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#FreedomConvoy2022 chaos a dry run for the next federal election

They said it couldn’t happen here and now it has.

#FreedomConvoy2022 is no more (mostly). Police have arrested the ringleaders (along with a few dozen others) and moved out protestors after a three-week protest-turned-siege of the nation’s capital allegedly over cross-border vaccine mandates for truckers.

The “deliberate and methodical” police operation to clear protestors, as interim Ottawa police chief Steve Bell described it, was a far cry from the laissez-faire approach initially taken by police against the protest that morphed into an occupation of the city’s downtown core. In a press conference on Saturday, Bell read from a prepared statement that included a line about the important role played by police in “defending democracy.” 

Observers of the mayhem in Ottawa might ask where that duty to democracy was when protestors were allowed to take over the city and cops seemingly did nothing to stop them. It wasn’t until the feds announced plans to invoke the Emergencies Act last Monday that any serious effort was made to remove protestors.  

Perhaps a public inquiry will offer some answers. It’s a requirement of the Emergencies Act, which has led to the freezing of bank accounts of convoy organizers and truckers who took part in the occupation of Ottawa and blockades of border crossings in Coutts, Alberta, and the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor. Other blockades have taken place at border crossings in Manitoba and BC. The accounts of some 58 “entities” totalling some $3.8 million have reportedly been frozen to date.

That inquiry should include the role of law enforcement – at least, it’s what NDP leader Jagmeet Singh has asked for in return for his party’s support for the measure, which was passed by the House on Monday night. So just like the U.S. review into the January 6 siege on its Capitol in the wake of Donald Trump’s election loss in 2020, we will have our own committee to look into the “Battle of Parliament Hill,” as some are calling it. Uncomfortable questions will have to be asked, like: do we ever come back from this? The short answer is probably not. 

Some of those among the arrested will no doubt go back to their lives. But others will only be further radicalized by the success in shutting down Ottawa – not to mention, the scenes of cops moving in on protestors, which will only serve to reinforce the idea of the Trudeau government’s alleged “tyranny.” It’s a volatile situation.

Extremist movements come and go, but the difference in Canada this time is the added anxiety and fear of a lingering global pandemic – and the fact that we happen to be living right next door to the biggest example of how susceptible our democratic institutions are to misinformation. If it can happen there….

We saw it with Trump in 2016. We’ve seen it with Brexit in the UK. Bolsonaro in Brazil. Duterte in the Philippines. And now we’re seeing it with #FreedomConvoy2022 in Canada. The fallout is already being felt.

During the weeks Ottawa was turned into an encampment and border crossings were blocked by protestors to upend trade, provincial governments in Ontario, Quebec, Saskatchewan and Manitoba – all of them Conservative it should be noted – moved to lift COVID-19 restrictions and passport requirements, even as a new variant of the coronavirus is emerging in Canada to take the place of Omicron. It didn’t seem to matter that most of the protestors were not participating in blockades over vaccine mandates. The mandates were simply the match that lit the fuse.

Indeed, everyone from QAnon Truthers who believe the government is run by a ring of pedophiles to those equating the actions of the current government in Ottawa to communist regimes behind the former Iron Curtain in Poland and Romania were among the protestors in Ottawa. So were armed anti-government conspiracy theorists and opponents of gun control – and all of them in the name of “freedom.”

But while the initial response of Ottawa police and open support for the protests by current and former members of various police forces has raised many questions, it’s the influence of U.S. money – including cryptocurrencies favoured by the far-right – and the role of social media misinformation that hangs over the events like a nuclear cloud. The occupation of Ottawa was no flash in the pandemic. It was a dry run for the next federal election. 

“Flood the zone with shit”

Millions were raised for the convoy, almost half of that in the U.S. It was a well-financed and highly organized effort that much is clear. That it was backed by a calculated campaign of misinformation on social media, including political interference from prominent Republicans and right-wing media outlets stateside was the surprise. The entire effort seemed to take its cue from the Steve Bannon school of insurrection. That is, to “flood the zone with shit” until what’s fact and what’s fiction isn’t clear anymore.

Before protestors even descended on Ottawa, the talk among political commentators with an eye to the continuing mayhem south of the border was about how prepared Canada is for the threat posed by a possible return to the White House by Trump in 2024. We just got a taste.

