Throughout the last two years is has been both fascinating and horrifying to see how quickly supposedly free people have been stripped of their rights in the name of a public health “emergency.” Virtually no country has been spared draconian lockdowns, mask mandates, and travel restrictions. Some governments have been more hard-line than others: Australia and New Zealand’s imbecile zero-Covid strategy shame the Antipodean countries, some American states, like California and New York, have targeted children with inhumane mask mandates and strict rules on interaction, and many countries have introduced vaccine passport to prevent the unvaccinated from participating in society. Austria went even further, to impose fines on those who refuse the vaccine. In Canada, the progressive poster-boy PM, Justin Trudeau, has been a uncompromising lockdown-enthusiast and a keen proponent of vaccine passports. And it was his insistence that truckers who cross Canadian state lines be vaccinated that instigated the biggest public uprising against the medical authoritarianism the world has seen to date. Ostensibly, Trudeau’s policies and handling of the affair are the sort of politics the left vigorously opposes: a crack-down on working people standing up for their right to work. But the only thing to come from the left has been deafening silence.
It is fairly obvious that Trudeau has been hoping for the Ottawa protests to descend into a level of chaos that would allow him to frame it as a Canadian “January 6,” the unruly protest at the Washington Capitol which the American left has preposterously hyped up as a dangerous insurrection. But the truckers and their supporters have been peaceful and jovial towards anyone who interacted with them in a respectful and openminded fashion. Not so Mr Trudeau and his allies. He accused a Jewish Conservative MP of supporting “people who wave swastikas” and a fellow Liberal MP said truckers honking their horns were code for “Heil Hitler.” The left was silent.
In the face of determined adversaries, the Trudeau government then upped the ante and invoked the Emergency Act, to enable banks to freeze protestors’ accounts and order private towing companies, so far reluctant to help police clear Ottawa’s streets, to work for the state. The mere invocation of the Emergency Act, designed for times of civil unrest or major natural disasters, was a wildly authoritarian overreaction, but with the protest now disbanded, Trudeau has refused to revoke his emergency powers or to even set a timeframe for doing so, effectively ushering in martial law by the back door. The left is silent.
It’s not just political figures who get an easy ride from the left. When the fundraising site GoFundMe decided that the Freedom Convoy was too extreme for their platform, they tried to hijack the $10 million that had been raised and distribute it to other causes. Another site, GiveSendGo, was hacked and the names of 92,000 donors made public. The left was silent.
In fact, the left has broadly saved their criticisms for the truckers, who protest mandates but are framed as conspiratorial anti-vaxxers and accused of destructive behaviour, despite the general peaceful nature of the protests. The contrast to 2020s Black Lives Matter protests, violent and destructive but lauded as a vital civil rights struggle, couldn’t be starker. BLM was rooted in protest against police brutality, but when Trudeau gave emergency powers to Ottawa’s police force and they cracked down heavy-handedly on the truckers, the left was silent.
It isn’t just the traditional left that has been silent. Virtually the entire political class has kept any reservations they may harbour over Trudeau’s handling of the protests to themselves. One suspects that most of them tacitly supports a government’s right to take whatever measures it deems necessary to deal with protests from people with undesirable opinions. There is a very clear divide emerging in politics across the globe – but it is not strictly the traditional left vs right dichotomy, rather, it is between those who believe the elites should be allowed to dictate how we live under the pretext of being the “experts,” vs those who believe in fundamental individual freedoms. And between the political class with their woke allies in academia, the arts, and big business, vs those with the “wrong” opinions on everything from vaccines to gender neutral bathrooms. What is increasingly clear is that the progressive left is very firmly on the side of the elites.