Freedom
In Alberta, truckers blockading a road that runs into Montana began voluntarily leaving on Tuesday. Marco Van Huigenbos, one of the protest’s organizers, claimed the blockade was “infiltrated by an extreme element” after Royal Canadian Mounted Police made 13 arrests Monday and seized firearms, body armor, and ammunition during a morning raid of three trailers that preceded the Emergencies Act invocation. “Our objective was to be here peacefully,” Huigenbos said. “To keep that message going, we want to peacefully leave [the border town] Coutts and return to our families.”
The paw prints of malign actors like former Trump administration ideologue Steve Bannon are all over the occupation of Ottawa by the “Freedom Convoy” and disruptions of other Canadian cities and transportation corridors by far-right rent-a-mobs.
- Canada Must Investigate the Convoy Money, The Tyee
By Gregg Wall (2-20-2022)
For anyone under any illusions as to what the so-called Freedom Convoy was all about, one need only look at its supporters in Canada and the United States, which included an inexhaustible list of far-right extremists. From members of Canada’s conservative party, including Alberta’s Premier, Jason Kenney … all the way to the United States, where billionaires, Trump and Elon Musk, weighed in with enthusiastic support (and of course, the mouthpiece of twenty-first century fascism, Fox News). Et al.
The Washington Post did a piece on the hacking of the mob funding site, GiveSendGo, in support of the economy damaging blockade, and discovered approximately 40% of the money donated came from elite, white enclaves within the United States, mostly GOP leaning. And perhaps while the protests may have started out innocently enough (that's a big maybe), the convoy was quickly hijacked by white supremacists, fringe members of the People’s Party (a party that won zero seats in the Canadian parliament, in the last election), and in Alberta, gun toting thugs.
The Freedom – to spread disease – Convoy, of course, had antivaxxer origins and decried the Trudeau government’s vaccination and public health measures & policies (which have been overwhelmingly successful and have saved countless Canadian lives, vis-à-vis the U.S., where refrigerated morgue trucks had to be brought in to deal with almost a million dead Americans). But the mob quickly spun out of control with a list of demands, including – but not limited to – the overthrow of the Liberal government, which just won re-election.
All of this was reined in over the last week and into this weekend, when the Trudeau government issued orders, under the Emergencies Act, and quickly mopped up the menagerie (which was a threat to public health, the economy, and the freedom of everyone else in Ottawa to coexist peacefully).
Lost in all this chaos was the fact that nearly 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. The Canadian Teamsters weighed in and identified the Freedom Convoy for exactly what it was: a threat to the economy, jobs, opportunity, and truckers. And a ‘despicable display of hate.’
Of course, the Convoy had similarities to the January 6th coup attempt in the United States, where an increasingly shrinking white demographic has lashed out at anything resembling change, under the banner of freedom. But for these Molotov cocktail throwers, and assorted anarcho-totalitarians, freedom always means one thing, living with: white rule, white rules, white supremacy, and white male patriarchy.
In America, and as I mentioned in my last piece, Thirteenth Amendment, being free increasingly means - particularly for the disenfranchised - the right to be indentured at birth with $30 trillion in national debt, the right to be systemically price gouged by monopoly and cartel. Freedom means bone crushing student debt. And freedom increasingly means medical bankruptcy, and wage and price controls set by monopoly and Wall St. Freedom in America means an opioid epidemic, ever-increasing childhood poverty, and the freedom to die early, with an ever-shrinking life expectancy.
In American, freedom, increasingly, only exists for the one percent to prey upon the balance of the nation.
Such irony, then, that the freedom these fringe Canadian groups cry out for exists far more so in Canada, than in the United States… where American workers, often, cannot quit work and start up a business, because they are all too often tethered to their existing employer for medical insurance (under a failed for-profit health care model).
And that’s probably the central point of this entire episode: thanks to the pooling of resources -- by the taxpayer and via a strong, progressive government -- Canadians are free from a lifetime of worry about impending health care financial crisis & bankruptcy. As a result, Canadians have the freedom to shift employment and even engage in entrepreneurship w/out medical worry. Barring significant change in the United States, and a Biden administration that actually begins delivering on the progressive change it promised the American people, Canadians are - and will remain - far more freer than their American cousins.
That’s the primary reason why in Canada, the members of the so-called Freedom Convoy are the lunatic fringe, while in the United States, they are the Republican party. A strong safety net, social contract, and a universal healthcare system helps ensure that right-wing radicalism remains on the fringes of Canadian society.
Copyright JM Hamilton Publishing 2022
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