Trudeau flees as first 1,000 Trucks Arrive in Ottawa

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I'm starting to feel black bloc tactics are an appropriate response.

To clarify some commentary today, we would not direct healthcare staff on whether or not to wear uniforms.

Healthcare workers remain a priority for the Toronto Police and officers will be present around hospitals this weekend to ensure they feel safe going to and from work.

It's amazing the types of people who blindly believe the media because it tells them what they want to believe...

You're missing a big part of the point, that having the better platform doesn't matter if you're going to sneer at someone's culture, say by smearing them all as ignorant bigots. Democrats could have the greatest platform possible, but they're still going to lose the working class to guys like Donald Trump if they can't collectively get over themselves and stop giving off the impression that they know what's best for everyone and everything would be great if the rubes would just give up their superstitions and recognize their betters.

This political obsession with top-down control has now spread into the broader culture, as we now are seeing with the mainstream Canadian centre-Left’s reaction to the recent large national truckers’ protest in Ottawa, an event that dominated the country’s news for days in late January. Many of the participants were bound together by an opposition to vaccine mandates. But no permanent organization ran the protest, which appears to have been built around social media, a GoFundMe page, and a loose affiliation of local groups that had developed amidst provincial-level protests over the past few years.

[...]

There is no doubt that a small fraction of participants were members of Canada’s tiny fascist militias—such as the Sons of Odin and the Proud Boys. In addition, the spirit of the protest and the issue it took up, vaccine passports, had already attracted members of right-wing groups that are not themselves truckers but wished to express solidarity or exploit the protest as an organizing and recruitment opportunity.

Those of us who cut our teeth in the 1980s peace movement know this pattern well. The Vancouver Peace March once attracted as much as 10 percent of the city’s population (50,000 protesters at its peak) for an annual walk across Burrard Bridge to support global nuclear disarmament. The vanguard of the march comprised the Trotskyites, Maoists, and other communist sectarians and foreign-dictator enthusiasts, who saw this as their big annual opportunity to radicalize and recruit ordinary anti-nuclear activists.

Right-wing commentators sought to discredit these protests by heavily featuring and platforming the most off-topic or radical protesters, and then seeking to paint all protesters with that broad brush. This approach generally failed, and was mocked by the mainstream press, which depicted the diversity of protesters and homemade signs as a sign of the depth of the movement’s support.

But in the case of the truckers, that hatchet-job approach is working, because our society’s values have changed, and because the target audience is different.

Canadians as a whole, and especially centre-left voters, have come to believe that the legitimacy of a movement inheres not in its size or the diversity of people and views it represents, but rather in its ability to discipline and control its supporters. By that lens, this protest looked illegitimate and frightening. Trucks were parked everywhere. Many people partied and got drunk. Some carelessly disrespected a military monument and other public landmarks. One driver was pictured driving by with a Confederate flag. Not only were the speech and signage of protesters not being controlled by any central authority; but some participants even celebrated the presence of heterodox opinions.

This kind of move, akin to covering a peace march by profiling the views of pro-North Korea activists and nudists who’d tagged along, went over shockingly well, signifying to urban media consumers that, at worst, the truckers were all homophobic Klansmen; or, at best, the protest leaders were unable or unwilling to tell everyone what to do—which, as noted above, is now considered to be a damning indictment.

In attacking Justin Trudeau and vaccine mandates, some protesters made false and unreasonable comparisons between present-day Canada and the early days of Nazi Germany, even using a swastika to make the point. Like most Canadians, I find these comparisons deeply offensive. But that is what they are: deeply offensive comparisons, born largely of ignorance and a persecution complex. They aren’t attestations of fascistic political belief.

[...]

I am not writing this piece to advocate for the protest and its participants. I am writing this piece to ask Canadians like me whether we want our future protests to be judged and covered by standards applied to the truckers today. I am asking us to think about what happens to the horizon of possibility for mass organizing when we throw in with the idea that actual, authentic grassroots protests are a thing of the past—because the only “legitimate” public demonstration is one choreographed from above, its participants either carefully reading from an identical script or intimidated into silence.

