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When Tractors Rolled Into Washington DC
No one knows exactly how many protesting “freedom convoy” truckers are currently encamped in Canada’s national capital city of Ottawa after an estimated 1,700 big rigs arrived on January 29. Thousands more protestors have joined them on the grounds of Parliament and nearby in support. And the protests appear to be growing.
More than $10 million (CAD) has been raised via GoFundMe.com to support the freedom convoy. That’s about three times more money than the governing Liberal Party raised in the last quarter of 2021. From the freedom convoy fundraising site, which has been “paused” pending a “review,” including grammatical errors and typos.
To our Fellow Canadians, the time for political over reach is over. Our current government is implementing rules and mandates that are destroying the foundation of our businesses, industries and livelihoods. Canadians have been integral to the fabric of humanity in many ways that have shaped the planet.
We are a peaceful country that has helped protect nations across the globe from tyrannical governments who oppressed their people, and now it seems it is happening here. We are taking our fight to the doorsteps of our Federal Government and demanding that they cease all mandates against its people. Small businesses are being destroyed, homes are being destroyed, and people are being mistreated and denied fundamental necessities to survive. It’s our duty as Canadians to put an end to this mandates. It is imperative that this happens because if we don’t our country will no longer be the country we have come to love. We are doing this for our future Generations and to regain our lives back.
We are asking for Donations to help with the costs of fuel first, and hopefully food and lodgings to help ease the pressures of this arduous task.
These protests were prompted by a pair of decisions first launched from the Biden Administration to impose vaccine mandates on truckers crossing the border. Canada followed suit. From ctvnews.ca: “there are 120,000 Canadians, and 40,000 licensed drivers in the U.S. who operate cross-border, the Canadian Trucking Alliance says, while about 70 percent of the $648 billion in trade between the two countries moves by truck.” Unvaccinated Canadian truckers returning from the U.S. must quarantine for 14 days; unvaxxed American drivers are turned away. An estimated 10-20 percent of these truckers are unvaccinated amidst a shortage of drivers and supply chain challenges.
Trudeau, after publicly trashing the protestors for actions some attribute to suspected infiltrators, fled town and has now tested positive for Covid. Other politicians want in on the GoFundMe campaign for the convoy, and Ottawa’s police chief blames Americans for much of its financial success. He also seems to be calling for military action.
Erin O’Toole, Canada’s Conservative opposition leader, who never seems to take a position he doesn’t later change, met his denouement this week. “While O’Toole met with demonstrators, he otherwise distanced himself from the protest and ultimately denounced it. Meanwhile, more right-leaning M.P.s such as Pierre Poilievre, Leslyn Lewis, and Mike Lake were handing out coffee and defending anti-mandate protesters in the House of Commons,” reported the National Post. Conservatives in Parliament are now shopping for a new leader.
Attempts to characterize the protestors as white supremacists or January 6-style insurrectionists are not selling and may be backfiring. “Critics lambasted the prime minister for accusing the protesters of being violent and hateful. The protests have been described as peaceful, with most disturbances coming in the form of people dancing, chanting and honking horns,” Fox News reported.
And not to be left out, a farmer convoy of tractors are deploying to Ottawa on Saturday. Talk about supply chain issues. And this is your reminder that Ottawa is the world’s seventh coldest national capital. These protests are occurring smack in the middle of winter. I hope truckers brought ice skates to enjoy the Rideau Canal.
I’m reminded of a similar event that occurred almost exactly 43 years ago in Washington, DC.; the “Tractorcade” protest over U.S. farm policies. The American Agriculture Movement led it and is still around. I was a young Capitol Hill staffer who had just arrived from Oklahoma a few weeks prior and remember the traffic snarls that ensued. The plethora of tractors reminded me of home, having spent a good amount of time driving behind slow-moving farm equipment but on much-less busy rural roads.
That was an era of low farm prices driven mainly by federal policies promulgated during the Nixon Administration by Agriculture Secretary Earl Butz. The former Purdue University agriculture economist and Ralston-Purina board member pushed to end farm subsidies, promoted corporate farming, and advocated for exports to raise farm income while lowering input costs for food makers. He called on farmers to plant “fencerow to fencerow.”
He sold massive quantities of grain to the Soviet Union following their agriculture disaster in 1969. When Soviet agriculture recovered, the purchases stopped, but U.S. production didn’t. Low prices without farm subsidies sent many farmers into economic despair, including farm foreclosures, for nearly a decade. A popular 1984 movie, “Country,” starring Sam Shephard and Jessica Lange, dramatized their plight.
