My Take | What Ottawa’s trucker protest says about the liberal-democratic decline

People don’t vote for realities, they vote for dreams, said Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. That’s why democratic politicians usually overpromise but under-deliver. In these populist times, people also vote out of anger.

In the United States, Donald Trump is staging a credible presidential return, and the Republican Party is rallying behind him. In Canada, Justin Trudeau, a classic Canadian liberal moderate, has been blindsided by a bunch of truck drivers. Right-wing politicians understand and know how to exploit voter anger; liberals in North America and social democrats in Europe have no idea why they have become the focus of that same anger.

The never-ending Covid-19 pandemic has one terrible, if not fatal, political consequence for the Western political establishment; that is, its on-again, off-again lockdowns and restrictions have upset everyone from small business owners to homemakers. Such voters tend to be right of centre or conservative.

The virus is not lethal enough to scare or kill off a big chunk of voters, yet is serious enough to disrupt and undermine their livelihoods, and living standards and routines. It doesn’t take a genius to realise that people are angry. And they need to blame someone for their plight. Why is my business failing? Why can’t my kids go to school? They may curse the virus and China, but they blame their politicians.

For more than a week, a long line of big trucks, cargo carriers, pickup vans, recreational vehicles and any number of cars have jammed central Ottawa, the nation’s capital. Ostensibly, the protest is against the federal government’s vaccine mandate for truck drivers entering Canada, first imposed in the middle of last month.

The Canadian liberal and leftist press typically ridicules the truckers and their supporters. An op-ed in The Globe and Mail makes fun of their Neanderthal behaviour, and unwillingness to take a small jab, insinuating that it is all out of ignorance. But before the imposition of the mandate, even some senior advisers within Trudeau’s cabinet had warned of troubles ahead. After all, six in 10 US truckers were already fully vaccinated even before the mandate, according to a Bloomberg report. The protest has snowballed into a wider political movement in Canada, and with widening support from the US and Australia. It may have been triggered by the jab mandate, but it is really the latest manifestation of widespread public anger.