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Cohen: Truck convoy — An American-style protest, a limp Canadian response

The prissy city that issues parking tickets on Christmas Eve and makes kids shut down lemonade stands is afraid to ticket truckers blocking downtown, because, you know, they might get angry.
Andrew Cohen - Feb 02, 2022

It is easy to talk of the Americanization of Canada, particularly in our political institutions. We now set fixed election dates, we ask appointees to the Supreme Court to appear before Parliament, we embrace attack advertising in elections.

More than anything, the tone of our politics has changed. Parliament does not have the congeniality or collegiality of a generation ago. Members clash in raw personal terms. Parliament sounds like Congress.

The Conservative Party is no longer the Progressive Conservative Party. Increasingly, it is what was once the now-defunct liberal wing of the Republican Party. It has acquired a hard-edged social conservatism, which makes winning hard in a moderate, centrist country.

If you are looking for more evidence, consider the trucker protest unfolding in Ottawa. You’d think this show was “imported from Detroit,” as the television commercial brilliantly sold the Chrysler 200.

Looking around, the signs of Americana are there: “Make Canada Great” hats, a Confederate flag, the ubiquitous banners (“F–k Trudeau, Trump 2024).” The crowd may be Canadian but it looks American. The vulgarity, the slogans, the props. Talk of the Tea Party. How original.

As the language and messages are American, so are the goals. Freedom, freedom, freedom, the protesters cry, like Richie Havens wailing at Woodstock. That’s the best you can do, your loudest chant, in a country overwhelmingly vaccinated? Canadians don’t live in a gulag. According to the Human Freedom Index, we are the sixth-freest country in the world.

But freedom to choose, whatever the cost to the majority, is the ark of the covenant of this “freedom convoy.” You have to work hard to make that argument in Canada, where freedom matters less than security.

That is why Pierre Elliott Trudeau, a civil libertarian, could impose the War Measures Act against terrorists in Quebec in 1970. He knew what mattered.

So, surveying the protesters, you might conclude: this picture is American. But look more closely and you may think we are not so American. After all, with downtown shut down, with businesses, clinics and offices closed, all we do is wring hands and wag fingers.

Yes, we ask the protesters to go home. Please leave, implores Mayor Milquetoast, a lame duck who has never been more lame. And if you don’t, he quacks, well, we’ll keep asking. Or, maybe, I’ll use my outside voice, even if it hurts your feelings, and then, well, you’ll be sorry.

We’re good at scolding in Canada. It’s “disrespectful” to dance on the National War Memorial or pee on the lawn or smear feces on someone’s door. It’s “concerning” or “inappropriate” when you honk all night. Now, stop. Please.

The prissy city that issues parking tickets on Christmas Eve and makes kids shut down lemonade stands is afraid to ticket truckers blocking downtown, because, you know, they might get angry. The more we tell the protesters the damage they cause, the more we embolden them to carry on.

Curfew? Permit? Public mischief? Wrongful assembly? Deadline? Limits? Boundaries? Really, there is nothing you can do but shrug, with a cost of increased policing at more than $1 million a day?

Meanwhile, the police chief congratulates his members for their patience and restraint, which seems to include tucking the protesters into bed at night. He talks about “de-escalation” while timid souls fear retaliation if we dare consider the rights of the majority, particularly the sleepless in Centretown — isolated, intimidated and frustrated.

Canadian? Someone inside foolishly tells the CBC the prime minister has left town, as if the mob were at his door. This makes news abroad. Better he channel his defiant father, hook his fingers in his belt and declare, “Just watch me.” At the very least, let him offer the police the “non-lethal weapons” he offered Ukrainians, the better to “de-escalate.”

So here we are. In tone, the truckers are Americans: defiant, noisy, coarse, messianic, insouciant. In response, the police and politicians are Canadian: deferential, polite, prudent, feckless.

Six days on, who has the upper hand?

Andrew Cohen is a journalist, a professor at Carleton University and author of Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History.

https://ottawacitizen.com/opinion/c...n-style-protest-a-limp-canadian-response