There's No Single Manifesto, But

Yesterday was Saturday of a holiday weekend in the US, and with little else going on, I spent a good part of the day following events in Canada. What struck me was images like the photo above, which isn't from either Windsor or Ottawa, but in this case, Cornwall, ON, more than an hour from Ottawa and much farther from Windsor. But I kept running into other demonstrations and disruptions in places like Fort Erie, ON or the Michigan side of the Blue Water Bridge north of Detroit.

Meanwhile, although the Windsor police have cleared the trucks blocking the Ambassador Bridge, it is very unclear whether the bridge is actually open to traffic, since demonstrators continue to mill around in the area, and the police seem reluctant to escalate the situation. This is a key factor, which I'll get to. The same circumstance seems to apply in Ottawa, where as far as I could determine yesterday, a party atmosphere continued to prevail, and crowds of the curious, part-time supporters, and partiers caused traffic jams into the city.

Legacy media seems to toe the Trudeau-Ford line, that these are illegal occupations and sieges fomented by a fringe group of disgruntled truckers. As I said above, there's no single Freedom Convoy manifesto, but I think one trucker interviewed in Ottawa correctly interpreted the subtext of the movement, the issue isn't vaccinations or passports -- he estimated that 90% of the truckers in the convoy are vaccinated -- the issue is a new and intrusive level of government interference that was originally sold as temporary, but which the state is increasingly reluctant to dismantle.

As other demonstrators and supporters have pointed out, masks are unnatural, but after two years, there's little official interest in relaxing mask rules. And as a practical matter, since vaccinations have proven far less effective than originally claimed, a regime of revaccination every few months is gradually being imposed on top of continued masking. The goalposts are still being moved, in large part because the original "public health" measures were never specified or approved by anyone, but they look to continue indefinitely even as the ostensible "public health" crisis diminishes.

These are reasonable concerns, and they're being picked up worldwide. The Trudeau-Ford strategy so far is to declare, as Trudeau has, that the COVID rules and the protests are two different things, and the protests are now illegal, but by implication, the COVID rules are not. The COVID rules "suck", as he put it, but everyone needs to go home.

This isn't going to work. It looks like each time a border blockage is cleared, another one pops up, and more ordinary citizens are motivated to take to the streets, as they did in Cornwall and Fort Erie. I've got to say that I hadn't followed Trudeau very closely up to now, but his video appearances show a babyfaced, privileged, callow-looking individual in a retro Beatles hairdo making impotent threats of "severe" consequences for people who do nothing but mill about in the streets with Canadian flags. (Maybe his stylist could get him to update his look and try a mullet.) Not good.

Although Canadians sympathize with the anti-mandate demands of Freedom Convoy, they increasingly hate the protests themselves. A new Maru Public Opinion poll found that 56 per cent of Canadians don’t have an iota of sympathy for Freedom Convoy — and two thirds wouldn’t mind seeing their blockades cleared by military force.

But Canadians are also turning their ire on a “weak” government response and an intransigent prime minister whom they blame for “inflaming” the situation. The Maru poll, which was conducted from Feb. 9 to 10, found that only 16 per cent of Canadians would vote for Trudeau based on his actions of the last two weeks.

I'm not sure how many Canadians actually watch the TV news and wish the Mounties would start cracking heads. But a bigger problem is that the Mounties themselves, and the other police services, don't want to crack heads either. I would guess they feel very uncomfortable with the position Trudeau and Ford want to put them in, the goon squad waiting in the wings with tear gas and rubber bullets. My sense is that their actual position is roughly the same as police leadership south of the border: they don't have the resources to end such large-scale demonstrations even if they wanted to do it.

They can't conduct or process mass arrests. Rank and file officers sympathize with the demonstrators. Violent police action would be an immense setback for community relations. A couple of well-publicized episodes of head-cracking in Ottawa last week, I would guess, focused the chain of command on how badly things could turn out for them, and I suspect department policy was quickly, clearly, and forcefully articulated to officers as a result. Arrests of any sort in such demonstrations seem to run in the single digits nationally, and this isn't going to change.

The impression I have is that both Ford and Trudeau are on the losing side of a political battle that has lost its public health justification, don't have the sense to temporize, and are frozen at the controls. Biden is in a similar bind south of the border.