Having already established his cowardice by fleeing Ottawa before the arrival of the truck convoy, Justin Trudeau now proves the wisdom of the ancient observation that bullies are often cowards.  Rather than address the demand that vaccination mandates for truckers who cross the U.S. border back into Canada be suspended, Trudeau is flipping the bird and escalating, as Hank Berrien reports in the Daily Wire:

On Sunday morning, the day after the massive Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa, Canada, to protest vaccine mandates that would force unvaccinated Canadian truckers crossing into the United States to quarantine once they've returned home, the CBC reported that the Transport Minister for Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's government stated that there was "working being done" to implement interprovincial vaccine mandates for truckers.

On interprovincial vaccine mandates for truckers Transport Minister @OmarAlghabra tells @RosieBarton “there is working being done to get us there” #cdnpoli

— Travis Dhanraj (@Travisdhanraj) January 30, 2022

This is such an in-your-face escalation in defiance of an obviously popular grassroots revolt that it seems to suggest Trudeau wants to provoke a reaction that would justify harsh repressive measures.

But it also hints at something else that is relevant to the situation: class antagonism.  Specifically, it's the contempt felt by educated elites — the people now known as laptop class for their ability to function even in a lockdown — for the classes below them in the social order.  These are the people who work with their hands, who did not make the acquisition of educational credentials the focus of their first decades of life, and the people who do not share the woke values and prejudices indoctrinated into those who hold higher education diplomas granted in the last few decades.

If those proles who spend their work lives driving trucks are going to challenge Trudeau, he'll show them who's got power and who doesn't.  Writing in Wattsupwiththat, Terry Etam explains (hat tip: Clarice Feldman):

The border vaccine mandate is the straw that broke the camel's back. The convoys are the result of years of frustration. Not just frustration with this overarching elitist frame of politics, but also things like the inimitable Gerald Butts, who took to Twitter after Canada's most recent election to stand in awe of what a great job the Liberals did to hold onto power — he called it electoral efficiency; the Liberals won by focusing all their efforts on key ridings and won with the absolute minimum of national support required. That's our elite? What kind of a civic-minded person finds that a good thing? What kind of person at all finds that a good thing?

And those are just a few more tips of the iceberg. Truckers are the ultimate representation of the blue-collar voice that Ottawa shuns like the plague. They will stand for photo ops all day with Greta, but will never set foot in a cab to see what the world looks like for those whose livelihood requires them to do something other than type. ...

I don't know if it will end well; the knives are out for the truckers, and the media is doing a bizarre maneuver where they cover every complaint against the convoy but do not focus on the convoy itself. Leading media figure heads like CTV News personnel take to Twitter to mock the whole thing, guaranteeing there to be more fireworks.

Maybe if that was the media's consistent job and role, the great unwashed masses could live with it. But it's not. A few years ago, Extinction Rebellion took to the streets to blockade various streets across the country. The media was out in full force; ten protesters at a bridge in Edmonton garnered more media attention than ten thousand trucks.

No one in the media was fretting about whether emergency vehicles would get through or not, as they are with the truckers, and that is possibly the most revolting aspect of this whole media implosion — Extinction Rebellion did not care at all if no one got through. Unbelievably, the police guarded the protesters from angry citizens. Now, the trucking convoy is going to great lengths to keep channels open for emergency vehicles — and the media reports that it may not work.

I don't think the Canadian elite have a clue about the passion they have ignited in people like Gina (click for an amazing video).  More than American elites, the Canadian ruling class looks to Europe for its model, which may incline them more toward aristocratic contempt for what they see as the lower orders.

My sense is that a prairie fire has been ignited in Canada, that after two years of obediently conforming to the extreme measures taken by the Canadian government (far more draconian than in the USA), the people who keep the country running have had enough.  Etam seems to agree:

Interestingly, the more the media and the cultural elites try to disparage the convoy on whatever flimsy grounds they find, the stronger support gets. Support is coming in from the US, Quebec, BC and all over the world. When the laptop class takes to the media to stir inflammatory stories about how GoFundMe donations "may be a form of terrorist funding" if any violence or property damage occurs (I kid you not), the rate of donations goes up.

It's almost as if the people no longer believe the government and the media.  And history offers us a clue as to where that leads.

Photo credit: YouTube screen grab (cropped).