Our long international nightmare is over: The Ambassador Bridge border crossing linking the United States and Canada is back open again after Canadian law enforcement authorities quietly pushed aside or hauled off the small gaggle of anti-vaccine protesters who had been blocking traffic for about a week.
It didn't take much. According to the NBC News account, police officers made "25 to 30 arrests" and seized five vehicles. Also credited with helping to resolve the situation: It's freaking February, and apparently only the most devoted of anti-vaccine activists were willing to weather a light weekend snowfall in Canadian February.
Another unlikely hero of the siege: "Lawyers for auto parts makers," who successfully convinced a judge that blockading approximately $400 million worth of U.S.-Canadian trade per day was super not cool. Like, really super not cool.
So that's that. Road got cleared, nobody got pepper sprayed or shot with rubber bullets, a whopping total of five (5) vehicles were towed off and none of it required any of the things that would probably have happened had the protests been on the U.S. side of the border, which if Trump were still in charge would probably have ended with Air Force strikes on key regional diners or whatever. No drama whatsoever.
The uneventful clearing of the Ambassador Bridge protest may or may not do much to quell demands by American conservatives that similar anti-vax, anti-mask blockades happen in this country. Fox News in particular has been giving the Canadian protests lavish attention, and national Republican figures like Sen. Ted Cruz have boosted the protests as part of their larger demands that democratic government do not a damn thing to help stave off pandemic deaths. But there's still no sign that demands for American anti-vaxxers to block traffic and stall trade are gaining much traction.
Calls for a "trucker" blockade or other mass action targeting the Super Bowl fizzled mightily as well, on Sunday. While small bands of anti-vax protesters made their displeasure known, there was no significant effort made to block traffic into the event. And, if you think about it for a moment, the reasons for this are fairly clear.
For starters, conservatives have spent the last half decade arguing that if protesters are standing between your car and a place your car wants to be, you are allowed to straight-up run them over rather than taking an alternate route.
Second, any supposed "trucker" protests in the United States might quickly run afoul of that most ingenious of American law enforcement funding operations: civil forfeiture rules that allow local police to simply take your stuff and be done with it. An American trucker blockade of an important artery through town is perhaps as likely as not to result in that town's police force driving around in repainted semis for the next few years.
Third, American police forces respond to protests not with handcuffs, but with repurposed military vehicles, "less-than-lethal" weapons that regularly inflict permanent and semipermanent injuries, and rooftop snipers. We have all seen what happens to protesters in America who block roads. If you're carrying guns, they let you do it for approximately as long as you like, and if you're not carrying guns, you get the fullest pseudomilitary response local officials can muster.
Nonviolent "trucker" protests will not be a thing in the United States. Conservative protests in this country consist of packs of barely organized militia members loaded down with weapons and ammunition, daring police and government officials to respond. Whatever vehicles they take with them are usually incidental; it's the guns that do the "protesting."
Fox News guests and Republican candidates may titillate audiences with dreams of closing major U.S. arteries in response to President Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci and various other public officials rudely suggesting things at them, but you've got to be incandescently, almost transcendentally white to have been watching Fox News for the last half-decade and still decide that you can stand in the middle of an American street and nothing bad will happen to you. I'm not sure anyone who watches Fox News or listens to Ted Cruz has that much trust.
So no, I don't think the Canadian version is going to take hold here. The American anti-vaccine movement has been going in a different direction, with Proud Boys and other white nationalist groups attempting to commandeer an otherwise haphazard, dizzyingly conspiracy-addled movement for their own purposes; much of the rest of the Republican anti-government movement has skipped past peaceful protests to simply threaten officials outright, as on Jan.. 6. American anti-government forces may have played a large part in funding the Canadian protests, but if it didn't work in Canada it's not going to fare any better here.
We're talking about very, very small groups of protesters to begin with—and more of the general public seems to be losing patience with the anti-vaxxers by the day.
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