The Freedom Truckers, Solidarność, And The Underground Railroad

I've noticed complaints, not just from Prime Minister Trudeau but from other Canadians, that the Freedom Truckers have been partly funded by US donations. The first observation I would make is that, at least until the Canadian emergency declaration, there was nothing illegal, unethical, or immoral per se in making such a donation on either side of the border. There is no indication that any appeals for trucker funds were fraudulent.

The second observation I would make is that even before Canada became what is now constituted as Canada, there has been a friendly-adversarial relationship between the neighbors over human rights issues. Before the US Civil War, that territory was the most practical destination of the US Underground Railroad, which was an abolitionist network that facilitated the movement of escaped slaves to areas where they would be safe from recapture. However, even northern non-slave states in the US were required to return escaped slaves to their southern owners if they were caught. Canada wasn't under this obligation.

It appears that Canadians welcomed them, in part because the British had been quicker to abolish slavery. Followers of The Curse of Oak Island show recognize the case of Samuel Ball, an escaped slave from South Carolina who earned his freedom by fighting on the side of the British during the Revolution. Given the ambiguity of his situation in the US after 1783, he relocated to Nova Scotia, where he was welcomed and became a prosperous landowner.

During the Viet Nam War, Canada assisted US citizens who wished to escape conscription by making it easy for them to achieve landed immigrant status. I've got to assume this is also some source of pride for many Canadians, who must see themselves in such cases as a "true north" in the face of US injustices, and eventually the US issued an amnesty for US citizens who'd fled to Canada to avoid the draft. But it seems to me that these things can go both ways.

COVID lockdowns and other restrictive measures like curfews, limiting worship and other assembly, and limiting otherwise lawful business activity, are restrictions on human rights. Certainly in comparison to genocide, mass incarceration, wholesale confiscations of wealth and the like, they're milder, but they are in fact human rights abuses that can be justified only when the consequences of not violating such rights are worse. The record of the COVID panic has been that the restrictions have often been ineffective in stopping the disease at all and have had destructive side effects themselves, and even at best, the benefits of measures like vaccine mandates have been uncerain.

Efforts to negotiate even minimal relaxation of COVID restrictions, even in the face of clear evidence of their ineffectiveness, have been dificult in many countries, including Canada. Things have been worse in Australia and New Zealand, but those places aren't immediate US neighbors. There's a certain amount of good will between Americans and Canadians, especially at the people-to-people level involving the plebs, though not the elites. Americans and Canadians sympathize with people like truckers on both sides of the border. To claim that American truckers are just as subject to US border controls as Canadians, making American sympathies for Canadians somehow misguided, is to neglect the fact that the workers on both sides want both sets of controls, which have little medical justification, ameliorated or removed entirely.

This goes to another factor driving American sympathies: Americans and Canadians drive the same cars, eat the same food (with only a few exceptions), drink the same soda and beer, wear the same clothes. On the American side, COVID restrictions have been eased because states like Florida and Texas have been able to prove that things have turned out about the same with or without masks, social distance, or vaccines, which has made it easier for residents of other states to demand equivalent relaxations.

In Canada, as Jordan Peterson has pointed out, no equivalent relaxations took place until the Freedom Convoy began its protests, at which point five provinces promptly did schedule some limited lifting. At the same time, US controls do continue in various states, often inconsistently enforced, medically unnecessary, and at best annoying. The Freedom Convoy has had greater effect on US politicians than in Canada in encouraging continued relaxations, which from a US perspective is reason enough to have helped out with it -- again, via channels that in the US remain completely legal, moral, and ethical, and were the same in Canada until the emergency was declared.

But the fact remains that COVID controls of any sort are now completely political. The Super Bowl, held in Los Angeles County under one of the few remaining US outdoor masking regimes, occurred with the masking rule entirely unenforced and largely flouted, with no observable impact on the disease. The Ottawa protest, which a year ago would have been denounced as a superspreader event, appears to have resulted in no noticeable outbreak. There was no serious condemnation of protesters as dangerous spreaders of infection; they are now guilty only of hooliganism, er, mischief.

US truckers now appear to be gearing up for their own convoy. Their goal, which I think is entirely appropriate, is to further efforts at completely eradicating the human rights abuse of COVID controls, which are largely unabated at the federal level in both the US and Canada.

The last case I would cite is US (and indeed Vatican) support for the Solidarity movement in Poland. I don't know what foreign money went to support this in what proportion, although CIA money was certainly involved, with Vatican money quite possibly in concert with the CIA; I would also imagine that Polish-Americans and other US private groups sent money as well. It was in opposition to human rights abuses. It was well, legally, ethically, and morally spent, whatever the objections from the Warsaw regime, just as much so as the money going from the US to Canadian truckers.