Consider This from NPR - The Canadian Trucker Protest Against Vaccines Has Evolved Into Something Much Bigger

Episode Date: February 18, 2022

Three weeks ago, semi trucks flooded the streets of Canada's capital city. Drivers were protesting a vaccine mandate at the U.S. border. But since then, the demonstration in Ottawa has evolved to be about much more and is spreading to other cities throughout the world. NPR correspondents Shannon Bond and Odette Youseff have been following this story and explain how the movement began and what has kept it going. In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for NPR and the following message come from the Kauffman Foundation, providing access to opportunities that help people achieve financial stability, upward mobility, and economic prosperity, regardless of race, gender, or geography. Kauffman.org Three weeks ago, in Canada's capital city, Ottawa, semi-trucks started swarming the streets. The drivers of those trucks were protesting against a mandate requiring them to be vaccinated against COVID-19 in order to pass freely back and forth across the U.S. border.

No vax mandates! No vax mandates! And anyone who's been to a truck stop knows how imposing a group of semis can be. They were running their engines, honking their horns, and harassing shop owners who asked them to wear masks. Well, the situation at this point is completely out of control because the individuals with the protest are calling the shots. That's the mayor of Ottawa, Jim Watson, speaking with a Canadian radio station two weeks ago. They have far more people than we have police officers.

Now, around the same time, Ottawa Police Chief Peter Slowly had an emergency meeting with the Police Services Board. He said Canada's capital had never seen a protest like this. The protesters had effectively brought downtown Ottawa to a standstill. This is a siege. It is something that is different in our democracy than I've ever experienced in my life. And the demonstration started to evolve, spreading to blockades at the border itself and drawing in more people and other symbols, like the U.S. Confederate flag, even swastikas. It's not so much that these groups have been folded in. It's that they're at the very core of the movement.

In fact, the organizers themselves are extremists. Stephanie Carvin is a former security analyst for the Canadian government. They have expressed anti-Semitic, Islamophobic and conspiratorial worldviews, and this isn't even their first attempt at a convoy. Carvin told NPR that it isn't that this protest got out of hand. Instead, she sees this as the plan all along. They've been trying to organize something like this for years that kind of amplifies their anti-government views. In reality, I think what we're looking at is something like a spark that lit a powder keg within the wider Canadian population. Now, the protests in Canada have started to calm

down a little. Police in Ottawa have sealed off the downtown area and are arresting protesters. But the movement has now found traction in other major cities outside of Canada. At its heart, this is a movement that is anti-government. And there's some concern that, you know, even if you appease them, they're not necessarily going to go home. Consider this. A demonstration that began in Canada as a protest against vaccine mandates has now tapped into something much larger. A growing anti-government sentiment that can be felt in cities throughout the world. From NPR, I'm Elsa Chang. It's Friday, February 18th. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, those so-called freedom

convoys in Canada have been getting support from around the world, and it's all been amplified by social media. Even some Republicans in the U.S., like Texas Senator Ted Cruz, have cheered them on. The Canadian truckers are heroes. They are patriots, and they are marching for your freedom and for my freedom. And now, organizers in the U.S. say they're launching their own convoy next week, which will travel from California to Washington, D.C. Meanwhile, this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau assumed emergency powers in an attempt to control the protests in Canada. And Canadian police continue to arrest protesters. NPR correspondents Odette Youssef and Shannon Bond have been reporting on this and spoke with my

colleague Alyssa Nadwarny. So Odette, let's start with a basic question. Who are these protesters? The shorthand has been trucker protests, but is that actually what we're witnessing? Well, Alyssa, it began with a small group of truckers that were protesting vaccine mandates in Canada. And, you know, it's a group that's largely not representative of truckers in Canada, where, you know, 90% of truckers are vaccinated. But this really gained steam when Fox News, right-wing influencers and politicians like Rand Paul in the U.S. started amplifying it. So it's really grown beyond just truckers. These demonstrations have included families with kids, people who are vaccinated but oppose vaccine

mandates, and also some far-right extremist and conspiracy theory elements. But Alyssa, it's also worth asking about who's taken a role behind the scenes, you know, not necessarily in the streets, but funding the truckers who protested in Canada. And we got some insight into that earlier this week when donor information from the Christian fundraising website GiveSendGo was leaked. And it turns out that more than half of donations to the Canadian truckers came from the U.S., although more money was raised in Canada. And altogether, millions of dollars were raised. And I'll just jump in here to say social media played a huge role in this, right? So there are these Facebook groups supporting the protests that have gained tens, even hundreds

of thousands of followers. But it turns out that some of these groups may not be what they seem. OK, say more about that. What have you seen on social media? Right. So we got news in the past week. Facebook has actually removed several groups and pages that had been supporting and promoting the protests and calling for donations,

some of them for spreading QAnon content, which is against Facebook's rules, and others for being run by fake accounts based overseas, including in Vietnam and Romania. The investigative news site Grid found the two biggest Facebook groups promoting these protests in Canada were being run by a digital marketing firm in Bangladesh. And they found others were being run by this Facebook account that belonged to a woman in Missouri but who had been hacked. Do we know why these foreign and hacked accounts are running the group supporting convoys?

