Participatory Political Violence: The Sensorial Toll of the Truckers’ Convoy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In February 2022, people local to downtown Ottawa were caught in the grip of a three-week alt-right occupation that called for the end of public health measures—at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic—and the overthrow of parliament—in a government town. As hundreds of protestors in heavy-duty transportation trucks rolled into Ottawa, blockaded the streets, and with the help of a well-funded, off-site logistical network, settled in with food and fuel, their demands literally idled in the impassable streets. Their populist message of “freedom” was supported by a predominantly white male-dominated group of protestors. Idling their diesel engines and blaring air horns day and night outside the House of Commons, and nearby Centretown neighbourhood, the self-described “Freedom Convoy,” repurposed public nuisances into tactics of the alt-right. This article examines how the Convoy used such tactics to stage a sensorium of participatory political violence in the nation’s capital. It telescopes on Centretown residents, Zexi Li and Victoria De La Ronde, who testified as part of the Public Order Emergencies Commission about the harassment they endured during the occupation. Their testimony reveals how decibel-breaking noise, and noxious diesel fumes, not only overtook the streets but also entered their dwellings, filling their homes with commotion and sulfur, making it impossible to seek respite from the convoy. The airing of populist grievances through coordinated acts of honking and idling speaks to an ontological shift in political violence in Canada toward participatory performances of insolence that ultimately mask broader extremist agendas.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".