With the illegal insurrection in Canada’s capital now entering its third week, close observers are linking the occupation to past protests supporting pipelines and fossil fuels, digging into the white supremacist funding and logistics behind the convoy, and spotlighting the increasingly serious health impacts for downtown Ottawa residents exposed to round-the-clock noxious diesel fumes, deafening truck horns, and random harassment and intimidation in their neighbourhoods.
The wall-to-wall news coverage is picking up the complexity of an urban invasion that produced three starkly different storylines:
• The Nazi, Confederate, and Three Percenter flags paraded through downtown Ottawa in the early days of the occupation, combined with the paramilitary tone and efficiency of the occupiers’ supply and logistics camp, set up in a baseball stadium parking lot six kilometres from Parliament Hill;
• The continuing siege that has driven many downtowners out of their homes, with protesters taking shifts to blare air horns around the clock until an interim court injunction shut them down for 10 days;
• The feeling of giddy celebration surrounding the more than 400 trucks still gathered in the immediate vicinity of Parliament Hill earlier in the week—about one-quarter of them occupied by families that had brought their children along.
Within a week of the convoy’s arrival, Ottawa’s EnviroCentre had begun adding up the carbon dioxide and particulate emissions assaulting residents of the city’s Centretown, Lowertown, and ByWard Market neighbourhoods, with irate truckers idling their vehicles for 16 or more hours per day. Health professionals pointed out that the price of convoy participants’ “freedom” would soon be measured in respiratory and heart disease, hearing loss, and potentially long-lasting emotional trauma for the citizens in their path, not to mention the children in their midst.
Some of the participants digging in for a long-term occupation, fed up with two years of pandemic restrictions, are describing this event as the most important moment they’ve ever been a part of. Equally fed-up local residents say the estimated 100 children in the crowd amount to a human shield, impeding efforts to shut down a radical right leadership pursuing a delusional bid to get Governor General Mary May Simon to dissolve a duly-elected government. (Children were being deployed more obviously at the heavily-travelled Ambassador Bridge between Ontario and Michigan—video image at 39:36.)
Ottawa resident Mark Carney, the former Bank of Canada and Bank of England governor now serving as UN special envoy for climate finance, was uncompromising in his assessment of the occupation.
“No one should have any doubt,” he wrote in the Globe and Mail earlier this week. “This is sedition. That’s a word I never thought I’d use in Canada. It means ‘incitement of resistance to or insurrection against lawful authority.’”
On the first weekend after the convoy arrived, it was “understandable that many would want to come to Ottawa to protest” after two years of pandemic restrictions, and “many Canadians who joined the demonstrations undoubtedly had peaceful objectives,” Carney said. But that was before two weeks of blocked streets, harassment, intimidation, alleged assaults on downtown residents wearing masks, and one group of protesters allegedly trying to set fire to a 100-unit apartment building with barbecue briquettes at around 4:00 AM and nearly succeeding. At last report, the local arson squad was investigating.
“From now on, those who are occupying the downtown of our country’s capital should be in no doubt,” Carney wrote. “They are no longer simply advocating a different strategy to end COVID-19. They are not patriots. This is not about ‘restoring freedom’ but beginning anarchy. This isn’t getting carried away at a rally. It’s not a rush of blood to the head. It’s deliberate and calculated, and because of that, they must know that from now on, there will be consequences for their actions.”
Looking back, “the goals of the leadership of the so-called freedom convoy were clear from the start: to remove from power the government that Canadians elected less than six months ago,” Carney added.
“Their blatant treachery was dismissed as comic, which meant many didn’t take them as seriously as they should have,” he added. “Certainly not our public safety authorities, whose negotiations facilitated the convoy’s entry into the heart of our capital and have watched as its dangerous infrastructure has been steadily reinforced—a policy of engagement that has amounted to a reality of appeasement.”
