AMAC Exclusive – By Daniel Roman
The French Revolution had the Sans Culottes, the German Revolution of 1918 had the sailors and soldiers councils, and the Russian Revolution had railway workers. While the media coverage of the Canadian truckers has tried to cast them in a similarly bloody and insurrectionary light, Canadians are nice people, even if they are tired of their hapless Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau.
Rather than the violent revolution, their opponents seek to portray, the actual scene in Canada today bears more resemblance to the series of nationwide strikes by truckers which paralyzed Chile in 1973. Those protests paved the way for the fall of the Communist government of Salvador Allende. Certainly, Justin Trudeau is unlikely to meet the same end as that Chilean leader, defending his governmental office in Ottawa with a pistol in hand in a romantic gesture of defiance. (Self-sacrifice is not really a Trudeau family virtue, after all.) Yet there is a deep irony to the situation in which Trudeau now finds himself. Having dealt in the politics of imagery for seven years, Trudeau has been unable to adjust to a real threat to his leadership in the form of the trucker’s strike.
Let’s be clear from the start. For all the enthusiasm it has generated not just in Canada but around the world, the strike by Canadian truckers which has shut down the capital of Ottawa as well as a number of border crossings with the United States is not a plot to overthrow the Canadian government, as Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-wing New Democratic Party, has chillingly alleged. Nor is it an operation by “little green men” masterminded by Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin, as CNN bizarrely claimed, without evidence.
Rather, the so-called Freedom Convoy is a populist reaction against COVID restrictions in general, but also something far greater. It reflects a growing backlash against a Canadian political system that fails to represent large segments of the population, and a Prime Minister who has built his career on making popular representation even narrower, using divide and conquer tactics to maintain power with well under a third of the vote. Millions feel disenfranchised by a government that has won fewer votes than the opposition two elections in a row, yet not only remains in power but acts as if it cannot possibly be defeated. A government whose approach to opposition—especially regarding COVID restrictions—has not been to persuade or conciliate, but to rub critics’ faces in their own impotence.
Democrats in the United States have taken to talking a lot about “democracy,” “legitimacy,” and the national “popular vote.” The dirty little secret of Justin Trudeau’s tenure is that his support never approached a majority, and he has maintained power with ever-shrinking proportions of the vote. In 2015, the Liberals under the fresh-faced Justin won 39.47% of the vote, which, while enough to produce a landslide result in seats, was less than the 39.62% of the vote Stephen Harper had won for the Conservatives in 2011. Four years later, Trudeau’s support fell to 33.12% of the vote. This was less than the Conservatives’ 34.34% of the vote, but enough to deliver his party 155 seats compared to 121 for the Conservatives. Critically, the Liberals won only 4 of the 62 seats in Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, revealing massive geographic polarization between the rural, energy-producing plains, and Ontario, where Trudeau’s vice-like grip on the Toronto suburbs helped him narrowly hold power. In 2021, when Trudeau called an early election, his support fell even further to 32.62%, while the Conservatives won 33.74%. Yet Trudeau’s Liberals actually gained seats, winning 160 to 119 for the Conservatives.
Following the 2021 elections, both Trudeau in government and the Conservatives in “opposition” acted as if he were politically invincible. Trudeau imposed some of the most vigorous vaccination mandates in the world and moved to eliminate religious exemptions. More jarring, the Conservatives, shaken by their defeats, backed the government not just on COVID, but controversially on a ban on “conversion therapy,” which in effect made it child abuse for parents to even question their minor children if they sought to change gender. The decision of the Conservative leader Erin O’Toole to force every Conservative member of parliament to vote for the bill undermined O’Toole’s position (which he lost last week), but it also convinced many that there was no opposition. If Trudeau could not be defeated, and even if he could be but the opposition supported all of the same things, was Canada really still a “democracy”?
