O Canada!

I’m putting aside the latest Bafflement Essay to write this short piece about Canada because, if it isn’t in the news, it should be.

I’ve never known much about Canada. Until recently its one appearance in my life took the form of a bear-like coat given to me by my mother, the fake fur she’d bought during a snowy winter in Montreal.

That was all I knew about Canada: it was cold. Also big.

Until last September, that is, when I did a three-hour Skype with a Canadian woman in Vancouver. Emma (not her real name) had a Sophie’s Choice kind of dilemma and I was doing some informal emergency counselling to help her work through the issues. Canada was fast following in Australia’s footsteps as the western country with the most authoritarian Covid response, and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had announced that at the end of October, ‘the unvaccinated’ would no longer be allowed to travel. Emma had to decide whether to leave her country before the gates closed.

Emma wasn’t ready to leave her country within the next few weeks; she still had some hope that, thanks to the growing number of activists, things would eventually get better. But one particular historical fact weighed on her mind: the fact that while some Jews got out of 1930s Germany in time, others ignored the signs. Could things get to the point where, as she put it, ‘there were boots on the ground’ and she would be forcibly detained? Would she look back on this moment and wonder why she didn’t leave Canada when she could?

Apart from pointing out that history never repeats itself exactly, I didn’t have an answer. Instead, we explored some of the practicalities of the worst-case scenario: leaving by private boat, crossing the border to the US by car or, if necessary, on foot under the cover of dark. At the same time I was struggling to believe that this could be happening in a western country: surely, as the breaches of human rights grew, international pressure would be applied?

Talking to her and others since then, I’ve heard how the lives of some Canadians have become more and more difficult as state and federal government have put them under more and more pressure. ‘The Unvaccinated’ can go to very few places and even food shopping and the school run present daily challenges in this newly-divided country. Baffled, I asked my new friend how she thought nice, liberal Canada had got to this point. Canadians tended to be very compliant, she said, they were trusting of authority and placed a high value on getting on with others. After eighteen months of seeing the western world turned upside down, the explanation made sense: this was the downside of being ‘nice’: it left you open to manipulation.

So it’s been with a sense of relief and solidarity that I’ve been following the Canadian truckers for the past couple of weeks: finally something was happening that might stop the country from sliding further into the darkness. For the first time since school geography, I looked at a map of Canada. My friends were on one side and Ottawa was on the other; the distance between east and west was huge. On YouTube, some of the truckers were already streaming their progress as they drove along the wide straight roads to the capital. Supporters stood on the snowy banks, waving Canadian flags.

Arriving in Ottawa, I surprised by how much space there was in the heart of the city. The streets were broad and Parliament Square made Westminster look like Toytown. And look, they had a Big Ben! I was beginning to understand how the vastness of the country was reflected in the way its people live; even the trucks, with their big snouts and metal pipes, make sense in this world. And if you like to spend time in nature but nature is cold, a good-sized motorhome comes in handy. Some of the protestors had come in motorhomes which were HUGE.

A nice channel called Ottawalks took me on an eye-level tour of the city. Moving along the pavements at walking speed, looking at the buildings, it was almost like being there. The skies were very blue, the snow was very white (where it wasn’t slushy) and the flags – the reclaimed symbols of the new movement – were very red. I was amazed at the resilience and good humour of the protestors as they set up outside kitchens, put on mini-concerts and inflated bouncy castles. The temperatures were sub-zero: how did they do that?

Getting to know a country through a protest is a bit weird. But it works. You have a way in that gets you under the skin of the place – people and a context that makes it meaningful. I’ve never been much into conventional tourism and this virtual journey is akin to the way I’ve done much of my travelling.

It would not have been possible without ‘the streamers’: the troop of citizen journalists recording events on the ground. These are the people filling the gap left by a mainstream media which follows the rhetoric of the Trudeau government in painting the protestors as racists, misogynists, terrorists and other bad things. As a result, much of the public is oblivious to events that those involved see as an ‘historic moment’. Regardless of how it turns out, nothing like this has ever happened in Canada before.

Scotty, who makes his living as a musician, has a YouTube channel which usually deals with music and his hobbies. UOttawayScotty, he says, is ‘not typically a journalist channel but I guess we’re journalists now'. No mainstream Canadian media outlet has been covering what’s going on in the streets of Ottawa, he says, apart from a recent team who packed up and left after the protestors asked them why they hadn’t come before.  

Despite having a kind of trench foot from days of walking the slushy streets, Scotty is keen to record the whole of the protest area before his data runs out. It will be important evidence if, as the organisers are expecting, the police begin arresting people on the grounds that there is violence. In recent days, tensions have been mounting as police have been taking the truckers’ fuel and then – because ordered to by a judge – returned it, although some truckers say the cans are filled with water.

The nighttime streets are quiet, but Scotty meets quite a few people who are still awake. He stops to talk to one couple as they sit in the cabin of their truck and finds them, after two weeks of makeshift living, in remarkably good spirits.

‘It’s two years of people not socialising. Strangers are hugging one another and people are smiling and they’re talking,’ says Anita. ‘It just feels so good – we’re being human again.’

She and her husband are concerned by the way the truckers have been portrayed in the mainstream media. ‘Listen, folks, you need to start questions. Don’t just be told what to think! Ask questions – it’s so important that we keep critically thinking. It’s okay to question. It doesn’t meant you’re a bad person. We need to do that as humanity going forward – we need to keep our governments accountable.’ (1)

At the end of the video, Scotty shares some of his thoughts about how Canada became so divided, so fast. He wasn’t with the truckers at the outset: he’s not political and just came to Ottawa to see what was going on, much to the disapproval of his family and friends. But having spent time with the truckers, he now actively supports them: ‘After meeting these people, I really like them,’ he says. ‘They’re my type of people.’

‘You go into the convoy and hear people talking, being kind to each other, being polite, you see all these things coming alive again, these human things, [people] helping each other out, cleaning the streets.’ he says. But it’s been hard to convey that to people outside the movement ‘just using Facebook or the mainstream media as their echo chamber,’ he adds. ‘That has been something that has been very difficult for me to navigate.’ (2)

Meanwhile on Zoom, the faces of my friends on the other side of Canada are looking cheerful for the first time since I e-met them.

‘I was starting to feel ashamed of my country,’ says one. ‘These truckers came and united it in a different kind of way.’ Like many Canadians who want an end to the restrictions, she is concerned about how polarised the country has become. And that’s another thing I’ve learnt about Canadians these past few weeks: there’s a conciliatory approach, a considerateness I’ve not seen in other protest movements.

But there’s no question, after what they’ve been through over the past couple of years, of giving up. ‘This is the biggest issue of our times,’ says Emma. ‘If we don’t have our human rights, we have nothing. Zilch.’

(1) You can hear what John and Anita said in full at about an hour into the video here.

(2) Another streamer worth following is Mike Baker Canada who, with his minimalist, ultra-polite commentary, strikes me as pioneering a new form of reporting-of-place.