Occupation leaders withdrew their 15-page “memorandum of understanding” February 8, claiming that it “does not reflect the spirit and intent” of the occupation and “we do not want any unintended interpretations to continue”. But the document, still available online, clearly lays out its authors’ intention to replace the Canada’s national government with a “Citizens of Canada Committee” with representation from Simon, the Senate, and Canada Unity, the main organizing group behind the convoy.
Just days before Canada Unity took down the document, a news site from Thunder Bay, Ontario reported that the group was “advocating a peaceful overthrow of the Trudeau government” and “actually looking for help from the Senate and Governor General in order to achieve that goal.”
That cause “has attracted the company of far right, anti-government, and other fringe groups in Canada,” the New York Times writes. “In the first days, in Ottawa, at least two flags with Nazi swastikas fluttered in the crowd. Many demonstrators were draped in flags that told Prime Minister Justin Trudeau where to go, rudely. They demanded Parliament be dissolved, and Mr. Trudeau be removed from office.”
As the second week of the insurrection dragged on, occupiers shifted their demands, with spokesperson Tom Marazzo proposing that the Opposition Conservatives, New Democrats, and Bloc Québécois form a coalition to negotiate with a core group of convoy organizers. Michael Kempa, associate professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa, declared that plan a “non-starter”, since “no other external party can become part of a coalition government. That’s just not how a constitutional democracy works.”
Marazzo’s spectacle had Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson saying the protesters were embarrassing themselves with scenes out of a Monty Python sketch, and urged them to just go home.
By the time the convoy rolled into town January 28, The Canadian Press had already connected some of its main organizers to a fossil-funded white supremacist event three years ago, where hundreds of trucks mobilized by the Yellow Vest movement came to town for a much shorter, more temporary Parliament Hill protest that drew then-Conservative leader Andrew Scheer as a speaker. “The convoy is mainly organized by a movement known as Canada Unity, which launched on Facebook in February 2019, when the United We Roll convoy protested on Parliament Hill , demanding more oil pipelines and an end to the carbon price,” CP wrote.
Signage at the time also opposed legislation that was then pending to ban oil tanker traffic along the ecologically sensitive north coast of British Columbia and enact the new federal Impact Assessment Act.
“While the grievances fuelling drivers vary, virtually all are united in opposition to an energy policy they believe will dampen the oil and gas sector,” the Star Edmonton wrote. “In addition to gripes with federal carbon pricing, which took effect this year, the convoy riders are opposed to Bill C-69 and Bill C-48, which would revamp the National Energy Board and the approval process for energy projects, and ban oil tanker traffic on British Columbia’s northern coast, respectively.”
Fast forward three years, and the capital city of a G-7 country has been brought to its knees by a group of far right insurgents masquerading as truckers, even though almost 90% of the country’s big rig drivers are vaccinated and their biggest union has disavowed the convoy.
Press Progress, a news site maintained by the Broadbent Institute, has compiled a comprehensive list of the “extremists and social media influencers” behind the occupation. The list includes:
• Canada Unity founder and “memorandum of understanding” co-author James Bauder, a Yellow Vest supporter and apparent adherent to the massive QAnon conspiracy theory, last seen targeting workers on a picket line outside an oil refinery in Alberta;
• Benjamin Dichter, a failed Conservative and People’s Party of Canada candidate who Press Progress says welcomed the Confederate flag to Ottawa, and is said to believe the federal Liberal party is “infested with Islamists”;
• Far right broadcaster Pat King, who frets about “depopulation of the Caucasian race” and joined the convoy with the prediction that “the only way that this is going to be solved is with bullets”;
• Renegade Independent Ontario MPP Randy Hillier, who told convoy supporters on Parliament Hill that “this is the hill we die on”;
• Tamara Lich, a member of Wexit, “a far-right secessionist movement that seeks to break away Alberta, Saskatchewan, and other western provinces from the rest of Canada”.
A CBC profile Thursday morning dug into the military, military intelligence, and RCMP background of some of the other principal organizers. Freelancer Justin Ling, who was a constant presence on Twitter in the early days of the occupation, broke down the “unrivaled coordination between anti-vax and anti-government organizations “ for The Guardian. Blogger Brittany Bested has assembled a profile of the convoy leadership, along with a timeline behind the event.
