Trudeau vs truckers: a head-on collision

Two-and-a-half centuries ago in 2015 I had a video call with a Canadian friend who lives in my hometown of Toronto. As we spoke, she was putting together a Middle Eastern spice box for the Syrian refugee family she’d sponsored through her daughter’s school, carefully printing the labels in Arabic. Canada had recently committed to accepting 25,000 refugees, compared with the UK’s 10,000, which we both agreed was stingy. I explained to her that although there were lots of charities and refugee initiatives here, the public attitude was different. Not xenophobic, I insisted, just less precious. None of the parents at my son’s school, as far as I knew, were organising welcoming committees for the Syrians, let along putting together spice boxes. Also, I added, no one here would be calling them ‘New Britons’.

‘What will you call them?’ she asked.

‘Foreigners.’

My Canadian friend gasped and touched her throat.

‘So do people call you a foreigner then?’

‘Yes,’ I said, ‘and it’s fine.’

‘What? How?!’

‘Because that’s what I am.’

In Canada the term ‘immigrant’ has long been viewed as an outdated pejorative. Not as bad as the n-word or the c-word, which uttered even in the most high-minded public context will get you fired almost immediately, but definitely worse than other expletives. A few weeks later when the first planeload of Syrian refugees touched down on Canadian soil, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was waiting at the airport. He gave them each a puffer jacket and a hug, baptising them as New Canadians.

I offer you this anecdote first as evidence of the astonishing and thoroughly earnest decency of most Canadians — a culture of people who, by and large, really do see immigrants not as suspicious foreigners but newly arrived people looking for a better life — but also as a roundabout explanation for the alarming spectacle that is currently raging on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, where an enormous demonstration led by a convoy of angry truckers has gathered to protest Covid vaccine mandates.