When some 900 tractors rolled into Washington on February 5 – the second time in two years – after traveling about 100 miles per day from as far away as Texas and Colorado, the reactions of most public officials in Washington were one of disgust. President Jimmy Carter’s Agriculture Secretary, Bob Bergland, was sharply critical: “(some) are seeking publicity and others are driven by just old-fashioned greed.” A Scripps-Howard news service reporter quoted one anonymous U.S. Senator: “While a few members of Congress may exploit the situation, many are turned off by it. I see a lot of hostility developing because of their tactics.”
Organizers were troubled by suspected infiltrators who “broke through public barriers, threw a thresher over the White House fence and accidentally totaled some police motorcycles beneath their vehicles,” reported Modern Farmer in 2014.
The tractors were parked on D.C.’s Mall for weeks. And while the protest resulted in about $1 million in damage to The Mall, it wasn’t just “mostly peaceful.” It proved helpful to the city, at least for a short while. As reported by The Smithsonian in 2012:
Tides turned on President’s Day weekend when a blizzard hit, covering the city in two feet of snow. The farmers, in possession of some of the only vehicles able to move, rose to the occasion and helped dig out DC. They plowed out hundreds of cars and aided stranded citizens. They transported doctors and nurses to hospitals, where the wives of AAM farmers helped cook and clean because regular staff was unable to get to work. Twenty-two inches and a whole lot of goodwill turned these agitators into heroes.
During their weeks on the National Mall, the farmers frequented the Smithsonian museums, taking refuge from the cold winter days and eating lunches in the cafeterias. In 1986, the American Agriculture Movement donated one of the tractors from the 1979 tractorcade to the National Museum of American History.
That tractor is no longer on display at the National Museum of American History.
President Carter promised to halt farm disclosures. When the farmers finally left, the farm disclosures resumed. But farmers got the last word. Carter was soundly defeated for reelection some 20 months later by Ronald Reagan, who easily carried most farm country. Since, much of the AAM’s agenda has been implemented, from country-of-origin-labeling requirements to an ethanol program.
Sure, the Freedom Convoy has its dismissive detractors, starting with the Amazon founder Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. Guest columnist David Moscrop (author of a book entitled “Too Dumb for Democracy?):
The convoy is, by and large, a fringe group — an unfortunate minority in which a further minority of insidious extremists lurk. They are bolstered by support from Conservative politicians and certain blustery media voices. They are driven by a generalized rage, misplaced anger about supply chain challenges and antigovernment sentiment. The lot of them, even as a national fringe, pose an outsize problem. They’re too big to ignore and too unreasonable to placate insofar as they represent a broader challenge. Either way, we shouldn’t ignore or placate them. Rather, the convoy and its supporters must be met with a counter-movement that refuses to give them an inch but, instead, focuses national, sub-national and local efforts on true threats to liberty, which do exist.
Where have I heard similar demeaning rhetoric before, dripping with condescension and elitism? At least he didn’t refer to the protestors as “a basket of deplorables.” In so many words. Moscrop thinks this is persuasive. Perhaps to fellow travelers and government bureaucrats everywhere, which describes the Post’s primary readership.
Maybe Canada’s truckers (and farmers) will get their “heroes” moment and the last word(s) as well, including at the next national election. And it’s true: A lot of Americans are pulling for them.
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You are a treasure. I love your insight in your posts I really learn things.
In a nutshell, the problem. Since when is the proper response to a protest of this size to declare that no one will engage with them, no one will try to understand them, they will simply be stopped. Stopped by suppression, de-platforming, accusations of various -isms. But never, “Hey, there are a lot of people who feel this way and maybe we ought to consider what they say.” No, it’s more posturing for the beltway crowd. I am so sick of our political class. Royally, royally sick of them all.
They may end up like French royalty.
I am so humbled by your nice comment. Thank you.
Main feed, main feed! Double-plus main feed!
Also see Miles from Home, 1988. Different, but same setting.
And then, there’s California, which has basically made owner-operators illegal. Those truckers are the ultimate in American entrepreneurism. They should all become a convoy to DC, and barricade Biden in the White House until he gets rid of that mandate.
If this was happening further to the east it would be called “the maple-leaf revolution” and the chattering classes would be lauding the new breath of freedom coming to a sclerotic dictatorship. (And the Biden family would be looking for graft opportunities.)
ps Do you really mean “farm disclosures”?
Honk Honk!
Apparently the truckers do not have a valid “lived experience”.
Honk Honk Brother Truckers!
