The Outbreak Of Civil War Is Political Chess, Not Checkers...,

Societies are subject to revolution when an elite faction wants it, the enforcer class is unwilling to defend the status quo, and there is a significant popular faction who want change. All three are generally necessary.

The Ottawa incident is conspicuously overshadowed by the Ambassador Bridge blockade, because the latter has serious economic consequences. We will soon know exactly how serious the Canadian Conservative Party is if the Detroit-Windsor choke point isn’t rapidly cleared. (It began clearing up Saturday morning - following an enhanced show of force)

The bridge blockades to date haven’t been happening to provinces like B.C or Quebec, but provinces with Conservative Premiers like Doug Ford (brother of Rob Ford) and Jason Kenney. It’s almost as though the protestors know that the authorities in those provinces won’t take steps to rein them in.

If I were among Canada’s current rulers, I’d be worried, not by the left, but by the right. The left doesn’t have an elite faction supporting it or the complicity of at least some police.

The vast majority of Canadian covid restrictions are provincial, not federal. The federal ones (international travel and air transport) are high-profile.

This makes it easy to sort the partisans partisans by the nature of their complaints – if the Feds/Trudeau are at fault for everything, they’re either hard-core conservatives or outright sympathizers. If [insert conservative premier(s)] are at fault for everything, they’re hardcore Liberal (possibly NDP). [Does not apply to Quebec, one half-hour later in Newfoundland.]

Ontario’s premier, Doug Ford, is keeping his head down and wants this all to fall to Trudeau – it’s not like he’s out there actively helping Ottawa, mobilizing police, or clarifying which rules are provincial. He has an election coming up in June this year. This approach is mostly being repeated in other provinces, with some differences (Quebec very different) – blame the feds, duck and cover.

It’s also very clear that Ford and others would far, far prefer the Feds have to mobilize federal resources instead of them – i.e. the military (because RCMP is provincial police force in many provinces). Trudeau does not want to be the second Trudeau to deploy the military domestically (that would drive the right berserk in a bad way).

Provincial announcements lifting restrictions (or setting timelines) have made it pretty clear the convoy protestors/their leadership (widely referred to here as #FluTrucksKlan) really do not care about the policy specifics – the only core, unmutable thing they want is Trudeau’s resignation. Draw your own conclusions.

It has not helped that the conservative party is going through its own throes of deciding between the somewhat-moderate leadership of O’Toole or throwing him under the bus and doubling down on social conservatives and anti_Trudeau everything.

O’Toole’s gone and everyone angling to replace him has been flirting with the protests – swerving back to hrumph-hrumph when they sense it’s getting really unpopular. Not that anyone expected courage from the federal conservatives, but unified party leadership might have kept the twitter-happy from getting too far over their skis and outright associating with the very nasty parts of the protest. (We shall see but I think this will hurt them long-term)

There are lots of ‘normal Canadians’ who symphathize with parts of the ‘movement’ complaints about covid restrictions. Some of those non-awful people are out protesting. Some will come out and hold signs supporting. Some just say ‘I don’t like this convoy stuff, but I am pissed off about …[insert own thing].” No-one I know thinks schools have been handled well – not a single person – but they mostly disagree about what should have been done. (Schools of course entirely provincial responsibility, some delegation to municipalities – but that doesn’t stop about a quarter of the pop from blaming Trudeau anyway).

But the leadership of the convoys is a different matter – they’ve just found a social wave they can surf and grift. Most of these have just been throwing lines out hoping for a hit for ages.