Hundreds of police in riot gear, many carrying automatic weapons, sweep through the streets to disband a protest. When pepper spray fails to disperse the crowds, mounted police charge at demonstrators. Some are arrested, their trucks towed away and their bank accounts seized. 

We might expect this violent suppression of protest and emergency curtailment of civil liberties to occur in an authoritarian regime like China or even North Korea. But Canada? That bastion of liberalism, tolerance and politeness? Never. Or at least, not without an almighty outcry. Yet the measures deployed against Canada’s “freedom convoy” of truck drivers gathered in Ottawa since last month, were sanctioned by President Trudeau himself. 

Imagine the uproar if, back in 2020, President Trump had frozen bank accounts belonging to key figures in the Black Lives Matter movement. Or consider the response if Boris Johnson used mounted police and pepper spray to stop Insulate Britain protesters blocking motorways. Yet when it comes to the Canadian truckers, left-wingers, including self-described liberals, have not just sat by and watched as the largest police operation in the country’s history cleared the streets, they cheered on Trudeau and applauded his emergency power grab. How do we explain this? 

Many “liberals” fundamentally disagree with the truckers’ cause. What began as a campaign against vaccine mandates and passports rapidly became a protest against all lockdown restrictions. Yet throughout the pandemic, the left has been adamantly pro-lockdown. The only dissent has been to demand harsher restrictions. Of course, lockdown never actually extended to truck drivers. People required to sustain a middle class lifestyle were not only expected to go out to work but to agree that we were all in it together. Protesting lockdown restrictions exposes the lie that everyone was happy to have their freedom curtailed. 

The left became suspicious of freedom, and people unleashed from restraints, long before the pandemic. But Covid has provided the perfect opportunity to ensure the general public is masked-up and socially-distanced at all times. 

The truckers don’t just represent the wrong cause but they are also the wrong kind of protester. They leave their homes to work and perhaps get dirty in the course of making a living. And let’s be blunt: they are mainly middle-aged white men who are unlikely to be up to speed with the latest woke vocabulary. Gammon, in other words. The Ottawa protesters are neither flogging their own identity nor staking a claim to victimhood but fighting for something bigger than themselves. Today’s activists find this impossible to grasp.

If the truckers are the wrong kind of protesters, Trudeau is most definitely the right type of President. The woke elite recognise he is one of them: they share the same high status opinions and speak the same made-up language. (‘She-cession,’ ‘people-kind’? No. Me neither.) Despite being a white man, Trudeau evokes every identitarian shibboleth in his own defence. It is no coincidence that his go-to insult was to accuse the truckers of “hate, abuse and racism” showing how woke thinking justifies attacks on the working class. In his handling of the freedom convoy, Trudeau looks like an insecure authoritarian desperate to suppress dissent in order to hang on to power at all costs. That he is cheered on by left wing commentators as he does so is shameful.