Plain English with Derek Thompson - What American Media Is Getting Wrong About Canada’s Big Protests

Episode Date: February 15, 2022

What if I told you that the anti-vaccination trucker protests in Canada weren’t principally about vaccines or truckers (or even Canada)? The Atlantic’s David Frum joins to set us straight about what’s going on in Ottawa and the meme-ification of protest politics. Host: Derek Thompson Guest: David Frum Producer: Devon Manze Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The press box is here to catch you up on the latest media stories. Hosted by Brian Curtis and David Shoemaker, these guys have the insight on the biggest stories you care about. Check out the press box on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Today we're going to talk about what I think is the most interesting story in North America right now, which is the protests that have paralyzed Canada for the last few weeks and the media myths about what's driving those protests. So first, in what's becoming, I hope, a useful exercise for planning English listeners,

I'm going to start by laying out the facts as I see them before we layer on interpretation. So here is the Canadian protest fiasco in roughly 90 seconds. In January, a rule held the truckers had to be vaccinated to cross the U.S. Canada border. Now, the vast majority of Canadian truckers are already vaccinated. But when the rule went into effect on January 22nd, it became clear that some unvaccinated Canadian truck drivers were going to plan a major protest of this mandate. And suffice it to say, this protest has now snowballed into a national fiasco. So at first, the trucker convoys, sometimes called the Freedom Convoy, would gather other protesters

along major highways and bridges, and they'd block traffic and block trading routes that were critical to the U.S. and Canada. So one of the bridges you're going to hear about, for example, is the Ambassador Bridge. That was blocked off for a while. It connects Michigan into Windsor, Ontario. Within a week, one convoy got to the capital city of Ottawa, and their protesters staged a rally at Parliament Hill. That's kind of like the Canadian equivalent

of Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C., the seat of the legislature. By early February, these protests were basically spiraling out of control, and there were copycat protests popping all over the world. The Canadian government has so far been moderately successful at clearing away the blockage from the most important bridges, but several cities, including the capital of Ottawa, are reportedly still snarled by protesters

and traffic and police, and several writers now calling this essentially a siege. Now this is basically a siege. broadly being called an anti-vaccine protest. And I think it may have started that way. But just as all protest movements have a life of their own, what's happening now in Canada appears to be some jumbalaya of kooky vaccine denial and populist nationalism, but it's combined with sometimes reasonable protests about unjustified COVID restrictions and general anger about the economy and inflation, which, by the way, in terms of inflation, will not be helped by blocking trade routes

with trucks. On Monday, Yesterday, for the first time in Canadian history, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act that will essentially allow him to use more force to clear protesters from the capital city. So what do I find so interesting about the Freedom Convoy protests? Well, first, the protests are a really interesting flashpoint for COVID policy. We're at a weird intersection right now with Omicron, where deaths are still very high, but lots of Americans seem very eager to move on from the pandemic. And that desperation to get back to

normal is putting vaccine mandates and mask mandates in the political crosshairs in a way that I don't think they necessarily were a few months ago. But second, there's something bigger. I think the media is missing here, especially about the global nature of these protests. I don't think this is really about vaccines anymore, and it's definitely not about truckers either. It's about what all global protest movements are about, which is visibility. It's about this age that we live in, this rolling age of anger where the public seems ready to revolt, excited about shutting down and shouting down the elites. And that's why I think the Canadian protests are all over Fox News and all over American newspapers. It's because when we look to our neighbors at the North, restless, angry, begging for this to be over, begging to be seen, I think what we see is a reflection of ourselves.

I'm Derek Thompson. This is plain English. Today's guest is David from. David is a staff writer at The Atlantic. He has written for the Atlantic, where I also write about the protests that are royaling Canada. David, welcome back. Thank you. David, in 60 seconds or less, what do you think the Canadian trucker protest is about? First, we should not call it a trucker protest.

These are protests using trucks, but very few of the people involved in the protests drive a truck for a living. most Canadian truckers are vaccinated, and the protest has been condemned by both the Canadian Trucking Association and by the Teamsters Union of Canada. Wow, I love it. We're already busting media myths in the first 30 seconds. The myth of the trucker protest. It's not really a protest among truckers. So, David, what are the elements of this protest movement? So this is a movement of protest by elements that are very familiar in American society. People are disaffected in a lot of ways and have found in COVID a place where their disaffection can go.

