When big rigs blockaded Ottawa in February 2022, Americans as much as Canadians were responsible.
Two American models for political action, The TEA Party and the 2021 Capitol Riot, were replicated, with the help of American money, in the Ottawa blockade.
TEA Party demonstration, Texas, 2009
Texas oil money[1] played large in both the TEA Party and the Ottawa riot.
By copying the American Petroleum Institute’s “Energy Citizens” campaign,[2] Canada’s oil industry had already – before Ottawa – built itself a social movement. This was easy in that Canada oil long has been a kind of annex of US oil. A few historical points.
Milestones in the Annexing by US Corporations of Canada Oil
- 1967 – Dallas-based Sun Oil Company (eventually Sunoco) made the first development of the Athabasca Oil Sands field in Alberta.
- 1978 – Houston?-based Halliburton oil-field-services company established its Halliburton Group Canada company, at a Calgary, Alberta office.
- 1999 – Houston based Exxon, already holding large Canadian oil-field assets,[3] placed its executive Ron Brenneman as head of the Canadian-government-linked Petro Canada, which itself has large oil-field holdings in and near Alberta.
- 2013 – in Montreal, a Halliburton Group Canada vice-president urged gathered Canadian oil-industry lobbyists to drink from champagne flutes of Halliburton’s patented “fracking” fluid, “CleanStim.” .[4]
- 2014 – The biggest non-Canadian leaseholder in the northern Alberta oil sands isthe Koch family from Wichita, Kansas, USA.[5]
That is, the Canadian oil industry that domestic truckers long have depended on is itself dependent on American capital.
In 2019, from Red Deer, Alberta, a pro-oil-industry truck caravan wheeled out, with a distinctly American tinge – “marbled with white nationalists, climate change deniers, and anti-immigration activists”[6] –bound for demonstration in Ottawa. Participants protested for two days on Parliament Hill.[7] The result was that Trudeau acknowledged participants’ “frustration, real challenged and real anxiety.” But warned that protest “must not be co-opted by those who spew intolerant and divisive language.”
Despite or because of this government warning, the Ottawa caravan of 2022 displayed distinctly more signs of belligerence, intolerance, divisive intent, and US control.
Alberta is called “the Texas of Canada” and many Albertans want to be Americans, embracing “Western Exit” (Wexit).
Wexit founder Peter Downing, who frequently wears a Trumper-style cap, told a crowd in Edmonton,
“Anybody who stands in the way of western self-determination, Alberta self-determination, you’re our enemy and we’re going to run you over.”
Wexit founder Peter Downing
Tamara Lich had worked for an oil-and-gas-services company with offices in San Antonio, Texas, and in Calgary.[8] Doubtless using contacts from her employment, Lich became a fundraiser, first for Wexit and then for the 2022 Ottawa demonstration.
Court artist’s rendering Tamara Lich in shirt emblazoned “I Love Canadian Oil and Gas” Briarpatch February 19, 2022
This way, for Ottawa, Lich could tap a pool of truckers and non-truckers that was ready-formed previous to outbreak of Covid-19.
As such, signs against Covid mandates was small potatoes. The big “stake” for organizers was a bloodless coup – to force Canada to change from prime-minister/parliament government to coalition government. Namely, organizers demanded in writing that Trudeau cede power to a coalition that would include demonstration organizers. Insurgents’ action, consistently illegal and frequently violent, lasted 21 days.
This bold, seditious action apparently depended on ability of planners to fool truckers into doing their bidding.
A journalist spotted this. Non-mainstream, but well sourced in the trucking community, TruckNews columnist James Menzies [9]wrote,
“Truckers who participated in a cross-country convoy culminating in protest at Parliament Hill this weekend have been duped into believing the convoy was about them.
“It never was,” Menzies continued. “It wasn’t about your rights to continue crossing the border unvaccinated. And by the time the convoy rolled through Ontario it had already fully morphed into something much bigger – and more dangerous – than what truckers were ever told.
