The premier of Ontario speaks of “occupation” and declares a “state of emergency” in the province. Ottawa’s police chief called the situation a “siege.” In fact, it is a real seditious movement.
What started as a protest by truckers against vaccines soon turned into an international far-right movement against democracy. How did we get here?
The success of the antivax truckers is primarily attributable to the stupidity of the chief of police and the municipal authorities of Ottawa to which must be added the inability of Trudeau to enforce the law. His jeremiads and his frowns were greeted by arm of honor demonstrators who, defiantly, transgressed with a smile a multitude of laws and regulations. reactions? Nothing! What is he waiting for, Justin? The White House urges him to act. When he decides to do it, he will have to resort to force. It could have been avoided if he had acted sooner. Trudeau and Canada risk paying dearly for his ineptitude.
Putting down this gang of bad guys won’t be easy even with the OPP, the RCMP and, perhaps, as a last resort, the military. It’s that seditious truckers have a thorough knowledge of the procedures and tactics employed by law enforcement in this kind of situation. The so-called Truckers for Libertyenjoy the support of “Police on Guard”, a group which counts in its ranks more than 150 active and retired police officers and 50 former soldiers who oppose the measures taken by the government to fight the pandemic.
The vast majority of the Canadian population is vaccinated. The “truckers” are a tiny fringe of right-wing idiots cheered on by the usual crowd of ultra-right rogue American politicians like Donald Trump.
One aspect of this case strikes me as fishy. Anti-vax truckers have received millions of dollars in funding from international donors on an unprecedented scale, according to an online extremism expert at theInstitute for Strategic Dialoguequoted by Politico.
Facebook says it has removed dozens of fraudulent pages associated with the Ottawa protest from its site. But on many social media platforms, there are many pages, recently created, supporting truckers with a strangely high number of followers. They urge antivax around the world to fund them and reproduce the same kind of discord in their cities. Trump loyalists for sure. But not only them.
I suspect that, without being at the origin of the movement, Moscow has inserted itself into the movement to integrate it into its war of disinformation against the West.
The Russian Secret Service may have gotten involved in it through the St. Petersburg troll factory called Internet Research Agency (IRA). Russia, especially with the crisis in Ukraine, has an interest in flooding social media with messages favorable to truckers to sow discord in Western countries and in particular those of NATO.
The IRA was very active in favor of Donald Trump during the 2016 presidential elections. In the 2020 election, the most popular Facebook pages with Christian fundamentalist content or targeted at black Americans were run by troll farms from Europe from the east.
According to a 2019 internal Facebook report published by the MIT Technology Reviewtroll factories were reaching 140 million US users every month.
The Russians have the ability to use social media to spread disinformation, promote division and thus influence public opinion in Western democracies.