Lead Up
FOX News, Tea Party & Trumpism
A dozen years ago, I went to Washington, D.C. for a Tea Party mass event with my friend Jon and partner Jay. The movement at the centre of this this “Restoring Honor Rally” arose in the wake of Obama’s election; its makeup almost exclusively white people, aggrieved at the social and economic shifts that took place over their lifetime and culminating with the election of this first Black President. They wanted their America back; or at least a pseudo-1950’s straight white protestant vision of it.
The rally was the brain-child of then-FOX News personality Glenn Beck. Christian persecution myths shared space with military worship and conspiracy theories. At the time that I figured that this movement was going to fizzle out and I wanted to witness this historical curiosity. I was wrong; the Tea Party would metamorphose into Trumpism and its “Make America Great Again” slogan, and lead a dark chapter in American history.
Despite the dark perceptions the people in attendance at the rally held, as individuals they were pleasant and the vibe festive. That’s been common to the right-wing fringe events I’ve observed over the years: people in isolation are almost always nice to strangers. Even to strangers like me stroking my boyfriend’s leg at a time where homophobia was rampant. It’s what they do when humanity is lost; though communal action or when you’re seen as part of an out group, that things take a dangerous turn.
American Backing for the Canadian Fringe
Six years after “Restoring Honor”, I witnessed the inception of Jordan Peterson as the unicorn of the right: a university professor who was able to synthesize arguments to justify the transphobic, sexist, Islamaphobic impulses of social conservatives. His rise began with his three incoherent lectures on YouTube arguing against the acceptance of trans people, which students at his University of Toronto then protested. Right-wing media in the United-States and Canada covered the little student protest and portrayed Peterson as a martyr. The disproportionate international attention elevated Peterson into a household name and he was able to crowdfund over a million dollars. It was Canadian right-wing media that made him a minor celebrity, but being a minor celebrity in Canada doesn’t make anyone a millionaire; it was American right-wing media that made him that.
I bumped into Peterson in Parliament while he was advocating that trans people’s pronouns posed a grave threat. The Conservatives had invited him to speak against Bill C-16, the legislation that added gender identity and gender expression to the Canadian Human Rights Act. He was surrounded by a cadre of men in their early twenties. I couldn’t tell if they were trying to act as security for Peterson, or what was going on, but it was clear they didn’t have any interest in the proceedings beyond their adulation for their perceived thought leader. When he left after appearing as a witness partway through, so did they. The cult of personality was apparent.
Transphobic Mobilization in Canada
Peterson gave the newest dog whistle around how non-binary people’s pronouns threatened free speech, but these absurd excuses to deny legal protections to trans people were nothing new. Similar exchanges had gone on in Parliament for decades. However, starting in 2019, a series of anti-trans organizations were set-up across Canada, mirroring the same organizations that had been developing in the UK.
Organized transphobia leaped from legislatures onto the streets, at a time where ad-hoc incidents of transphobia had otherwise been declining. This street action was new:
American Conspiracy Theories Camp in Ottawa
Over much of the same period, during the pandemic, a small but consistently active contingent of anti-vaccine conspiracy theorists regularly protested in Ottawa. QAnon references joined conspiracy theories such as that the vaccine against Covid-19 contains 5G-enabled microchips. As the QAnon slogans made clear, these were directly related to disinformation emanating out of the United-States.
Initially the anti-vaccination protests set up residence on the grounds of the Cenotaph, and camped there in tents for months. In conversing with the self-styled security guard for one, he was going off about this conspiracy theory that the Queen had been replaced in the 1960s by a clone or some such, and therefore the government was illegitimate.
Another QAnon conspiracy theorist who believed Covid was planned crashed his truck into the grounds of the Prime Minister’s residence in Ottawa and tried to locate him while armed with three guns. He was apprehended and later sentenced to six years.
Covid Party of Centretown
All of these seemingly disparate forces would converge in Ottawa this past month as the “Freedom Convoy” descended on my neighbourhood.
There was two very different ways of experiencing these events. For the participants, it was a party that spanned the entirety of the 25,000 strong communities of Centretown and downtown Ottawa. There were like-minded folk, communal meals, multiple dance parties, and stuff for the kids. For the residents of this community, it was a miserable and at times terrifying three weeks as out-of-towners harassed locals, assaulted employees at businesses, blasted horns at all hours, and blocked off access streets major and minor; cutting off all public transit and denying residents access to their own driveways.
The honking exemplified this dichotomy: great fun for the party-goers, but tortuous for locals that that endured it twenty hours a day, seven days a week, from which being inside their home offered no respite. Police leadership and bylaw had decided on a policy of non-enforcement for convoy members, so it was like this day and night for weeks:
The lack of enforcement for the mob overrunning the local community gave people an opportunity to show their true colours. In my immediate vicinity:
- I was yelled at in front of my apartment building for wearing a mask by a convoy supporter. I would be harassed multiple times for wearing a mask while running errands and told “I hope you die from the vaccine” by one supporter.