And that is why I continue to say that Trudeau will never back down. He will continue to slander the protesters with the worst kind of rhetoric. We don’t have the sort of leaders who think “Maybe these guys have a point and we should consider their requests.” Our leaders see us as subjects to be ruled abusively.
I fear that it may eventually come to bloodshed in Ottawa as it will certainly in DC once the American version arrives.
This is going to get really, really ugly. But I fear that it must if anything is going to change.
Instead of fearing that things are going to go from 0 to 10, a more productive use of energy might be to think how to get from 2 to 3.
I doubt I can get a logical (or even a coherent) answer, but I keep wanting to know what criteria our “betters” who decide whether a cause is “noble” or just the ranting of a few “deplorables”? Obviously it’s not just the number of protestors, as many protests with small numbers of participants have been declared “noble” while protests with large numbers of participants are declared the product of a “fringe.” It’s not whether violence is used in the protests. It doesn’t appear to be whether the demands of the protestors are more or less logical than others. I’d love to hear from the politicians or the punditry class what criteria (other than their likes of “feels”) determine whether a protest is a legitimate grievance deserving of embrace or a lunatic fringe that must be ostracized and crushed.
Oh, I think there is a logical and coherent answer. But it is an evil one: whatever tends to support my grasp on power is “noble”; whatever tends to obstruct, reduce, or deny me power is “deplorable”.
You mean tar and feathers rather than a guillotine? Or an almost entirely peaceful bit of civil disobedience? Or a strongly worded letter to the editor?
It’s good that you’re entertaining other possibilities. I’d say we should max out any and all of the above before resorting to the guillotines. Our founding father had sense enough to do that before resorting to revolution.
Great. See you next January 6th.
Allegedly, Justin Trudeau asked Joe Biden to impose the vaccine mandate on truckers first in order to give Trudeau cover for his own vaccine mandate. The Liberal government had announced its trucker mandate quite some time ago but backed off. Then the Biden administration’s own mandate went into effect and the Trudeaupians said, “well gosh, now we have to do it.”
Note: I have no citation confirming that’s how it all went down. This is all just Internet speculation.
Section 67 of the Criminal Code gives the Mayor of Ottawa or his delegate the authority to declare the convoy an unlawful assembly. The Mayor has refused to do so, therefore by implication it presumably isn’t an unlawful assembly. The way that politicians are more than eager to demonize the convoy participants in the media but aren’t brave enough to actually exercise their legal authority is what really grinds my gears.
(Apropos of nothing: Section 69 of the Criminal Code, suppressing a riot, is the only circumstance in which the police have a legal duty to enforce the law.)
Why oppress the masses when you can get them to do it themselves?
GoFundMe has now suspended the trucker’s account, per the request of the state, and has said it will give the unclaimed money to charities of its choice. People who contributed have to request a refund. This is extraordinary.
The company says: “We now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation, with police reports of violence and other unlawful activity.”
The congress of idiots who meet at Buzzfeed are applauding the move, citing the appearance of Confederate flags.
I hope GoFundMe gets sued out of existence.
Those peaceful demonstrators BLM and Antifa, I’m sure.
That is theft on the part of GoFundMe. It is one thing not to send the money to the Truckers. It is another to just not return the money for the venture.
Of course, like all leftists, there is no such thing as other people’s money, just “our” money.
At least one U.S. state attorney general (West Virginia) threatened GoFundMe with action over GoFundMe’s deceptive practices. GoFundMe now says it will automatically refund donors’ donations, rather than their earlier stance of requiring a request for refund.
BUT . . . GoFundMe has likely in one move destroyed its credibility as a vehicle for people support the causes that people choose. Who will ever again trust that the money donated to a charity via GoFundMe will actually go to that charity? GoFundMe claims they have “evidence” to support their reasoning for the shutdown, but they won’t show it, so of course we are justified in concluding GoFundMe is now just deciding arbitrarily which funds it likes and which it doesn’t.
Or, if the state coerced GoFundMe into shutting down the truckers’ fund, that may be legally permissible in Canada, which does not recognize individual liberty, and permits the government to punish its citizens arbitrarily. But, in the United States such action would be, as they say these days, “problematic.” (Though we see it increasingly permitted for governments in the United States to choose arbitrarily which people and associations are to be encouraged, and which are to be punished, regardless of what the law says.)
Leftists, but since they don’t believe in non-governmental charity, I can’t see how GoFundMe can survive.
I certainly would never use them now for anything. It is not like they are youtube, twitter, or facebook. There is no network advantage that they have. You set up a donation link and send it to people. It does not matter who the broker is. I don’t think people troll GoFundMe to find things to give money too. They are even more vulnerable than Kickstarter.