On Sunday, Canadian police finally cleared away
anti-vaccine demonstrators who had been blocking the Ambassador Bridge between
Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, a key commercial route that normally carries more
than $300 million a day in international trade. Other bridges are still closed,
and part of Ottawa, Ontario, the Canadian capital, is still occupied.
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The diffidence of Canadian authorities in the face of these
disruptions has been startling to American eyes. Also startling, although not
actually surprising, has been the embrace of economic vandalism and
intimidation by much of the US right — especially by people who ranted against
demonstrations in favor of racial justice. What we’re getting here is an object
lesson in what some people really mean when they talk about “law and order.”
Let’s talk about what has been happening in Canada and why I
call it vandalism.
The “Freedom Convoy” has been marketed as a backlash by
truckers angry about COVID-19 vaccination mandates. In reality, there does not
seem to have been many truckers among the protesters at the bridge (about 90
percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated). Last week a Bloomberg reporter
saw only three semis among the vehicles blocking the Ambassador Bridge, which
were mainly pickup trucks and private cars; photos taken Saturday also show
very few commercial trucks.
The Teamsters union, which represents many truckers on both
sides of the border, has denounced the blockade.
So this isn’t a grassroots trucker uprising. It’s more like
a slow-motion January 6, a disruption caused by a relatively small number of
activists, many of them right-wing extremists. At their peak, the
demonstrations in Ottawa reportedly involved only around 8,000 people, while
numbers at other locations have been much smaller.
Despite their lack of numbers, however, the protesters have
inflicted a remarkable amount of economic damage. The US and Canadian economies
are very closely integrated. In particular, North American manufacturing,
especially but not only in the auto industry, relies on a constant flow of
parts between factories on both sides of the border. As a result, the
disruption of that flow has hobbled industry, forcing production cuts and even
factory shutdowns.
The closure of the Ambassador Bridge also imposed large
indirect costs, as trucks were diverted to roundabout routes and forced to wait
in long lines at alternative bridges.
Any attempt to put a number on the economic costs of the
blockade is tricky and speculative. However, it’s not hard to come up with
numbers like $300 million or more per day; combine that with the disruption of
Ottawa, and the “trucker” protests may already have inflicted a couple of
billion dollars in economic damage.
That’s an interesting number, because it’s roughly
comparable to insurance industry estimates of total losses associated with the
Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed the killing of George Floyd —
protests that seem to have involved more than 15 million people.
This comparison will no doubt surprise those who get their
news from right-wing media, which portrayed BLM as an orgy of arson and
looting. I still receive mail from people who believe that much of New York
City was reduced to smoking rubble. In fact, the demonstrations were remarkably
nonviolent; vandalism happened in a few cases, but it was relatively rare, and
the damage was small considering the huge size of the protests.
By contrast, causing economic damage was and is what the
Canadian protests are all about — because blocking essential flows of goods,
threatening people’s livelihoods, is every bit as destructive as smashing a
store window. And unlike, say, a strike aimed at a particular company, this
damage fell indiscriminately on anyone who had the misfortune to rely on
unobstructed trade.
And to what end? The BLM demonstrations were a reaction to
police killings of innocent people; what’s going on in Canada is, on its face,
about rejecting public health measures intended to save lives. Of course, even
that is mainly an excuse: What it’s really about is an attempt to exploit
pandemic weariness to boost the usual culture-war agenda.
As you might expect, the US right is loving it. People who
portrayed peaceful protests against police killings as an existential threat
are delighted by the spectacle of right-wing activists breaking the law and
destroying wealth. Fox News has devoted many hours to fawning coverage of the
blockades and occupations. Senator Rand Paul, who called BLM activists a
“crazed mob,” called for Canada-style protests to “clog up cities” in the US,
specifically saying that he hoped to see truckers disrupt the Super Bowl (they
didn’t).
I assume that the reopening of the Ambassador Bridge is the
beginning of a broader crackdown on destructive protests. But I hope we won’t
forget this moment — and in particular that we remember it the next time a
politician or media figure talks about “law and order.”
Recent events have confirmed what many suspected: The right
is perfectly fine, indeed enthusiastic, about illegal actions and disorder as
long as they serve right-wing ends.
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