A question emerging in the last couple of days is whether some of the leading lights behind the Yellow Vest protests just happened to shift their focus from carbon pricing and pipelines to COVID-19 restrictions and vaccine mandates—or whether they saw both as fertile ground for insurrection.
“Canada’s next leader will have to deal with a mobilized, motivated minority of the population that views government and science as threats to be eliminated,” behavioural psychologist Caroline Orr Bueno tweeted ahead of last September’s federal election. “Like the Yellow Vest movement—which saw oil and gas pipeline protest being used as a cover for right-wing extremist activity—the anti-vaccine movement has become entangled with far-right extremism as white nationalists and other extremists use the guise of vaccine skepticism to push increasingly extreme conspiracy theories targeting Jews, immigrants, health care workers, and others.”
News reports are just beginning to follow the money trail behind the occupation, with funding through crowdfunding sites GoFundMe and GiveFundGo shut down, hundreds of donations streaming in from outside Canada, some of the money apparently routed through a hacked Facebook account, five major Bitcoin investors raising about $500,000 for the convoy, and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendocino vowing to investigate the organizers’ funding.
For all that the occupation is supposed to be about a global health crisis, there’s little indication that participants are terribly concerned about the health impacts they’re bringing to the downtown neighbourhoods immediately south, east, and west of Parliament Hill. Air pollution readings in the area were up to 14 times above normal, and experts were warning that even short-term exposures at that level could trigger life-threatening conditions like asthma, CBC reports.
Jeffrey Brook, Scientific Director of the Canadian Urban Environmental Health Research Consortium (CANUE), said the occupation “poses a number of unnecessary risks” to people living in core-area neighbourhoods.
“Small increases in air pollution exposure, which these diesel truck/generator emissions are causing over parts of the city, can aggravate your lungs and cardiovascular system, which means already-stretched hospitals could see more emergency room visits and/or admissions for asthma, heart attacks, and strokes,” he said in an email. “The constant noise can also add to the burden on nervous and cardiovascular systems, and contribute to more stress and sleep disturbance for nearby residents.”
Carleton University environmental epidemiologist Paul Villeneuve gave CBC the litany of harmful substances contained in diesel exhaust. “Those include things like arsenic, formaldehyde, benzene, and many of these have been shown to cause cancer and affect the cardiorespiratory system,” he said.
Diesel also includes nitrogen dioxide, fine particulate matter (PM 2.5), which “is a noxious pollutant,” said atmospheric scientist Douw Steyn, professor emeritus of air pollution meteorology at the University of British Columbia. “Particles of that size tend to lodge deep inside your lungs” and “ultimately, with long-term inhalation, can produce serious health effects.”
Steyn explained a phenomenon called the “urban canyon” effect that keeps substances trapped in place once they’re produced. “Unless there is very high wind, the pollutants are going to be trapped there,” he said. “And of course, that is where people live and move and breathe.”
Toronto physician Dr. Mili Roy, Ontario co-chair of the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE), said air pollution in Ontario already causes more than 6,600 premature deaths per year. She told CTV that exposure to traffic air pollution can trigger asthma, respiratory infections, and allergies in adults and children, while increasing the risk of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, bronchitis, heart disease, high blood pressure, infertility, birth defects, and neurological conditions like Alzheimer’s.
Air pollution also increases the risk of COVID-19 transmission, infection, and death, she said.
The Ottawa EnviroCentre crunched the numbers to get at the carbon dioxide emissions the occupation was generating. Using Natural Resources Canada data, Jen Stelzer, the centre’s director of community sustainability program, calculated that an idling rig burns through 3.1 litres of fuel per hour, and the fuel emits 2.7 kilograms of CO2 per litre, for a total of 8.37 kilograms of CO2 per hour, or 200.38 kilos per day.