It's a minority movement, about a third of Canadians more or less back the protests in a broad sense. They back the ideas. They may not back the methods, especially as the methods have gotten more disorderly. 30, that's unpopular, but it's not fatally unpopular. Let's tease apart the origins of the disaffection, as you call it. I want to read you a section of an article that I saw passed around online quite a bit to get your reaction. This is an essay from Barry Weiss's substack common sense by the writer Rupa Subramanya. I'm quoting now, and the quote is this. The mandate is a moot point.

Americans have a similar requirement, and anyway, the vast majority of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. So it's about something else, or many things, a sense that things will never go back to normal. A sense that they, the protesters, are being ganged up on by the government, the media, big tech, big pharma, they are done being ignored. That the elites, the people who have zoomed their way through the pandemic, had better start paying attention to the fentanyl overdoses, the suicides, the crime, the despair. End quote.

David, this is a vast grabback of protest motivations. what is your reaction to this piece? Well, first, I would advise that particular piece be handled with flameproof tongs. Because one of the things having, I read that piece very carefully, and one of the things the piece was very much at pains to draw cover over

is how few of the protesters were. The author of the piece became part of the story because actually, I think only one person quoted drove a truck professionally. But the piece was, kept referring to people as trucker protesters, even though, is there any evidence that this person drives a truck? Yes, Canada has the same rural urban divides as the United States,

but they're much less, just generally social divides in Canada are much less extreme. One of the ways to things to understand about Canada, and one of the reasons why there has been no Trump in Canada to date is, along with Germany, Canada's had, if you divide the population into bands of fifths, Canada's had the best performing middle fifth of any developed country along with Germany. It's still a very much a middle class country. It has the same phenomenon of the cities pulling away from the rest and the top 1% pulling away from everybody else, the top 10% pulling away, but not as extreme. So, David, why did this happen now?

Canadians have seemingly been pretty patient about COVID restrictions for the last two years. And the trucker vaccine mandate, which to your point is not the whole of the protest, but it's arguably a spark. It was telegraphed since like the end of 2021. Everyone knew this was coming for months. So why is this spasm of protests happening now? The reason the protests find an audience is, I think it was Canadian governments overreacted to Omicron. That Canada had very stringent measures in place. I was in Canada in the summers of both 2020 and 2020 for a long period of time.

And people were incredibly patient. They were incredibly good spirit, public spirited. They went along. I spend my time in a very rural place where there is vaccine hesitancy even before COVID. But people went along with the rules because Canadians do that. And even in the summer 2021, they were very good to humor about, Canada had a slow rollout of the vaccinations, and they were very patient about that, and that there were real mistakes of the government that led Canada to be so slow starting its

vaccination program, and people were tolerant about that. But there was a real feeling in the fall of 2021, okay, this now is truly over, the economy can recover, and then the Omicron variant appeared, and governments, and the two most important, two of the most important governments are headed by conservative premiers in Ontario and Alberta. They clamp down hard. And in retrospect, much harder than what's necessary. Let me sum up what I think I understand so far. The protests are a minority movement, but then again, its supporters account for one-third of the country, which is roughly equal to Prime Minister Trudeau's electoral share.

So the protests were sparked by trucker vaccine policy, but it's now bloomed to incorporate a bunch of cultural, public health, maybe even economic motivations. And this is a good time to point out that Canada, like the EU, is dealing with its own highest inflation rate in at least three decades. But that still leaves us with the question of who. Who is this movement? Would you say it's fair, David, to say these are working class protesters, or is that a misnomer? This idea of representing them as working class is not quite right. I mean, there is, if you go to the place where the hardest work of Canada is done, you will see people who are overwhelmingly immigrant or the children of immigrants, making 25,

Canadian dollars an hour, there aren't any of those people at the protests. These are people who own their own small electrical business, you know, if they're not permanent right-wing agitators, the people who are sort of drawn into this. And this is a very familiar type of the United States, contractors, plumbers. They own it. So they are owners. They may not make a lot of money, and they certainly don't have, they work with their hands, and they certainly don't have the affect of highly educated people. And their incomes are very variable. And they've been very much hard hit in 2020, 21. So that kind of person has something to say.

