How Canada’s ‘Freedom Convoy’ is inspiring protests in other countries

Dozens of Facebook and Telegram groups inspired by the Canadian truckers have sprouted up across the world, from Cyprus to Argentina to New Zealand, with members expressing solidarity and shared frustration, and in some cases, even organizing convoys to their own local capitals.

After nearly two years of COVID-19 restrictions around the globe, the chorus of frustration with health restrictions and mandates to be vaccinated or risk losing work or access to other services seems to be resonating globally, at least online.

Aram Lemmerer, 39, is a business owner and an anti-mandate organizer in Austria. He told the Star he spoke to a crowd of anti-vaccine protesters last weekend and got a “roaring” response by evoking the images of trucks rolling into the Canadian capital.

“I said, has anybody seen what was going on in Canada?” he said. “And the roar you got was like a soccer stadium, crazy. The next question I ask: Shall we do the same thing in Austria? It was a wave of roar, it was insane.”

Lemmerer said he and two other organizers have a commitment of 2,500 vehicles driving to Vienna in a convoy on Feb. 13, including cars, trucks, tractors and cyclists, although he said he didn’t know how many would ultimately come. They want the current government to give up all restrictions and resign. Austrian lawmakers on Thursday approved a measure to mandate COVID-19 vaccinations for its entire population, or face a fine equivalent to more than $700.

It’s just one example of how Canada’s “Freedom Convoy” is being used as a galvanizing force by people fed up with COVID-19 restrictions in their own countries.

Brett Caraway, an associate professor at the University of Toronto information faculty who studies social movements, said the uptake of the convoy idea outside of Canada means the movement may have to broaden its focus, which has been national so far.

“The longer you see this convoy transpire and the longer you see versions of it across the world, you can expect new alliances to pop up,” he said.

“It was just sort of a convoy under the banner of freedom … Well, there’s a lot of people that can identify with that, that’s a major rallying cry.”

Caraway said that one of the things social movements do is define and name a problem, blame someone for that problem, and use actions to voice opposition to it. The Occupy movement, for example, targeted inequality with the slogan “We are the 99 per cent,” with protesters literally occupying urban cores and financial hubs.

The “Freedom Convoy,” Caraway said, is also a populist movement based on occupying urban cores — this time based on the right-wing notion of freedom rather than the left-wing idea of class struggle.

And in the age of the internet, the convoy, like the Occupy movement, didn’t need to be that well organized in order to take off — it just had to resonate with people online.

Of course, the number of people participating online does not equal the number of people that will show up to protests in person. More than 100,000 people donated to a GoFundMe fundraiser for the convoy, for example, while estimates of the maximum crowd size in Ottawa last weekend were about 10,000 participants.

“It’s an ‘occupy’ movement; it’s just a different occupy movement,” he said.

A struggle for the Canadian convoy from the beginning of the protest has been in policing its boundaries, Caraway said. So extremist right-wing groups have been “hitching a ride,” reducing some Canadians’ sympathies with the cause. He added that a protest centred on liberty is also bound to face internal contradictions as it promotes individualism but relies on mass co-operation in order to exist.

As the convoy idea spreads throughout the world, that problem is only likely to grow.

“I think that problem will become even more complex for them as the truck convoy model gets applied in other contexts,” he said.

So far, at least 34 countries have at least one Facebook group or Telegram channel planning a convoy, according to a list compiled by organizers and viewed by the Star. Some are in the planning stage, while others have begun.

Australians started gathering on the lawns across from the national library in the capital on Jan. 31, promising to stay to protest COVID-19 restrictions until Parliament sits on Feb. 8, according to the Canberra Times.

Jess, from New Zealand, said seeing the Canadian truckers made her realize “her country needed to hear the call to stand up.”

Last Friday, Jess, who would not give the Star her last name, posted a video to TikTok under the handle @nztruckies, calling for Kiwis to resist COVID-19 restrictions, featuring footage of Canadian flags and truckers.

After the video “went viral,” Jess said she made a Facebook group to organize a convoy to the country’s capital city of Wellington. Beginning on Sunday, two groups will depart from the top of the North Island and the bottom of the South Island and converge near the middle, where Wellington is located. Jess said she expects tens of thousands of people will participate.

But Jess and others from the South Island won’t make it all the way there. They need to be vaccinated or show proof of a negative test to ride the ferry to the North Island, home to Wellington.

That’s not deterring them. They’ll travel as far as they can, she said.

“I’ve been wanting to do something for a long time now … We want our freedom back.”

New Zealand has had travel restrictions in place for the entire COVID-19 pandemic, and plans to loosen them for its citizens this month, provided they are returning from Australia. New Zealand largely avoided outbreaks of COVID-19 until the summer of 2021.

Jess said she got the idea to centre the protest around truckers from Canada. They’ve cut a New Zealand flag in half and given one piece to the people starting in the North and the other to those coming from the South, she said.

“We’re going to join it at Wellington and we’re going to be saying ‘They tried to divide us, and now we are united again.’”

Kam Tonne, a woman from Texas, started a Facebook page in support of the Canadian convoy two weeks ago, as it was heading to Ottawa. Now in support of her idea there’s a Telegram channel and multiple Facebook groups boasting tens of thousands of followers, all trying to get a convoy going to D.C. for March 1.

Tonne, who went to cheer on the Ottawa-bound convoy in the cold when it passed near the U.S. border at Sault Ste. Marie, said the Canadian effort was key to getting like-minded Americans united, after several attempts to get a national protest against COVID-19 restrictions off the ground.

Canadian convoy organizers also recognized the global scope of the movement in a news conference Thursday.

“Our movement has grown in Canada and across the world because common people are tired of the mandates and restrictions in their lives that now seem to be doing more harm than good,” said Tamara Lich, the fundraiser head, speaking to reporters briefly.

Within Canada, a strong minority align with the protesters, suggests a poll released by Abacus Data on Thursday that surveyed 1,410 Canadian adults from Jan. 31-Feb. 2, with a margin or error of 2.7 per cent 19 times out of 20.

The poll found 32 per cent of respondents said they had “a lot in common” with the protesters, compared to 68 per cent who said they have “very little in common with how the protesters in Ottawa see things.”

It may play an important role in defining Canada’s conservative movement in the future, including whether right-wing populism will play a greater role, Caraway said.

“This is an important moment in the reflection of Canadian’s political identity,” he said. “In the U.S., the conservative movement has been displaced by a right-wing populist movement. This right-wing populist world has been developing for a long time and the internet is allowing them to find each other.”