As Coutts anti-mandate blockade continues, Alberta government plans to drop vaccine passports

This column is an opinion from Graham Thomson, an award-winning journalist who has covered Alberta politics for more than 30 years. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

Sow the wind, reap the whirlwind.

Or in this case, sow the conflict, reap the cross-border blockade.

On January 22, Premier Jason Kenney declared in a tweet that "Ottawa's trucker vaccine mandate has to go."

Days later, a truck convoy of protesters angry at the vaccine mandate began tying up an Alberta-Montana border crossing.

That's not to say Kenney was actively encouraging unruly demonstrators to lay siege to the Coutts crossing as a protest against the federal government. But Kenney knew about the anger building among a minority of truckers who had chosen to be unvaccinated and therefore unable to freely travel across the border.

He has supported truckers' right to protest whether in Ottawa or in Coutts as long as they "do it in a way that's respectful."

But Kenney made it sound as if those Freedom Convoys had a legitimate chance of forcing the Canadian government to reverse the vaccine mandate on cross-border truckers; just as he made it sound like his trip to Washington D.C. last weekend could help convince the American government to reverse its own identical vaccine mandate on cross-border truckers.

Watch| Kenney says province ready to lift restrictions soon

Neither tactic had any chance of success. The cross-border mandate was an international agreement not open to cancellation by a convoy of dissenters representing a minority of Canada's trucking industry.

But the convoys remain: one making life miserable for people in downtown Ottawa and another making life miserable for people at the Coutts border crossing.

The protestors might be comforted to know that Kenney shares in their misery, at least when it comes to their actions at the Montana border.

Alberta's blockaders have turned their ire toward the Kenney government and its pandemic mandates, most notably the province's vaccine passport, or as Kenney euphemistically named it last September, the Restrictions Exemption Program (REP).

Some truckers have claimed they've been in unofficial, backdoor negotiations with the Alberta government the past few days to lift the REP in exchange for an end to the blockade.