Freedom Convoy | Truckers in arms

For more than two weeks now, thousands of Canadian truckers and their supporters have orchestrated blockades in protest against vaccine mandates and COVID-related restrictions. The convoy, calling itself ‘Freedom Convoy 2022’ and numbering around 500, consisted of truckers who had driven from different parts of Canada to pressure the federal government. While many reports have characterised these protesters as loony ‘antivaxxers’ backed by the political right, the protest’s organisers, in a statement released on Facebook, have made their demands clear: terminate “the vaccine passports and all other obligatory vaccine contact tracing programmes, or inter-Canada passport systems” and “terminate COVID vaccine mandates and respect the rights of those who wish to remain unvaccinated”. Numerous interviews with the protesters indicate that apart from the vaccine mandates themselves, a number of other factors — a deep-rooted loathing of intrusive government surveillance in the name of public health, fear that such intrusiveness could become permanent, resentment at the loss of a ‘way of life’ that did not involve masking up or discrimination on the basis of vaccination status — are roiling the protesters. With industry getting restless over the disruption in supply chains and the truckers in no mood to back down, the Trudeau government is caught between a rock and a hard place: while negotiating with the truckers after having dismissed them as a ‘fringe’ would seem a sign of weakness, evicting them by force carries heavy political costs.