Bill Berkowitz for BuzzFlash: The Conspiracy Theorists and Right-Wing Hucksters Behind the Canadian Trucker Convoy Now Revealed
April 24, 2020
By Bill Berkowitz
For four-plus winter weeks, we watched as the so-called Canadian “Freedom Convoy” took over the streets of Ottawa, Canada’s capital city. For a while, the movement, which claimed to be focused on opposing COVID mandates, became the most talked about story in right-wing media. It wasn’t until the Canadian government took a forceful stand against the convoy’s participants, that it dissipated.
An American look-alike movement, encouraged by the usual suspects, never developed legs. Now, thanks to reporting by the Toronto Star’s Justin Ling, we know some of the names of the most significant organizers. They are James Bauder, Tom Quiggin, Norman Traversy, Tamara Lich, Corey Hurren, Jason LaFace; basically people I had never heard of.
Long reported that, “The convoy protest was not about just the pandemic. But nor could it have happened without the pandemic. Organizers were able to leverage fatigue and frustration with government restrictions and social isolation to grow their movement, drawing on one particularly potent conspiracy theory in the process: the idea that an international cabal has taken control of Canada, and is weaponizing the pandemic to consolidate its dominance. This occupation was marketed as the last stand to stop tyranny — and has become a global rallying cry for a burgeoning anti-media, anti-science, anti-government political force” (https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/2022/03/19/was-it-really-about-vaccine-mandates-or-something-darker-the-inside-story-of-the-convoy-protests.html?rf).
I have a longtime friend who, if I were asked to describe his politics, I’d say that he is center-right. He is definitely not a Trumper. He is, however, a very angry and disillusioned former leftist. He writes about race and class issues for mostly conservative publications. When the “Freedom Convoy” began its blockade of bridges, and took over the streets of Ottawa, he was extremely supportive. In e-mail exchanges, he maintained that this was a legitimate worker’s movement. He, in a sometime mocking tone, wondered why the Left in the U.S. were so dismissive of these working class heroes.
The answer to that question became obvious as the days of occupation dragged on and reporters began digging into its origins. It became clear that the organizers were longtime right-wing ideologues and hucksters, not really interested in vaccine mandates or mask wearing. They were more interested in taking down the government of Justin Trudeau, and spreading their movement to the U.S.
Eventually, my friend came around … somewhat! He now recognizes that right-wing organizers were driving forces behind the action. Despite the evidence that an overwhelming majority of Canadian truckers were not supporting the caravan and that the most important trucker unions opposed the action, he still insists it was a working class rebellion. Ultimately, his fallback position has been that there were right-wing forces behind it, but Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergency Powers Act was a brazen anti-civil-liberties action.
Meanwhile, as expected, right-wing media began extolling the virtues of the Canadian truckers, with Fox News leading the drumbeat. Several Republican politicians issued statements encouraging a U.S. copycat movement. “I hope the truckers do come to America. I hope they clog up cities,” Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul told the Daily Signal, a publication of the conservative think tank, the Heritage Foundation.
As we know now, the U.S. trucker convoy was a dismal failure.
Ling’s reporting took the convoy origin story back more than a year, when James Bauder posted a video on his Facebook page from “a snow-covered parking lot in Thunder Bay.” Using his phone camera and focused on “a pickup truck with its bed full of red jerry cans. A small group of people mill about in reflective yellow vests, brandishing a Canadian flag. Cars and semi trucks are covered in homemade signs. ‘Everybody in Canada is involved in this,’ Bauder told his Facebook friends. ‘We got people across our great nation travelling to go to Ottawa to stand up for Canada unity.’”
Ling reported:
The convergence on Ottawa for two days in January 2019, dubbed “United We Roll,” was moderately successful, attracting the support of Conservative party leader Andrew Scheer and collecting more than $140,000 through an online fundraising campaign.
A few months later in Medicine Hat, Alta., Benjamin Dichter stood at an event to introduce a man who bills himself as a top intelligence analyst and whom Dichter, in a comparison to novelist Tom Clancy’s fictional CIA agent, called “Canada’s Jack Ryan.”
When he took the stage, Tom Quiggin described a plot between Islamists and socialists to control Western governments. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, he warned, was the apex of that “entryism.”
“If he is re-elected this fall, and he does not immediately disavow his previous commitments to globalism and Islamism, he will then be pouring gasoline on the already burning embers of discontent,” Quiggin warned audience members including Tamara Lich, who had helped organize the event.
Soon after, more conspiracy theories began rolling out of the minds of these so-called convoy influencers. Norman Traversy “invoked the rallying cry of QAnon, the American conspiracy theory movement that claims Satanic pedophiles have infiltrated the U.S. government. ‘Where we go one …’ he shouted [at another gathering]. ‘We go all!’ the crowd shouted back.”
Corey Hurren got involved, posting “a meme to his Instagram account falsely alleging that Microsoft founder Bill Gates and the Switzerland-based World Economic Forum were complicit in creating COVID-19.”
Using the World Economic Forum as it foil, Ling reported that “Bauder wrote on Facebook that Trudeau ‘needs too (sic) be arrested and charged for treason, and for participating in committing crimes against humanity’ and warned that it was nearly too late to stop the World Economic Forum’s devious plan: ‘WE HAVE BEEN LEAD (sic) RIGHT INTO A TRAP. A few more moves and it’s checkmate, Game Over.’”
According to Ling, “Bauder created a ‘memorandum of understanding’ that detailed the protest’s objectives. ‘By having the Senate of Canada and the Governor General of Canada sign this MOU into action, they agree to immediately cease and desist all unconstitutional, discriminatory and segregating actions and human rights violations,’ it read. Failing action from the Governor General and the Senate, Bauder said, signatures would be collected to trigger a national vote to remove the government. ‘So this is just step one of calling for a referendum through Elections Canada,’ he said in a livestream.”
COVID didn’t stop the organizing, and if anything it increased to a fever pitch. Thus the so-called Freedom Convoy” materialized. Ling noted “The protest teemed with outstretched arms wielding cellphones, broadcasting live — to Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, but also to alternative social media sites Bitchute and Rumble. Occupiers, and their supporters back home, essentially had a 24-hour news network — by occupiers, for occupiers.”
Although it wasn’t easy to disassemble the convoy, it happened rather quickly once the decision was made. Some of the organizers have been arrested. Some, like Quiggin, are still banging away on podcasts and social media.
In assessing the movement, Ling writes that it “has now outgrown the former organizers. Sympathetic social media channels continue to expand. Groups like Diagolon are recruiting new members. The conspiracy theorists that propelled this movement proliferate online. Some demonstrators no doubt returned from Ottawa satisfied, believing that they had made their point. But others came back armed with dangerous lessons. As one put it on a recent livestream: ‘Violence in some way, shape, or form is the only way these people are going to respond.’”
Convoys as right-wing protest totems are not over. A week ago, protesters showed up in Vancouver. Interestingly enough, in a Press Release dated April 11, was headlined “THE CANADIAN FREEDOM 22 TRUCKER'S CONVOY AND THE PEOPLE'S CONVOY IN THE USA STAND IN SOLIDARITY AS BOTH RESIST TYRANNICAL GOVERNMENT OVERREACH IN FREE NATIONS” (https://finance.yahoo.com/news/canadian-freedom-22-truckers-convoy-004700428.html).