Canada has more legal leeway to freeze trucker convoy donations
Attorney Andy McCarthy weighs the legality of the Ontario government blocking donations to the Freedom Convoy on ‘Your World.’
Ottawa – On the ground in Ottawa the trucker protest in the shadow of the nation’s Parliament building looks like no other protest witnessed in recent memory.
The large powerful machines of commerce and the highways of North America are lined up along with Canadians and their Maple Leaf flags demanding the right to work under their own conditions. If it doesn’t look much like a protest, that’s because in many ways it isn’t, it's more like a strike.
CANADIAN TRUCKER SENDS MESSAGE TO JUSTIN TRUDEAU: 'I WISH HE WOULD BE A LEADER'
Protest almost always implies a threat. The threat of Occupy Wall Street or Seattle’s CHOP zone was that people will ignore the laws and rules of society. The threat of the BLM riots in the summer of 2020 was that if demands were not met buildings would burn. The threat in Ottawa is of a different order, these people are threatening not to work.
Nobody much cares if an anarchist protester decides not to go to their job as a furry friendly sex worker, or barista at the communist coffee collective, or Ivy League teaching assistant. But if men and women stop driving their trucks then everything, every product, every service, every object we reach for will be affected. The truckers even fit the physical image of a classic strike, all they need, to this New Yorker’s eyes, is a giant inflatable rat.
Meanwhile, the Canadian government and their lackeys in the American media have begun to play their role as strikebreakers. Last week the truckers were all supposedly white supremacists or enablers of white supremacy. Like the rhetorical version of a piece of undercooked pasta tossed at the wall, that didn’t stick at all. So now they have moved to the classic anti strike language of "outside agitators."
The last truck blocking the southbound lane moves after a breakthrough resolved the impasse where anti-COVID-19 vaccine mandate demonstrators blocked the highway at the busy U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. (Jeff McIntosh /The Canadian Press)
Now we are told all of these thick accented, flag waving Canadians are just dupes for nefarious American interests. This is a very old playbook, take this entry from the Canadian Encyclopedia about the 1919 general strike in Winnipeg, detractors "called the strike a revolutionary plot led by a small group of "alien scum." Winnipeg’s leading newspapers took this view, too. In reality, there was little evidence that the strike was started by Bolsheviks and immigrants from Eastern Europe."
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So is it here, in Ottawa. It is completely obvious from seeing and chatting with those here on the ground that this is not some American Trojan horse meant to infect the Great White North with Trumpism. The temperature is literally zero, which feels more like a punishment than weather, and these folks are taking selfies and dancing to Rick Astley.
A truck convoy of anti-COVID-19 vaccine mandate demonstrators continue to block the highway at the busy U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, Wednesday, Feb. 2, 2022. (Jeff McIntosh /The Canadian Press)
No, Ottawa is not "under siege." I coursed into town, a block from Parliament Hill in an Uber that faced no traffic at all. Most stores and restaurants closest to the events are closed, but that is just a small chunk of this city, and a block away it seems to be business as usual, at least the pandemic version with its "For Lease" signs on closed businesses.
My driver told me that "of course we should be vaccinated and wear masks, but we need our freedom." He supports the truckers, though he is by no means a vaccine or COVID denier.
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The left, in both Canada and the United States used to like it when the workers of the world united, or at least they claimed to. But this time it's a little different. This time the neoliberals are learning that Western workers don’t want a global world in which elites mandate the actions and lifestyles of the people.
The workers want freedom. And as this protest, or strike, or whatever we choose to call it spreads across the world, our leaders cannot help but sit up and take notice.
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