When the federal government moved to invoke the Emergencies Act to cut off the convoy’s financial supply lines #Chinada started trending on Twitter, along with various other hashtags describing the Trudeau government as a “dictatorship.” 

The tweets associated with the social media campaign behind #FreedomConvoy2022 propagate the same “myths” associated with seemingly disparate far-right movements, including the language of incels, Islamophobes and Hindu extremists, according to this investigation of social media originally published in The Conversation.

And while most Canadians don’t get their news from social media, what happens on platforms like Twitter and Facebook sets the tone for news coverage on TV and in newspapers online.

When police brought in the mounted unit on Friday to disperse one group of protestors, for example, reports that an “elderly woman” in a stroller had been “trampled to death” by a horse began circulating through a number of online accounts, some with photoshopped images. 

Ottawa police corrected the record in a statement, as would Fox News reporter Sara Carter, who was among the first to post the “news” to her 1.3 million followers on Twitter. It turns out that “someone was taken to a hospital with a heart condition,” Carter would clarify on Saturday. The 49-year-old woman allegedly “trampled” later reported that she was “hurt but okay.” The province’s Special Investigations Unit has been called in to investigate.

But by then the feeding frenzy was already full bore, with some high profile Republicans on social media, including Texas Senator Ted Cruz retweeting the report and “political commentator” Candace Owens calling on the U.S. to “send American troops to Canada” to stop the “tyrannical rule” of the Trudeau government. Yup, you read that right. 

The falsehoods would quickly turn to farce with mainstream outlets like Newsweek picking up the thread and reporting Owens’s comments and describing Ottawa police tactics as “heavy-handed.” Newsweek’s story also quoted reports in the Guardian that police used pepper spray and “stun grenades” to disperse protestors. The latter was reportedly after protestors tossed smoke bombs and a flare in the direction of police. 

Fox wasn’t the only American news outlet framing the police operation in severe tones. One New York Times story reported that police were arresting protestors “at gunpoint.” The story was updated twice after it was originally published online on Saturday to remove the reference to “gunpoint” in the opening paragraph. Here too media reports seemed to embellish the reality on the ground. The situation in question involved one instance of a protestor who refused to come out of his camper where the RCMP tactical unit was present. According to Ottawa police, there were concerns of possible explosives.

Other reports online falsely claimed police were using “gas” on protestors. A canister of tear gas was used in at least one instance, Ottawa police confirm, but the reference to “gas” suggested sarin was being deployed.

Police were being mindful not to appear overly aggressive given the presence of children among the protestors and the potential PR fallout from that, which granted is not how protests of this size are usually handled. 

But like Godwin’s law – the internet adage that posits that the longer an argument goes on, the more likely it is to end up at Nazis and Hitler – it didn’t take long for coverage of the Ottawa occupation to go down that rabbit hole. 

Elon Musk got in on the act tweeting a meme comparing Trudeau to Hitler. Here again, mainstream media picked up the story. 

In a report republished in the National Post, Bloomberg News described the meme as “satirical,” noting in its account that Musk was born to a Canadian mother and attended Queen’s University in Kingston as if that seemingly makes him well placed to comment on the situation. Musk has 74 million followers on Twitter. He eventually deleted the tweet without comment after concerns were raised by various Jewish organizations.

Back in Canada, former Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day joined in on social media to compare the Emergencies Act to, among other things, efforts by the Chinese regime to put down the Tiananmen Square uprising. Other Conservative MPs continued the theme as the Emergencies Act was being debated in the House on Monday, claiming that a single mother who donated $50 to the cause had her account frozen. The BC MP behind that claim, Mark Strahl, has declined to comment further – he claims he doesn’t want to “dox” the woman in question. But the RCMP has released a statement contradicting the claim to say that “at no time” did the RCMP provide a list of donors to financial institutions. Only the names of “individuals and companies suspected of illegal acts,” had their names turned over. It’s worth noting that many Conservative MPs, including Strahl, have donated to the convoy. But none of them have reported their accounts being frozen. 

The opposition predictably blames Trudeau’s “divisive rhetoric” for the protests and the boiling over of anger in Ottawa. It’s fair to say the PM has little time for those among the occupiers he has described in the past as “racists and misogynists.” After all the threats he’s has to face from said “racists and misogynists” he can get a little punchy.

