In the same way that France did not see the movement of yellow vests coming in 2018, Canada did not imagine that after two years of pandemic, convoys of anger would besiege Ottawa, demanding an end to sanitary measures. and the overthrow of the Trudeau government.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
This, this revolt organized on the margins of the right, no government had seen coming. Since January 29, it’s been going crazy and we don’t really see how it will end. To all the social fractures dug before and during COVID-19 has just been added a new axis, staggering this one: the rational/irrational fracture.
For 10 days, I have been watching and observing. It’s deeply stinking and disturbing to see a busy downtown, uninhibited hateful thugs stealing soup kitchens, to realize that the hard core has a lot to do with America’s far right, that under the impetus of bullies determined and well-heated, democracy is taken hostage while the signs proclaim FREEDOM! On the other hand, alongside the tough extremists, there are just tanned, well tanned people who ask good questions. They are, like the majority of us, exasperated by the arbitrariness of the measures, the tiresome trial and error, the covid democratic deficits.
Two years after the start of the pandemic and its chaotic management, we are all on edge, left and right. The extremes are becoming more radical, on all fronts of living together, and the center is emptying. Seems like reasonable individuals push each other, literally…
It is also ironic to see these screaming and honking convoys occupying the city centers. Mounted in bands from the outskirts to the major centres, they block the nerve center of the capitals which represent what they despise. Cities which, paradoxically, have seen their centers empty with the pandemic. But the metaphor of the depopulated center goes further. In the Western social fabric, the middle classes are collapsing over the recent crises, becoming dangerously poorer, their purchasing power is strangling them, while others are getting rich indecently. The middle class so dear to Trudeau is a fantasy that fades and becomes indefinable. Meanwhile, Bernard Rambo Gauthier claims to belong to the “people” and the ordinary world…
The political center has also disintegrated in recent months, to the point of seeing parties disintegrate (PQ), lose themselves (PLQ), or dismiss their “moderate” wing (PCC). The new political proposals come from the right of the right. In Quebec, the left has crystallized around QS, while the CAQ occupies a kind of paternalistic center right and a bit of liberticidal covid governance.
ALL centers; urban, political (vaccine, even!) tend to empty themselves to see the extremes prosper. The truckers’ movement, heavily infiltrated by radicals, is on the sidelines. Except that the margins tend to widen these days. When the center implodes, the margins bloom. Much has been said in recent years about the famous soft consensus, of “we govern at the center », the softness and tepidity of the ideas practiced in Quebec. We suffered from this extinguisher consensus, but now things are going into a spin.
We are living in an unusual political and social moment. A strong and disturbing moment, whether we like it or not, whether we are trucker to Confederate flag or besieged triple vaccinated.
We have all understood that our democracy is much more fragile than we imagined, and that we can make an impression, paralyze a city, bring down leaders by acting outside traditional frameworks. The soft center is the collateral victim of the five waves of COVID-19. After the pandemic (and we will see it quickly in Quebec with the next elections), politics will be a bitter battlefield. Parties of legend may die. Voters will be mobilized with ardor in the extremes. And civil society will know that it can have an effect outside the political framework.
I look at this face-to-face that stretches out in Ottawa, this cartography of the streets taken, I see this evanescent PM, and it is like the prefiguration of what could become, if we are not careful, life post-COVID-19 politics: a tough majority consensus, and roaring extremes.