We should also think about the Proud Boys and Sons of Odin who may well have gone to the rally to radicalize its participants. The on-the-ground experience of regular folks participating will have been that of being called Nazis, traitors, Klansmen, bigots, and so forth. Not only will this alienate the participants from Canadian society; it will make them look less unfavourably on others who are called Nazis and Klansmen. How bad could those guys really be, they will ask themselves, if they’re supposedly just like me? Were they, too, denounced unfairly?

[...]

In time, most people will just start ignoring those claims. This being an age in which the authoritarian threat is real and society-wide, a high price may one day be paid for all this crying “wolf” over fascism.

What I am really trying to do is sound a cultural alarm bell about the exaltation of order, discipline, and control. These are authoritarian impulses. In a nation where rapid change is not just a moral necessity, but an ecological one, we must not only retain the capacity for mass mobilization, but also the ability to properly recognize and resist actual authoritarian forces, irrespective of whether they fly under progressive or conservative banners.

The perils of left populism
It remains unclear how populism should serve as a working program for broad left demands

This article is a response to “What the Left can learn from the ‘Freedom Convoy’,” by Emma Jackson, published in The Breach on February 2, 2022.

As the contradictions between classes sharpen in a crisis, so too do the contradictions within them; and wherever this is the case, the spectre of populism is sure to exert a persuasive appeal. In a recent piece for The Breach, entitled “What the Left can learn from the ‘Freedom Convoy’,” writer and organizer Emma Jackson calls for an “expansive left populism” to defeat the far-right. There is much in Jackson’s assessment on which a principled left can only agree—in a powerful litany of motivating causes, Jackson rallies against pharmaceutical profiteering; government austerity; the overexploitation of migrant workers; the underdevelopment of First Nations; declining wages and quality of work; and more. These are certainly among the fronts on which the left must fight—but it remains unclear how populism as such should serve as a working program for broad left demands, given its susceptibility to the politics of reaction.

Populism has proven an effective framework for centre-left electoral strategy throughout Europe and Latin America, providing significant gains for broad coalitions such as SYRIZA in Greece, Podemos in Spain, and more suspensefully, Apruebo Dignidad in Chile. While these are noteworthy objects of study, it’s difficult to apply their lessons in North America, where there are no leftist parties in Parliament to coalesce, let alone govern. Here it’s likely that interest in populism crested around the time of the 2016 US presidential election, during which liberal commentators drafted a provisional equivalence between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. Both candidates were ideological outliers, it was said, eccentrics of their respective tickets; and both made a class-first appeal to a declining standard of living, recruiting support from the same disenfranchised base. Surely this implied proximity—based on a purely subtractive assessment of a self-cancelling status quo, Democrats versus Republicans—was in part responsible for the liberal commonplace that Bernie’s ‘democratic socialism’ was authored by and for a mythical “white working class”—the same to whom Trump pandered at his self-consciously blue-collar rallies with sinister panache.

In Canada, most significant examples of populist style still come from the political right; from the far-right People’s Party to the Yellow Vests, an eclectic imitation of les gilets jaunes in France. As Jackson writes, “the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views,” presumably outmanoeuvring the left at our own game. Rather than simply assume that the contemporary form of politics is populist, however, we could ask: why is this style and method so well-suited to the purposes of rightism in advanced capitalist economies? What precisely is populism, other than a generic practice of a generalized people? And what, if anything, is its proper content?
Populism’s reasons

Populism, according to the late Argentinian scholar Ernesto Laclau, is not a politics per se but a model of discourse. In his influential account, populist style works to establish a provisional equivalence between a plurality of heretofore unsorted demands by reference to a common signifier—an enemy or otherwise excluded element of the group created thereby. As his lifelong collaborator Chantal Mouffe describes, the goal of populism is to construct a people, rather than discover any such body already intact. Mouffe continues: populism consolidates a specific group of interests under the hegemonic sign of ‘the’ people, delineating an ‘us’ from a ‘them’—though neither term factually precedes its symbolization as part of an antagonistic couplet. Populism designates the purely formal means by which a common interest is demonstrated, by reference to a common adversary.

