The Decibel - What remains a year after the convoy protests

Episode Date: January 27, 2023

A year after tens of thousands of people descended on Ottawa, some in their big-rig trucks, a lot has changed. Border restrictions have been lifted. Same for vaccine passports and most masking requirements. But the alienation and anger that lay underneath the movement seems to remain.Ottawa reporter Shannon Proudfoot discusses what some of the participants of the convoy think about it now, and whether another version of this protest could pop up again.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

So I'm out here on Wellington Street standing directly in front of Centre Block. It's just before lunchtime and it is very, very quiet out here. The only people out here really close by are a couple of people shoveling at the main gates. There are sometimes a few protesters still out here on and off, especially on the weekends, but nobody today. That's the Globe's Shannon Proudfoot. A year ago, that stretch of downtown Ottawa sounded very different. A lot has changed in 12 months. The leaders of the protests, including Tamara Leach, Chris Barber, and Pat King, are awaiting trial.

So are the people involved in the armed blockade at Coots, Alberta. But are we any closer to understanding why so many people joined the protests in the first place? Shannon has been talking to some of them. Today, she'll tell us how they feel about it now and whether something similar could happen again. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail. Shannon, thank you so much for joining me. It's great to have you on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for joining me. It's great to have you on the podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. So it's now been a year since the convoy rolled into Ottawa. And to look back at this anniversary, Shannon, you talked to a couple of people who were there to participants, if you will, rather than the leaders that we heard a lot from at the public inquiry.

So one of the people I talked to, his name is Lloyd Crow, and he's a farmer. He grows soybeans and wheat in Prince Edward County in Ontario. And he spent the whole three weeks here in Ottawa. And the other person I spoke to was Harold Jonker, who is a truck company owner who lives in the Niagara region, and he also came for the whole three weeks. Okay, so we've got Lloyd and Harold. What brought them to Ottawa in the first place? So slightly different versions of the same thing. In Lloyd's case, he and his wife Dorothy got vaccinated because they wanted to be able to visit their grandchildren in the U.S. He expressed some hesitancy or concern about the vaccines, but they did it.

But he said it was sort of a principle thing. He didn't like hearing the stories. The way he put it was that these frontline workers were turned from heroes into enemies, that we had kind of lionized these people. And then all of a sudden, we were sort of as a society mad at them, or his perception was that they were being punished for making a decision not to get vaccinated. And what about Harold? Why did he go to Ottawa? Now, Harold, it was a little bit different. His dad is in his early 70s and had a number of health

problems. And Harold says when COVID first came around, his family said to his dad, you know, you better be careful. You have these other health concerns. You got to watch it. And there was one day where he and his wife drove two hours to go visit and they were planning to sit on the lawn while his dad sat on the porch. And at the end of the visit, he said his dad turned to him and said, well, when are the kids coming to visit? And he said it the way that people tell you things that are stuck in their heads, right? And that are kind of stuck in their chests. He said, my dad said to me, I'm 73. I know where I'm going. I need to see my grandkids. And in Harold's telling, he says, that was the moment I realized there's something wrong here. He is deeply suspicious of the vaccines and would not

get vaccinated himself. And he seemed to me a little bit more invested in kind of the broader, what you might think of as sort of the belief system that animates a lot of people who participated in the convoy. What do we mean by belief? Yeah, so there's sort of a, like, it's kind of this constellation of things that connect. So he believes that the COVID pandemic was sort of overblown. In Harold's mind, he eventually arrived at a spot where he decided none of that had to happen, that COVID wasn't that bad, that the vaccines weren't really the safe solution they were held up as, and that basically he and his dad and his family and everyone had paid too much and it should just stop. Now, I think there's another way, and he and I had a really good conversation. It wasn't adversarial. We talked

for an hour and a half. It was really helpful and illuminating to kind of get to a place of understanding. And I said to him, you know, I had a pretty rough few years too. And I had a lot of those moments I hated, but in my mind, the place I've arrived at is sometimes that's just how life is. And sometimes terrible things happen that we kind of just have to muscle through. And I said, am I understanding right? That for you, kind of the real point is that none of it should have happened, none of it had to happen? And he said, yeah. And I think that's a really, that seemed to me like a really significant kind of dividing point in the way you might decide to see the last few years. I don't think I'd be amiss in assuming that some people probably don't have a lot of sympathy for how some of these convoy protesters conducted themselves for those

few weeks while they were in Ottawa. But why is it important to understand these motivations that we're talking about, the motivations behind the convoy in this way? I guess what I'm asking really is, like, is why bother trying to understand this side of things? Well, to me, it means that what happened last year is not really gone. You know, it's gone off the streets of Ottawa. That particular manifestation of it has dissipated, you know, by force. People were forced out of Ottawa. They were forced back to their cities. But a lot of the underlying factors that led to it, I don't think have really lessened at all. I feel like what is at the core of some of the convoy thinking or much

of the convoy thinking is the idea that somehow the last three years or two years at this time last year happened only to them. And I think it's necessary to take a step back and realize that everyone's had a really brutal few years and had to give up a bunch of things they didn't want to give up or that cost them a lot, you know, emotionally or life-wise or whatever. And that there is real suffering attached to that. And, like, I just would never argue for listening or understanding in only one direction because that would be incredibly cheap and myopic. And I think, I don't know if there's a likelihood of listening or understanding

on either side of this debate, if you will. But I don't know. There's just a real, as I said, like sort of a real kind of blinkered narcissism at the core of some of this to me. Okay, so let's talk about these underlying factors then, because I guess I wonder, from the experts you talked to, I wonder how we can understand these factors. So what are the main things at play here? So the two researchers who've been looking at this are Jared Wesley and Fayo Snigovsky at the University of Alberta.

