Trucker protestors have changed Canada irreversibly – and for the better

Out of the pantheon of establishment demons there suddenly emerges the latest threat to conformist, neo-Marxist globalist civilisation: White Supremacist Truckers. The term sounds like the title of a ‘B’ movie horror feature and has as much resemblance to reality. It was Justin Trudeau, even by politicians’ standards a stranger to veracity, who first attempted to demonise the truckers of the Freedom Convoy with a string of slanders that were quickly taken up by the mainstream, or as the protesters and a growing number of people elsewhere call them, the legacy media.

Since the Freedom Convoy first approached the suburbs of Ottawa, Justin Trudeau has become slightly less accessible than Kim Jong-un. Rushed by security men to an unknown destination, allegedly out of fear for his safety at the hands of the demon truckers singing, dancing, cooking barbecues and indulging in much hilarity in down-town Ottawa. From the beginning, the aim was to depict the protesters as violent fascists, constituting a threat to public order and lawful government. The innumerable videos going viral, showing scenes of carnival-like conviviality involving families and children, have made a laughing stock of the Canadian government’s extravagant misrepresentations – or, in other words, lies.

This porkiefest was initiated by Justin Trudeau. Emerging briefly from the cave or other sanctuary from which he governs Canada, the Canadian premier launched into what must be the most reprehensible and rebarbative slandering of his own compatriots perpetrated by any democratic leader. Having already dismissed the protesters as a “small fringe minority”, a piece of idiocy for which he is now being taunted by Elon Musk, Trudeau subsequently launched into a mendacious diatribe.

Citing the retired former justice minister, aged 81, in an attempt to lend gravitas to his ravings, Trudeau declared: “As my friend Irwin Cotler said on Saturday, freedom of expression, assembly and association are cornerstones of democracy, but Nazi symbolism, racist imagery and desecration of war memorials are not… We are not intimidated by those who hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless. We won’t give in to those who fly racist flags, we won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans.”

He omitted to charge his targets with kicking dogs or trampling on children’s toys, but otherwise the denunciation was pretty comprehensive. On cue, the collaborationist media grabbed the baton and ran with it. Within hours, an image had been projected globally of violent fascists occupying Ottawa, urinating on war memorials, desecrating statues, robbing homeless people of their food and assaulting anyone who got in their way. In this dystopian scenario, the only time the sea of Confederate flags waving over the protesters was dissipated was when it gave way to a forest of Nazi swastika banners on a scale that made the Nuremberg Rally look understated.

The very extravagance of the accusations ought to have given pause to journalists; but no woke accusation is too extreme for the legacy media. Even a brief glance online at video footage – the Freedom Convoy is one of the most extensively filmed events to have taken place – would have demonstrated the nonsensical nature of Trudeau’s claims.

Nazi symbolism? Yes, one interloper did appear with a Nazi flag, alone and masked (which itself suggests his disaffection from the protest); he was instantly surrounded and forced to leave, the incident recorded on camera. He was widely suspected of being an agent provocateur and investigations into his origins are ongoing.

The same happened to a hapless individual who appeared with a Confederate flag, though that emblem does not have the same resonance in Canada as south of the border. In an effort to give that isolated incident a seemingly wider context, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) reported “at least one Confederate flag”. To this Jordan Peterson tweeted: “‘At least one Confederate flag’ @CBC how can you be so consistently and appallingly pathetic?”

Racist imagery? Where? One of the most prominent organisers of the truckers protest, Tamara Lich, is an Indigenous woman from the Métis tribe; her colleague Benjamin Dichter is Jewish. Numbers of easily identifiable Sikhs have been to the fore in convoy activities. This looks like the strangest “white supremacist” rally of all time. So, what about “desecration of war memorials”? Again, yes, some out-of-towners unthinkingly parked their cars close to the steps of the memorial; when police pointed this out they immediately moved, in what Ottawa Police described as a very cordial endeavour with no issues. Later, some fireworks were let off nearby, but not on the memorial.