The trucks need to be idling to sound their horns, and some news reports have had the horns sounding for 16 or more hours per day. So if, say, 200 of the more than 400 trucks still in town are semis, and the occupation was entering Day 14 as this story went to virtual press, their total emissions would hit 561,000 kilograms—without accounting for the round trip from as far away as British Columbia.
“The effects of this ongoing protest go beyond the obvious,” EnviroCentre Executive Director Sharon Coward told The Energy Mix in a statement. In addition to the diesel haze in the air, “parked trucks along our rivers and canal system mean that spilled diesel, oil, and other contaminants wash directly and untreated into our delicate water systems as they flow off the streets with melt water. Urban wildlife has been subjected to noise pollution reaching100 decibels for extended periods of time, a level on par with a constant chainsaw.”
So “the impact of this occupation extends for human and wildlife residents long after the trucks leave,” Coward said. “Our people and communities (human, animal, plant, and ecosystem-wide) need to return to the beautiful city we all call home, and to minimize the harm this convoy is causing as soon as possible.”
Throughout the occupation, meanwhile, news reports have warned that prolonged exposure to noise that loud can cause permanent hearing loss—and until the court injunction took effect, the truck horns were sounding for hours at a time, when they’re meant to be used for seconds.
The Globe and Mail says people in the targeted neighbourhoods can expect long-lasting health effects from an onslaught that has left some seniors afraid to leave their homes and some health care workers seeking rides to work so they won’t be targeted in the streets.
“People in the city are dealing with the emotional and mental toll of a protest that has occupied downtown Ottawa… as trucks blare their horns at all hours, streets are blocked by large vehicles, and some report physical and verbal abuse from protesters,” the paper writes. “Experts worry that the stress could have long-lasting effects on the health of residents who have also been navigating life during a pandemic.”
“I don’t think, as a resident, that one can look at one’s environment in the same way again. That when there are other protests, this will be a trigger,” said Ivy Bourgeault, professor in the school of sociological and anthropological studies at the University of Ottawa. “Uncertainty and no control just causes enormous amounts of stress, and that is in addition to the chronic stressors that people have been dealing with in relation to the pandemic.”
After coping with all that the last two years have brought, downtowners are now “suffering pretty significantly in terms of their sleep patterns, their mood, their irritability, and their overall physical health,” added Taryn Grieder, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. “There’s a link between psychological stress and physical effects on the body,” she added, so “it’s not a good situation.”
Local resident Tim Abray was one of many locals who said they’d been attacked by occupiers, in his case because he approached their illegal encampment at Ottawa’s Confederation Park to take pictures. He told the Globe he’d been sleeping badly, and that he and his family had their bags packed in case they had to make a quick exit.
“The previous two years are nothing in comparison to the last week,” he said. “This is an ever-present imminent, physical and mental community threat.”
With that sensationalist headline, you will lose me as a longtime, faithful reader, along with EnergyMix credibility. Poor choice of words
Except it wasn’t our choice of words. If you read into the story a bit, the quote came from the former governor of the Bank of Canada and Bank of England, Mark Carney.
I assembled the story with care, because I thought it *was* important to acknowledge that the convoy participants don’t see what they’re doing the same way the community does. That’s why I led with the split-screen reality we’ve been seeing — the people running street barbecues aren’t in the military-style encampment a few kilometres away, nor do they live in an apartment building that someone who is a part of their group tried to burn down at 4 AM.
In time — very soon, I hope — there will be an urgent need to figure out where to begin a dialogue with anyone in the group who isn’t down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories and, yes, sedition. (There. I said it again, because I know that Mark Carney knows his stuff.) But you don’t negotiate with Nazis and white supremacists, especially not when they’ve taken years to plan a coordinated attack across the country and are now using children as human shields to keep a major border crossing and trade route closed.