This formal emptiness doesn’t necessarily equate to political neutrality, however. Populism, says Mouffe, is a discursive strategy by which one erects a conceptual “frontier” between a people and its counterpart. And while Laclau and Mouffe each acknowledge the preponderance of right-wing populism in the political field, both thinkers see populism as a formal operation that can reach beyond the supposed “class essentialism” of the Marxist tradition, collating various progressive causes by way of a rhetorical attractor or emotional appeal. This strictly discursive strategy leaves aside rationality and objectivity altogether; abandoning any factual standard by which to differentiate between a fantastic frontier, proffered by conspiracy theories and popular prejudice, and the real gulf between class interests.

For this reason, populism is always in danger of backsliding into simplification—closer to bourgeois nationalism and conspiratorial fervor than to liberationist politics—insofar as populist style is fundamentally unable to observe any difference between science and ideology, fact and fiction, truth and lies. Where all signifiers are counted equal insofar as they are efficacious, the best result one can affect is a false depiction of a true state of affairs.

More importantly, the empty formalism of populist style conceals a predetermined social content. In Laclau’s description, populist group formation presupposes a chaos of interests prior to a point of articulation, such that a summary atomization logically precedes the constitution of a people from so many separate claims. In this respect, populist style infers the radically atomized social fabric of liberal capitalism—not as an ideological effect concealing the operations of class society, but as social reality itself.

‘Populism’ is thus based on a liberal axiom of highly changeable individual interest, subject only to persuasion. With reference to the electoral successes of self-styled ‘populist’ parties the world over, one might even suggest that the purely formal defense of populist style associated with Laclau and Mouffe is in some sense a reification of the ballot form—displacing the consulting subjectivities at play in liberal democracy onto the social field at large.

The dangerous class

Should we choose to directly equate the practice of politics with populist style, then we might indeed deceive ourselves into thinking that the contemporary right, however fractious, has a decisive advantage today. But this chastening comparison is less compelling should we conclude that populism is uniquely suited to reactionary mystification. With reference to the so-called Freedom Convoy, Jackson opts for the former narrative:

In stark contrast to the Left, the past few days have revealed how much better the Right is at meeting people where they’re at … Instead of building an insular movement restricted to people who agree with each other 93 per cent of the time, the Right has successfully tapped into widely held resentment and built a mass on-ramp for people with highly divergent views. It’s why the Freedom Convoy isn’t just being ardently defended by white supremacists on Rebel News, but also by anti-vaccine Green Party supporters in the inboxes of mainstream environmental organizations.


This is a fairly precise description of the populist style outlined by Laclau and Mouffe, as well as its superficially broad effectivity—by tapping into a timely resentment, the right has collated so many only seemingly disparate interests into a large coalition. This would be a damning comparison in terms of momentary scale, were we to mistake the qualitative ‘masses’ from whom socialism would recruit—those who create the wealth on which the world turns—with the merely quantitative ‘masses’ of populism: which is to say, a bunch of people, doing stuff.

As we know, populist style is chiefly utilized on behalf of ruling class interests, masquerading as a discontented working class front; and the Freedom Convoy is no exception. So rather than accept the terms of populism as a rhetorical attractor, explaining the affective appeal of the convoy in nebulous terms, we should immediately ask why the likes of Rebel News pundits and Green Party environmentalists converge on this of all causes.

Where populist style typically supposes left and right to converge on a similar terrain, struggling to orchestrate the many conflicted desires of its favoured people, it’s crucial to note the objective circumstances from which the Freedom Convoy and its associated movements effectively recruit. These are not working class movements, even to the degree that they appeal to, and have truly endangered, large factions of alienated workers. The anti-vaccine movement is chiefly comprised of disaffected members of the lower middle class, libertarians, entrepreneurs and others classically destined to align with proto-fascist currents during a massive transfer of wealth to the ruling class, such as we have seen over the course of this decade, and during the pandemic especially.

Of course, socialists should have a reply to the economic and social anxieties of these demographics. To a certain extent this grouping, divided against themselves, may be identified with the fabled “middle class” to whom all political parties campaign. Doubtlessly, the attempt to insert this term of meagre ascendancy into the popular vernacular, obfuscating the class society altogether, is partly responsible for today’s perception that the right has effectively cornered the sympathies of working people. But we must be able to say with clarity: it is no miracle that the right is able to recruit from those predisposed to reaction by their objective position between warring classes.