- Suspected convoy supporters put handcuffs on my building’s lobby doors a week after another residential building down the road was set on fire and the doors taped shut to prevent the occupants from escaping.
- The liquor store on the first floor of my building was overrun by out-of-control convoy supporters and forced to close.
- The ice cream shop a few doors down had to close when a staff member was assaulted, the victim adding “They were yelling racially charged slurs at me and asking me if the reason that I had my mask on was because I was an anti-Asian slur.”
- The coffee shop near me, where a friend saw staff being abused by convoy supporters, had its window smashed.
- When I counter-protested with a sign poking fun at the honking, one truck driver drove at me with his truck towards the sidewalk veering within a few feet and a group men yelled that I was “antifa” and a “communist” trying to incite others.
Entitlement paired with a disregard for its impacts on local residents:
- Convoy supporters flooded the Ottawa 911 system with fake calls, resulting in a plea from police for them to stop.
- They harassed staff and volunteers at one of the crisis shelters and demanded free food, while also blocking the shelter’s drop-off with their vehicles.
- They targeted elementary schools. I witnessed convoy members honking non-stop outside one, while a convoy supporter gave the middle finger to and shouted at children and teachers outside another.
- They parked trucks on all the main downtown bus routes and viable alternatives, denying public transit to the 25,000 residents. They also cut off downtown residents who don’t have access to a car from getting groceries and medications delivered.
- They were threatening patrons and staff at restaurants, grocery stores, and the mall. The grocery stores had to close on multiple occasions because of this. The mall was closed for nearly a month due to the same. So too with adjacent shops and restaurants, which was particularly brutal for them as this followed a period of pandemic restrictions that had just lifted.
- They were repeatedly jetting down the wrong way of one-way streets, camping their vehicles in the middle of intersections, honking 120dB train horns at all hours, and erecting hot tubs and structures in the middle of the road, preventing residents from accessing workplaces or even their driveways.
- Hooligans were roving town constantly shouting “Freedom!” and “Fuck Trudeau!”
They refused to stop the worst of these behaviours despite endless pleas from everyone affected, and even after the city, the province, and the country had all declared states of emergency. The issue had never been the subject matter of the protest; it was this abusive treatment of the local community.
Meanwhile, key elected officials were pretending like this was a protest like any other. The interim leader of the federal Conservative Party, Candace Bergen, stated “I don’t think we should be asking them to go home” even when it was already known that one of the organizers of the occupation, Pat King, was a white supremacist who talked about the “depopulation of the Caucasian race” blaming gay & trans people, Muslims and refugees, as part of a “UN agenda”.
On the provincial level, Randy Hillier, MPP for nearby Lanark-Frontenac-Kingston was encouraging the flooding Ottawa’s 911 system in direct response to the Ottawa Police’s plea not to do that. His behaviour encapsulated so much of what was wrong with all of this:
An Additional Level of Uneasiness
As a trans person, there was an additional level of uneasiness for me as my neighbourhood was overrun by “Freedom Convoy” supporters, because I was well aware that their beliefs overlapped with transphobic ones. There’s hints of that in what I shared already above with Randy Hillier’s Twitter bio or that Pat King’s statements, but I ran into transphobic signage like this as well:
Another source of the unease was from the constant presence of Trump supporters and the People’s Party of Canada (PPC). Both of these made scapegoating trans people for societal ills central to their respective platforms, with the PPC pledging to roll back human rights protections for trans people and the Trump administration having enacted a series of measures to purge trans people from society. With these individuals overrunning the area, and given my own history around transphobic incidents, I no longer felt safe using public washrooms in my neighbourhood.
Convoy Demands
I made an effort to speak to many of the people connected to the convoy who had set up camp in my neighbourhood.
Some had legitimate grievances. I talked to a train engineer, who, as a government contractor was required to be vaccinated in order to keep his job, even though he wasn’t public facing. I talked to a mama bear whose son had just recovered from cancer treatments, and didn’t want to get vaccinated out of fear that it might worsen his heart. I talked to an elderly couple who were tired of the lockdowns in a province that had at one point earned the reputation of having the longest in the world.
But the demands emphasized by the protesters as a whole didn’t leave room for nuance. As made clear throughout the occupation, only the following two would end the lawlessness in Ottawa:
- For the Prime Minister to resign.
- For the federal government to remove all temporary measures designed to protect the public against Covid across Canada; including prohibiting provinces and municipalities from enacting their own measures.
