Canada’s Parliament and national capital have now been under siege for 12 days by far-right and fascist activists, many of them equipped with firearms and other lethal weapons. They are vowing to continue their occupation of downtown Ottawa until all public health measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 are abolished.
The vast majority of Canadians—including truckers, almost 90 percent of whom are fully vaccinated—view the far-right “Freedom Convoy” with revulsion.
Nevertheless, the Convoy constitutes a grave and imminent threat to the democratic and social rights of workers in Canada and around the world.
There are two essential reasons for this. First, the Convoy has been gotten up by, and is serving as an extra-parliamentary instrument of, powerful sections of Canada’s capitalist ruling elite—politically fronted by the Conservative Party official opposition and much of the corporate media. Their aim is to push politics far to the right, beginning with the abandonment of all anti-COVID-19 measures and to replace Justin Trudeau’s minority Liberal big business government with a regime committed to even more aggressively pursuing class war at home and the predatory interests of Canadian imperialism globally.
This anti-democratic and anti-working conspiracy is being aided and abetted by Donald Trump, other leading figures in the failed January 6, 2021 coup and the fascist riff-raff that served as their shock troops in the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential election by storming the US Capitol. These forces are providing the Convoy with substantial political, financial and logistical support.
Read More: The far-right occupation of Ottawa: January 6 goes global
