Freedom Convoy protests [Split from All things 2019-nCoV]

[Halifax Tar]

Credit where due: Canadaland publisher Jesse Brown (very broadly & generally leftist, but also very anti-anti-Semitism shenanigans going on these days) has public second thoughts about his original concerns with the whole convoy protest thing - a decent 40 minute listen.

#1207 I Was Wrong About The Freedom Convoy

Was the Freedom Convoy a violent uprising or an act of political protest?

www.canadaland.com

The article by Matt Gurney (a guy who's far from a fan of the woke elements of the world) referred to about some of the more hidden elements of the protest is this one:

Dispatch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he's in trouble. Who's listening?

The scale of Ottawa's defeat is a jarring and continuing indictment of the capacity of the Canadian state, and the state must reverse this situation, decisively.

www.readtheline.ca

Gurney article also archived here.

I listened to that while i transited through NB yesterday. I was impressed by the walk back.

 

[The Bread Guy]

I listened to that while i transited through NB yesterday. I was impressed by the walk back.

Agree or disagree with the guy, this isn’t the first time he’s applied new info into a new take.

 

[Kirkhill]

I have to say that while Brown's revision is welcome his foil's obturacy was not.

There might have been bad things happen because there might have been anti-social elements present. And they were protesting the wrong government.

Meanwhile we regularly have the same confabulations of the aggrieved out supporting each other regardless of the cause... and many of them are out for the socially approved chaos they enjoy.

To my knowledge no fences were torn down, no pavements torn up, no bricks thrown, no molotovs made.

 

[MilEME09]

Warrant issued for James Bauder after skipping town and not showing up for court.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1962546452607218179

 

[The Bread Guy]

Warrant issued for James Bauder after skipping town and not showing up for court.

https://twitter.com/x/status/1962546452607218179

Still waiting for his asylum claim to come through in the U.S., I guess ...

Freedom Convoy Founding Organizer Says He is Seeking Political Asylum in the United States

To avoid his upcoming criminal trial in Canada, James Bauder says he is ‘living in exile’ and enlisting support from Trump allies

pressprogress.ca

... with this from the piece from early July:

... Matthew Kolken, a high-profile New York state immigration lawyer, has been brought on board to help the Canadian asylum seeker seek refuge in the United States.

“He said, ‘This is very winnable,’” Bauder recalled. “‘You’re going to set legal precedents … this is a case of a lifetime.’”

Kolken, who is described as a “conservative influencer” by Fox News where he appears as an occasional commentator, told PressProgress he had “no comment” as to his client’s chance of success, but confirmed Bauder is formally applying for asylum under section 208 of the US Immigration and Nationality Act.

“Any alien who is physically present in the United States or who arrives in the United States … irrespective of such alien’s status, may apply for asylum in accordance with this section,” Kolken noted.

As he waits for his asylum application to be processed, Bauder is quietly gaming out his next moves.

Over the coming weeks, Bauder plans to roll out an ambitious media strategy to raise awareness of his legal battles and an associated crowdfunding campaign that could involve appearances on big American cable news programs and support from allies connected to Trump’s White House.

“Some big, big names are going to be involved in covering this story,” Bauder promised, adding that there are “definite people that I’m working with that are very close to Trump and the Trump admin team.”

On Canada Day, Bauder had lunch with Paul Vallelly, a former military analyst for Fox News and a retired general who served as a commander of a US Army PSYOP group. Vallely advocates Canada becoming America’s 51st state, has close ties to former Trump national security advisor Michael Flynn and is a prominent influencer in QAnon circles.

Vallelly posed for a photo with Bauder’s Canada-US “Freedom Convoy” flag and signed a note crediting Bauder for being a “great ‘patriot’ for Canada.” ...

Here's Vallelly's recent take on the case (also archived here) ...

The Real Story of the Canadian Convoy And James Bauder - Citizens Commission on National Security

The Story of a Canadian hero………………………….. This is the result of a private meeting with a Canadian hero, his fellow convoyers and supporters seeking freedom in Canada. In the midst of the turmoil created by the COVID-19 lockdowns, there was a powerful movement that started in Canada that most...

ccnationalsecurity.org

... with a bit from that piece

... Bauder currently has 7 lawyers. He understands his situation is quite fragile. His finances and ability to continue to pay his attorney are unstable at best. He is asking President Trump to lobby the Canadian Federal Government to pardon the truckers, which only PM Mark Carney can do. Bauder contends that Trumps personal experience with lawfare and political prosecution make him uniquely qualified to appreciate his perspective. As the President, Trump can help guide his administration to take a closer look at his case and all the Canadians improperly impugned, attacked, and who had their rights violated ...

Online GiveSendGo campaign has raised ~$13K as of this post.

Let's see how it goes for him ....

 

[MilEME09]

Convoy leader James Bauder faces Canada-wide warrant after failing to appear in court

James Bauder was charged with mischief to obstruct property, disobeying a lawful court order and obstructing/restricting a peace officer.

edmontonjournal.com

Here's the actual article quoted in the tweet

 

[QV]

As I've stated many times, the media has been the problem for us in this country. David Cayley lays it out with respect to how CBC botched it's reporting on the Convoy... deliberate I say.

