John Robson: The Contrast in How Striking Federal Workers Were Treated Compared to the Truckers’ Convoy

A strike captain leads members of the Public Service Alliance of Canada in a chant as they picket outside Place du Portage in Gatineau, Que., on April 28, 2023. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

Commentary

It’s just as well that striking federal public servants didn’t use trucks to block roads, interfere with critical infrastructure, and cause Canadians major and lasting inconvenience if not harm. Someone might have said something. For instance, “seize their bank accounts.”

Just kidding. Not about blocking roads, etc. Those things really happened. But the only drawback if PSAC had used trucks is that it would have made the contrast that much more awkward. Or would it? These people don’t embarrass easily.

As the Ottawa Citizen noted on April 18, PSAC released a list of “just over 250 picket line locations across the country” that “included government offices, Service Canada centres, offices of members of Parliament, correctional facilities, Royal Canadian Mounted Police stations, military bases, and border crossings.” The PM did not declare it unacceptable.

Then on April 23, PSAC national president Chris Aylward said: “We’re trying to have picket lines across the country in some strategic locations where it’s going to impact the government, and we’re actually going to be escalating those actions – whether that’s ports across the country, or anything like that. It has a very wide-ranging impact on Canadians and the Canadian economy as well.”

Had Tamara Lich said it, she’d have gotten handcuffed. These guys got raises.

Someone was bound to point to the contrast between how Official Canada treated striking public sector workers and the truckers’ convoy. And someone will again next time a disruptive left-wing protest is handled with kid gloves or payouts. But if our political masters saw such remarks coming, or even noticed them when they arrived, and they may not have since they aren’t exactly well-endowed with Robbie Burns’ gift of seeing themselves as others do, they evidently dismissed the remarks as only raised by the sort of deplorables they regard with pre-emptively icy contempt anyway.

The prime minister eventually, this February, professed to regret pre-emptively calling the Freedom Convoy a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” He told reporters, “I wish I had phrased that differently.” But the real question isn’t the wording, it’s the thoughts, emotions, and conduct behind it.

The truckers, after all, wanted more freedom. The public servants wanted more free money. And the response of the state was dramatically different in the two cases.

Trudeau famously refused to meet with the convoy, which was itself divisive because a major issue was that they felt unheard in Ottawa. And while he didn’t meet with striking public servants either, he kept insisting he was going to meet their demands in large measure. Indeed, behind the theatrics of oppressed proletarian office workers with cushy secure jobs squaring off, fists and jaws clenched under militant red banners, against a prudent fiscally responsible government under partisan red banners, both sides were basically in agreement that the public sector isn’t yet big enough or well enough paid and never will be.

Anybody who follows these things knew that, after ritual posturing, the unions would get virtually everything they asked for. They’re Trudeau’s kind of people, and the system looks after its own. But he needed the “cover” of having apparently yielded to “fairness” and union determination rather than marching into battle under a white flag.

As for those who are not his kind of people, it is worth recalling that his convoy insults were not an isolated incident. Previously, on a French-language Quebec program, he had called opponents of compulsory vaccination (in translation, but true to the original) “extremists … who don’t believe in science, they’re often misogynists, also often racists.” Sunny ways indeed.

He added, “It’s a very small group of people, but they take up some space.” And so “This leads us, as a leader and as a country, to make a choice: Do we tolerate these people?”

Clearly not. “We” are too tolerant.

I’m not saying he’s about to start jailing Canadians for “picking quarrels and provoking trouble” as in the Chinese communist dictatorship he incautiously admitted to admiring. Even though his internet censorship bill will, we may confidently predict, basically target unacceptable bigots who “take up space” that could furnish Sprachensraum for pleasant sophisticates inclined to vote Liberal.

What I am saying is that what you hear is what you get with Trudeau. His reflexive, sincere belief is that that everyone who disagrees with him is a knuckle-dragging bigot with twisted motives. If prompted to soften the message he will concede that there are exceptions who have been led astray by the devils among us. But then he will draw his shining sword and smite the evil-doers with an Emergencies Act.

There’s a maxim variously rendered and attributed that apparently originates with the eminently forgettable Peruvian coup-leader/President Oscar R. Benavides, a classically sleazy rather than ideologically maniacal tin-pot dictator: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”

Hola, amigos. Help yourselves to the Treasury.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.