I went out shortly after 3:30 pm February 4th, ultimately to meet my wife down at her office in time to lug her laptop back home. Toronto Police Services had issued a notice that they were closing College St. west to University and University south from there in anticipation of tomorrow’s trucker protest which is supposed to assemble at seven points outside the city and then roll into the downtown core to Queen’s Park at noon on February 5th. Based on that info, I walked along Bloor to Yonge, and down to College, thinking I’d document the early stages of the protest.
South of Wellesley, I met a surprisingly long line of protesters snaking north. However, they weren’t protesting vaccination mandates; they were protesting the Olympics and calling for a boycott. It struck me as ironic that on my way to scout out a ridiculous shitfest, the first thing I should stumble upon is a group with legitimate grievances. That raises the obvious philosophical question: how can I tell the difference between a legitimate and an illegitimate grievance? Since no one in the history of philosophy has been able to crack that nut, don’t expect much from me either.
After the protest had passed, I walked down to College St. then west in front of Toronto Police Headquarters where they had parked a number of horse trailers. It was already bitterly cold and the temperature was dropping. You could hear the horses stamping their hooves inside the trailers.
I continued through the Bay St. intersection and on to University where a lone protester stood in the middle of the intersection. He looked a little ragged, possibly homeless, and I wondered what the hell anyone would be doing alone there. Meanwhile the police ignored him; they were busy setting up buses and cars to block the way south. I wondered if I should approach the protester, worried that if I got into a drawn out conversation with a nutcase, I’d be late getting down to meet my wife. When I got closer, I realized that the protester was indeed a nutcase, but not the sort of nutcase I was expecting. It was the Touchi Artist guy who’s always hanging out at Dundas Square and has posed for photographs on countless previous occasions. I took a few more shots of him holding his sign which, among other things, tells the truckers to go home, and then we chatted for a couple minutes. He told me about his tai chi and then I said good-bye and headed south.
By the time I made it to the office, my fingers were numb and painful, like my toes when I was kid and having too much fun skating to recognize that my toes were turning into ice cubes. My wife came down to the lobby and we walked together up Bay St., pausing by the steam vent outside the Seven Eleven at Richmond where I photographed a photographer photographing me through the steam. The further up we walked, the louder the honking got. At Bloor, I said I’d kick myself, coming out like this with my camera and then ignoring the main event, so my wife walked east and I walked west, still carrying her laptop for her. And I worried that my fingers were turning numb again.
At University, I learned that the source of the honking was a convoy of farm tractors that had motored into the city and parked themselves on the stretch of Queen’s Park between the ROM and the Faculty of Law on the west side and the Gardiner Ceramic Museum, Annesley Hall, and Emmanuel College on the east side—all my almae matres within easy reach. It turns out the primary source of the honking was a white van tucked in with all the tractors. There was a kid inside and he was leaning on the horn, no responsible adults in sight. Probably his parent(s) encouraged it. Great, I thought, teach them when they’re young; raise a whole new generation of psychopaths. In fact, there were a lot of kids sitting in tractor cabs while their dads gathered in the street for what looked like a tailgate party that had gotten out of hand.
I walked down the length of the tractors, sometimes ducking in between them to photograph signs, and found that the line went down to the cenotaph at the north end of the park. The police had positioned a bus and several cars across the road there and no one could get any further south towards the legislature. There, I swapped my 35 mm lens for something longer, freezing my fingers in the process. It seems the truckers in Ottawa are bringing Ottawa weather to Toronto. A man with a bullhorn shouted sound bytes about how we should all be ashamed of ourselves, letting communists dictate to us how we live. And all the media gathered round a man who was no less unhinged than the Touchi Artist standing alone on the far side of Queen’s Park. Shot a few more yahoo redneck proto-fascist signs, then left.
Walking along Bloor, there was a guy playing steel drums on the corner and people passed him, smiling or dancing, and dropping coins. Just one city block and you couldn’t hear the honking anymore. It’s highly suggestive. These people aren’t as significant as they think they are. Why then do they seem to have an outsized presence? I think the clever exploitation of social media platforms may have something to do with it. I think, too, irresponsible mainstream media bear some responsibility, flitting like moths to a noisy flame. They feed a vacuous news cycle and nothing can be more vacuous than these protesters, as evidenced by the man with the bullhorn, letting his college words spill from a grade school mind.
As an afterword, I see that GoFundMe will not be distributing monies to the truckers as it violates their terms of use. Donors can get a refund. In answer, organizers have switched to a “Christian” fund raising platform endorsed by Donald Trump, just in case you had any doubts about how to politically position the “Freedom Convoy.” As a matter of truth in advertising, they need to change the first word in their name. Let me suggest another “F” word. Also seven letters.