Stealing food from the homeless? One group of people, allegedly part of the convoy, did present themselves at a food distribution centre for homeless people. In return, the convoy members cooked hot meals for the homeless community and have continued to feed them. Then there is the statue of Terry Fox, the heroic figure who tried to run across Canada with a prosthetic leg, to raise money for cancer research; switching to French in his statement, Trudeau condemned its desecration. Some truckers decorated the statue with a Canadian flag and placards with slogans, as demonstrators of every stamp have regularly done before; but because it was done by people opposed to woke orthodoxy, in this instance it was “desecration”.

It is worth noting that Trudeau, who expresses such concern about desecration of statues and memorials, has attended BLM demonstrations, despite that organisation’s record regarding statues and monuments. In 2020 he “took the knee” at a BLM rally – rather a Damascene conversion for a man of whom few photographs exist prior to the age of 30 with his face unobscured by black makeup.

Among the worst casualties of the protests is the credibility of the media. Long gone are the days when journalists rushed to an event, discovered everything they could about it and then wrote a factual report. Today journalists, like civil servants, recognise there is a “line to take”. Vaccines save lives, these people are opposed in some way to vaccines, therefore they are Bad, they are killers; they must be destroyed. So, straight to the keyboard and no parleying with racists.

Some journalists have rebelled against this travesty of news reporting. Tara Henley, who left CBC for Substack, said her employer had demanded “the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma”. The former opinion editor of the Vancouver Sun, Gordon Clark, has denounced his former colleagues for letting moralism trump professionalism. Contemporary journalists are not news reporters, but government or liberal-consensus copy-takers. The latest extravagance from CBC is the suggestion that the truckers’ protest was instigated by Russia. (Why not, it was used against Trump?)

No wonder people are abandoning the legacy media. However, Trudeau has an answer to that: lest his helots should escape from the fake news menu of the mainstream media, he intends to censor the internet. He has just brought back to parliament the outrageous censorship legislation he has twice before attempted to pass. Under it, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission will be empowered to regulate social media content created by Canadians. It is the beginning of a Chinese-style firewall.

Canada has become the most woke nation on earth. The extreme character of the law banning “conversion therapy” signalled a war on the Christian denominations. Speech is already policed to a repressive degree; the land of lusty lumberjacks is now a jungle of pronoun sensitivity.

So infatuated are some of Trudeau’s initiatives, they verge on insanity. His government has just declared all manufactured plastic products toxic – there are 10,000 of them and any of them can now be prohibited. There are 370,000 Canadians involved in plastics manufacture, of whom 60,000 now face redundancy under the first tranche of bans. Loss of plastic packaging for food could cost the Canadian economy up to $5bn a year.

This is what happens in a society where the state usurps excessive power, driven by ideology. But it may all be heading for the buffers now. The Freedom Convoy is about a lot more than Covid restrictions, including vaccination mandates at the border . It has expanded to embrace the mounting discontent of Canadians over a multitude of issues: after being strait-jacketed by the state, Canadians want to breathe freely. Trudeau’s supporters, stupidly, are touting a poll showing that “only” 32 per cent of Canadians support the truckers (up four points over a week): since when could one-third of the nation be described as a “small fringe minority”?

All the way to Ottawa, tens of thousands of adults and children waving Canadian flags, cheered the convoy as it passed. Now, in at least one province, these people are threatened with arrest. Is that credible, in a western democracy?  However, that is changing. Recently, Canada has been described as the first post-national state – a globalist icon. No longer: the proliferation of Canadian flags, reminiscent of the preoccupation with the national emblem in the United States, signals that Canadians have rediscovered a national patriotic identity.

The immediate outcome of the protest – whether the truckers gain their demands or not – is now academic. After the spectacle of the Freedom Convoy streaming, 45 miles-long, across the nation, nothing will ever be the same again. If Canadians needed a further wake-up call it was supplied by GoFundMe intervening in the allocation of more than $10m in donations to the truckers. For Trudeau the writing was on the wall when the last, completely unnecessary, general election denied him a majority.

Canada is having its Tea Party moment; when it will find its seismic Trump follow-up experience is uncertain. What is certain is that conservatism has returned to Canada, springing up from the grass roots; no longer will the state commissars dictate the minutiae of everyday life unchallenged. The Liberal government looks pathetic: “Ottawa has been brought to a standstill for ten days!” wail the people who have brought Canada to a standstill for two years. The lies and insults from Trudeau and his minions will not be forgotten. The future looks very different from the present. O Canada…