This completely unethical and deliberately deceptive. You are intentionally misleading attempting to claim Mark Carney said the demonstration has “Roots in Pro-Pipeline, Pro-Fossil” groups to . This is your narrative not his. Utterly disgraceful that you would even try to blame the Ottawa’s crisis in the streets with Canada’s pipelines and carbon energy industry. Not worth anyone wasting a minute more on this garbage fake “news” site.
We documented those roots in our story, and we never implied that the information or comment came from Carney. Your choice whether to waste any more of your time on our site, but just note that our latest attribution for the pro-pipeline, pro-fossil connection is none other than Tamara Lich, who very helpfully showed up in court a couple of days ago wearing her “I ❤️ Oil and Gas” hoodie — which connects back directly to the 2019 convoy.
That’s not to say that people don’t have the right to that slogan, or didn’t have the right to hold the 2019 convoy. Of course they did, though it might have helped their cause if they’d managed to keep white supremacists off the podium. But here’s Bob Rae on the distinctions between real protest and what we’ve witnessed in Ottawa over the last month: “A truck is not a speech. A horn is not a voice. An occupation is not a protest. A blockade is not freedom, it blocks the liberty of all. A demand to overthrow a government is not a dialogue. The expression of hatred is not a difference of opinion. A lie is not the truth.”
I really wish any of that were fake news, I really do. If it were, it would be a lot easier for people in our downtown neighbourhoods to recover from.
Has they use to say in my day, follow the money. Only they forgot we live in a country of innovators and collaborators.
It’s okay – I screenshot my reply that you just refused to publish. I’ll be sharing it on social media and protected sites, right after I report you and your disgusting article.
Thanks. Just be sure to link to the original story when you do.
Note to readers (and future commenters): Our comments section has always been and always will be an open forum for a wide range of views, as long as they’re grounded in sound science and other forms of reality.
Carney (is that Art or Mark?) the oligarch says that it’s sedition. Well, of course. A generally peaceful protest with a single message (stop the mandates) gets smeared with a host of irrelevant associations and illegitimate comparisons. Who cares what their politics are? They aren’t running for office or asking us to concur with their weltanschauung. The question they pose is, “Do you want restrictions to continue or not?”
Um, you date yourself, Russ, but it’s Mark.
It hasn’t been “generally” peaceful, or peaceful at all, for people on the receiving end of the abuse. I had to read in on this far more deeply than I would have wanted to to get the story right, but saw no one, anywhere denying the right to free association, denying the right to peaceful protest. Taking neighbourhoods hostage for two weeks, depriving people of sleep for days on end, harassing people for wearing masks in the midst of a global pandemic, bringing hundreds or thousands of very large trucks to a confined urban area with intent to intimidate — none of that is “freedom” or free expression. It’s multiple different forms of violence, which is why I thought it important to include a section in the story on the environmental, physical, and health impacts of the insurrection.
I was careful to distinguish between the associations and links of the organizers behind the occupation and the larger group of people who’ve signed on. But the issue is neither irrelevant nor illegitimate. No one is making it up about the Nazi, Confederate, or Three Percenter flags, and the organizers have been clear (until they apparently realized it was a bad look and took down their “memorandum of understanding”) that their goal was to overthrow a duly-elected government. “Sedition” is the calm, technical term for that. If we’d wanted to be inflammatory, we would have called it treason, but rather than going there, let’s just get them shut down and send them home, shall we?
I’m grateful to friends and colleagues who’ve helped me understand over the last couple of weeks that what amounts to an attempt at a nation-wide insurrection is fuelled in part by the deep fears and frustrations we’ve all been through over the last couple of years. While I don’t see a clear path right now to opening those lines of communication — really, everyone has to go home first — I know we need to get there. But you don’t negotiate with Nazis and white supremacists. Which means that the people participating in the carnival downtown are doing themselves no favours by allowing their concerns to be hijacked by far right extremists.
it’s kind of you to reply. I disagree on many fronts. However all of the other information posted on energy subjects by you and your colleagues is of great interest and importance. The response of health officials and politicians to the emergence of this virus has polarized us in a way that religion does, namely irrespective of evidence. Religion, however, has been with us long enough that we know generally not to discuss it in polite company, and not to flaunt religious conventions when visiting. Eschewing the C-19 vaccinations and other restrictions as ineffectual, I find myself “visiting” in my own country, and I object.
