Carbon Convoys: Extractive Populism and the Canadian Far Right

Abstract

This dissertation offers the first comprehensive analysis of the second phase of the pro-fossil fuel, “extractive populist” movement in Canada across a largely Alberta-based cycle of protest, from 2016 to 2022, with particular attention on the emergence and diffusion of the convoy as a signature protest tactic. Placing Marxist political ecology, Gramscian approaches to far-right populism, and conventional social movement theory into conversation, I ask what the relationship is between “corporate grassroots” campaigns, climate obstructionism, and the rise of the far right. Drawing on a corpus of data including interviews with convoy organizers and far-right activists as well as the social media output of numerous pro-fossil fuel groups, I trace the personnel, organizational, and ideological overlaps between the corporate grassroots ‘extractivist action coalition’ responsible for an increasingly robust pro-oil and gas protest movement from 2016 to 2018, and three subsequent far-right movements: Yellow Vests Canada (from late 2018 to 2019), Alberta separatism (from 2019 onward), and the “freedom” movement (from 2020 onward). In doing so, I document radicalization at multiple levels across the cycle: in movement tactics, as the convoy underwent an “upward scale shift” from the local to regional then national levels, and was converted from a tactic of demonstration into one of occupation; in ideological frames, as climate denial, nativist and Islamophobic opposition to migration, “western alienation,” opposition to public health measures, and evangelical Christianity, became linked in a chain of equivalence to the globalist conspiracy theory, which served as a “master frame” across the cycle, spreading from the far-right fringes to the mainstream; and finally, in the transformation of electoral politics in Alberta, manifested in the movement-ization of the ostensibly mainstream United Conservative Party. Ultimately, I find that corporate grassroots campaigns can play a critical role in fuelling broader cycles of protest marked by radicalization and an uneasy alliance between fossil capital and the far right. Furthermore, I find that, while extractive populism may have originated as a top-down movement, over time this changed as segments of the population, especially from within the fossilized petty bourgeoisie, became capable of relatively autonomous mobilization. Ultimately, I argue that, without Canadian fossil capital’s corporate grassroots efforts to subsidize a pro-oil and gas movement, the convoy would not likely have emerged as a hallmark of far-right populist protest in Canada.