u Photo: Ana Krach / Pixabay
CRY FREEDOM: Trucker demonstrators play street hockey at the February protest in Ottawa.
tially adopted a laissez-faire attitude toward the protesters, issuing a few tickets and hoping that the movement would run out of fuel. When that didn’t happen, thanks to supporters on both sides of the border sending them money and diesel, the government of Justin Trudeau moved against the truck blockades. On February 13, police arrested several people and cleared away the rest of the protesters at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ontario, which is a key economic link to Detroit and the United States. Not long after this action, Trudeau declared a national emergency, the first such declaration in more than 50 years (Trudeau’s father Pierre
invoked an earlier version of the act in 1970 in response to the kidnapping of a government official and a British diplomat). Trudeau now has enhanced powers to end the blockades and the protests that are continuing throughout the country. The emergency declaration coincided with the police arresting 11 people associated with protests in Alberta who had a small arsenal of weapons that they apparently were willing to use to keep their blockade going.
T
he protests that began with a critique of government overreach have prompted the government to do just that to maintain public or-
der. The Trudeau government has already implemented new financial restrictions to reduce even further the money supply flowing to the protesters. Some civil libertarians have sided with the truckers. Legal pundit and perennial contrarian Jonathan Turley has championed their free speech and suggested that their acts, like those of the #BlackLivesMatter protests, fall into the same category of “good trouble” that lawmaker John Lewis famously advocated. Turley has it exactly wrong. Lewis was praising activists making personal sacrifices to improve the common good. He was not referring to people like the Canadian truckers, who are
ColdType | March 2022 | www.coldtype.net
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