Thanks in turn, Russ. I totally share your concern about this awful, deep polarization, and I so appreciate even the few moments we’re both taking to discuss it across the line.
We (all of us) face the same dynamic on climate action and energy transition, of course. One of the things I’ve found so frustrating about the vaccine and COVID-19 battles is that, on climate, I can trace the path to a future that is win-win-win for everyone involved, and have been arguing for a few years that it’s important to genuinely listen to people outside the climate “bubble”, rather than just lecturing or trying to shout louder. I’ve not yet learned how to do that in a situation that (**in my framing, which I know is not yours**) pits the science of how viruses are transmitted or slowed down against the immense and real pain those control measures are causing, amped up (again, **in my framing**, and I’m not trying to be adversarial here) by inaccurate or deliberately false and inflammatory content on social media.
None of which is to suggest, BTW, that the public health response has been perfect. If you search our site for the term “vaccine apartheid”, I’ll be curious about how our coverage on that topic lands with you!
Something I do know, though, is that in this kind of discussion or debate, it’s so important to be hard on policy but gentle on people. Whether it’s about climate or the convoy, there are exceptions to that rule — I feel no obligation not to harshly call out greenwashing on emission reductions, and as you’ve seen, I draw a bright red line against Nazis and white supremacists. But for the rest of us, I would far rather be disagreeing through conversation, as I hope we’re still doing here, than by shouting back and forth or shutting each other down. The temptation is always there, particularly when people are sleepless and scared, but anytime we can mutually find a way to keep talking, we should all be happy to take the win.
Thanks Mitchell for your detailed and thoughtful summary of the situation we face. This is a new, to us, and frightening political landscape. It seems we are forever fighting these rearguard battles. When might we finally move forward?
Re: “Ottawa Insurrection Has Roots in Pro-Pipeline, Pro-Fossil Convoy” _____
Then again, so does our mainstream print news-media. … Postmedia — which, except for The Toronto Star, owns Canada’s major print publications — is on record allying itself with not only the planet’s second most polluting forms of carbon-based “energy”, but also THE MOST polluting/dirtiest of crudes — bitumen. [“Mair on Media’s ‘Unholiest of Alliances’ With Energy Industry”, Nov.14 2017, TheTyee.ca] https://thetyee.ca/Opinion/2017/11/14/mair-media-unholiest-alliances
During a presentation, it was stated: “Postmedia and CAPP [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] will bring energy to the forefront of our national conversation. Together, we will engage executives, the business community and the Canadian public to underscore the ways in which the energy sector powers Canada.”
Also, a then-publisher of Postmedia’s National Post said: “From its inception, the National Post has been one of the country’s leading voices on the importance of energy to Canada’s business competitiveness internationally and our economic well-being in general. We will work with [Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers] to amplify our energy mandate and to be a part of the solution to keep Canada competitive in the global marketplace. The National Post will undertake to leverage all means editorially, technically and creatively to further this critical conversation.”
A few years ago, Postmedia also had acquired a lobbying firm with close ties to Alberta Premier Jason Kenney in order to participate in his government’s $30 million PR “war room” in promoting the interests of the fossil fuel industry in Canada. Furthermore, in late May, Postmedia refused to run paid ads by Leadnow, a social and environmental justice organization, that expose the Royal Bank of Canada as the largest financer of fossil fuel extraction in Canada.
Really, should the promotion of massive fossil fuel extraction, even Canada’s own, be a partisan position for any newspaper giant to take, especially considering fossil fuel’s immense role in manmade global warming thus climate change? And, at least in this case, whatever happened to the honorable journalistic role of ‘afflicting the comfortable’ (which went along with ‘comforting the afflicted’), especially one of such environmental monstrosity? … The above constitutes ethically-challenged journalism.
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