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The lack of trust in police and government at all levels is concerning."

Who were the winners in the weeks-long Freedom Convoy standoff?

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Not Mayor Jim Watson, (now former) police chief Peter Sloly or the Ottawa Police Service. Not city council, and definitely not Ottawa residents.

The truck protesters? With relatively small numbers, they successfully made an outsized amount of noise and immobilized the downtown core, but can hardly claim victory after gaining little support and, in the end, failing to realize their stated goals of ending COVID-19 mandates and bringing down the Trudeau government (which, you may recall, recently gave Canadians the opportunity to legitimately do just that).

There were no winners, but there may have been one overarching loser: democracy.

The lack of trust in police and government at all levels is concerning, says Daniel Stockemer, professor at uOttawas school of political studies. A democracy needs the people to give trust for the legitimacy of the state. If they dont have this trust anymore, it could have dire consequences. And I think thats the potentially long-term worst effect of this.

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This sentiment applies not only to convoy protestors, but also to counter-demonstrators who, frustrated by a lack of concrete response from elected and enforcement officials, confronted truckers themselves, most notably at the Battle of Billings Bridge.

But the lack of trust in the system was clearly evident among the protestors, a tent that welcomed people with all kinds of grudges and grievances: vaccine and mask mandates, Justin Trudeau, Eastern Canada, communism, the green economy, wokeness, and racialized and other marginalized people and communities. Confederate and Nazi flags waved, while some compared the limits placed on their liberties to the experiences of Holocaust victims.

Its a movement that opposes something, Stockemer says, and its always easy to bring a lot of people under one tent who oppose something. I think the masks and vaccine mandates is an umbrella theme that can recruit people who are dissatisfied.

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Stockemer describes the convoys appropriation of nationalist pride as an attractive and clever tactic. They co-opted patriotism and the Canadian flag, he says. There was this idea that youre either with us, and Canadian, or youre not with us and youre not Canadian. They tried to divide society, and thats dangerous.

Stockemer doesnt think the protest had the number of participants or coherence to become a mass movement with any significant long-lasting effects, but hes worried about the continuing erosion of norms, and the convoys possible contribution to that decay.

I saw a flag comparing their situation to the Nuremberg trials, he says. This is completely out of order. Ten years ago, a former U.S. president calling a sitting Canadian prime minister a leftist lunatic would have been the main news headline. Today, you dont even talk about it.

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What I find shocking, he adds, is this acceptance, by some protestors, but also by some politicians, of this very extreme element. Weve seen a large increase of polarization in a lot of countries, and I think this movement can contribute to that. It can contribute to people not having trust in the government anymore, and if you dont have trust in the government, you start looking for something else.

While care should be taken to avoid lending support to far-right extremists, including some of the convoys organizers whose voices were magnified in the media, the so-called woke liberal elite that is so disdainful of the convoy protesters ignores them at their peril.

There are real material issues that are at play here, says Roberta Lexier, associate professor and historian of social movements at Calgarys Mount Royal University, especially as weve seen with the 2008 economic crisis and, following that, climate change and its effects, and then we get hit with the pandemic.

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Capitalism has entered a pretty significant crisis, and peoples material conditions are really being affected by those overlapping crises. The reality is that people are suffering, and what the right, or whatever you want to call it, has done really well is theyve found a way to tap into that anger and frustration that I would argue is often quite legitimate. The system is failing people, and theyve found a way to tap into that and mobilize it towards something.

Lexier points to other factors that have contributed to the malaise, including the NDP absconding a left-wing alternative, and years of conservatives, particularly in the U.S., creating distrust and undercutting experts. She cites climate change as a clear example of the deliberate hobbling of science, where both sides of the debate are now expected to receive equal attention.

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Any journalist I know was not taught that thats how you do objectivity. When 98 per cent of scientists agree on a thing, you can say that. But we spent decades undercutting experts, undercutting media, undercutting government, and basically trying to put the power back in the hands of corporations.

Its easy to credit events in the U.S. for the surge of right-wing populism in Canada particularly, for example, given the funding the convoy received from south of the border. But Lexier cautions against treating it as an external movement that was merely transplanted here.

The funding is a big part of the story, but we have a lot of home-grown right-wing supremacist fascism that we have to face as a country. Its built right into the core of who we are, because thats why we were invented as a nation, to open space for white people to settle the prairies and elsewhere. So its a mistake to think this is only coming from the outside.

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The task of convincing convoy supporters to switch tents, though, is a difficult one. Its far easier to stir up anger than it is to explain and address structural realities that are playing with peoples lives. Meanwhile, the elitist approach of the left doesnt easily engender converts.

Theres a tendency on the left to attack each other for not being pure enough or ideological enough, where you have to have read Marx to participate. The way its been approached, by saying, We cant talk to you if youre racist or if you dont already realize that capitalism is failing has not worked particularly well.

Lexier admits she doesnt know exactly how to reach those attracted to the convoy, except by connecting with peoples material concerns and seeking different approaches to address them.

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Things are awful and, between the pandemic and climate change, theyre just going to get worse. And if we dont start offering an alternative or start showing people that this isnt the right path, the one we are on is incredibly terrifying, and were not that far from the very terrifying parts of it doctors and nurses being told not to walk to work in their uniforms and being targeted for their professions is not that far from being targeted as a communist or a Jew.

Its not going to get better by policing, and its not going to get better by lecturing. It only gets better by acknowledging that this is a core problem of the system that were in, and were going to have to find a way through that.

bdeachman@postmedia.com

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Democracy the big loser in the 'Freedom Convoy' - Ottawa Citizen