told me by telephone last week that he believes “the instincts of small-c conservatives are to protect institutions. But they don’t realize that those institutions are gone. They still have faith in a system of governance already compromised.”
The truckers know better.
There’s no reason to protect institutions that have been corrupted. And that’s pretty much all of them.