Jonathan Kay
Fairforall Substack, Feb. 12, 2022
“But something interesting happened in the last week or so: Progressive critics of the convoy badly overplayed their hand, and their own divisive rhetoric became a story in itself.”
I can always tell when Canadian political news gets exciting, because these are the rare moments when foreign media outlets email me for commentary. In recent days, I’ve been asked for comment on Canadian truckers’ “freedom convoy” by the Washington Post, a Spanish-language radio network, and even a podcast based in Hanoi. Certainly, The New York Times has taken notice, grimly warning its readership of the “far-right activists” embracing the truckers’ cause.
There is certainly a grain of truth to the Times’ description. The convoy was originally conceived as a way to fight back against government rules mandating the vaccination of cross-border truckers. But some of the organizers were populist radicals, and there have been sporadic sightings of extreme right-wing symbols at the protests (even if the paucity of these embarrassing outliers seems to have disappointed the left-of-center pundits and politicians who were primed to treat the convoy’s arrival in Ottawa as Canada’s version of the January 6th Capitol riot).
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