Populism tempts us with the dangerous illusion that both right and left recruit from an identical discontent, and that we are speaking to the same fundamental interest, albeit with different reasons. In broad strokes, this is true; the larger part of the right has a class interest in common with the larger part of the left, insofar as the larger part of each faction have to sell something of themselves in order to survive. In many specific instances, however, this idealization entirely elides the fact that right and left do not represent separate administrative strategies for gradually improving the lives of the middle class. Rather, these positions (at least theoretically) span the distance between socialism and reaction, thus representing very different interests. With a class analysis in hand, it’s not difficult to account for the apparent success, and the strangeness, of the Freedom Convoy; nor is it especially tempting to model a broad left movement on the ideologizations of a proto-fascist business lobby and its easy riders, who represent a truly marginal percentage of their industry after all.

That said, this is a decisive moment, as contradictions within classes multiply and lateral antagonisms mount; and it is important for the left to have a multi-level reply to the anti-mandate movement as it presently exists. The ruling and business classes no doubt stand to benefit from a vaccine mandate, where this requirement has finally removed any expectation of a greater social wage from the state for those unable to work; it is a scandal for equity and hastens the privatization of nominally public space. None of these legitimate concerns has any bearing on the incontrovertible evidence that the available vaccines save lives, and ought to be embraced as a public good. As the left itself struggles with this basic fact, succumbing in many quarters to bizarre conspiracy theories, and many of our family members and friends are tempted to further extremes of misinformation, we shouldn’t miss the more covert features of these conversations. Populism is never so literal in its representations.

As greater evidence of populism’s formal emptiness, the central terms of this debate have long since been euphemized, even as the pandemic rages. This week, the Freedom Convoy unfurls a sea of Canadian flags and intermittent swastikas. In its most photogenic moments, this ‘movement’ seems to have nothing to do with the management of a global pandemic whatsoever. This has long been the case, of course. As the People’s Party pivoted from their established brand of xenophobia to a chaotically effective, rapid-growth campaign against “vaccine passports,” the irony of this terminology was stark: after all, as a fanatical anti-immigration party, the PPC would check actual passports at every door. Nobody believes in free movement with less consistency than Maxime Bernier and his adherents, but he found a foothold in the popular imaginary, and used one paranoid talking point to operate another.

This kind of equivocation is itself a hallmark of populist style, and the remarkable success of populism on the right intimately concerns this bizarre convertibility of every cause and every sign. “In the anti-mandate movement,” Jackson writes, “everyone’s participation is welcome.” This is a sure indication of a single-issue populist movement in the making; right down to this statement of false inclusivity, where a self-vetting “everyone” is nonetheless recruited from within the densely overdetermined interests already comprising class society. If it sounds like a strange claim to make for a movement with such close ties to organized racism, it’s surely as strange that a de facto white nationalist movement has been so inclusive on the face of it. Such are the vagaries of ideology, which can only be corrected gradually and by reference to reality.

This, perhaps, is what we should read when Jackson says that the right is better than the left “at meeting people where they’re at.” For all the prejudice and experience condensed into this folksy idiom, we could restate it in equally circular terms: the right is better than the left at recruiting from experience that is already interpreted to the right. That said, the new right has happened upon wrong solutions to real problems, and there’s no doubt that any progressive movement needs to speak to these problems with an unsparing specificity, and a large amount of understanding where possible.

Jackson’s essay stares down this difficulty with a great deal of courage; but envy of the right, however formal, has never ended well. Jackson argues that we “have to learn from what the Right is doing successfully. We have to listen to their story about power and control, and counter it with a more compelling story of our own.” But we need an objective, rather than an imaginary standard by which to organize; because the left cannot recruit against itself, nor parlay the racist conspiracism of the owning class and their associations.

Where the populist playbook is concerned, we simply mustn’t oppose one fantasy of strength with another. No matter how broad, the movement against capitalism has so much more to offer than a rumour of belonging, on the other side of an exclusionary threshold.

