The convoy that shut down Ottawa made for a stark contrast with the lesser-known convoy that occurred eight months earlier. Where Mike Otto’s demonstration had been marked by a rare willingness to look honestly at the genocide that birthed our nation, this new convoy embodied an aggressive presentism—a refusal to contemplate any uncomfortable truths, whether Canada’s violent history, or the reality that Covid was still surging (many convoyers got sick), or the planetary warming they were helping along by idling their massive trucks for a month (the convoy’s unofficial symbol was the smuggled-in jerry can filled with gas). In less than a year, we had gone from the We Stand in Solidarity Convoy, a recognition and embrace of enmeshment, to the Freedom Convoy, a rejection of interdependence in favor of hyper-individual independence. Clearly, a subset of my country wanted their guilt-free fantasies back—and they would hold the rest of us hostage to get them.

Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, loc. 867