But if we’re going to point fingers, it’s Conservative MPs that have encouraged the blockades. It’s Conservative MPs that have been interviewed in front of crowds waving upside-down Canadian flags with swastikas. It’s Conservative MPs who have appeared on Fox to disparage our democratic institutions. It’s Conservative MPs who are fundraising off the anger of the protests.

When it comes to social media, creating outrage is the point. And to say Conservatives have been duplicitous would not be overstating it.

Alberta premier Jason Kenney, for example, announced that his government would be taking the feds to court over the Emergencies Act, describing its provisions as “disproportionate.” Only it was his government that formally requested federal assistance to clear the blockade at Coutts. 

Meanwhile, People’s Party of Canada head Maxime Bernier and his Ontario lieutenant Randy Hillier spent their time openly inciting mayhem, encouraging protestors in Ottawa to “hold the line” and clog 911 emergency lines with calls to occupy police. 

Hillier never did make it to a press conference called at the Lord Elgin Hotel in Ottawa on Saturday afternoon to respond to the “police action.” He reported on Twitter that he was being “prevented” from attending by police, who had set up barricades at entry points around the downtown. Some see wondering why Hillier hasn’t been arrested. Convoy organizer Tom Marazzo, the lone show at the conference, offered a tearful take on media coverage of the police operations. He compared it to the genocide in Rwanda when the media seemed more preoccupied with the controversy surrounding Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding.

Overthrow the government? You bet.

The protests in Ottawa have been overwhelmingly described as “peaceful.”

But that ignores the invasion of privacy and widespread harassment and intimidation of residents who couldn’t get to their jobs, the hundreds of businesses affected by closures, and news media that had to hire security to fend off harassment.

To be sure, we’ve never seen anything like the verbal and physical intimidation directed at journalists on the ground. It’s a familiar feature at Trump rallies. It’s also part of the Bannon formula to disparage and discredit media with personal attacks and take up the space they occupy on the ground and in cyberspace. It’s happening on the streets. It’s happening on Twitter where the platform is being increasingly taken over by bots or trolls more interested in saturating the platform to feed the fire with invective than inspire debate. There have also been incidents of violence at the constituency offices of at least two Liberal MPs and other incidents seemingly inspired by the protests.

Then there are the guns. A number of firearms were seized at the border blockade at Coutts. The Ottawa police also confirmed on Saturday that they are also tracking down leads about firearms among protestors in Ottawa, but have yet to provide an update. The convoy’s head of security, former RCMP officer Daniel Bulford,  said in a video statement released before turning himself into police on Friday that convoy organizers were working “in collaboration” with police to track down firearms that may have been part of some 2,000 firearms stolen from a truck in Peterborough, which was later discovered in Peel.

At times during the occupation, you could be forgiven for thinking that what we were witnessing was an attempted invasion from south of the border – with all the American flags and upside-down Canadian flags. Only unlike 1812, this war is being fought for the hearts of otherwise god-fearing Canadians, a growing number of whom seem confused about how our parliamentary system of democracy actually works and seem keen on adopting a system of government – and constitution – more like that of the United States. They’ve been sold a bill of goods.

They’re not the only ones. From the so-called “loyal opposition,” which will now say anything to gain power, to law enforcement and our military and large swaths of the conservative media, the alt-right forces of Trumpism have infected (and infiltrated) the country.

We are in danger of being overrun by a U.S.-inspired movement that views the pandemic as a hoax, and for the militant among them, an opportunity to justify violence. And it’s only going to become a bigger problem and pose more of a threat to our national security because of social media platforms opposed to government regulation and eager to monetize anger. 

Indeed, we were technically this close to an election on Monday when the PM rose in the House to offer the view that a vote against the Emergencies Act would be viewed as a vote of non-confidence in the government.

The NDP’s support meant that didn’t happen, but an election could still conceivably happen if the Senate decides not to give the Emergencies Act royal assent (in which case it will most likely be sent back to the House for amendments) or the NDP pulls its support in 30 days’ time when the provisions of the act are set to expire. 

Overthrow the government? You bet. The convoy has already taken down Conservative Party leader Erin O’Toole and Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly. Few could have imagined that when it rolled out in late January.

They’ve not all left Ottawa. A few trucks are still reportedly laying in wait, it seems, on a farm 100 kilometres outside the capital just in case. It’s been a clusterfuck of chaos. That was the point. 

@enzodimatteo

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