the freedom convoy: class disruption in a digital age
The 2022 Freedom Convoy is perhaps the most misunderstood event in Canada’s recent history. It should not be dismissed.
This was a Canadian crisis and it was not just about vaccine mandates and government overreach. It was about belonging, memory and who still counts as the center of Canada. The Freedom Convoy marked a rupture in the country’s sociopolitical order, exposing fractures not just in public health policy but in deeper structures of class, identity and media representation.
Mainstream coverage focused on legality, public nuisance and extremist symbols. These were real factors, but they flattened the story, missing the convoy’s central truth that it was a digitally mediated class revolt, a symptom of deeper structural inequalities in Canada’s social order (*Drake, 2022).
For much of the twentieth century, rural and small-town Canada provided the country’s cultural default. The trucker, the farmer, the hockey parent were archetypes of national character. But Canada has urbanized, diversified and embraced technocratic governance. The rural working class no longer sits at the center of Canadian identity.
The convoy made this displacement visible. Participants were largely drawn from rural, white, working-class communities. Trucking, once a proud pillar of blue-collar labor, is now under structural threat from automation. The looming promise of autonomous vehicles sends an unmistakable message: your work and your way of life are expendable.
When Prime Minister Trudeau called the Freedom Convoy a “fringe minority,” many embraced the label. Their frustration was not only about mandates but about losing cultural ground. The previous and highly publicised firing of Don Cherry from Hockey Night in Canada, for remarks linking sport, immigration, and national identity, became shorthand for a broader feeling that Canada had moved on without them. Layered over this identity crisis was the rise of increasing digital governance during the pandemic. Vaccine passports, contact-tracing apps and financial sanctions under the Emergencies Act confirmed for many that society was moving toward a structure of total visibility.
The Emergencies Act was a watershed moment, invoked for the first time in Canadian history. The shadow of Pierre Trudeau’s 1970 invocation of the War Measures Act loomed large: once again, a Canadian prime minister (ironically, his own son) resorted to emergency powers in response to civil unrest. Its announcement came the same day weapons caches and conspiratorial plots were discovered at the Coutts border crossing in Alberta, transforming what had been billed as a populist protest into a national security crisis.
The convoy’s originator, James Bauder, had circulated a “Memorandum of Understanding” calling for the dissolution of the Canadian government through the Governor General, a constitutional impossibility, and framed the mission as divinely ordained, dubbing it “Operation Bear Hug.” He and his wife livestreamed their drive from Calgary to Ottawa, turning their cross-country journey into a recruitment campaign.
As the movement grew, far-right extremists, QAnon groups and accelerationists joined in, inspired by the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot. This convergence of religious fervor, economic grievance, and radical politics created a volatile mix. Canada was forced to confront questions about free speech, policing, government overreach, media and the durability of liberal institutions.
Mainstream media largely cast the convoy as a public order event dominated by extremists. While the presence of hate symbols was both real and troubling, this framing obscured the broader social forces driving the protest. Populist media reframed the event as a righteous working-class uprising, while social media fractured the narrative further. Social media and livestreams from the cabs of trucks bypassed editorial filters entirely, producing a parallel reality where participants were protagonists, not threats. The convoy’s leaders became household names. James Bauder, Pat King, Tamara Lich, and Chris Barber, who were all arrested and charged. Scholars have since argued that the Convoy highlighted a fragmented information ecosystem, where mis- and disinformation were amplified through social media platforms (*Laidlaw, 2022).
Bringing big rigs into Ottawa and blockading key trade routes was both symbolic as well as tactical. It inverted Canada’s spatial hierarchy: rural, peripheral voices occupied the urban core. The trucks became moving billboards of dissent, their horns a sound installation that turned the capital into a stage and forced the nation to watch.
Beneath the slogans and memes ran a deeper current: fear of erasure. To be “essential” is to matter; to be automated is to vanish. The convoy was not so much a protest but a refusal to quietly recede from the center of national life.
And perhaps its most enduring impact is epistemic. The convoy revealed that Canada no longer shares a single narrative about reality. Legacy media, populist outlets, and algorithmically personalized feeds each produced their own version of the convoy, and citizens chose which one to believe. For some, it was a freedom movement. For others, a proto-insurrection. Truth became subjective, reinforced by algorithms that privilege emotional resonance over verification.
The Freedom Convoy was a signal. It showed that the battle is no longer only about policy or class, but about meaning itself. It was a struggle over what it means to belong: to be central rather than peripheral, to be seen, to be Canadian.
The language of self-reliance, suspicion of central authority, and fierce pride in work were cornerstones of the convoy’s culture. These values shaped an older understanding of Canada: pragmatic, hardworking, skeptical of intellectual pretension but deeply invested in fairness and community.
Those values erupted in public, amplified by trucks, horns and livestreams, but also by the fear that this way of life was slipping out of the national narrative. The convoy was an attempt to drag that identity back to center stage, to make it visible again, if only by sheer force of presence.
But the stage itself is fractured. No single story could contain what the convoy was. For some, it was a freedom movement, the last stand of working-class autonomy. For others, it was a dangerous flirtation with authoritarianism and conspiratorial thinking. The convoy revealed that Canadians already inhabit different realities, each with its own heroes, villains, and mythologies.
This is the unresolved question the convoy leaves behind: who gets to define Canada? Which histories are remembered, which identities are centered, which futures are imagined? These questions can no longer be settled by institutions or elections alone. The convoy was a culture renegotiating itself in public. It turned identity from something inherited into something fought over.
Meaning has become something negotiated in real time, accelerated by a media environment that hardens positions and makes reconciliation harder.
What remains now are images: news photos, memes, livestream clips, police bodycam footage. These will form the archive through which the convoy is remembered, argued over and reinterpreted. They are not neutral. They are frames, choices, interpretations. They are the raw material from which Canada will continue to make and remake the meaning of that moment.
* Drake: So-called “Freedom Convoy” is a symptom of a deeply unequal society
