The Freedom Convoy – a massive protest by tens of thousands of truckers in Canada – with the support of tens of thousands more cheering them on along the streets as they have rolled on to Ottawa has been a spontaneous combustion of outrage by working class Canadians. Some are calling the 45 miles long (!) caravan of truckers the biggest political protest in modern Canadian history.
We are, of course, firmly on the side of the truckers.
But what has been truly fascinating has been the rage and indignation of the left against the fringe protesters. Some of the same media outlets that cheered on the Black Lives Matter violence in our cities, have sneered at these working class protesters as dangerous white wing crazies that should be met with “firm resistance,” as a Washington Post columnist advised. The Post worries that this is the same kind of “toxic,” “anti-government” movement that led to people storming the Capital last year.
Left-wing Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau fled the capital of Ottawa as the 45-mile-long convoy approached on Saturday. He sneered that the protestors were “anti-science, anti-government, and anti-society.”
In Nova Scotia the government has made it illegal for Canadians to gather along the roads in support of the peaceful truckers and is issuing fines for those who dare show their support.
But good news: the movement isn’t subsiding, it’s spreading. A European Trucker Convoy group with 7,300 members has announced that truckers from the Netherlands, France, Hungary, and Germany will converge on Brussels, the capital of the European Union on February 7. In Australia, a trucker group with more than 10,000 followers announced plans to meet in the national capital of Canberra.
Let’s hope that the Freedom Caravan heads to Washington, D.C. next. That will really get the left’s heads spinning around.