Canada's Stupid Coup

I'm moving. After seven years at the same apartment, I am going to move into the suite across the hall from mine, as it’s a little larger than the one I have now. I had a chat with one of my neighbours recently who heard about my plans and was curious about how much my rent is going to go up. During our conversation, she drew a straight line from the outrageous cost of rent in Vancouver to her support for the truckers freedom convoy.

She wasn’t aware of the convoy’s links to hate groups or that it had displayed swastika’s on parliament hill. Like a lot of people, she’s had a hard couple years working in an industry that has been heavily impacted by COVID and has struggled with a cost of living that is out of control. She feels abandoned by a government that isn’t doing enough for her.

While I don’t agree with her support for the so-called truckers convoy, I can’t deny that her anger is legitimate. She and others like her have every right to be angry with the government. To me, she seemed like a good example of someone considering extremist political options because the moderate choices have failed.

I’ve been thinking a great deal the last week about this November 2020 blog by Sri Lankan writer Indi Samarajiva. In it, he argued presciently that America was in the midst of a "Stupid Coup" as a result of Trumps refusal to accept the 2020 election results. Drawing from his own experience of a stupid coup in Sri Lanka, he warned Americans that they were headed towards violence. On January 6th 2021, just a couple months later, the insurrection at the capitol buildings in Washington DC proved him right.

"It’s absurd, because the whole thing seems like a clown show" he wrote. "Coups are supposed to be orderly, authoritarian, not this dumb shit."

Canada, I think we might need to confront the fact that the amount of dumb shit we've been subjected to these last two weeks rises to the level of a stupid coup. The so-called Truckers Freedom Convoy occupation of downtown Ottawa does not appear to be abating. There are disturbing reports of a second occupation site further away from Parliament that is being fortified with supplies, further entrenching the extremists and successfully intimidating the police. They've used their trucks to set up blockades at international border crossings in Coutts, Alberta & Windsor, Ontario, which has already cost millions in economic losses. A recent opinion poll put them at 30% popular approval, which was enough support to organize solidarity rallies throughout the country.

Canada Unity, one of the suspiciously funded groups organizing the convoy, initially put out a "Memo Of Understanding" that outlined their demands. The document said it was their intention to bring an end to all COVID precautions by replacing our elected government with something else made up of the Senate, the Governor General, and of course, themselves. They've since withdrawn this document from their website, after it was endorsed by 320,000 people in an online petition, replacing it with a statement about how it did not "reflect the spirit and intent of the freedom convoy movement" despite being written by its organizers.

Reader, this sure seems like stupid coup territory to me.

The supporters of the failed Sri Lankan coup came back months after their defeat and unleashed a series of bloody terror attacks. Samarajiva's warning to us is that it didn’t matter that the coup attempt had failed, it had enough popular support to critically damage the systems of government. The supporters of the coup no longer believed that democratic processes of government were legitimate enough to be worth participating in, and so they took up arms.

Having a large cross section of your nation's population (30% popular support) that has genuinely given up on elections and democracy because they believe the system doesn’t treat them fairly leads otherwise peaceful people to consider supporting more extreme measures. The logical conclusion of this is political violence.

In the eyes of the Trucker Convoy and many of their supporters like my neighbour, democratic processes are no longer regarded as being legitimate enough to justify giving up extreme methods of trying to get your way. It doesn’t really matter how ridiculous their MOU about overthrowing the government was, or that the spokespeople don’t appear to understand the concept of provincial & federal government jurisdiction. It matters that over 320,000 Canadians endorsed them (more than the population of my hometown, Lethbridge AB). It matters that a large and growing group of our fellow Canadians have given up on the rituals of peaceful democratic violence in favour of returning to politics based on literal violence.

As much as it is tempting to dismiss the convoy as a bunch of white supremacist idiots (which they definitely are), it would be foolish not to recognize that right wing extremism is gaining in popularity thanks in part to peoples frustrations over COVID. The racist, extremist People’s Party of Canada has successfully grown its popular vote totals in consecutive elections and is now a federally funded party. In all likelihood, the next leader of the Conservative Party of Canada will be someone who pushes the party (and the country) even further to the far right. If the ascendency of right wing extremism continues, none of us will be able to escape the consequences.

I will leave you with a common phrase often attributed to Mahatma Ghandi, a phrase that is likely familiar to activists and those who work for social change:

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Ask yourself if this describes your own thinking about the convoy, because it certainly does for me. In just over ten days I went from ignoring them, to making fun of them, to understanding why we absolutely need to fight them.

We should all be concerned about what happens next.