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.