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As you, my offshore readers, know, the Canadian flag is flying worldwide these days, as anarchists are attempting road blocks using “mobile barricades,” better known as trucks. You might ask me: Is Canada a democracy?
Well, we try, albeit certain folks, who read social media while refusing to take a grown up interest in the news, might disagree. Exposing any person of the “conspiracy persuasion” to social media is like giving crack cocaine to an addict. Not pretty, not to those of us watching from the sidelines. The rest of us balance our social media with the traditional (no longer majority) media.
My best friends enjoy pounding the table to expound some theories, AND they are humble enough to listen to ideas from me and each other. In contrast, the conspiracy types are without such humility, full of certainty, and just don’t listen. I’m sure you have met such people in your own country.
In Canada, where election dates are not fixed, our prime minister called a federal election in the middle of covid. Which sounds mad, but he had a reason, he said: To give the people a say in how the pandemic was fought, a say in the various mandates such as vaccinations… for cross border trucking.
I assume the average trucker voted as readily as the next man. The current protest by a few is not to make a point, not to get their fellow Canadians and politicians to listen—not when their point was blared on the first day—but rather, by their own report, not merely to protest but to keep their blockade going until our elected government dissolves the various covid mandates. I say “their” because Canadians, according to polls, don’t feel a “we” for what those few are doing. Back on the playground we scorned having a tantrum to get your own way. When we had aged and had a bigger vocabulary we scorned “emotional blackmail.” It requires a strange sense of entitlement to think you somehow know better than the crowd standing around watching as you flail and outburst and block traffic.
My local newspaper loves to put a snarky comment after each letter to the editor. On Valentines Day, we have five letters. The five snarks:
(As truckers reveal a new agenda) Is that what it’s really about?
(Regarding our prime minister) We were just there with a vote last fall and blew it.
(Again, the prime minister) Is this anything we didn’t know before this guy was re-elected? Epic fail by voters.
(Regarding local city hall) Anecdotally, the misery meter is running high.
(Regarding our flag suddenly being flown worldwide) So much for the polite Canadian.
Being middle aged, I can remember when we said not trucker but “teamster.” As a trucker wrote years ago in an essay, people don’t know that the drivers they see today are not the drivers of before. In my day, the teamsters—which included nearly every driver—all had their local union buttons with a picture of two horse heads; they had their international magazine that might have a U.S. president on the cover (I remember seeing Nixon) and never have any Canadian prime minister. For a time the teamsters union was led by the infamous Jimmy Hoffa. He is widely seen as being mixed up with organized crime, and, in the end, being “disappeared” by his associates. I recall a T-shirt featuring cement overshoes and the slogan “Jimmy Hoffa swim team.”
I was a co-driver, or “swamper,” back in the early seventies, driving with my brother, who was an “owner-operator” for a local cartage company. By the late seventies, US congress had acted to “de-regulate.” This greatly reduced teamster membership, leading to mostly nonunion “truckers,” and degraded working conditions: No longer does a transport driver feel like a king of the road. (See wikipedia) But here’s what I think: If drivers were still part of the teamsters union, having union brotherhood with fellow drivers, and with union men in factories too, then I don’t think that today a few drivers at border crossings would be depriving other teamsters of business, other workers of spare parts and inventory: As you know, some Canadian auto factories have had to temporarily close their doors.
As I write this, polls have shown that most Canadians are in favour of removing the protestors, and, at certain borders, Canada’s “prime idiot” is fin-n-n-ally taking action. Ain’t that nice? As a middle aged man, I am confident that people’s memories are short, and a few years from now the public will be forgetting the costly delay, and saying that Trudeau acted “wisely” and faster than he in fact actually did. Oh well, human nature is very prevalent.
Actually, I hope my offshore readers have short memories too, because persons in non-democracies who believe in holding old grudges, (Your grandfather stole my grandfather’s goat!) are just too sadly divisive for me to contemplate… Next to my T-shirt “Social Media Kills” I could have one saying “Union workers of the world unite!”
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Just in: (February 19) Here is a long video by two of the smartest folks in Canada, neither of whom is a politician, Professor Jordan Peterson and national writer Rex Murphy. Old enough to know the word teamster, they “Question government Authority” and stick up for the protest truckers and the common people.
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As a Robert Crumb cartoon of my boyhood was captioned,
“Keep on making trucking” comments,
Sean Crawford
North of Coutts border crossing,
February
2022
Blog call back: Two posts back I referenced Canadian Gwynne (link) Dyer’s belief that there will not be a Russian invasion. Today I still agree with him, despite what mighty intelligence agencies believe…. Partly because, after every journalist in North American had been hoaxed into believing in Saddam’s Weapons of Mass Destruction, (WMDs) Dyer was the only journalist humble enough to look back to see exactly how they had all been hoodwinked.
