‘Freedom Convoy’ gone, but lanes of trust still blocked in Canada

For René de Vries, it was peaceful and party-like. He made pancakes on one of the days he visited with members of the “Freedom Convoy” as it occupied downtown Ottawa in protest of Canada’s public health restrictions. “I thought it was great,” he says. 

So when the convoy was condemned as a radicalized minority and cleared out with emergency powers by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, it reconfirmed his mistrust in mainstream media and mainstream politics. He says we’ve all been “bamboozled.”

For Zexi Li, an Ottawa resident whose apartment looks over the downtown core, where rigs and heavy trucks parked for three weeks, the past month has been oppressive. She barely slept, and only with the help of speakers and ear plugs, amid incessant honking of air and train horns. 

“We didn’t see any steps taken by our leadership to help us when we so desperately needed it,” she says. So she agreed to be the lead plaintiff in a class action against the convoy.

Friday marks one month since hundreds of trucks first drove into the capital of Canada and catalyzed a far bigger movement than authorities or the public expected. Four chaotic weeks later, the convoy itself has been cleared, but deep scars remain. Those are both physical – as police continue to block roads leading to a fenced secure zone around Parliament Hill – and figurative. The Freedom Convoy – the movement itself and all of the misunderstandings and misinformation around it, especially as it became an international lightning rod – has torn at the fabric of Canadian society and left the country grappling with how to restore trust that’s been lost on all sides.

“There’s a big ‘aha’ moment going on in Canada,” says Frank Graves, head of Ekos Research Associates in Ottawa which has measured Canadian attitudes toward the Freedom Convoy. “This is not a hiccup. This is not just a debate about vaccine mandates. This is something much deeper, more structural and challenging.”

Mislabeled as extremists?

The convoy set out after the Liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau upheld a vaccine mandate for truckers to cross the border from the United States. (The same rule applied on the U.S. side.) But it quickly morphed into a protest against all public health restrictions and Mr. Trudeau himself.  

But their tactics and alliances – amid growing international attention and funding, especially from the U.S., where vaccine skepticism is much higher – quickly came under the microscope. Among the biggest concerns were the radicalized positions of some of the organizers. Canada Unity, for example, issued a memorandum, since revoked, demanding the immediate end of all COVID restrictions. Hate symbols, though not identified with a particular group, were also reported on the scene of the protest. 

Those who see public health measures as government overreach resent being cast as extremists. Mr. de Vries, who is not vaccinated, says he has always been into alternative medicine. So last April he began attending anti-lockdown protests, where he met other “like-minded” Canadians, he says. A man who once put his support behind the Liberal party has now run for office for the People’s Party of Canada, a right-wing, populist party that has attracted vaccine skeptics. 

“I’m not an extremist guy,” he says via Zoom, while on vacation. “I”m a very middle-of-the-road person. … But especially in the last two years, there has been no dissent possible about lockdown measures or against Big Pharma.” 

Mr. de Vries says his Twitter account was suspended during the convoy – he doesn’t know why. He says it’s possible some of the hate symbols – from a Confederate flag to a swastika that appeared in Ottawa – were “false flags” planted by the Trudeau government. But even if they weren’t, a few radical voices shouldn’t overshadow the entire movement, he adds. 

“Any dissent, even when it’s peaceful, is presented as extremist, far right,” Mr. de Vries says.

Deserted by leaders?

For as much as Mr. de Vries feels misrepresented, Ms. Li is frustrated, she says, by the characterization of the convoy as a “peaceful protest,” and by criticism from outside that “this is just honking, live with it.” The trucks blared horns for hours every day, producing noise up to 150 decibels, her lawsuit states, a noise she says still rings in her ears even though the trucks are gone. 

“Those ‘moderate people,’ those people that say they don’t want to torture you, they stand next to the people that do,” she says.

Ms. Li, a 21-year-old public servant, says she attempted to communicate with the convoy members parked on either side of her apartment block, trying to express the harm they were doing to her community. But she says they only retorted that they had been suffering for two years. 

“People are frustrated with the pandemic. And yeah, we hear those cries of frustration, but ultimately, it’s about the way that they chose to express it and the harm they chose to do to other people,” she says. “Your home is supposed to be your sanctuary. It is supposed to be your safe space. But they took that away from us.”

Ms. Li says she agreed to be the face of the now $300 million class-action lawsuit after she watched police allow the protest to persist while politicians blamed one another instead of making the hard decisions. “I believed in the police. I believed in our government,” she says. “But the trust that they will make the right decisions for the public is gone.”