Yeah, I asked Karen Kornbluh at the German Marshall Fund. She's been tracking the conversation online about these protests. Here's what she said. There's a financial incentive and there's a political incentive. And some of the actors that we see are in it for one reason or another, and some are in it for both. So, you know, in the case of this Bangladeshi marketing firm, this could be astroturfing, right? It could be organizers of the protests, you know, paying this firm to make it seem like these protests maybe have more support than they really do and to help drive some of those millions of dollars in donations. It could also be scammers who just, you know, grab onto these divisive political issues in order to make a buck, send people to their own websites where

they can show digital advertising. And then there are the right-wing figures and media outlets that Odette mentioned. You know, they are promoting this for political reasons, but they are also driving traffic to their own websites. So let's get into the message behind the convoys. Odette, it started in Canada as a protest against vaccine mandates, but we've seen that change. What is it about now? Yeah, you know, Alyssa, the message has kind of had to change, you know, because so many COVID restrictions are being lifted anyway, as case counts go down. So now we're seeing demands for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's resignation. And you know, this anti-government sentiment is really

resonating globally. The timing here has been so key to the spread of these demonstrations. You know, we're in year three of a global pandemic. People are tired of it. They want their lives to go back to normal. So even though, you know, this is a small minority of people, they've been so vocal and effective in their tactics that it's providing a lot of inspiration to other people across borders. Yeah, let's talk about that inspiration. What are you seeing around plans for a convoy here in the U.S.?

Well, these organizers have been trying to put together a convoy since late January. As to their goals, here's what one of the organizers, Brian Brazzi, said in the Facebook announcement about this convoy. Canada needs our help and we're standing with Canada. You know, don't forget that in the United States, we're standing up to end the Emergency Powers Act. But here's the thing, Alyssa, there's nothing called the Emergency Powers Act in the U.S. And Brazi didn't respond to a question about what exactly he's referring to. You know, the mandates here have really been implemented at

the state and local levels. And it's hard to predict how this is going to turn out. In social media spaces, you see a lot of enthusiasm for this convoy that they're planning, but also some paranoia about bringing something to D.C. You know, there really hasn't been any large scale nationwide mobilization of the right in D.C. since January 6th last year, largely because of fears over federal scrutiny. Shannon, considering so much of this is being organized on social media, how responsive are Facebook and other platforms? Well, you know, it's important to know here, you know, Facebook says it does allow criticism of

government policies. You know, you can organize protests. That's not the issue here. It and other companies, I think, have learned a lot of lessons, you know, going back to the 2016 and 2020 elections, of course, January 6th. So now they have these rules in place against inciting violence, against fake accounts doing this kind of manipulation. But the question with these platforms always is how well are those rules enforced? Because ultimately, if you're not taking down these groups for breaking rules until they've already gained such a large audience, you know, how effective are the rules really? Odette, as we try to figure out the impact of these protests, what do we know about the influence of far-right extremists? Yeah, you know, they've been a part of this. Just earlier this week, authorities arrested 11 people

and seized 13 long guns at a demonstration in Alberta, Canada. And Alyssa, you know, the images that police released of some of the equipment they seized reportedly included insignia of a known extremist group. I spoke with Amarnath Amarasingham. He's an extremism expert and a professor at Queen's University in Ontario. He says several people behind the Canadian movement are known Holocaust deniers, conspiracy theorists, and white nationalists, and that they've been looking for causes that would capture the wider mainstream imagination. You know, they've tried before, but now the moment is kind of ripe. Three years into the pandemic, three years into a whole host of misinformation around the pandemic, the rise of conspiracy theories around the pandemic, general anxiety and exhaustion with pandemic and lockdown, they had people listening. And the real concern

here is that, you know, you're having sort of a more mainstream population now in spaces mixing with avowed extremists, forming connections and finding common ground. So Amara Singham says he's worried that even after these protests eventually die down, those connections don't go away and they could have a lasting impact on politics and elections. That was NPR's Odette Youssef and Shannon Bond. Additional reporting in this episode from reporter Emma Jacobs. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Elsa Chang.