And there's three big sort of things that probably underlied all this or that certainly underlied all this. One is status loss. One is what we would call tribalism. And one is the loss of deference or the lack of respect for democratic norms. OK, so the first one is status loss. What is meant by that? So status loss is the feeling that your way of life or your livelihood is being threatened by forces beyond your control. What's key there is that it's a difference between sort of either how you felt your life used to be. Did you feel like it was easier to like make a living or be accepted in society 10 years ago? Or is your life different from how you expected it to be? Or do you feel like things

aren't going as well for you as they did for your parents? It sort of puts you into a place of zero sum thinking where if anyone else gets something, that means you've lost something. Or in order for you to gain something, it means something has to be taken away from someone else. It kind of induces a feeling of scarcity. Like you feel like what is available to you is threatened in some way. Okay. Okay. So it sounds like kind of a loss of control almost there. Very much. It's very much about a loss of control. That's exactly right. Yeah.

And so then the second thing you mentioned was tribalism. And so what do we mean by tribalism and how does that factor into all of this? So tribalism, I think, is sort of the part two of status loss. And this is often fed by elites, which can be media commentators, leaders of political parties, sort of influencers, if you will, who tell people who feel threatened in some way, you know what, you're right. You are getting the short end of the stick. You are not getting your due. And you know what? It's not your fault.

It's someone else's. And now I'm going to helpfully point out to you whose fault it is. And I think it's closely tied to that feeling of who should you blame for your feeling that you're not getting your due in life. And I'm thinking about those F. Trudeau flags that are all over the place. It sounds like Trudeau was certainly one of the figures, I guess, that was pointed to in this way. Yeah. When I talked to the professors, they both sort of said in different ways, you know, if you went to a central casting office, you couldn't get someone better in terms of fueling feelings of Western alienation, which is kind of where the roots of a lot of the convoy came from, and sort of class warfare. Then this, you know, sort of urbane leader who is kind of

seen as very woke, I'm putting that in quotes, who is the son of the architect of the National Energy Program. Like, if you wanted to inspire a two minutes hate from a certain segment of society, like you really couldn't do better than putting a poster of Justin Trudeau on wall. We'll be right back. All right. And then lastly, you mentioned that some people have stopped respecting some basic democratic norms, essentially. What's an example of that? One of the things the researchers I talked to talked about was the decline of what's called loser's consent, which means that if there's an election in Canada, say, and your party or your candidate doesn't win, there was typically a norm that we thought of as loser's consent, which is that you would accept the outcome. Like you would basically not

be a sore loser in political terms. And you would think, okay, my guy didn't win, but this guy did, he's in charge, you know, we'll try again another day. But we're seeing more and more a rise of people kind of pushing back against that, the idea of delegitimizing elections or thinking that someone who wins is not worthy of your respect or that they don't legitimately govern you. Yeah. And I'm thinking too, of course, during the convoy, there was a sub-movement of trying to overthrow the government essentially and instate other people to be in charge. That sounds like it kind of ties into what you're saying here. There was that sense of sort of, you're not the boss of me.

Like, I don't accept the rules you're laying down because I don't accept your leadership as being legitimate. You know, in 2019, we saw a similar movement, the United We Roll movement come into Ottawa, but it only rolled in with about 100 truckers compared to the tens of thousands of people that showed up in 2022. So what was the spark that was happening last year to make that so different? It was COVID, and it was COVID in a couple of different ways. My personal pet theory for a long time has been that we haven't paid enough attention to how much the grinding stress of COVID has affected people individually and then how that adds up to affect public life. So for tens of thousands of people, it was being very, very angry in some way about the vaccine mandate and hitting the road to Ottawa.

There's also a more pragmatic thing, which is that we were in the midst of an Omicron lockdown and a lot of people, it seems like particularly people who adhered to the convoy movement, were out of work. They couldn't work because things were shut down. And so you're in a position where why not road trip it to Ottawa? You're not losing hours. You have nowhere else to be. Like, it's just a very practical thing. I'm struggling not to use the cliche perfect storm, but it does feel like that. Like there were a lot of things kind of conspiring at once where there were these underlying factors, and then you have the accelerant and poof, up it goes. But couldn't this still happen again? Like people probably heard about the 2023 convoy potentially being organized in Winnipeg for February. That was called off. But isn't it possible that we could see another

convoy-style protest gain widespread support in the future? I think so, in the sense that a lot of the forces that made that happen last year have not really gone anywhere. And I'm not saying that literally you would have trucks coming to Ottawa again. But if you have a small segment of the population that feels disconnected, not heard, hard done by. If you have a media ecosystem that is feeding that notion for them, if you have politicians or sort of social media figures who are telling them that they are getting a raw deal and it's not fair and it's that person's fault over there, it's not hard to imagine how it would just need another animating effect. And so what do we do about that? Like effect. And so what do we do about that?

