Today – Jan. 30, 2022

Those taking part are on their way, ostensibly, to protest pandemic measures, including vaccine mandates for truckers, but that’s just the tip of the spear. The leadership of the group is promising to remain peaceful, but the convoy is made up of many individuals and far-right groups that have embraced the convoy as a Canadian version of the Jan. 6 rioting in the United States.

The movement shares an affinity with Trumpist toxic authoritarianist politics. Indeed, the convoy has received attention from Donald Trump Jr. Police and security services are preparing for the worst as experts express concern about the online vitriol and journalists covering the convoy are harassed.

Time and time again we learn the lesson, or at least come across it, that teaches us that rage-soaked antigovernment types can’t be reasoned with. This time around, the convoy has produced an incoherent “memorandum of understanding” premised upon a misunderstanding of government and absurd demands. Of course, the memo should be ignored. It’s the product of a temper tantrum. But doing nothing is a risky, suboptimal strategy.

The convoy is, by and large, a fringe group — an unfortunate minority in which a further minority of insidious extremists lurk. They are bolstered by support from Conservative politicians and certain blustery media voices. They are driven by a generalized rage, misplaced anger about supply chain challenges and antigovernment sentiment.

The lot of them, even as a national fringe, pose an outsize problem. They’re too big to ignore and too unreasonable to placate insofar as they represent a broader challenge. Either way, we shouldn’t ignore or placate them. Rather, the convoy and its supporters must be met with a counter-movement that refuses to give them an inch but, instead, focuses national, sub-national and local efforts on true threats to liberty, which do exist.

These types of groups are typically driven by attitudes, grievances and priorities of such a nature that they pose a particular risk to racialized folks and other groups that are traditionally the target of hate and violence. I’d call the convoy a canary in a coal mine, but the bird is long dead. For instance, we’ve known for some time that online right-wing extremism is on the rise in Canada as hate crimes continue to grow.

Canada’s response to the convoy should be a strict line of resistance that doubles down on, or in certain cases at least introduces, commitments to anti-hate resistance, pandemic supports, vaccine mandates and a media policy of refusing to platform, humanize, or, God forbid, glorify the convoy and its members beyond the bare necessity of speaking to their existence and outlining a program for pushing back’

The convoy speaks of threats to liberty. It would be close to something if the participants weren’t so far off. Threats to liberty are rampant in Canada, but not because of vaccine mandates. Rather, it is income and wealth inequality; worker exploitation; gendered, religious, racialized and other forms of hate violence; ongoing settler colonialism; and other forms of structural marginalization and oppression that compromise liberty. Same as it ever was.

The “Freedom Convoy” is a regrettable movement that offers a reminder that open societies will produce protest movements — as they should. However, when those movements are toxic, they must be denounced and resisted. In their place, we should adopt a politics of liberation that takes up more space and offers solutions to structural problems by remaking our institutions to ensure that they are fully inclusive, both morally and, just as importantly, materially.

The Toronto Sun responds.

LILLEY: Media’s handling of trucker convoy one-sided, inflammatory, shameful

Can we really be shocked that public trust in the media continues to fall?

Brian Lilley, Toronto Sun, Jan. 28, 2022

(https://torontosun.com/opinion/columnists/lilley-medias-handling-of-trucker-convoy-one-sided-inflammatory-shameful)

Run for your lives, the barbarians are at the gates!That pretty much sums up the reaction of most in the Canadian media to the trucker convoy that has been winding its way across the country for the last week before descending upon Ottawa on Saturday.

If you haven’t heard, this protest is destined to become Canada’s January 6th, the storming of the American capital that took place just over a year ago. Where did the idea come from that people involved in the convoy wanted to attempt a violent overthrow of the Canadian government?

It wasn’t from any of the organizers, it was an anonymous comment made online and referenced by Global News in one of their reports. It was enough to set the tone of the coverage for days to come — these are violent extremists. Beware!

I’ve covered all kinds of political protests from the Summit of the Americas riots in Quebec City to riots in Montreal, violent protests in Ottawa and the Idle No More campaign that took hold near Parliament Hill for weeks. Never have I seen our national media, led by those on Parliament Hill, spend so much time digging into the comments and views of a group of people trying to find those they can demonize.

Yes, some supporters have been using terms like fascist and Nazi to describe the government. That’s far from accurate, regardless of your political views, but do you take that extreme rhetoric and pin it on the organizers of the convoy?

Those terms are thrown at me by supporters of the Trudeau government on a daily basis and I don’t pin that on the PM and his cabinet. People have lost all sense of decorum online and immediately jump to extreme rhetoric. It happens on all sides.

Normally though, journalists will say that organizers of a protest want a peaceful protest even as extreme elements threaten violence. That isn’t happening with this protest because it’s not one most in the media like or understand — it’s a group of people they look down upon.

When Trudeau referred to the convoy as a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views” the journalists covering him didn’t push back and ask him why he would use such language. They just moved along.Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole has faced more difficult questions on this front at every step than Trudeau has.

Apparently, the journalists on Parliament Hill these days think their job is to hold the opposition and not the government to account. It also appears their job to support some protest movements and attack others based on the personal preferences of the journalists.

The line between columnists and commentators, like myself, and supposedly neutral, objective reporters gets blurrier by the day. The behaviour of Canada’s media from reporters to news anchors, show hosts to editors, has been shameful over the past few weeks.

Can we really be shocked that public trust in the media continues to fall?

Perspectives