But it is also disturbing to me how people can't see that no matter how much Trump "speaks" to them, he is the one who literally looks down on them and abuses them. The Republican party, as a whole, really isn't much better.

When you talk about attitudes towards individuals, I see a chicken v egg problem that hasn't been considered. The liberals I know had not previously looked down on "workers," even if they were oblivious to forces ruining blue collar lives, but they DID start to look down on groups of people that were clearly and excitedly following the siren call of Trump (which often turned out to be blue collar workers).

People support the blockade until it affects them.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/ ... -1.6338177

Alberta Indigenous leaders speak up against approach to Coutts border crossing protest and blockade

linda manyguns, associate vice-president of Indigenization and decolonization at Mount Royal University, says she is offended by what has taken place over the past week at Coutts, Alta., as an impasse has complicated travel to the southern border for days.

"It's obvious that there is some sort of preferential treatment to some portions of society that can demonstrate and shut down borders," manyguns said.

Demonstrators began parking their trucks and other vehicles near the Coutts crossing Saturday in solidarity with similar events in Ottawa to protest COVID-19 vaccine mandates and broader public health measures.

The protest has stranded travellers and cross-border truckers, compromised millions of dollars in trade and impeded access to basic goods and medical services for area residents.

Protesters agreed on Wednesday to open a lane on each side of the highway at the crossing. Since then, traffic has been moving slowly through the border.

RCMP said Thursday that they had heard protestors intended to pull out of the area soon. Protest organizers reversed that decision soon after.

In previous statements, RCMP characterized the protest as an "unlawful blockade," adding that they had been engaged with protestors to find a peaceful and safe resolution for all involved.

manyguns said past Indigenous-led protests were met with different actions taken by law enforcement and government, including the Gitxsan rail blockade.

The protest on the train tracks on Gitxsan territory near New Hazelton, B.C., was part of a movement of more than 30 rail blockades that swept the country in February 2020, halting freight and passenger traffic in many areas.

The rail line protests were launched after RCMP arrested people blocking access to construction on Wetsuwet'en traditional territory near Houston, B.C.

The blockade in Coutts isn't nearly as large and hasn't lasted as many days.

But other Alberta Indigenous leaders and activists say there have been notable disparities between the response from authorities when it comes to this protest compared to recent Indigenous protest actions.

On Wednesday, the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation in northern Alberta released a statement.

It said if the blockade was being organized by Indigenous people, authorities would respond quickly to remove it using Alberta's Critical Infrastructure Defence Act, which was passed in 2020.

manyguns agreed with that assessment.

"It doesn't matter whether it's murdered and missing women, it doesn't matter whether it's pipelines or whether it's issues with trees or territorial issues," manyguns said.

"We are constantly being reigned in — it is a blatant demonstration of the government's preference for some peoples' voices and not others."

Sahtu Dene activist Michelle Robinson hosts a podcast called Native Calgarian. She believes the Critical Infrastructure Defence Act was established to stop Indigenous people from protesting pipeline projects.

"So we literally have legislation in place to allow them to lawfully arrest these folks [in Coutts]. And even with the law on their side, they still won't do it because they're not Indigenous," Robinson said.

Robinson said the Royal Commission on Aboriginal Peoples and the Truth and Reconciliation report, as well as the inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, girls, trans and two-spirited people all represent a two-tiered justice system.

"And yet, we're still seeing a lot of the Canadian population almost surprised that this is happening," Robinson said.

manyguns said the message Indigenous people are receiving after witnessing the ongoing negotiations between RCMP and organizers of the Coutts protest is that Indigenous people don't matter.

"Aboriginal people are so sequestered into minimal activities in order to negotiate or make change for the things that were promised to them in treaties and I mean, we've kept our side of the deal. They got the land. All we want is to be treated fairly," manyguns said.

Did this make the news in Canada?

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/03/north-dakota-access-oil-pipeline-protests-explainer

Freedom Convoy leader asks rhetorical question ‘are there any white supremacists here?’ to try and disprove the notion. Instead the crowd cheers and someone on stage excitedly admits to being one