Elitist snobs are demonising Canadian truckers’ revolt

Instead of seeing the truckers’ protests as an explosion of frustration at Canada’s lockdown regime, the US left sees them as another harbinger of some neo-Nazi tide sweeping the West, from Brexit Britain to, who’d have thought? – Saskatchewan.

Protestors and supporters at a blockade at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge, sealing off the flow of commercial traffic over the bridge into Canada from Detroit. Picture: AFP.

For most Americans, Canada is the polite, slightly dull neighbour who keeps his lawn carefully mowed, plays quiet games of garden quoits and observes what’s going on next door with a steady mixture of condescension and incipient panic.

Like that peaceable neighbour, Canada rarely impinges on the American consciousness. Canadians get mocked for their funny accents, their bad weather and the earnestness of their self-deprecation.

Their politics are a source of bafflement: left-wingers look north of the border with a certain envy, the place where the medicine is socialised and the state religion secular multiculturalism. Conservatives think the country is a kind of genteel socialist hell, redeemed only by the presence of some spectacularly productive oilfields.

But occasionally, like a Joni Mitchell ballad or a stray ice hockey puck, something comes across the 49th parallel with such force that even Americans have to sit up and take notice.

Protestors and supporters at a blockade at the foot of the Ambassador Bridge, sealing off the flow of commercial traffic over the bridge into Canada from Detroit. Picture: AFP.

For almost a month, the truckers’ protest that has more or less locked down the country’s capital, Ottawa, has been seizing attention in the United States. The protest was sparked by the decision of the Canadian government of Justin Trudeau – a man who, in his unctuous persona manages somehow to combine the most repugnant of two north American national stereotypes: the cloying sanctimony of Canadian moralism and the preening vanity of American egomania – to impose a vaccine mandate on truck drivers.

If they haven’t been vaccinated they must quarantine for 14 days after crossing the border with the US. Since cross-border traffic is the lifeblood of the trucking business, the impact on those who aren’t vaccinated is ruinous. While the vast majority of Canadian truckers have been jabbed, this imposition on the small minority – men (and a few women) who spend upwards of 20 hours a day alone in a cab with the merest of human interaction – seems needlessly onerous.

So, in an unusual show of defiance in that famously compliant nation, Canadians are revolting. Thousands of trucks have rolled across the country and now infest the nation’s capital. Trudeau has fled to an undisclosed location.

Protestors block the roadway at the Ambassador Bridge border crossing in Windsor, Ontario. Picture: AFP.

With their peculiar tendency to see everything happening in the rest of the world entirely as an extension of America, most of the media in the US have decided that the Canadian trucker revolt is the latest alarming manifestation of far-right, American, white supremacism. News organisations have searched far and wide for evidence that the Canadian protests are all simply a fascist front funded by wealthy Americans. (No luck with that yet.)

Instead of seeing the protests as they are, a wider explosion of genuine frustration at the regime that has kept Canadians cooped up for two years, the American progressive mind needs to see them as another harbinger of some neo-Nazi tide sweeping the West, from Brexit Britain to Trump’s Washington, and now – who’d have guessed? – Saskatchewan and Manitoba.

While the trucker protests have been noisy but generally calm, the media have seized on even a hint of an infraction as evidence of the inherent violence of the right. These are the same people of course who spent the summer of 2020 insisting that the Black Lives Matter protests that left cities burnt and looted were “mostly peaceful”.

In a now familiar pattern, the media have been joined by the more powerful tech companies in an effort to suppress the protests. Facebook has been assiduously taking down what it says is the usual “misinformation” about the protests. GoFundMe, another tech business peopled by recent gender-studies graduates of elite universities, actually shut down the funding that had been raised for the truckers and pledged to give the money to causes of their own choice, until threatened with legal action.

The vehemence of this response (together with the Canadian government’s own angry denunciations) suggests the trucker dispute is better understood as the latest theatre in the war on working classes waged by people who once were supposed to be their advocates and allies.

The framing is as it has been on almost every other issue on which our elites now pour derision, such as immigration, education, crime and justice. The (usually white) working classes are too stupid to understand the facts, the science or the data. Only technocratic progressives, whose efforts are dutifully amplified by media and tech companies, are equipped with the right level of learning that empowers them to make decisions for the rest. Any opposition to those mandates is the product of ignorance fuelled by fascistic ideology.

This might be all very well if the record of the technocrats were unimpeachably successful. But repeated experience in the last decade or so has demonstrated that on almost all issues of importance these elites have no greater wisdom or authority than the rubes they so evidently disdain.

This has become increasingly clear with Covid. So much of what we were told was unchallengeable “science” throughout the pandemic has not survived extended contact with reality: the efficacy of mask-wearing or social distancing, for example. A recent paper by a trio of respected economists estimated that lockdowns had had very limited effect in reducing mortality while doing enormous damage to the economy.

It’s no surprise that the Canadian truckers are being emulated in the US – a similar protest is now planned, with Washington as its destination.

The problem, as haughty leaders have discovered throughout history, is that sooner or later the trust you want to compel needs to be validated by successful outcomes. How refreshing that it’s those polite Canadians who are helping the rest of us understand.

The Times