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“Freedom Convoys” or Mob Rule?
The truckers now snarling Ottawa and the US-Canadian border are spoiling for a fight in America, too.
For the last two weeks, a noisy cavalcade of several thousand anti-vaccination protestors have taken over the downtown core of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city, to demand an end to the country’s vaccine mandates and the resignation of its Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. A thicket of several hundred 18-wheeler trucks and campers are still parked there, many right in front of the Parliament Building on Wellington Street, where they’ve essentially shut down all traffic and built an encampment complete with a kitchen, saunas, and a stage for speeches that turns into a DJ booth and dance party hub at night. Some of the trucks have been doing loops around downtown, snarling traffic, honking their horns, and shouting abusively at passersby, demanding they stop wearing masks.
By all descriptions, the protestors have been a mix of ordinary Canadians tired of the pandemic along with many believers in fringe conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. At the very heart of the movement are far-right organizers like QAnon believer James Bauder, whose group Canada Unity promotes fantasies of invoking international conventions to force the Canadian government to unwind public health measures and…
