Blame America?
How the transnational right paralyzed Canada’s capitol
Canadian political leaders are blaming America for the Freedom Convoy, a group of anti-government protestors using trucks to paralyze the nation’s capital and temporarily close down the crucial trucking lane in the Windsor/Detroit Border. On February 11, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau described his conversation with Joe Biden earlier that day. “We discussed the American, and indeed global influences on the protest,” Trudeau said. “We talked about the U.S.-based flooding of the 911 phone lines in Ottawa, the presence of U.S. citizens in the blockades, and the impact of foreign money to fund this illegal activity.”
Earlier that week Jagmeet Singh, leader of the left-leaning New Democratic Party which often supports Trudeau’s Liberal Party in parliamentary votes, said, “It is clear that this is not a protest; this is an act to try to overthrow the government, and it is getting funded by foreign interference and we need to investigate and stop that – stop the flow of that foreign interference, particularly coming from the [United] States.”
Politicians often blame protests on outside agitators, a tried and true scapegoating tactic used to deflect attention from internal problems. Yet these “Blame America” arguments have a smidgen of truth to them.
Americans have offered tremendous boosts to the Freedom Convoy in both media and money. At a rally in Texas in late January, former president Donald Trump hailed “those great Canadian truckers.” Fox News hosts have repeatedly cheered on the Freedom Convoy, with Tucker Carlson enthusing about it being copied in the United States. Just as Che Guevara hailed the prospect of “one, two, many Vietnams” so Carlson seems to dream of “one, two, many convoys.” Copycat protests are being discussed in the USA, Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. A hacked Facebook account in Missouri turned out to be one of the most vocal and far reaching advocates for the protest on social media.
Leaked donor data from the Christian crowd funding site GiveSendGo simultaneously substantiates and complicates the narrative of American intervention. In two separate campaigns, the Freedom Convoy raised a total of US$9.6 million from 104,180 donors. Fifty-nine percent of those donors (over 60,000) were from the United States, 39 percent from Canada and the remainder from elsewhere. The biggest donations, $90,000, is alleged to have come from the California billionaire Thomas Siebel. (All the identifying data points to Siebel although he hasn’t confirmed it.) More broadly, a Washington Post investigation of the ZIP codes of the donors makes clear that the financial support largely is from well-to-do right-leaning communities. As the paper reports, “the richer an American community was, the more likely residents there were to donate, and the biggest number of contributions often came from communities where registered Republicans made up solid majorities.”
So: Blame America? Is the USA exporting its loopy political disorder north? Not so fast. The data also shows that Canadians donated more per individual. A little over 50 percent of the total amount (to the tune of $4.8 million) came from Canadian supporters.
More to the point, the organizing of the Freedom Convoy makes clear this is for the most part a Made-in-Canada operation. Lead organizers are long standing members of the Canadian far right, involved in previous protests supporting white nationalism and opposing labor unions and climate change action.
As Emily Leedham noted in Jacobin:
Freedom Convoy organizer and Canada Unity founder James Bauder’s allegiances are to the far right…. Two years ago, Bauder participated in another convoy called United We Roll which had connections to far right elements in Canada’s Yellow Vests movement and other white nationalist hate groups.…In addition to Bauder, other Freedom Convoy organizers, such as Pat King, Tamara Lich, and BJ Lichter, have a history of associating with hate groups and expressing racist and anti-immigrant sentiments.
Instead of blaming America, it’s better to think in terms of transnational right-wing ideological networks. The Canadian/American border has largely always been porous for white people. Just Canadian actors, like Jim Carrey and William Shatner, or singers like Celine Dion and Joni Mitchell find fame south of the border, so prominent Canadian-born reactionaries ideologues like Father Charles Coughlin and Mark Steyn (a notorious Islamophobe) have often found America an ample market for their wares. Conversely, the ideas of the 1920s Klan caught on like fire in the cold of Canada, with northern franchises of hooded bigotry finding a ready audience.
But if Canadian migrants who seek riches by heading south are an old story, it’s become much more pervasive in the age of NAFTA, with the traffic now flowing in both directions. Under NAFTA, cars are transnational. Your car could have parts made in Ontario, Michigan, or Veracruz. Our ideologies are the same way. The anti-globalists are mixing and matching ideas from Paris, Budapest, Rio, Claremont, Calgary and many other spots. Canada, by virtue of being bilingual and multicultural, is an important node in this global network. The Freedom Convoy was a test case for the network, one that succeeded and will be widely copied.
Coupled with the advent of social media, globalism has produced a transnational right that loves to complain about “globalists” and the need for stronger borders while also happily circulating memes and money (usually in USD).
Two emblematic figures of this new era are erstwhile Trump consigliere Steve Bannon and Canadian Gavin McInnis, estranged father of the Proud Boys. Although the avatar of America First thinking, Bannon has been eager to knit together an international alliance that unites nationalists and populists across the globe, a ragtag entente that ranges from Donald Trump to Victor Orbán to Jair Bolsonaro to Marine Le Pen to Nigel Farage, among many others. The transnational right l might seem like a hodgepodge until one considers the common enemy of liberalism and cosmopolitanism that unifies xenophobes, homophobes and anti-feminists.
Websites like Breitbart or Canada’s Rebel News provide a clearing house for this movement, so that news of a migrant caravan, a new vaccine mandate, or a trans athlete joining a sporting campaign can easily spark global outrage without regard for where it takes place. The far right runs on anger and the global meme sharing network supplies steady fuel.
Gavin McInnes is a perfect example of the transnational right: born in England in 1970, raised in Ottawa, he first made his mark in 1996 in Montreal as a co-founder of Vice, which pioneered the kidding-not-kidding racist humor that became the hallmark of the alt-right. He moved to the United States in the late 1990s. In 2016 he founded the Proud Boys, a clubhouse for aggressive, aggrieved bigots. McInnes disavowed his connection with the Proud Boys in 2018, although it clearly bears the marks of his ideology. Proud Boys participated in the January 6 attack on the USA capitol. In 2021, The Proud Boys were named a “terrorist entity” by the government of Canada, and the Canadian chapter has supposedly dissolved. Proud Boy members are currently talking about organizing a People’s Convoy to travel to Washington, DC.
But if the far right is transnational, so is opposition to it. The seige of Ottawa is already offering lessons to U.S. Capitol police on how to prevent trucks being used a weapon bully a city. Counter-protesters in Ottawa were effective in blunting the siege when the police were still flummoxed or complicit. Anti-fascists around the world can draw both inspiration and instruction from the mobilization of the hostility large democratic majorities everywhere have towards the hard right.
(Edited by Emily M. Keeler)
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I don't like the term "far right." Depending on context, I would prefer either "fascists" or "masculinists." Fascism is a theory of the state; masculinism is a complementary theory of society.