They were an ocean apart, but watching Ottawa’s protest left Justin Giovannetti with a deep sense of dread as NZ’s convoy descended on Wellington. The remaining lessons from the Canadian experience aren’t happy ones, he writes.
This post was written before the police operation at parliament began this morning
With the steady drumbeat of protesters yelling “freedom” and the singing of the national anthem when police grew near, the scenes outside my Wellington office and those taking place in Ottawa, over 14,000km away, were strikingly similar until a few days ago. It’s no accident.
Swap out ‘God Defend New Zealand’ for ‘O Canada’, sprinkle a little snow around, and New Zealand’s capital city could easily have served as a stand-in for its Canadian counterpart over much of the last month.
The occupation of the parliamentary grounds in Wellington began as a New Zealand-wide convoy inspired by an earlier effort in Canada. Both movements are different in important ways, but their basic DNA is nearly identical. The same far-right talking points, distrust of the media and anti-vaccination messages appear at both. I wasn’t surprised when the Dominion Post reported that the fundraising website for the Wellington protest is registered in Canada. As someone who has watched both protests closely – the Canada one because I’m from there; the Wellington one because it’s now my home – I’ve been struck by the parallels and differences, between the protesters but also in national responses.
Canada’s protest began as a convoy of truckers angry at a new vaccine requirement for cross-border travel into the US. The sight of big rigs heading for the Canadian capital demanding an end to vaccine mandates gave the protest a patina of working class credibility at first. However, the trucking industry itself opposed the protest and the rhetoric shifted from mandates to conspiracy theory by the time the convoy got within sight of Ottawa.
By the time the first New Zealand truckers got together for their drive on Wellington, the Canadian protest had been in place for nearly two weeks. It’s winter in Ottawa and parliament grounds aren’t as accessible: instead of setting up a tent village, the Canadian protesters lived in their trucks, running engines all night long. Compared to what we would soon see in Wellington, they’d made themselves a permanent nuisance. In a way, Wellington’s protest has gone on so long because it hasn’t been as much of a pain as the one in Ottawa was from the start. Most people in the capital can go about their lives with little disruption, something that wasn’t true in Ottawa.
As bad as it started, the Canadian protest got worse. By early February, protesters shut down the busiest bridge between Canada and the US, a central link in the North American auto industry. Other border crossings were also blocked, as the protest made it clear that painful economic disruption was now its goal. This was what New Zealand’s protest movement was learning as the first pictures began coming in of trucks, camper vans and regular cars in the hundreds rolling south from Auckland and points north.
As I saw the footage, it became clear to me that I was about to witness in person on Wellington’s streets what Ottawa had been living with. It also seems clear to me that Wellington’s protest, with its most recent threats of rolling blockades and pain in every city unless its demands are met, is about to move to phase two of the Canadian occupation. At least in Canada, that’s the point where authorities couldn’t wait any longer and responded with batons.
What I’m left with now is that the Canadian protest seemed to shake public confidence in the state. It left people with a sense that their institutions and leaders just weren’t up to the challenge of an admittedly challenging age. The police failed to stop the protest, intelligence agencies failed to provide enough warning and political leaders failed to respond. Eventual moves, like cracking down on protest financing, only followed weeks of stinging criticism. In Canada, the capital of a G7 nation was immobilised for a month by disorganised truckers. That doesn’t happen to states that take themselves seriously.
For anyone keeping an eye on Ottawa, it was clear that the convoy heading to Wellington would be unlike the anti-vax protests we saw last year. Despite the loud warning across the Pacific, around noon on February 8, the first protesters rolled up to parliament unopposed. They then blocked the streets around the government complex and moved onto the forecourt for a long occupation. They haven’t moved since.
It seems clear at this point that it was a monumental failure by the New Zealand police and the country’s intelligence agencies. The second large intelligence failure in three years involving far-right groups. While there’s been breathless news coverage, the country largely seems to have responded with a shrug. The prime minister has sidestepped criticism by putting the focus on police and the concept of constabulary independence. The commissioner of police has faced no sustained call to explain his failure, while the country’s intelligence chief hasn’t even put out a statement.
Justin Trudeau faced criticism from his own members of parliament for mishandling the protest, despite the fact that nearly all the powers to deal with it rested with provincial leaders. He eventually used the emergencies act, Canada’s most powerful legislative tool, to take full responsibility and end the protest. Thousands of police officers were flown in from across a continent and anti-terror agencies were put to work following funding from around the world. Last month, Ottawa’s occupation was crushed by an overwhelming but surprisingly restrained police force.
In the Beehive a day after the Canadian protest ended, Jacinda Ardern said that there was no proof of foreign funding of the protest outside, only anecdotes. That’s partly a reflection of her choice to defer any investigation of foreign funding to police, who so far haven’t revealed whether they’ve looked. It’s a small but pivotal difference to me that illustrates the larger picture. There has been a lack of accountability for the protest in Wellington. No leader has yet to stand up and claim responsibility for putting an end to the occupation. After watching how Ottawa’s protest ended, I’m not sure what our leaders are waiting for. Hopefully it’s not the kind of widespread economic damage that forced Canada’s leaders to act.
As of yesterday, the encampment outside New Zealand’s parliament has outlasted its Canadian inspiration.