Canada is a worse place than it was four weeks ago because of the “Freedom Convoy” debacle.
And there’s plenty of blame to go around. But in assigning responsibility for the nightmare we’ve just endured, it’s important to rank those responsible by degree of culpability for the divisions they’ve caused or deepened in our population, the degrading of public discourse, the tremendous costs incurred, the diminished faith in public institutions and the international embarrassment Canada has suffered.
Above all, we should distinguish between those who must shoulder the blame for promoting and perpetrating wrongful behaviour, and those who merely failed in their duty to respond effectively to the wrongdoing.
With that in mind, here’s a list of who deserves blame for what’s happened, beginning with those most responsible.
We know the names of the key convoy organizers — Tamara Lich, Chris Barber, Pat King and a handful of others — and they’re already facing legal and financial repercussions for the roles they played in spearheading the occupation of Ottawa and promoting its spinoff blockades at the border in Coutts, Alta., and the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, as well as other disruptions.
The cost to businesses and Canadian taxpayers will be astronomical. Their farcical manifesto — calling for the scrapping of all pandemic public health measures and/or the overthrow of Canada’s government — would have been merely laughable if it didn’t betray a frightening callousness towards the tens of thousands of vulnerable Canadians whose lives have been and continue to be saved by vaccine mandates and other COVID-19 protocols. Many misguided Canadians joined and helped finance what became a dangerous and damaging misadventure, but it was the convoy leaders who unleashed everything that followed.
Thousands of Canadians, including cross-border truckers opposed to vaccine mandates and various allies espousing a grab-bag of viewpoints — anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-science religious zealots, Trudeau haters, libertarian extremists, far-right racists and People’s Party of Canada devotees — coalesced into the aggressive, horn-honking, harassing mob that occupied Ottawa for 22 days and spread mayhem elsewhere. Bouncy castles for kids and ubiquitous Canadian flags suggest a lot of ordinary but easily led Canadians wound up in the convoy crowd. But that doesn’t excuse the weeks of law-breaking and belligerence brought to the capital. What many of the participants will view as their flash of fame should, in fact, sink in eventually as a moment of shame in their lives.
The Conservative Party of Canada has disgraced itself in this moment of history. Ex-leader Erin O’Toole seemed to understand that the so-called party of law and order couldn’t possibly condone what was taking shape in the shadow of the Peace Tower in the early days of the occupation. But he, too, flirted with the populist forces at play, finally agreeing to meet for friendly talks with protesting truckers — a position that proved too moderate anyway for his convoy-beguiled caucus. So, the “angry, negative, and extreme” wing of the party that O’Toole warned about soon deposed him. The caucus has since rallied, in large part, around the blockade boosterism of leadership frontrunner Pierre Poilievre. Interim leader Candice Bergen (who, like Poilievre and other Tory MPs, posed for pictures with Ottawa’s hostage-takers) belatedly urged the trucker-occupiers to go home. But the Conservatives — including former leader Andrew Scheer — have generally encouraged, excused and enabled the blockaders, lending the legitimacy of their elected offices to an obviously unlawful cause.
Certain members of the convoy movement must be singled out for exceptional atrociousness: the alleged goons with guns at Coutts; the Confederate flag and swastika wavers in downtown Ottawa; the anti-maskers who invaded the Rideau Centre to harass patrons and shop owners; the thugs who stormed the Shepherds of Good Hope soup kitchen and demanded free meals; the abusers of the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, National War Memorial and Terry Fox statue; the bullies who menaced local citizens for wearing masks or otherwise going about their business in occupied Ottawa; the jerks who tried to intimidate journalists.
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Canadian individuals and businesses that donated money to support the convoy occupation and blockades clearly aided and abetted the mayhem that ensued. This should serve as a warning to others who may be inclined to back any political action — by right-wing and left-wing groups alike — designed to go far beyond the bounds of legitimate protest.
People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier and independent Ontario MPP Randy Hillier — an anti-mask and anti-vaccine exile from the province’s Progressive Conservative Party — were among the high-profile Canadian influencers who rallied the convoy crowd on Parliament Hill and then propagandized for weeks in favour of occupation and blockades via social media. It’s no surprise they got behind the movement; each has self-serving reasons to promote the kind of anarchical politics the “Freedom Convoy” represents.
Former U.S. president Donald Trump, Republican Sen. Ted Cruz and the Fox News misinformation empire are among the foreign influencers that backed the convoy and its reckless aims. Non-Canadian donors also gave millions of dollars to bankroll the chaos in Canada — much of it, thankfully, blocked in the end. Social media disinformation campaigns based in other countries appear to have stoked some Canadians’ discontent. The meddling of outsiders in our politics — especially in amplifying marginal or extremist viewpoints and actions — remains a serious concern.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his government clearly mishandled what began as a fringe movement of anti-vaccine mandate agitators but drifted into a national crisis. Trudeau’s broad-brush smearing of unvaccinated Canadians as “misogynists and racists” fuelled the fires of outrage that spawned the convoy mess. He then boxed himself into a corner where it seemed like any kind of discussion about any issues raised by the protesters — let alone negotiation — was deemed to be capitulation. The government invoked an Emergencies Act that many reasonable critics have called an overreach that could have been avoided with more deft management of the situation weeks earlier.
And would it really have been too much, at some point along the way, for federal officials to have coordinated, with the provinces, a national strategy for tentatively ending vaccine mandates that emphasized the need for a science-based call on all final decisions? The Conservatives were demanding some version of this, but Canada is a country built on compromises — and we could have used a few to help defuse the convoy crisis.
Finally, arm’s-length agencies such as the RCMP and CSIS — ultimately under the federal government’s authority — bear some responsibility for the failure of intelligence and logistical response that allowed hundreds of transport trucks to entrench themselves on Parliament Hill for three weeks. Ottawa Police (see below) deserve most of this blame, but how could a G7 nation — beginning with its prime minister — let jurisdictional etiquette lead to the occupation of its capital?
Ottawa’s police and municipal government initially responded to the invasion of the city by hundreds of big rigs as if it were a conventional protest that might last a weekend. Non-confrontational “policing” that had the effect of facilitating the occupation proved disastrous, eventually costing the police chief his job and plunging city council into disarray. Toronto learned from Ottawa’s mistakes and prevented a trucker occupation of that city a week later; Washington is studying the Ottawa catastrophe ahead of a threatened trucker assault on D.C. next month. The abject failure of Canada’s capital to stop a takeover of Parliament Hill and adjacent parts of its downtown has already become a textbook case of how not to deal with such a crisis.
We shouldn’t forget that there’s a non-human player — the coronavirus — that ultimately gave rise to the Freedom Convoy and all of the blameworthy behaviour that has followed in its slipstream. The global COVID-19 pandemic, still far from over, is a landmark event in modern history. It has killed more than five million people worldwide, and its impacts extend well beyond public health into politics and social upheaval in many countries — including Canada, as the convoy calamity has made clear.
Randy Boswell is an Ottawa journalist and Carleton University professor.
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