Convoy of the deluded

As Yogi Berra once said: “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Here we go again with another truck convoy to Ottawa by the misguided fuzzy-thinkers.

Three years ago, it was the “yellow vest” movement that inspired a convoy of trucks to leave Edmonton and head for Ottawa.

image: Pinterest

I spoke to one yellow vest protestor back then who had brought her vest to Mexico and intended to wear it on the beach as a symbol of solidarity against PM Trudeau and immigration. Wearing it would have been puzzling to the Mexican tourists, who were in the greatest numbers by far. She never did.

In 2019, the “Stand Up Canada Yellow Vest Pipeline Rally” began a truck convoy that was supposedly inspired by the French yellow vest protests. But much was lost in the translation.

Other than the wearing of yellow vests, named after the fluorescent garments that French motorists must carry in case of emergency, the Canadian version was a mishmash of slogans and vague anger.

Unlike its unclear Canadian counterpart, the French yellow vest movement was actually about something.  In France, on Nov. 17, 2018, hundreds of thousands of people occupied roads and tollbooths, blocking traffic around the country to protest a fuel tax hike. They vented anger at the broader economic policies pursued by centrist President Emmanuel Macron, who is seen as favouring the rich.

The Canadian yellow vest movement raised about $100,000. According to the group’s gofundme page, its cause was:

“Our goal is to put Western Canada’s oil field workers back to work, end the useless and redundant carbon tax, end the dependency on foreign oil and stop shipments from Saudi Arabia, see pipelines constructed to tidal water.”

However, the cause was muddled elsewhere. Yellow vest protestors in Calgary carried signs reading “Quebec please separate,” “Build pipelines” and “The UN is a scam.”  The protest against Canada’s acceptance of immigrants referred to a move by the United Nations to deal with the migration crisis out of Syria which was on a scale not seen since the Second World War.

Then Conservative leader Andrew Scheer said that signing of the UN motion would mean that “foreign entities” would be able to dictate Canadian immigration policies.  Scheer’s characterization of the pact’s legal authority was later dismissed as “factually incorrect” by a former Conservative immigration minister, Chris Alexander.

Fast forward three years and here we go again with an ill-defined “freedom convoy.”

Now Andrew Scheer tweets that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is “the biggest threat to freedom in Canada.”

Some Conservatives are falsely claiming that vaccine mandates are leading to empty grocery store shelves.

Protesters are carrying “F–k Trudeau” flags, harassing journalists and staff a homeless shelter, and desecrating national monuments.

And straight out of Trump’s la-la land, convoy organizers have written a “memorandum of understanding” calling on the Senate and the Governor General, to repeal all vaccine-related restrictions.

In shades of the January 6 storming of the U.S. Capitol a year ago, one organizer called Trudeau a “criminal” and said the goal of the convoy is to “compel the government to dissolve government.”

Like groundhogs, Canadian dark-web dwellers emerge every few years. Blinking and confused in the bright daylight, they regurgitate the slogans and vitriol seething inside them. They jump on whatever bandwagon is passing by.

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The whistleblower who got it wrong

Alana James was convinced that she found serious wrongdoings. James, a relatively new B.C. health-ministry employee in 2012, was sure that contract researchers hired by the ministry had broken the law and misused confidential medical information for personal gain.

former auditor general John Doyle. image: Vancouver Sun

James had been hired to draft and review information-sharing agreements between the ministry and the researchers. But everywhere she looked she found misconduct.

For decades, BC’s health ministry had enjoyed a collaborative relationship with academic researchers on drug safety. For example, one of these researchers Roderick MacIsaac, a PhD student at the University of Victoria, had been reviewing the effectiveness of British Columbia’s new smoking-cessation program. James was convinced that he and others had misused anonymous health records in his research.

Anonymous records such as those found in PharmaNet, stripped of personal details such as names and addresses, had been regularly shared with researchers to evaluate government programs. Investigative reporter Kerry Gold says:

“A record of every prescription dispensed or purchased in the province, PharmaNet is a researcher’s gold mine (Walrus magazine, September, 2019).”

Alana James was so convinced of wrongdoings that she told her boss, Robert Hart. Hart considered James’ allegations misguided. It was his opinion that she didn’t fully understand the complex relationships of those she was accusing, much less the nature of their work. Crucially, she had no evidence of wrongdoing.

James felt dismissed by her boss; she was told “to shut up and go away” in her words. So went over the head her boss to then auditor general John Doyle.

Doyle took James seriously -not because there was any evidence of wrongdoing but because in the previous year a high-ranking health official had pleaded guilty to charges of receiving personal benefits related to a health-records contract he’d awarded to a doctor. The ministry was still smarting from the scandal.

Sensing the possibility of more misconduct, Doyle’s office asked the ministry of health to look into James’s claims. Suspicions from the auditor general gave credibility to James allegations.

Margaret MacDiarmid, the new minister of health, only a day into her job, held a press conference on September 6, 2012, and said that RCMP investigation was underway. This was a big surprise to the RCMP because there was no investigation underway. However, MacDiarmid’s announcement added more weight to James’ claims.

Caught up in the zealous fervour that gripped government, investigators accused Robert Hart, Alana James’ boss, of wrongfully receiving money. Hart didn’t know what they were talking about but he was suspended immediately and escorted from the building. Eventually, he and six others were fired including the student Roderick MacIsaac.

Humiliated, MacIsaac withdrew from his PhD program at University of Victoria. In January, 2013, the introverted forty-six-year-old who had put off his studies to take care of his aging mother through her final stages of terminal cancer took his life.

To get to the bottom of the matter, the government commissioned a investigation by the ombudsperson. The report, called Misfire, began in 2015, took nineteen months to complete and cost $2.41 million. It found no wrongdoing by anyone but by this time lives and reputations had been ruined in the wake of James’ wild claims.

“The episode remains one of the most sensational cases of wrongful dismissal in Canadian history, and it was driven by a set of assumptions that were unfounded and at no point tested—until it was too late,” says Gold.

Footnote: John Doyle completed his term as auditor general in 2013 and went back home to Australia. He hired Alana James, a trained nurse, to care for his chronically ill wife. After the death of his wife, Doyle and James married in Australia where she began graduate work and research at the University of Melbourne.