Canadian Trumpism takes a truck ride

“Freedom convoys” converge on Ottawa to defend (you guessed it) freedom, made up of anti-sanitation truckers.

They are protesting the compulsory vaccination of Canadian and American truckers crossing the border, a decision imposed by the Canadian and American governments.

It’s not nice to put all the demonstrators in the same truck, but you still have to note that the movement gives pride of place to everything that can be found as conspiracy theories in the garbage cans of the internet.

The figurehead of the “free” truckers, Patrick King, has already spoken without laughing about the need to bring change to Canada by arms, by killing people. He also subscribes to the far-right “great replacement” theory, which falsely postulates that there is a plan to “replace” white people in democracies.^⁠1.

And the group “Canada Unity”, at the heart of the organization of the convoy, wants for its part to overthrow the government of Canada^⁠2. Canada Unity envisioned a “contract” with “Canada’s highest authorities” – the Senate and the Governor General – to form a committee that would govern the country in order to restore freedom…

In short, a coup d’etat: replacing the deputies elected last fall by non-elected ones (senators, the GG and members of the “Committee of United Citizens of Canada”). So, to save democracy, establish a dictatorship.

If this reasoning gives you a headache, it’s because the 5G chip you were injected with is doing its job: you are now a sheep who blindly believes in the state.

Thursday, at Paul Arcand^⁠3a Quebec trucker who supports the freedom convoy has denied a basic fact, universally recognized where the anti-COVID-19 vaccine is available to all: the unvaccinated are more likely to end up in the hospital for complications .

I quote the trucker: “No, it’s not proven, it’s dictated by the government. »

Yet it is the case everywhere, this fact – the unvaccinated are overrepresented among those who develop complications from the virus – which is documented in several provinces, states and countries, by independent experts who all come to this conclusion.

But according to this trucker, who echoes the faith of thousands of Holocaust deniers like him: “It’s not proven”, even if it is.

It symbolizes the relationship of followers of Trumpism with the facts: when a fact bothers you, say that it is false and, then, voilà, fake news anyway, it’s fixed…

Trumpism?

It’s simple, Trumpism: when I win the election, the election was legitimate; but if i don’t win the election, then the whole election was fixed with the views guy and i’m going to poison the well of democracy just for revenge.

There is a fringe of the Canadian right which claims to be Trumpist, which launches accusations of “dictatorship” and “tyranny” as if Canada were Kazakhstan, as if Justin Trudeau were a bloodthirsty dictator. Maxime Bernier courts them shamelessly, in a pale imitation of Donald Trump, whose verbal violence and outrageous exaggerations he apes.

If you doubt the Trumpism fueled by freedom truckers, Donald Trump Jr himself congratulated Canadian truckers for their fight against (I quote) “tyranny” in Ottawa!

It would be funny if politics stayed away from this delirium. But some stars of the Conservative Party caucus^⁠4 – like Pierre Poilievre and Candice Bergen – find nothing wrong with the “fight” organized by people who want to replace federal elected officials with non-elected ones. Some truckers dream of doing in Parliament what the Trumpists did in Capitol Hill^⁠5one year ago…

But this is not enough for the Conservative caucus to unanimously distance itself from it.

Even the former leader of the Conservative Party Andrew Scheer, still an MP, sinks into Trumpism: in thanking the truckers, he declared that Justin Trudeau was “the greatest threat to freedom in Canada”… Nothing less!

In short, beaten at the polls in 2019 in free elections, Mr. Scheer adopts a vengeful rhetoric that Donald Trump would not deny, with excessive remarks that will excite the most radicalized elements of his political family.

Question for Quebec Conservative MPs Alain Rayes and Gérard Deltell, worthy men who have never flirted with this kind of political delirium: are you embarrassed to be in the same party as these Trumpists, sometimes?

The truckers who converge on Ottawa claim to be of the people, of course. But the people are mostly vaccinated, the people mostly adhere to health measures, even if they are mostly tired of the deprivations of the pandemic.

The “freedom” truckers are in the minority, they do not represent the people. They embody the pack, more than the people.

In fact, according to the Canadian Trucking Alliance, the majority of truckers – 90% – are vaccinated^⁠6. And the Alliance denounces the large-scale role-playing in which these truckers who fantasize about the Canadian dictatorship engage in while driving towards the federal capital…

In a real dictatorship, of course, they wouldn’t even be allowed near the capital.