David Cayley: How CBC botched coverage of the Freedom Convoy

At no point did the CBC acknowledge the protest as a political phenomenon that deserved to be carefully examined

nationalpost.com

In his provocative new book The CBC: How Canada’s Public Broadcaster Lost Its Voice (And How to Get It Back) — set for release with Sutherland House Books on September 16, 2025 — veteran producer and broadcaster David Cayley examines the decline of the institution he served for more than four decades. He argues that the CBC has abandoned its duty to speak to and for the whole country, retreating instead into narrow ideological echo chambers. In this excerpt, Cayley recalls how the broadcaster’s response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy crystallized its inability to engage with Canadians across political divides.


The CBC once imagined its audience as a single community, bound by shared interests and a common national purpose. In the 1960s, producers like Patrick Watson were taught to ask of every program: “How will it serve the audience?” That question presupposed a public that was coherent, if not always unanimous — a public that might quarrel over facts and policies, but still inhabited the same civic space.

This became clear to me as I watched the reaction to the “Freedom Convoy” that converged on Ottawa in February 2022 to protest against forced vaccination. In my eyes, the convoy clearly manifested a large and vibrant new public. Its vibrancy was reflected in the effort, and the risk to livelihood, that was involved in getting all those big rigs rolling toward our capital city in the dead of winter; its considerable size was shown in the crowds that gathered on bridges and in parking lots along the route to cheer this spontaneous cavalcade on. But, when the truckers and their supporters got to Ottawa, they were not treated as an emergent public with something important to say. Instead, they were treated as an invading army, and, finally, as a grave threat to national security. “These people,” Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said, are “often racists” and “misogynists” who “don’t believe in science” and who hold “unacceptable opinions.”
Article content

The CBC clearly concurred. Its nightly television newscast, The National, set the tone for its coverage, on the weekend the trucks arrived in Ottawa, by interviewing a trucker who was not even in Ottawa and who opposed the convoy, rather than talking to one of its participants. At no point, thereafter, did the CBC acknowledge the protest as a political phenomenon that deserved, both by its size and its argument, to be carefully examined and interrogated. Nor did the CBC recognize the protesters as an incipient public to which the public broadcaster owed, by that fact, a certain obligation. Instead, the demonstrators were viewed and discussed entirely as an unfortunate outcropping of misinformation, or as a problem of public safety.

What this said to me was that the CBC, as the public broadcaster, now only converses with the publics of which it approves. It also said that the CBC doesn’t recognize the growing polarization of opinion within the country as something which it has an obligation — a statutory obligation, in fact — to address with an even hand and an open mind.

Many other contemporary questions resemble the issue of vaccine mandates on which the Freedom Convoy disagreed with the government. The defining feature of these issues is that they divide people according to their basic commitments, or cultural stance, and not just on the basis of differing interpretations of some agreed set of facts. Some of these differences have been growing and establishing themselves ever since the various cultural revolutions of the 1960s began to take hold; some reflect the so-called filter bubbles now curated by social media algorithms. The point, in either case, is that worlds are colliding. Worldviews, in modern Western states like Canada, have become incommensurable — they no longer possess any common term, or denominator by which they can be related to one another.

The easy response to this collision, and the one unfolding all around us, is mutual vilification. The prime minister calls the protesters bigots, and the truckers, in turn, wave their ubiquitous FCK Trudeau signs. This is comforting to each party but does nothing to address the widening abyss between them. The group with FREEDOM on their blazons represented Canadian society as a contractual bond between free, self-determining individuals — they were, in short, classic liberals — while the majority, who claimed that failure to get vaccinated was a punishable anti-social act, stood for a view of society as something like an immune system: a single, collective, and mutually responsible being, acting under the sign of life.

Neither of these views can be judged, in some simple sense, as right or wrong. They stand on different grounds and are conditioned throughout by the grounds on which they stand. Their only possible modus vivendi lies in curiosity, mutual respect, and a willingness, as Leonard Cohen once said, to “compare mythologies.” This spirit was not evident in Ottawa in the winter of 2022 — on either side.

This dissensus, as I’ve called it, is something new. Canadians have always disagreed, sometimes violently, but formerly they disagreed within an overarching modern consensus. When public broadcasting was born in the 1930s, Prime Minister R. B. Bennett presented it as an instrument for “the diffusion of national thought and ideals.” The man who led the lobby for public control, Graham Spry, saw the CBC, even more grandly, as a means by which Canada would realize its “destiny.” Both men saw Canada as a society animated by common ideals and bound for a common destination. They saw their country as developing within a broad, transnational consensus, whose pillars were science and democracy, progress and growth.

Now, the common denominator has gone, and consequently, people and positions tend to fall apart into hostile camps. Informed consent and vaccine mandates quickly come to blows. Economic growth faces ecological limits that undermine its legitimacy. Science, expected by its founders to calm the war of opinion, now inflames it instead.

Faced with these fractures, the CBC has chosen reaction rather than renewal. It seeks to shore up old certainties — objectivity refurbished, campaigns against misinformation launched — while ignoring the deeper collapse of consensus. The result is that it converses only with the publics it prefers, abdicating its duty to cultivate a truly pluralistic public forum. This, I argue, is the crisis of the CBC, and unless it learns to open itself again to all Canadians, it has no future as a genuine public broadcaster.