AndrewLawton:

Call them the honks heard ‘round the world. The convoy that rolled across Canada in January before making downtown Ottawa the freest spot in the country sent a message about much more than vaccine mandates.

In a country whose pandemic restrictions have been defined by complacency and acceptance rather than resistance, the convoy was the moment at which Canadians decided they’d had enough.

While I initially hesitated to do a post-mortem of a protest which, at the time I’m writing this, is still ongoing, I also can’t ignore that regardless of how it ends, the convoy represents a turning point in Canada which I hope will be an enduring one.

There are two primary reasons for this. The first is practical. Within a couple of weeks of the convoy showing up in Ottawa, half the provinces in the country had put forth plans to lift their vaccine passports. No one seems to buy the claims from those provinces’ premiers that the convoy had nothing to do with the decisions. If you listened closely you could hear the honking all the way from Ottawa as they made their respective announcements all within a few days of each other.

The second reason is more fundamental. The convoy was not only a turning point in the pandemic, but also in the country’s history. 

Canada is not a nation born from revolution, so we don’t have the rebellious spirit baked into our DNA like our American cousins and those elsewhere in the world. We didn’t need a 1773 tea party to have a 2022 convoy, clearly. While “better late than never” certainly applies, I also think the Canadian uprising came at the moment it was needed most.

The convoy effect wasn’t just marked by government capitulation, but also citizen cooperation. The divisions governments have been creating along the lines of vaccination status, mask-wearing, and the essential/non-essential divide have prevented Canadians from understanding it’s the state which is the barrier to freedom, not fellow citizens.

I remarked in a past column that COVID has made strange bedfellows of libertarians and social conservatives on things like church closures and the state seeking to replace choice with mandates. The coalition created by the convoy is both deeper and broader. Libertarians, populists, disaffected Green, Liberal and NDP voters, and social conservatives, and those who’ve never been politically engaged enough to find a tribe are gathering against a backdrop of 18-wheelers.

The old line from Margaret Thatcher comes to mind, about her 80 per cent friend not being her 20 per cent enemy. Too often in politics, especially on the political right, we let the differences define us instead of the similarities, to the expense of our opponents.

The challenge with broad coalitions is that they might only work for narrow purposes – in this case, putting an end to vaccine mandates and passports. But I would argue we are on the precipice of a reshaping of the political discourse that isn’t based on the traditional left-right divide.

That the People’s Party of Canada managed to triple its share of the votes from 2019 to 2021 is noteworthy, but all the more so if you take a look at the people showing up to the fledgling party’s rallies. It wasn’t just a group of disgruntled former Conservative voters, but a coalition much like the one the convoy has enjoyed.

As government pandemic policy grew more and more indiscriminate about which individuals and sectors were being targeted, the number of people motivated to rally behind the freedom cause grew.

There might be some disagreements within the coalition crowd about foreign policy, Indigenous issues, or climate change, but there was near-unanimous support for freedom.

Not a libertine, amoral freedom – but a liberty based on individual choice and bodily autonomy.

Given how terms like ‘pro-choice’ and ‘bodily autonomy’ have been historically claimed by supporters of abortion rights, I should point out that the libertarian resistance to pandemic restrictions emboldens, rather than challenges, the pro-life movement.

Life and liberty go hand in hand – life without liberty is unfulfilled, and liberty without life is impossible. 

The “my body, my choice” catchphrase has always been disingenuous because abortion involves another body in a way that mandatory vaccination doesn’t, so standing up for the individual and the