And there's sympathy because of the overreaction to Amacron by provincial governments. But as always with these kinds of protests, the most radical people take over. And they begin using methods that are broadly unacceptable. And they take advantage of cracks in the Canadian security system. But I think there is a real difference to how Canadians reacted to the shutdowns in the center of Ottawa versus how they reacted to the court closings of the borders. And it's the border closings that have provoked the firm reaction that is now belatedly beginning. Let me disentangle this. So there are almost two fronts to this protest, not that we should think of it like a war, but there are fronts like a war. There are blockages

at the border, and those blockages threaten trade between the U.S. and Canada, trade of food, car parts. But there are also, number two, I mean, major protests that have frozen the capital city of Ottawa and other cities throughout Canada. And this is maybe a good time to mention that I don't know Canada very well, and you were born in Canada and own a home there. So what is it that Americans need to know about Canada to properly visualize everything that's happening there?

Well, you have to remember how vast Canada is, how far away Ottawa is from everywhere else, and how small a city Ottawa is, and how completely government-centric it is. So you can have people behaving really obnoxious, in the middle of Ottawa. And as irritating as it is to be the people who live, the million or so of the 40 million Canadians who live in Ottawa, to everybody else, it might as well, you know, it's something

you see on television. The attack on the border crossings, that was putting pressure on the artery by which Canada lives. That Canada lives by trade and lives by trade with the United States. And to stop those, that's a direct threat to economic recovery. It's a direct threat. I mean, you had car plants shutting down. You had many businesses that were hard hit.

And what you also saw was their impact on the politics. When you get these disruptions, whether it was the indigenous people shutting down the pipelines in 2020 and the rails and the roads, or whether it's anti-vax people shutting down, Ottawa and the border crossings, the first two or three days, people have reactions to the protests and their cause and methods. by day four or five, certainly by day seven, the question is, what's the government doing? It's the government's job to keep things orderly. And so one of the things that the protesters calculated correctly is they are doing a lot of harm and increasing harm to Justin Trudeau. And even though for a long time, there's nothing Justin Trudeau could, I don't know that many of the people listen to you are going to be interested in the technicalities of the jurisdiction.

of Canada's police forces. We sure they don't need to go all the way there. No. We don't know. But you do need to know that one of the reason why Trudeau looks so factless was because of the technicalities of the jurisdictions of Canadian police forces. But no one cares about that. What they want to know is there it is the most iconic skyline in Canada, Parliament Hill,

the Parliament buildings, the Peace Tower. There are people who are behaving. Maybe you're sympathetic, maybe you're not. But clearly, they're unruly. And clearly, it's the government's job to deal with them and the government doesn't do it. And who are the people in government whose names you know? They start with the prime minister. So the latest news, as of our recording, Monday afternoon,

is that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked legislation called the Emergency Act that gives him sweeping powers to fight these blockades across the country. And as you've mentioned, fight them most specifically in the capital city of Ottawa. What is this emergency act? And what do you think is going to happen next? Well, the act that you mentioned, was passed in 1988, and it replaced a previous emergency law that was evoked by the president was famously evoked by the famous present prime minister's father, Pierre Trudeau, during a terrorist

crisis in 1970, which the elder Trudeau met with overwhelming force, including the deployment of the military on the streets of Montreal, and large-scale arrests. There had been a murder and a kidnapping, and the Elder Trudeau met it very firmly, and although it remains a controversial decision at the time was hugely popular, and indeed he was able to rescue one of the two people's lives were in danger. This was an attempt to come up with a law that gave the Prime Minister some powers that weren't as draconian as those that were invoked in 1970. Among other things, it will give him the ability to use the RCMP, which has the Federal Police force, which is greater. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police has more capabilities than

most of Ottawa. The Parliament Hill itself is policed by a parliamentary police force that's quite tiny and not very, you know, that's more about counterterrorism than anything else. The city of Ottawa is patrolled by its own municipal police and the Ontario provincial police, and they don't tend to have, they're not, again, they're a little defenseless against these kinds of giant truxes weapons. The RC&P have more capabilities. and they can be used.

Plus, the prime minister has more ability to enact fines that go into effect if you disrupt legislation. And one of the things that has been hopeful about all this is that the protests have been reasonably compliant with court orders. When the courts say don't honk, they don't honk. They've broken that down. And certainly the ambassador of Bridge and the other border crossings was cleared very rapidly and very bloodlessly, which is a tremendous relief.