For her, rebuilding it can only come after a thorough investigation into what happened – why authorities allowed the protest to embed itself in the capital, a move that cost police chief Peter Sloly his job. 

The long road to rebuilding trust

But Mr. Sloly’s actions are not the only ones to be examined. At its crisis point last week, Mr. Trudeau invoked the never-before-used Emergencies Act. It endowed the executive more authority, including freezing of accounts without a court order for those accused of supporting the blockades. For those already distrustful of the government, the invocation sealed their opinions that Mr. Trudeau is anti-democratic. Freedom Convoy organizers penned an open letter to Parliament asking if “Canadian democracy can survive such an incredible abuse of power.” 

The use of the act is controversial well beyond the convoy itself – part of the reason Mr. Trudeau rescinded it Wednesday, just days after the House of Commons approved it. Another key to rebuilding trust will be how a public inquiry into use of the Emergencies Act plays out, says Abby Deshman, director of criminal justice for the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which had opposed the act’s use.

“Are those actually going to be robust truth-seeking mechanisms? I think if they are, that will go a long way to restoring any trust that has been lost,” she says. “If, however, they turn out to be very superficial or extremely partisan exercises, I think that could be very damaging to the public’s trust.” 

On the one hand, moving forward requires understanding some of the driving issues behind the protest. Mr. Trudeau has been criticized for labeling the group a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” But roughly a third of Canadians said they sympathize with the protest and its objectives in a polling tracker by Ekos Research. Mr. Graves says that is a reflection of a growing “northern populism” that political elites have discounted and that has grown with the pandemic. This is a “distinct” group, he says, leaning rural, conservative, and working class. They are also overrepresented strongly in under-50 Canada.

“I think Justin Trudeau has done a number of things right during the pandemic. But the kind of dismissal of this as a really unpleasant fringe, it was sort of his Hillary ‘deplorable’ moment,” Mr. Graves says. “I think that is one of the common features, not just [in] the United States and Canada but throughout the advanced Western world, the tendency to diminish the significance of the problems the people who are attracted to these kinds of populist movements are experiencing.”

A vocal minority or a majority?

On the other hand, the protest was not just composed of Canadians tired of strict pandemic public health measures, though it garnered significant international attention at a time when global fatigue with the pandemic is widespread. 

Amy Kaler, a sociologist from the University of Alberta who has studied protest movements, suspects American outlets in particular were drawn to the symbolism of rigs driving cross-country – “these kind of rugged individualists standing up to effeminate socialist Justin Trudeau who they really seem to hate,” she says. “I think what we are witnessing in real time is the crafting of an origin story.”

But in the shrill coverage, all sorts of distortions were made, starting with the labeling of this as a “trucker convoy.” Is it a trucker convoy when the Canadian Trucking Alliance condemned it, and the vast majority of Canadian truckers are vaccinated?

Is it a peaceful protest if it costs billions in international trade due to blockades at the border and in lost wages? Many Ottawa businesses had to shut down (including an entire downtown mall).

France, for example, is a country known for its boisterous striking, but there, protesters strike a balance between stating their message and maintaining approval. “The people on strike will pull back rather than persist to the point where they lose public support,” Dr. Kaler says.

Or perhaps swaying Canadians to their side was never the goal, she adds.

Many Canadians continue to maintain that at the core of this movement is a radical element promulgating misinformation and hate that appeals to more Canadians than the country has ever realized. Amanda Jetté Knox, an author in Ottawa, studies hate movements as part of her work in LGBTQ advocacy. Even she was surprised by the scale of it. She weighed in on the subject via social media, and received more personal attacks than ever; so has Ms. Li, who says she has received threatening calls and emails accusing her of being a mole for the Chinese Communist Party.  

“I have lost trust in Canada being somehow safer than other places,” Mx. Jetté Knox says. “This is a huge wake-up call for Canada, and there’s a reckoning that needs to happen now.”

At the same time, Dr. Kaler says it’s imperative not to overplay divisions. Other moments in Canada’s history – from the hanging of Metis leader Louis Riel in 1885 to conscription during World War I – have been far more divisive with much higher stakes. This debate is not split down the middle. About a week before the protest was cleared, a poll by the firm Maru showed two-thirds (64%) of Canadians saying “Canada’s democracy is being threatened by a group of protesters and they must be stopped immediately.” 

“There is a discourse that says we are deeply divided. But there is nothing really that supports that,” Dr. Kaler says. There is a very loud, angry group, she adds. “But that’s nowhere close to there being some great line dividing down the middle and people separating off.”