Who is behind the truckers’ movement? How is it funded? Who pays (some very expensive) to support them? And what do recalcitrant protesters risk? We explain everything to you in six figures.
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$4.5 million
This is the amount that the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign had raised on GoFundMe, thanks to the participation of some 120,000 donors. The campaign was taken down on February 4, because it violated the terms of use of the crowdfunding platform.
Donald Trump has called the fundraising freeze unacceptable. Republican Senator Ted Cruz and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, meanwhile, have called for an investigation into whether GoFundMe defrauded donors.
Photo: AFP
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, recently sanctioned by Twitter for spreading misinformation about COVID-19, even called GoFundMe a communist enterprise.
AFP
$10 million
This is the amount in Canadian dollars that was raised between February 4 and February 14 by the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign on GiveSendGo. After the freezing of fundraising on GoFundMe, it is to this Christian site that the supporters of the trucking movement have turned.
Created in 2014, GiveSendGo has already hosted several campaigns linked to far-right groups, including those of Enrique Tarrio of the Proud Boys or American Kyle Rittenhouse, who killed two people during anti-racism protests in Wisconsin in 2020.
AFP
During the night of Sunday to Monday, the platform was the victim of a cyberattack and its site is still inaccessible today.
92,844
This is the number of donors to the Freedom Convoy 2022 campaign on GiveSendGo who have had their identities disclosed.
Sunday evening, Distributed Denial of Secrets (or DDoSecrets, for short), a nonprofit whistleblower site, announced that it had 30 megabytes of donor information, including names, email addresses, postal codes and internet protocol addresses.
The majority of these donations would come from outside the country: 52,000 would have been made from the United States, against 36,000 in Canada. On the other hand, it is at home that we would have been the most generous, since $4.3 million would have been amassed there, against $3.62 million altogether with our neighbours.
$90,000
This is the amount of the highest personal donation recorded on the GiveSendGo platform.
It would have been carried out on February 9 by the American billionaire Thomas Siebel.
That same day, Brad Howland, boss of Easy-Kleen Pressure Systems — a New Brunswick-based manufacturer of pressure washers — reportedly made Canada’s largest donation, $75,000.
21
A fundraising campaign on the Tallycoin platform had set itself the goal of raising 21 BTC (21 bitcoins). Knowing that one BTC is trading at more than $56,000, the campaign, which now exceeds 22 bitcoins in donations, has therefore raised more than a million dollars. This money was collected from more than 5500 donors.
AFP
It must be said that cryptocurrencies are very popular with certain figures of the American far right who see it as a good way to circumvent the restrictions of banks and crowdfunding platforms.
$500 to $5000
This is the amount of the penalty that violators of the Emergency Measures Act, invoked Monday by Justin Trudeau, risk.
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The government has also allowed Canadian financial institutions to “immediately freeze or suspend the account of any individual or business affiliated with these unlawful holds without a court order.”
People who violate the Emergencies Act also face up to five years in prison.