What nobody wants is any kind of casualty, either among, certainly among the civilians, whatever, however little you think of them, many of them have brought children. And there are a lot of kids there. So the police have to be very careful. And of course, we want to protect our peace officers too. This protest is not exclusively about vaccine mandates, but it does put a fine point on the benefits and the risks of vaccine mandates, which to me cash out something like this. on the benefit side, there are studies from the U.S. and around the world that show that vaccine

mandates increase vaccine uptake. And I believe that that means that vaccine mandates do mechanically save lives. But they save lives at the cost of making the unvaccinated and the anti-vax feel more isolated and censured and angry and often literally punished. And there are some countries like Denmark where I recently spoke with a government advisor, which has now lifted, all of its, basically all of its COVID rules and has never had any vaccine mandates. 81% of adults in, excuse me, 81% of the entire population in Denmark has gotten a vaccine. And the government advisor that I spoke to said, we've always thought that there is a risk too high to take with mandating vaccines because you will harden the opposition to the vaccines.

To me, I know people who think this is an easy call on both sides who think it's obviously totalitarianism to impose vaccine mandates and you think it's a no-brainer to impose them because you're saving people's lives and that's the definition of public health. I'm going to be honest, I struggle with this. I don't know where and when vaccine mandates are perfectly appropriate. And I wonder whether you've done any thinking on the propriety of vaccine mandates in the context of these protests. I am very sympathetic to vaccine mandates. I'm open to the evidence that they could backfire, I certainly don't find it an unreasonable imposition in the context of infectious disease. If there were a vaccine against heart attacks and you didn't want to take it, I think that was a pretty

foolish decision, but okay, it's on your call. But a vaccine against an infectious disease, we all have an interest in the fabled herd immunity. I think one of the things that we do see, though, and where you are clearly right, is that you will hear people say, I am for vaccines, I'm just against mandates. But in the real world, that turns out to be an almost untenable line. And we have seen so many people in public life, people we know, they start saying that. But they become, in practice, even if they are personally vaccinated themselves, they become anti-vaxxers. And the reason is, this goes back to our meme economy. We who take part in public discussion, get feedback in a way in the age of social media we never used to do. Yeah, social media

is a huge invisible leading actor here. And it's not just that it increases the velocity of the feedback from the public to the elites, but also, and you've made this point a few times, it helps to turn complex causes into simple memes. And those memes can be exported. And that's really true, I think, for the left, as it is for the right. Like for Black Lives Matter, the race, fist or being seen as kneeling, these were memes that encircled the globe. For the French protests of 2018, the Gilles-Jean, French for the yellow vest that drivers had in their cars, when they protested the gas tax hike there, the yellow vests were a meme that went worldwide. The new meme is MAGA hats. You've got MAGA hats on Canadian protesters,

which doesn't make any sense, but it does because it's a meme. I think what you put it all together, we are in an age of anger, an age of rolling semi-permanent dissatisfaction among these, this broad swath of the middle class, and that anger is like dry kindling that can suddenly become a conflagration wherever there's a spark. But when you use this image of conflagration in the Gilles-Jean, here's something that we can do, and one of my favorite examples of how the modern world works comes from exactly that protest. One of the most iconic images from the Yellow vests. These are the vests that French motorists are required to wear, carry in their cars, and the Macron government put up gas taxes to fight climate change and it ignited a protest movement among people who drove a lot and they wore their yellow vests.

One of the iconic images was an image of the Arch de Triumph at the end of the Champs-Elle-Ezeat, wreathed in flames because of the intensity of the protest. And I keep on my computer a photograph of the photographing of that scene. And what you see from a different angle is a bonfire maybe 10 inches high. And 18 reporters lying flat on their stomachs shoot with their cameras pointing into the flames at the Arch de Triomp to create the image of a giant conflagration, to use your word, when in fact it was just 10 inches high. Wow. That's a really compelling point. And it's a good place to conclude because it allows us to come to come. to a stop with a bit of media analysis.

It is obviously true that the media is drawn to pessimism and to exaggeration, that we have a tendency to show that every 18-inch bonfire is actually an 18-story conflagration. But at the same time, 18-story fires exist.

Not every crisis is a trick of media framing. And I think you could plausibly say that our job, yours, David's, and mine is not only to find the fires, but to describe them by their actual height. So I hope we did that today. I hope you'll come back. We'll continue to track the development of these Canadian protests as potentially they continue to travel around the world. And we'll try to describe them as accurately as possible, no matter how high the flames get. So, David, thank you again. Such a pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Planning this with Derek Thompson is produced by Devin Manzi. Thank you so much for listening to the show. If you like us, follow us on Spotify, rate and review on Apple Podcasts. We will be back with our second episode this week on Friday. We will see you then.