Right Stuff

One of the most remarkable political events of the strange period that was the COVID‑19 global health emergency was surely the month-long protest that played out in our capital city in January and February 2022. I was particularly absorbed in it for personal reasons, as I had close family living in the downtown and because I had lived in Ottawa during the October Crisis of 1970. I still remember the sight of soldiers on and around Parliament Hill when the War Measures Act was invoked by Pierre Elliott Trudeau.

Now, with somewhat more distance from the trucks that blockaded Wellington Street, we can see that incident as an eruption of symptoms pointing to a deeper, underlying malaise. Indeed, this is merely to state the obvious. The precise nature of the malaise will, one hopes, continue to occupy the more serious among our political and cultural analysts. Certainly, one symptom...