8. The Nitty Gritty: Capitalism & Fascism

The same CBSA report said the southern Ontario CBSA had received multiple threats "from an individual threatening to 'wage war' in Canada."

OTTAWA - The former head of the Canada Border Services Agency was surprised to learn last winter that officers did not have the authority to stop would-be protesters from entering

RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki is expected to testify Tuesday morning at the public inquiry into the federal government's use of the Emergencies Act last winter.

A proposal to have federal government representatives meet with some convoy organizers probably wouldn’t have panned out, a senior public servant told the Emergencies Act inquiry.

OTTAWA - The "Freedom Convoy" protests that took over downtown Ottawa last winter and inspired several border blockades caused serious concerns about Canada's international reputation and its economic security, senior

With the onset of the “truckers convoy,” media commenters wrote about a crisis of expertise in Canada resulting in the disintegration of a shared sense of reality. Michael Den Tandt called the growing lack of a shared sense of reality in Canada “poison in the sinews of society.” Charlie Angus lamented the fact that people increasingly rely on their “own Facebook feeds, Reddit channels, and Slack chat information buttressing an utterly alternate reality of science, medicine and politics” instead of relying on “anchors of commonality” like national media and the experts reflected in it. Andrew Coyne worried that the convoy was  “a movement in opposition not merely to vaccines, but to science, authority, expertise of all kinds: in a word, knowledge.” While these concerns may have taken on a new sense of urgency today, they are not new. Questions about how societies arrive at a shared understanding of truth and reality, about the role of experts in arriving at this shared sense of reality, and about how to take decisive policy action based on it, have preoccupied people who think about the role of expertise in political institutions for decades (1, 2, 3), if not centuries (1). In fact, just a few short months before these concerns began circulating in the mainstream national conversation, the ISSP sponsored a panel at the annual Canadian Science Policy Conference (CSPC). Moderated by Dr. Kelly Bronson (UOttawa) and Dr. Gwendolyn Blue (UCalgary),  panelists Dr. Melanie Rock (UCalgary), Dr. David Guston (Arizona State), and Dr. C. Scott Findlay (UOttawa/Office o the Chief Science Advisor) shared perspectives on questions like “whose expertise counts?”, “what is expertise?”, and “what kinds of expertise are often left out of policy processes?” Revisiting these perspectives now offers a different angle into understanding this “crisis of expertise” in Canada; instead of seeing recent events as the product of a deficit within the Canadian public we might see them as an invitation to think carefully about how we as a society grant experts authority and, in so doing, construct our sense of reality, together. During the panel discussion, no one disagreed with four main criteria, proposed by Dr. Findlay, that define what makes “experts”: they should have knowledge that is relevant to the policy area in question, this knowledge should be validated by some kind of external and legitimate community, they should be willing to have their knowledge challenged by others, they should explicitly disclose any competing interests. This vision of expertise is similar to the one circulating in the media, and for good reason. After all, it does reflect, in general terms, how our governments and courts are currently designed to adjudicate expertise. One of the problems the trucker convoy seems to have raised for Canadians, though, is that we can’t all agree on: what counts as relevant knowledge in every context; what counts as a legitimate community for external validation of that knowledge; who should have the right to challenge that knowledge and how they should be able to do it; or how to handle the fact that all experts have competing interests of some kind. Arguably, it is disagreements at this level that lead to the divergent versions of reality which are worrisome for so many. Many of us have seen versions of a meme depicting someone “doing their own research” about COVID and commenting that based on this research they’ve discovered something that government public health experts missed. Many of us may even have had a good chuckle at the idea that “doing one’s own research” in this way is better than listening to the person with credentials and the entire machinery of a government resourcing data collecting, analysis, and dissemination. Far from being a sign of intelligent critical thought, we are meant to conclude that “doing one’s own research” (on the internet, via tools like Google and on platforms like Reddit, Twitter and Facebook) highlights lack of scientific knowledge and literacy as well as lack of capacity for truly critical thought. But is it really so cut and dry? Many highly knowledgeable (and credentialled!) people turned to Twitter and other social media platforms to share robust data and analysis throughout the pandemic, especially at times when they felt that governments weren’t doing enough to protect the health of their citizens (1, 2, 3). We would be naïve to think that these rumblings on social media platforms didn’t have an impact on how governments pivoted their pandemic responses over the course of time. Would we be as ready to laugh at someone “doing their own research” if they were listening to these kinds of people on Twitter? Why or why not? What, specifically, is different between this role for social media in driving evidence-informed decision-making and the ways of interacting with these online platforms at which many are so eager to laugh? If our answers to these questions are easy and simple, then we’re probably answering them poorly. As Dr. Guston put it, societies decide on who counts as an expert (and therefore who gets to help define collective reality) based on to whom they are willing to delegate authority. This can be as true online as in formal judicial or policy development proceedings. Normally, societies do this based on the presumption of a knowledge asymmetry: experts know more than others about the topic at hand, and societies delegate advice-giving and some forms of decision-making to them on this basis. This delegation is a signal of trust not only in the experts themselves, but also in the institutions into which they are meant to be included. This relational definition of expertise doesn’t at all preclude the four criteria for expertise we already mentioned; however, by putting the act of delegation front and centre, rather than the question of who should count as a legitimate expert, it draws attention to how the process of delegating to experts is not only social, it is also part of democratic process. If there’s one thing we know about democracy, it is that it is messy and contentious. If delegating to experts is part of democratic struggle, making absolute pronouncements about who should and should not count as an expert across all settings and all time, who should and should not get to help define reality, is not too different from making absolute pronouncements about which politicians will be better at governing the country. While this kind of rhetoric may be par for the course during election campaigns, we all understand that at the end of the day the answer to this question comes down to matters of values, ethics, ideology, and taste. This idea that delegating to experts is a democratic exercise, rather than an exercise based on clearly established ‘best practice’ criteria, might be unsettling to some. Doesn’t it, after all, open the floodgates for the kind of disinformation and social division we seem to be growing more and more concerned about? Indeed, this is a question that CSPC panelists and panel attendees didn’t necessarily agree on. For some, too much democratization muddies the waters and hinders good decision-making by bringing into the domain of experts those who possess neither the credentials nor the qualities to be there. For others, this democratization, even if inconvenient, is a simple fact of how recourse to experts unfolds in democracies today. From this perspective, pining for a return to the “good old days” when more of us trusted the same experts to define reality for us is like trying to put the horse back into the stable. The alternative is to acknowledge that our institutions have failed to adapt and adjust to the fact that this approach to authorizing expertise no longer works (if it ever did 1, 2). So, what would it look like to enter this “crisis of expertise” from a different angle? We can’t answer that fully here, but we can offer some questions to get things started. What if governments and their appointed experts were to step back from looking outwards and laying the blame for the current situation on fake news and on technically ignorant people “doing their own research”? What if instead they were to look inwards to consider the possibility that holding on to a vision of expertise that fails to be convincing to a large swath of society may be at least as big a problem as the disinformation that seems to be keeping so many up at night? Governments and institutions of knowledge-making have greater ability to change themselves than to change others, and a little humble self-reflection rarely goes amiss.