There was much wrong with this; the federal government had no authority over the lockdowns – that was a provincial matter. It was the conservative government in Ontario that had instituted the ones in Ottawa, for example. The vaccination requirements for working with at-risk populations was municipal (eg. policing) and provincial (eg. health care workers) as much as federal. The event that served as the purported cause of all of this – the federal government requiring truckers entering Canada to be vaccinated – was a non-issue given that the United-States already had the same requirement. For the people I spoke to, and for the messaging I saw, none of those other actors mattered: they were laser-focused on Trudeau specifically. It defied logic.
With “Fuck Trudeau!” being one of the two main slogans of the convoy, and an opposition to any public measures to mitigate the spread of the pandemic in the face of a then out-of-control Omicron wave, there was no room for dialog. This was an ultimatum with a city held hostage, not a call for reason.
Conspiracy Theories Everywhere
Despite it all, “Freedom Convoy” supporters didn’t appear to appreciate the gravity of their actions.
During my conversations with them, it was clear that they were being fed information from social media and fringe news sources to discount the displeasure of the local residents. I also watched convoy live streamers concoct conspiracy theories on-air to free themselves of accountability. Among the allegations that I heard:
- Claim: Crime was down in the occupied areas.
- Claim: The only people who lived downtown were government workers.
- Fact check: This is where the poorest in Ottawa live.
- Claim: Locals support them.
- Fact check: 87% of Ottawa residents wanted them gone.
- Claim: The media planted confederate and nazi flags for a photo op.
- Fact check: Multiple residents saw the flags.
Conspiracy theories had enormous clout here; their primacy was a defining trait of this entire event. For example, this was on a truck parked a few doors away from me:
Meanwhile, Romana Didulo, QAnon conspiracy adherent who heads a cult of over 70,000 and believes she is the true Queen of Canada showed up with up to a hundred supporters at the convoy. She had been previously arrested for calling on her followers to “shoot to kill” health care workers administering the Covid vaccine. I listened to her speech on some live feed; it was sentence fragments incoherently put together but her crowd was lapping it up.
On another occasion while walking with my best friend, we ran into a group of fifty or so convoy supporters. They cheered as a speaker equated the vaccine with Satanism, invoked Bill Gates (conspiracy theory: he put microchips in vaccines), Jeffrey Epstein, pedophiles, George Soros and the World Economic Forum, and claimed that the media had planted the confederate and nazi flags. It was an incoherent QAnon-fuelled anti-Semitic rant, but the entire crowd was into it.
I repeatedly saw signs and stickers for Infowars, the website and show of American conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who asserts among many crockpot beliefs that the victims of school shootings were paid crisis actors, resulting in the harassment and death threats to the families.
Conspiracy theories, particularly American ones, and demands that were untethered from reality were core to this. American news media usually ignores what happens in Canada, to the point where less than half of Americans even know Ottawa is the capital, but they were covering this. However, as with the federal Conservative Party, Fox News in the United-States and right-wing media were intentionally misrepresenting the events on the ground in Ottawa for partisanship ends. This led to millions being funnelled to continue the circus in Ottawa where more than half of those donations came from the US. Even Trump was endorsing the convoy while calling Trudeau a “far-left lunatic”. This exacerbated matters for the local community.
It got to a breaking point. Faced with weeks of enforcement inaction, residents started to take matters into their own hands such as with “The Battle of Billings Bridge”, the three grannies, balcony guy, pot and ladle man, and Zexi Li’s injunction. As I was walking to grab a furnace filter, I saw a man step in front of a lone van draped in four Canadian flags – the tell of a convoy vehicle – and block its passage.
Horrifyingly Ignorant
Finally, on the fourth weekend of the siege, after weeks of pleading to end the barrages, after days of warnings of imminent action, the police moved in and started to tow vehicles and arrest individuals that refused to stop blocking the city’s main roads. 191 people were arrested and 76 vehicles were towed.
The mixture of disinformation, entitled behaviour, and lack of personal accountability would lead to catastrophically poor judgement. Police were restrained relative to past actions and gave protesters every opportunity to stop obstructing roads, but nonetheless those who tried to physically impede their advancement were met with violence. As this was all unfurling, I was watching families bring their young children to the front of the stand-off with police. It was horrifying. I later saw on livestreams children being shoved around as protesters tried to counter the police; I saw kids crying unconsolably as their dad was taken away by law enforcement; I saw new families come in.
As I walked by Kent street on the final day, protesters rapidly tried to erect barriers of snow to block their vehicles from being towed. A three foot pile of fresh snow wasn’t going to do anything. “We’re doing this for you”, a woman carrying a shovel shouted at me after noticing my mask.
I kept walking.
The city manager would later declare that this Covid Party had cost residents at least $30 million dollars.