The ‘Freedom Convoy’, Injunctions, and Extractivism: Understanding the Implications for Land Defenders and Social Movements

In the aftermath of the ‘Freedom Convoy’ and the blockades in Ottawa, Windsor, and Coutts, Alberta, crucial questions remain unanswered about the connections between an ascendant far-right and the broader project of extractivist settler-colonialism in so-called Canada. Join us on May 19th to explore the implications for Indigenous land and water defenders and left social movements.

Jacob McLean will share research on the continuities between the United We Roll Convoy and the recent Freedom Convoy and their ties to white supremacy and extractive industries.

Anne Spice will draw connections to Indigenous land defence and invocations of critical infrastructure.

Irina Ceric will investigate how the use of injunctions against convoy organizers replicates rather than challenges the repressive impact of this legal tool.

BIOS: Jacob McLean is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change at York University, studying the conjuncture of the climate crisis and the rise of far right populism, with a focus on the Yellow Vests Canada movement. Anne Spice is a Tlingit member of Kwanlin Dun First Nation. She has been actively supporting Indigenous land re-occupations since 2015, and her work dwells in the intersection of Indigenous geographies, histories and futures of Indigenous resistance, poetry and art. She lives in Tkaronto, where she is a professor of Indigenous environmental knowledges in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies at X University. Irina Ceric holds an Osgoode post-doc with “Jurisdiction Back: Infrastructure Beyond Extractivism”, a SSHRC-funded team project led by Dayna Nadine Scott and Heidi Kiiwetinepinesiik Stark and is taking up a tenure-track position at the University of Windsor Faculty of Law in July.