I’m sitting the ornate Winifred Bambrick Room, inside Library and Archives Canada, waiting for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the stand a…

A lawyer for some organizers of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests was ejected from the Emergencies Act inquiry on Tuesday after repeatedly interrupting the judge who is chairing the process.

While he opposed the use of the act, he was prepared to defer to the Ontario provincial government if they felt it would help end protests.

The commission began its first day of witness testimony Friday with residents from Ottawa’s downtown telling their story.

The Intercept obtained the hacked donor data of GiveSendGo, including about 104,000 donors who contributed to the Freedom Convoy and Adopt a Trucker.

🧵If you're new around here and are interesting in convoy financing, here's a quick thread of my biggest hits on the topic. Articles are behind a paywall, but here are the threads with most of the details:

The former CBCer said she was stifled by the broadcaster's "radical political agenda." We wanted to know: how so?

A persistent bit of misinformation about CBC News reporting continues to bubble up in certain Canadian publications and political venues, claiming that CBC retracted its stories about foreign donations to the convoy protest movement made via GoFundMe and GiveSendGo. This is false.

Canadian media outlets boost voices of far-right parliamentarians who promote extreme, hateful and conspiratorial views in Europe

A Canadian protest movement appeared to be fuelled by opposition to COVID-19 restrictions, but conspiracy theories swirled just below the surface.

Newly surfaced document raises questions about what organizers were planning and what Ottawa Police knew before the convoy arrived

Canadians are increasingly weary of the pandemic and its management, but research polling shows the majority are resolved to support the measures being put in place by governments to see us through.

Elsewhere, officials are deploying tear gas and...Barry Manilow

Might there be something in it for them?

Workers in Canada’s trucking industry have suffered during the pandemic. The “Freedom Convoy,” a right-wing, pro-business social movement, purports itself to be the people’s champion of liberty — yet it couldn't care less about the hardships and burdens of its fellow workers.

We are now into the third week of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ that has besieged downtown Ottawa. What we have witnessed is a total abdication of responsibility by all levels of government, exacerbated by Ontario Premier Doug Ford, who has cowered in the face of any crisis that was not artificially manufactured by himself and his party.

The anti-mandate protests in Ottawa and across Canada—the various forces vying for control—the threats and opportunities the situation presents.

Thousands of truckers are being hijacked by anti-vax loonies and encouraged to parade through red state America in search of any remaining Covid-19 restrictions to protest. The so-called “People’s Convoy” is scheduled to leave Barstow, California, on Wednesday, February 23, and meander eastward, picking up truckers as they go for a final jamboree and road-blocking in Washington, DC, on Tuesday, March 1, 2022 – the day of Joe Biden’s first State of the Union address. Are these the same organizers that brought us Canada’s “Freedom Convoy,” blocking the streets of the capital, Ottawa, for weeks and blocking border crossings to the U.S.? No, those organizers were arrested. Those trucks were confiscated. Those protesters have been debanked and uninsured. This is a whole new crop of American Made truckers.

Everything happening in the United States comes to Canada, only a little later and a tad more politely. The rage that erupted in a Presidential-endorsed riot in Washington on 6 January 2021 has now exploded to the north. Fueled by a confused swirl of resentment against the array of pandemic protocols that all advanced capitalist states have invoked to curb and contain Covid-19 – including vaccination passports, mandatory masking, business lockdowns, and cross-border restrictions – so-called “Freedom Convoys” have descended on the nation’s capital Ottawa, holding the city hostage. US-Canada border crossings have been blocked in Ontario, British Columbia, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, and Alberta, and the convoys have staged sporadic protests across the country, from Fredericton, New Brunswick to Surrey, British Columbia.

I have spent time listening to leaders and activists from across this country, and I have learned one thing: we as civil society must step up and provide courageous leadership in this time of crisis. Unions, racial and climate justice organizations, faith leaders, students, residents’ groups, health care activists – all of us have a role to play to help overcome this polarization, to bridge divides and to focus on crucial issues of  social justice. We need to start organizing at the national and local level – bringing together people from all walks of life to determine strategies that will address the realities of each region of our country. There is no magic slogan that can turn this around. It’s about deep organizing. We know that public health measures are about saving lives, just as mandatory seatbelt laws save lives.

Vaccine trains would stop at every station and inoculate railroad workers, who didn't protest