We have to live with the dangerous Freedom Convoy fringe. But politicians don’t have to lend them support

Opinion

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This article was published 26/01/2022 (1066 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

There were so many Canadian flags. People carried them, hung them from their trucks, wrapped them around their shoulders. The Bass Pro Shops parking lot in Vaughan was filled with people who wanted to see the Freedom Convoy, and to bathe in giddy, misguided, collective rage. They honked their horns and hooted and hollered and yelled more at CBC journalists than anybody else. A mother stood to the side, her two-year-old bundled in a stroller. Her name was Dasha, and she wouldn’t give her last name. She was unvaccinated. I asked her, what was this for?

“Freedom,” she said, “for the people.”

How do you define freedom, I asked.

“To do anything we’d like to do. Like we did before. To go back to normal.”

The truck convoy was started to oppose the federal vaccine mandate for truckers to cross the U.S.-Canada border. It is being organized by extremists with some deeply noxious anti-Islam, antisemitic, racist views and who have also written a document in crayon legalese demanding the removal of the government. The convoy has become a bug light for anti-pandemic, anti-lockdown, anti-vaccination, right-wing grievance, to the point that Donald Trump Jr. has made a video about it. People at the rally yelled, Freedom!

“They put graphene oxide in the vaccines, they suck the air from your bloodstream, that’s why they can’t breathe,” yelled one woman who walked beside me. It’s not true.

The convoy features people who threaten journalists, or spit on them, or threaten violence in general. Thursday night, in Ottawa, the parliamentary sergeant-at-arms sent out a memo to members of Parliament that attempts had been made to discern their home addresses. It said they should lock their doors.

How do we go back to normal? I asked Dasha.

“If the government lets us,” she said.

But the hospitals are full. Vaccines help keep people out of hospitals. She laughed.

“Well, if you go online, you’ll see that there’s a lot of videos, a lot of doctors speaking up. If you go online and listen, it’s very easy to see.” She mentioned the recent anti-vaccine rally in Washington, D.C.

“The hospitals are full of s—, that’s what they’re full of.”

This was one of several convoys converging on Ottawa, though the figure of 50,000 trucks being thrown around is pure fantasy. This parking lot was jammed; there were crowds on every highway overpass south of Vaughan and across the top of the GTA, and beyond. There were anti-vaccine signs, those F— Trudeau flags you can find in any town in the country, the Gadsden flag that American conservatives love.

It was a clarifying day in Canada, and hopefully it’s the worst we see this week. Conservative influencer and former “Dragons’ Den” panellist W. Brett Wilson tweeted what seemed to be a coded reference to murdering your enemies in reference to the prime minister. Former Conservative Party leader Andrew Scheer called Trudeau “the biggest threat to freedom in Canada.”

Why would they exaggerate the hospital numbers? I asked Dasha.

“Well, maybe you should ask Trudeau about this.”

But Trudeau isn’t in charge of hospitals.

“This is the whole plan, OK?

Plan?

“I don’t know exactly. I don’t know why you’re asking me. I’m just a regular person that wants to go back to normal. Why can’t we just call it a day and say this is a regular flu just like any other flu?”

She turned away to watch the people in the parking lot. Later that day, Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole said he would meet with the convoy. Freelance journalist Justin Ling asked him what he was thinking, twice, and O’Toole couldn’t say, trying to placate a part of our base.

Look, everyone’s tired. This is hard. The anti-vaccine movement does not encompass the entire unvaccinated population. There are still many unvaccinated people who lack institutional trust for good reason, or who find the barriers to vaccination still difficult, or who just need a trusted voice to tell them the truth.

But true anti-vaxxers simply cannot be made to see that vaccines are exceedingly safe, or that vaccines are the best tool to push society back toward normal, and they’re all over this convoy. The call to remove lockdowns came as Ontario approached a record for daily deaths in the province. No prominent conservative seems to mention that the Americans have the same rule.

“I see it as pointless, because the U.S. has the exact same regulation for crossing south, and you have to cross south before you can come north and deal with the Canadian regulations,” said one vaccinated trucker who requested anonymity. “So what’s the point of it? You can’t go down to protest at the White House, because you’d need to get them to change their regulation first.

“I think you’re seeing a small proportion that are anti-vaxx that are involved in trucking, and what scares me is all these other fringe groups that are latching onto it, and if something does go wrong, it’s another black eye for truckers. There are so many other things in trucking they could be protesting.”

It is no surprise that Canada has a segment of the population that are victims of misinformation, or of hatred. It’s no shock we have media, mainstream and otherwise, that feed both. And sadly, it’s no shock that the Conservative party considers that group as potential voters.

In a way, it’s like COVID in reverse. You don’t need a big percentage of people to get really sick to overwhelm the hospitals; you don’t need a big percentage of people to oppose vaccines to overwhelm the parking lot of Bass Pro Shops. We have to live with this fringe, whatever it is. Sure.

But we also have a major party embracing the giddy inchoate rage of our angriest citizens, and it doesn’t take too much imagination to see where that could go next. You know why those flags were everywhere? Because this is Canada. And we have to find a way to live with that.

Bruce Arthur is a Toronto-based columnist for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @bruce_arthur