The left should seek to employ the disruptive power on display in Canadian protests — but only on its own anti-racist, antifascist terms.
For over two weeks now, protests against Covid-19 public health mandates have occupied Ottawa, Canada’s capital, under the banner of the “Freedom Convoy.” Would that an anti-authoritarian liberation struggle worthy of the name could have such staying power; if only those in the fight against racial capitalism could take a city and hold it, putting state power on the back foot.
The right, of course, doesn’t have some of the baked-in obstacles that the left faces — above all, the police, whose light touch so far has been key to the right-wing-led protesters’ ability to set up camp in front of the Canadian Parliament. Videos even show some cops offering words of support to the protesters. On more than one occasion, cops have cleared counterprotesters out of the way of truck convoys joining the blockade.
In contrast, Indigenous land defenders of the Wet’suwet’en First Nation have been met in recent years with consistent police violence when they have attempted to use blockades to stop pipeline construction. Which is not to say that the left wants the police on their side: Left-wing, Black, and Indigenous-led liberation movements cannot, and would not, seek the understanding of the police forces that oppress them.
There are other lessons, however, for the left to take away from the occupations and blockades in Ottawa — lessons that in no way entail supporting state power or embracing the protesters as potential working-class, anti-authoritarian allies. Instead, the left should seek to employ the same disruptive power on display in these protests, but only on its own terms.
The relative leniency with which police have met the convoy protesters could be coming to an end. Ottawa’s police chief was ousted this week amid criticism of his inaction against the convoy. And on Monday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared a national public order emergency — the first time a Canadian government has taken such action in half a century — to clear the occupation and allied blockades along the Canadian border. The emergency order gives the federal government extraordinary powers, including overriding rights to public assembly and permits blocking anyone believed to be taking part in the protest from using financial institutions.
There is nothing for the left to support in the invocation of these repressive powers. Those same measures will be used to quash the movements we support. Poor, marginalized, and racialized communities are already summarily arrested, deported, surveilled, and excluded from the economy.
And the Canadian state is not showing a unique willingness to repress right-wing movements; rather, we are seeing Trudeau’s government forced into a corner, having ceded ground to these protesters that no left-wing, anti-racist protesters would be permitted.
We need not join liberal calls for police and state intervention in order to oppose the occupation and the copycat convoys it inspires. Instead, we can support the counterprotesters pushing back against the convoys as an antifascist response to the presence of far-right forces in their midst.
Likewise, we might find sympathy for the Ottawan locals who understandably want a return to peace in their normally quiet city, rattled nightly by the occupation’s honking trucks and late-night music. Yet the problem with the occupation is not that it is disruptive — blocking key points of capital’s circulation is a strategy to be embraced.
The same tactical logic informed the Arab Spring, the European Square movements in 2010, and the Occupy encampments the following year; taking over tracts of city space is hardly an invention of the trucker convoy. The truckers’ ability to hold a city center for weeks in a powerful nation like Canada is nonetheless worthy of note. These dynamics together sum up how the danger, as ever, lies not in drawing lessons from the right-wing protests but in drawing the wrong ones.
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