“I raised alarms early,” continued Menzies, “in a blog ‘The murky matter of protests and the donations that drive them,’ when I noticed who was behind the convoy. These weren’t truckers organizing a GoFundMe…on the way to $8.5 million….”
Early on, Ottawa Chief Peter Sloly announced,
“Highly organized, (the demonstrators are) well-funded by a “significant element from the United States”
Forty-four percent of raised demonstration money came from Americans.[10] As such, the record suggests “Ottawa” was an effort to provoke fresh Trumpist outrage in the US at a time when Trump had slid in polls. [11]
No Towing
The three-week-long occupation would have been impossible if tow trucks had removed big rigs that were parked illegally.
Occupation organizer Pat King
Apparently with advance knowledge, organizer Pat King told reporters, “There’s no tow trucks in Canada that will touch (the big rigs).”[12]
Sure enough, Canadian tow companies en masse declined lucrative contracts to tow big rigs.[13]
In Ottawa and at a related demonstration in western-Canada, tow companies received terrorist threats not to tow. Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly said,
“They have been threatened– direct threats to harm their employees and their business – through some sophisticated online activities.[14]
Besides threats, part of the sophisticated online activities likely was bribe offers to owners of tow companies from the millions of dollars available in “support” funds for demonstration. For Ottawa-area tow owners, bribes would be small potatoes, nearly routine.[15]
In May 2020 in Ottawa, a police operation seized a tow truck, drugs, weapons, and cash while arresting members of four organized crime groups engaged directly in the towing industry.
In conclusion, the message, I think, is don’t be fooled – as were the hundreds of big-rig drivers – by power plays disguised as “free speech.” Read between the lines of mainstream news accounts. Imagine something big being concealed, and look for evidence.
[1] I.e. the oil industrialist fortune from the Texas-Oklahoma-Kansas petroleum belt..
[2] Using the name “Canada’s Energy Citizens,” the oil industry claimed to “defend our very way of life” from “sinister forces” from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to foreign environmentalists to Hollywood celebrities.
[3] At the time of the Ottawa demonstration, Canada oil was fully 35 percent of Exxon’s total oil holdings.
[5] Washington Post, March 20, 2014
[6] National Post, Canada, February 15, 2019
[7] No to the carbon tax; no to Bill C-69, designed to overhaul the review of energy projects; no to Bill C-48, which looks to ban crude-carrying tankers along B.C.’s coast. And there was a resounding yes to the idea of building pipelines that would carry Canadian oil to tidewater.
[8] Offices of STEP Energy Services Ltd. USA and Step Energy Services Ltd., respectively A STEP news release says,
“In the U.S. STEP offers coiled tubing, fracturing, and cased hole and open hole wireline services in the Permian Basin and Eagle Ford Shale Play in Texas, the Bakken Shale Play in North Dakota, the Haynesville Shale in Louisiana, the Midcontinent region, and Kansas….In Canada, STEP provides deep-capacity coiled tubing and hydraulic fracturing services in the Montney, Duvernay, Viking, and Deep Basin. (fields).”
[9] TruckNews, January 30, 2022
[10] Database of the non-profit Distributed Denial of Secrets (DDos)
[11] Associated Press, February 17, 2022
[12] Ottawa Public Broadcasting, February 17, 2022
[13] Toronto Star, February 8, 2022
[14] Canadian Broadcast System, Feb 11, 2022 . One likely result of the sophisticated online activity came in western Canada, where, WesternStandard Web site reported,[14]
“TnT Towing in Lethbridge said they had been contacted, (reporting)
‘We don’t know who it was that called, but we don’t want to get involved.’”
One small towing company in southern Alberta said
“We’ve had calls from locals who won’t identify themselves asking if we plan to send tow trucks. When I told them ‘no’ they said ‘good (you’ll continue to receive business).”
[15] The 2015 Montreal inspector general’s report documented organized crime’s ability to curtail normal competition in seeking government contracts for the rental and operation of tow trucks.