Like as a society, what do we do about that alienation that underlies all of this? So one of the things that Professor Wesley suggested was this idea of, on a political level, regional caucuses that are cross-party. Because right now in Canada, we have, if we're thinking about like sort of partisan politics, we have a real regional divide where the support for the conservatives is very Western. And so you kind of have regional divides mapping onto partisan divides, which is sort of a recipe for a lot of tension where basically, if you know that the guy you're across from, or the person you're across from today,

you're going to have to see next week and the week after and the week after you're less likely to write them off or do really hardball negotiations or sort of, you know, just kind of slough them off because you know you're going to have to meet with them again. And so basically he's arguing for a political and a social version of that where we have to cross paths with people and be in close proximity to people who are not like us. We have to get out of our bubbles. The hope would be or the idea would be that that would filter up, filter down, that if we're all kind of very encamped amongst people like us and sort of inclined to see the other team as the enemy, if you kind of break down those teams and

mix them up, maybe you kind of lessen some of that. But some of it too, this researcher, Professor Wesley, argues that basically we're not as polarized as we think we are. He has done lots of research where he asks people, for instance, and this is in Alberta, to plot themselves on a left-right political spectrum. And he says the bulk of people put themselves somewhere in the middle. They don't put themselves right out to the left or the right. They sort of see themselves as essentially centrist. People tell them they don't like conflict. They don't like politics as blood sport.

They don't like everyone kind of trying to choke each other out and yell at each other. They actually like what he called boring stuff. They like compromise. They like politeness. So it could be that sort of we're making the mistake of chasing kind of the empty calories of clickbait and rage and online viral memes, when that's not actually what people want. But we've sort of set up this kind of strange economy where if you're a political leader or, you know, you're producing YouTube videos or whatever, you think that the way to people's hearts and minds is to generate drama and like behave like

you're on some kind of unhinged reality show when that's not really what most people want. But the question is, how do you reset that cycle? Like, how do you get out of that sort of chicken and egg dilemma? Yeah, that's an interesting it's an interesting way to think about it. Yeah, I'd like to just finish off here, Shannon, by coming back to Lloyd and Harold. Did they tell you what what happened when they finished in Ottawa and they came back home? Yeah. So when Lloyd came back home, he belongs to a large church.

And he had been getting messages while he was in Ottawa sort of from people in his church and in his community who were kind of horrified that he was there. And he's very kind of polite and kindly about it. He says, I don't blame them. I know what they were seeing on the mainstream media. And he was there. And he's very kind of polite and kindly about it. He says, I don't blame them. Like, I know what they were seeing on the mainstream media. And it was horrible. His argument would be that that was not the reality that he saw. But then when he came back home, he said sort of the reception from his church, he wasn't sure if they were going to kick him out. It was sort of a mix of people hugging him and saying, thank you. You know, you did good work. You were out there fighting for us. And people who were still kind of appalled that he was there. He did say that in the year since

the temperature on everything has kind of turned down a little bit, the edges have sort of softened. One of the things that Lloyd told me that really stuck out to me is when he heard the public inquiry announced, he sent them a long letter. But I said to him, what did you want them to know? Like, what did you tell them in your letter? And he said that it was the most important three weeks of my life. For Harold, when he left Ottawa, he said there were several kilometers of people lined up along the road in their vehicles, honking and waving. He saw his kids on the roof of his van. He was sort of greeted by this like hero's ticker tape parade. But on the other hand, he had been a part-time councillor on the West Lincoln Town Council, and they ended up voting for an investigation into his participation in the convoy,

found him in breach of the Code of Conduct, and they suspended him without pay for 30 days and ordered him to account for and repay the monetary value of the food he'd received as gifts. He has now filed a lawsuit against them. But he also ran for re-election in October and finished third or fourth in his ward. And he was one of a number of pro-convoy anti-vaccine candidates in the Niagara region who were defeated, who had been very public about their positioning. So I suppose there's a bit of a statement to be made there. Yeah. And so a year later, Lloyd and Harold, do they feel differently about the things that led

them to be there and participate in the convoy? They both said they had no interest in doing the kind of reunion tour. And they both said the same thing. Sort of our battle is won. The vaccine mandates have been dropped. People have their freedoms back from pandemic measures. What would be the point? I've always thought that was kind of interesting because the protest, the convoy was always sort of destined to succeed, right? Nobody was going to live with pandemic measures forever, but also destined to extinction. So the convoy protesters could claim success and claim that they made this happen, even though it's maybe, you know, correlation instead of causation. But also, it's kind of taken the wind out of their sails. Like, what reason would you have to do another one of those at this moment?

Shannon, this was a really interesting conversation. Thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me today. Thanks for having me. It was great. That's it for today. I'm Mainika Raman-Wilms. Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Kasia Mihailovic is our senior producer, and Angela Pichenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you next week.