Officially, of course, the strike is about COVID restrictions, which in Canada have lasted longer and been far harsher than anywhere else in the Western world. Whereas lockdowns in the fullest sense were an artifact of the spring of 2020 in most of the United States, and received sequels in Europe in 2021 with a total national lockdown in the UK in the spring of 2021, Canada is the only major country outside of Australia where full lockdowns were attempted in response to the Omicron variant in December. While Boris Johnson in the UK resisted pressure to shut down Britain a third (or would it be a fourth?) time, Ontario closed restaurants, gyms, and schools for the month of January 2022, while imposing strict vaccination requirements. While Justin Trudeau would be quick to note that this move, like many others, was carried out not by the federal government he controls, but by a provincial government led by Rob Ford of the Conservative Party, the complicity of Canada’s most powerful Conservative politician made things even worse.
These protests then are as much against the Conservative Party and its uselessness as an official opposition as they are against Trudeau. And in that respect, they have already succeeded. The arrival of the truckers in Ottawa was the signal for the removal of Conservative leader O’Toole, who had tried to expel Conservative politicians who met with protestors only to find himself thrown out by a vote of 73-47. His interim successor, Candace Bergan, is an outspoken right-winger who is pro-life, an unusual position for Canadian politicians. She has refused to condemn the convoy, and her disagreement with O’Toole over the latter’s desire to back Trudeau was a major reason for his ouster.
The protestors have therefore already succeeded in carrying out a revolution within the Conservative Party, ensuring that it will now actually oppose Trudeau.
What of Trudeau himself? The Prime Minister vanished for several days at the start of the “crisis” ostensibly due to COVID exposure, though while this would explain his physical absence, it does little to justify why he went silent. Most of Trudeau’s response then and since returning has been a mixture of confusion and outrage over how anyone could try and engage in political opposition outside the contours of the rigged game he has established. He accused truckers of waving Swastikas and of representing a “fringe minority,” apparently blind to the irony of a government which won 31% of the vote claiming to represent the popular will.
By threatening the use of the Army, he further antagonized the protestors and demonstrated that he viewed them not as constituents but as enemies. Then, by declining either to actually use force or to negotiate, he outsourced the entire problem to local officials without guidance, leading to clashes with locals that he is now trying to blame on the protesters, shady American backers, or Vladimir Putin.
Trudeau seems to have hoped ignoring and then insulting the protestors would make them give up and go away. After all, that worked with the Conservative Party for the last seven years. Instead, he has made them feel vilified, and motivated them to continue. Even some of his own MPs have begun to have doubts. Liberal MP Joël Lightbound suggested that “a decision was made to wedge, to divide and to stigmatize.” As Politico notes, dissent within the Liberal Party has tended to be short-term and ended in near-immediate expulsion. Lightbound, however, is Trudeau’s caucus chair in Quebec, where the Conservatives have historically been weakest. If Quebec is wavering, then Trudeau may have wider problems.
Trudeau’s whole strategy throughout his career has been to always appear merely preferable to the alternative. In Canada, that meant the Conservatives on the right, or the New Democrats on the left. Internationally, it meant Donald Trump in the U.S. For once, however, Trudeau’s own “successes” may have left him with no one to contrast himself with. There is no Conservative leader who can shield him from criticism. Bergan has made clear she feels this is Trudeau’s problem, not Canada’s. Internationally, his efforts to claim Donald Trump has been behind the protest have been laughable, and Tucker Carlson and other figures have responded with the most dangerous of assaults on any leader – mockery. Reviving longstanding rumors that Fidel Castro is the real father of the Canadian Prime Minister, Carlson has turned Trudeau into a punchline.
The protest may not be the end for Trudeau, but it certainly looks like the beginning of one. His isolation is now clear, as is his impotence. His entitlement is displayed before Canada and the world as the bedrock of his political legitimacy. The opposition has undergone a revolution and, win or lose, will no longer play his game. Trudeau, who for 7 years has been able to blame everyone but himself for problems, now stands alone, an Emperor without clothes. A man who represents not a country, not an electorate, not a principle or even an idea, but merely himself. We have the truckers and other members of the “Freedom Convoy” to thank for that.
Daniel Roman is the pen name of a frequent commentator and lecturer on foreign policy and political affairs, both nationally and internationally. He holds a Ph.D. in International Relations from the London School of Economics.