Getting a grip on the trucker standoff at the U.S. border.
COUTTS is the chokepoint.
Fresh produce from California, for instance, is trucked through the tiny whistle-stop en route to Calgary, one of the strongest transportation & logistics centres of any inland western Canadian city. As a major distribution hub, Calgary depends on the free flow of economic goods. And places near and far (Alaska is a good example), depend on Calgary to get their stuff. And that stuff either arrives from Coutts or it doesn’t (there’s always the plane but that will cost you big time).
Should your goal be to disrupt supply chains, you couldn’t pick a better spot than freezing the flow of commercial traffic at Coutts.
WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?
If you think the best journalism squirts out of legacy media like the CBC, read no further.
The way locals & truckers on the ground in Coutts tell it on ‘live’ social media (not the racket filtered through unabashedly hard right digital services) is government and media and mainstream institutions can’t be trusted. Dual standards are pissing these people off. Pointing to First Nations blockades, Black Lives Matter and the Occupy mob as proof, the whole business reeks of hypocrisy, they say (in colourful language CBC and its fellow travellers would bleep in a heartbeat).
And that’s just it. The only way to get attention pulled away from legacy media & political operators deaf to the views held by people like the truckers is to do what the Freedom Convoy has done. And it works like a hot darn!
For you see, this protest is no longer about vaccinations. It probably never was. It’s about The Economy of Attention.
WHO OWNS THE STORY?
Nobody and everybody.
One thing is for certain: there’s good money in keeping the lights on the protest. A GoFundMe organized by a Maverick Party shill has attracted many millions of dollars (nearing ten as of this writing). And contrarian digital media has never had it so good in Canada; it’s in the interest of feisty FOX-wannabes to keep the protest fires burning in Coutts and in the nation’s capital.
We suspect this won’t end well—for any of the actors involved.
You can write O’Toole off.
And Trudeau (the younger) will likely do what his dad did with anarchy in Quebec over fifty years ago—trigger the Emergency Measures Act—ordering federal forces to do what they do to restore order. And we think that’s what the organizers of the truckers protest expect and want Canada to do—pull the trigger.
You may have forgotten an astonishing statement in the New York Times, made by Justin Trudeau in 2015. The freshly-elected prime minister declared, “There is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada,” and consequently that “makes us the first post-national state.”
What you’re seeing now is what a so-called post-national state looks like.
And the Freedom Convoy and its kin in Coutts is likely just a beginning…
This column is the consensus opinion of the writers Donna Kennedy-Glans & Don Hill. If you haven’t already, please subscribe to BEYOND POLARITY — scroll down on your phone or tablet, or look to the right in the panel beside this post. Enter your email to FOLLOW, a wheel spins, hamsters get fed.
The questions remain, But can we get to tide water? Or our condo’s south of the border. All kidding aside. This is about Peace, Order and Good government and who will champion that and who will shirk responsibility.
Nope, the is NOT about POGG; this is about standing up for your rights.
This is about governments that will not listen and continually tell us that they know better than we what is best for us. Again, nope. I have lived in this province my whole life (I am 71) and over those years I have become less and less and less again a believer that the government either has my best interest at heart, is moving in my best interest or, even, is sufficiently competent to make many of the decisions that it does make.
I have had all my shots; I am – as noted – “of an age” and I have those “underlying health conditions” that make me a prime candidate for death. Notwithstanding that, I really do believe that the government is vastly over reaching and has been for some time.
I feel that the governments (plural, you understand) have very much created a hysteria that ends up with the populace demanding that they “do something” even when that “something” is illogical and stupid. Further, I believe that the governments are actively ignoring any commentary that does not support their narrative. I therefore do understand the frustration of the truckers and I support their actions.
Donna, I think that you have identified something important.
You say, “The way locals & truckers on the ground in Coutts tell it …. is government and media and mainstream institutions can’t be trusted. Dual standards are pissing these people off.”
I have to say that from my perspective, the federal government [I will come to the Alberta government in a moment] has sufficiently pissed me off that I have concluded that the absolute intent of the feds is to squash Alberta and to send US back to the stone age. I do remember Trudeau the elder and his attacks on Alberta – which started about a decade BEFORE the NEP – and were explicitly stated as being because the government of Alberta had more power than the federal government of the time thought was appropriate. Trudeau junior has simply continued his father’s campaign. From my perspective, the other two major federal party leaders simply acquiesced in that approach (O’Toole) or gleefully egged JT on and complained that he was not doing enough against us (Singh).
The result was that I refused to vote in the last election. That was the first election for which I was eligible to vote in which I did not vote in over fifty years [yeah, I’m an old guy]. I simply didn’t want to be part of what I viewed as a corrupt process that was oriented to bankrupting my province.
So, I do, I do understand the argument of the truckers in Ottawa that no one listens to them and simply denigrates them as stupid, “not listening to the science,” Nazis, racists and on and on. Yup that certainly describes all those of us in Alberta that disagree with our “betters” in Ottawa and elsewhere who absolutely know what we need (of course, there is no way that we could ever know what we need ourselves1). Those guys are not our “betters” but are, instead, are absolutely our worsers!
Now, as for Coutts. Again, there is a great deal of frustration. It is ostensibly centered around Covid but, again, it is a result of frustration that our “betters” in Alberta know what is best for us but they absolutely don’t listen to the populace. There are many like me (I got my three shots, etc. absolutely as soon as I could) who are absolutely convinced that the Alberta government has terrifically mismanaged our healthcare system and their mismanagement is the reason that there is insufficient capacity in our hospitals. That insufficient capacity, in turn, is being used as an excuse to shut down things that should not be shut down.
And, yes, the media is the handmaiden of the government in spreading the gospel of “thou shalt” and “thou shalt not.”
I won’t go on but, please understand, I do, I absolutely do understand the frustration of the folks in Ottawa and Coutts. Our worsers have taken it upon themselves to tell us how to live our lives and have used the health of other people as a weapon against us.