I don’t usually link to articles at National Review Online, as
many contributors have too often veered off course for those with conservative values. However, today, Michael Brendan Dougherty
puts the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Canada in an historical perspective, and
it may be cause for a bit more optimism.
Here’s a start:
When you look up at Canada and
see truckers — most of them independent owner-operators of their rigs —
suddenly coalescing into a powerful protest movement, making the government afraid, complaining
of inflation, and getting condemned by the Teamsters, you have to realize it’s
all happened before.
Truckers have done this before.
Throughout the 1970s, trucker strikes in the U.S. led to snarled traffic for
days and weeks in the American Midwest. Truck driver J. W. Edwards felt
squeezed by the ongoing energy wars, which were raising gas prices, forcing
truckers to stop constantly to only half-refuel, and cutting into what was a
modest, but steady, living. Edwards stopped in the middle of I-80 in
Pennsylvania, got on his CB radio, and started explaining to other truckers
listening in that he’d had it. Within an hour, hundreds of other big-rig
drivers joined him, idling their vehicles and putting Pennsylvania’s main
interstate into paralysis.
Over the next few days, truckers
shut down traffic across ten states, trying to flex their muscle and let the
federal government hear their anger on the policies of fuel rationing and
reduced speed limits that were costing them their way of life. Along the way,
there were confrontations with police and the National Guard. Soon independent
truckers began forming political groups, such as the Unity Committee, that
could be present at negotiations with the Department of Transportation, or the
Fraternal Association of Steel Haulers, which directly challenged the
Teamsters, which at the time had over two million members. Deals with the
government were cut to get the trucks moving again, but further strikes of
independent truckers took off in 1979, again over speed limits and on the
Carter administration’s preference to allocate diesel to farmers over long-haul
truckers.
And now it’s happening again.
. . .
Full article is here.
UPDATE 4:15pm: Conservative Treehouse reports:
Ontario Comrade Doug Ford Promises to Crush the Rebellion,
Declares State of Emergency,
Announces Unilateral Orders
to Target Noncompliant Truckers with Arrest,
$100k Fines and License Revocation
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