Open roads and close-minded protests

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/04/2024 (553 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

My turn behind the wheel on Monday, heading east.

Took over driving the rental at Moosomin, Sask., already hours on the road after leaving Saskatoon and abandoning a flight that was already hours late and seemed likely to remain on permanent delay.

Behind us, the sky aflame with the sunset, so the rearview was an orange lozenge — the only other colour in it, the thin black line of the road along the mirror’s bottom edge.

I’d forgotten the anti-vax-mandate convoy — which, with many of the same leading lights, has morphed into the anti-tax-convoy — had promised an April Fool’s Day blockade.

I needn’t have worried.

In Alberta, the border protest wasn’t at the border, because that would have meant paying National Park fees, or being on federal land, or something. But it was at least a fairly large protest.

Not so at the Saskatchewan-Manitoba border.

Our own little carbon-tax klatch looked for all the world like a tiny travelling carnival, the kind that sets up with rides in mall parking lots or at fall fairs.

A huddle of brightly coloured, lit-up vehicles, flags and banners, set off on the north side of the Trans Canada. On the shoulders of the road on either side, eight or 10 police cars, two on the convoy side with their lights flashing,

Back down the road, closer to Moosomin, there had been a light-up roadside sign, about as far back from the festivities as you’d expect an itinerant carnival’s requisite abandoned tilt-a-whirl or teacup ride to be, after it had been left on a low-bed behind a hood-tilted, broken-down semi-hauler.

The sign read “Slow — protestors on road.”

As soon as I’d seen it, I was ready for a hassle.

I don’t have a problem with people legitimately protesting — I do have a problem when they decide their “rights” are implicitly more important than anyone else’s.

In Alberta, protest organizers were taking close-ups of the faces of RCMP officers, telling followers to “light them up on the internet” and “show their kids what they do.” As if that matters. Keeping order is part of police responsibility. (Many more police officers were no doubt sitting elsewhere, looking at their phones all day and collecting their overtime, just in case some freedom-yelling miscreant took things further.)

It’s hard to imagine what the illusive hunt for more freedoms in what’s already a demonstrably free country has cost us in police overtime alone.

There are others who happily take advantage.

Siding with the protesters may give some politicians votes, provided those same politicians are smart enough and careful enough not to get caught on camera making fun of the protesters. Because, rest assured, seasoned career politicians, safe in their sinecures, regularly make fun of the rest of us, for our credulity and our sincerity. And for having unsuccessful roadside protests.

Was the latest Canada-wide protest a groundswell? Well, it sure doesn’t look like one.

No offence intended, but it looks very much like something else instead: barely a ground-ripple.

It also seems, for a small core of convoy protesters, the Ottawa protests so long ago meant a short moment of internet fellowship and fame, a kind of notoriety they revelled in.

And a kind of fame they have spent the ensuing months and even years since trying to replicate.

They are welcome to seek out past glories, though I hear the words of Bruce Springsteen’s Glory Days as they try: “Well, time slips away and leaves you with nothing, mister, but boring stories of… glory days…”

In other words, the latest protest seems more about self-aggrandizement than about fighting for freedom — and I find the core players’ endless calls for donations to prop up their self-promotion cycle to be a kind of grift that’s patently indefensible.

Actually blocking the road to the general public and the endless irritation of slow-roll protests on a main highway are seemingly akin to high-school bullying tactics.

I suspect most people are like me. After five hours on the road and three more left to get home, when I saw the light-up sign warning of the protesters, I sent a mental message to the police: “End this quick.”

In Alberta, there was a creepy-looking, gravel-voiced man wearing an Easter bunny mask, handing out treats to his fellow protesters. A man on a horse, trying to lasso an inflatable hippo. A protest leader calling for his fellow protesters to bring hockey sticks for flag poles, in case they had to do some “high-sticking,” and later saying he just meant they could play road hockey.

I think I’m not alone in saying I don’t have time for this playhouse.

I had a job to get back to, and bills to pay, apparently unlike some.

The lights vanished in the rearview in a matter of minutes.

The sky, fading to black. The carnival over, hopefully for good.

Russell Wangersky is the Comment Editor at the Free Press. He can be reached at russell.wangersky@freepress.mb.ca