HAUNTING HONKING

  Rex Murphy: I know that with such fast-flowing events as the Conservative leadership race, the Liberal budget, and of course Joe Biden’s matchless press conferences — there will someday be a book called Profiles in Incoherence — that the dark hours of the truckers protest are receding from memory. The Emergencies Act has — I think — been lifted, and people are slowly repairing their spirits from that trying episode. Still, we are not completely out from under its shadow. To borrow a phrase, famous from another context, “it haunts us still.”
   It was, I know, historic in the full sense, this unprecedented attempt by gangs of wild truckers to “overthrow the government” of Canada. I cannot recall a time of equal national tensions and anxiety, when all Canadians listening to their radios, or checking in with friends and neighbours, awaited the dreaded possibility that their government might fall to the honking hordes of the Bouncy Castle Revolution.
   Everywhere people clustered in their kitchens, in coffee shops, at Walmart, exchanging the latest news from the front, astonished and alarmed that a country so tranquil, so composed and temperate throughout almost all its history, was now facing a desperate challenge to its very existence.