The “freedom convoy” that has descended on Ottawa began as a revolt against new requirements that unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers returning across the border from the US must quarantine for 10 days. While we can debate the wisdom of the rules in question, what cannot be denied is the truckers’ huge symbolic importance. In a society that has grown much more polarised under Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, they have given a voice to groups consistently demonised by the Left-liberal Canadian establishment: namely conservatives and the white working-class.
After three generations of an official culture of political correctness in education and the media, Canada has become a strongly Left-leaning society. Six in 10 voters support the culturally Leftist Liberals and New Democratic Party (NDP) while 4 in 10 back the Tories or populist People’s Party of Canada (PPC). In many other western societies, such as Britain, the balance is far closer to 50-50.
This gives Trudeau’s Liberals an incentive to tack to the woke Left on cultural issues to attract votes from the NDP while adopting a market-friendly economic approach to soothe business interests. When reports – which turned out to be false – of mass graves of indigenous schoolchildren surfaced, and Left-wing activists burned 30 churches in response, Trudeau called the actions “understandable” and did little to stop this attack on Catholic communities.
Elite institutions and mainstream media, many of whom uncritically promoted the moral panic around mass graves and abetted the myth of Canada as genocidal, are increasingly going woke. Their embrace of an ethos of ultra-sensitivity to the optics of how policies, symbols or statements affect minority groups has become so extreme that even Left-wing journalists have had enough. Veteran journalist Tara Henley, who left the broadcaster CBC for Substack, wrote that her employer “demand[s] the parroting of orthodoxies, the demonstration of fealty to dogma.” Former Vancouver Sun opinions editor Gordon Clark excoriated his former employer and colleagues for letting moralism trump professionalism.
Trudeau has been almost as polarising for Canada as Donald Trump has been for the US. His approval rating among conservative voters is typically in low single digits while switching between the Tories and Liberals, once commonplace, is now rare.
Though their cause has only modest support, the truckers have tapped into the alienation of culturally conservative working-class Canadians from Trudeau and the cultural elite. As if on cue, the Canadian media has tried to portray the protest as racist, focusing on the extremists on its fringes. Trudeau has, without evidence, described anti-vaxxers as racist and misogynist while NDP leader Jagmeet Singh smeared the convoy as led by “those that claim the superiority of the white bloodline and equate Islam to a disease,” a complete fantasy.
This establishment reaction, akin to Hilary Clinton’s description of Trump voters as a “basket of deplorables”, is as important as the protest, and likely to further polarise the country.
Eric Kaufmann is professor of politics at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a senior fellow at Policy Exchange
