It was a frigid day. The convoy, which consisted of about a hundred trucks ranging from small pickups to large commercial transports, had departed five days earlier from Red Deer, Alberta. After 3500 km of trucking, they had arrived in the nation's capital and pulled up in front of the snow-covered Parliament Hill.

In the driver's seat of a semi-truck, a white man wearing a reflective yellow vest got on his walkie-talkie and gave the order. The entire convoy erupted in a deafening cacophony of honking horns, drowning out all conversation and thought. The horns seemed to scream, ‘Today, you political elites, with all your chattering, will be silent. Today, you will listen to us.’

I snapped photos and took short videos as I headed towards the crowd.

A makeshift sign propped up in the flatbed of a pickup read, ‘Trudeau! Your job: protect our borders like you protect your own home and family. Do your job! No carbon tax. Canada absorbs more CO₂ than it produces!!! No migration pact. No illegals. No United Nations. Canada Strong!’

‘Support Canadian agriculture – carbon taxing destroys Canadian economy – put the grain in the train and oil in the pipe’, read another. It also featured a little cartoon mascot: a smiling steak in a cowboy hat encouraging the viewer to ‘eat beef’, connecting the dots between high-carbon energy infrastructure and high-carbon lifestyles.

Yellow vests and variations of the slogan ‘I love Canadian oil and gas’ were pervasive.

I arrived at the front of the convoy. Emblazoned onto the hood of the lead truck was the convoy's official logo. The logo featured a Canadian maple leaf, inside of which a young soldier stood at attention, saluting the skies where two military helicopters flew. To the left of the helicopters, two oil derricks protruded over the horizon, towering into the blue sky. Black silhouettes of people, representing the movement, fringed the bottom, superimposed by the words, ‘United We Roll for Canada’.

Yellow Vests Canada and the United We Roll convoy

The gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement erupted in France in November 2018 as a protest against President Emmanuel Macron's plan to increase fuel taxes. The fluorescent yellow high-visibility vest was chosen as the symbol of the movement, since French motorists are required by law to travel with one at all times (Cigainero, 2018). Initially, there was ambiguity as to the political orientation of the protests, as hundreds of thousands of people from across the political spectrum poured into the streets, without affiliation to a political party or trade union. Kipfer (2019: 212) writes that ‘while their original demand (to repeal the gas tax hike) resonated with the populist and far Right, their demands evolved because of a dynamic of collective mobilization that kept putting the vests in touch with movements rooted in other subaltern social spaces’. As a result of this intermingling with progressive actors, after Macron reversed course and repealed the gas tax rise on 5 December 2018, their demands broadened in a decidedly left-wing direction, and came to include calls to raise the minimum wage and retirement benefits, and to reintroduce a wealth tax that Macron had cut (Chrisafis, 2018). While it would be possible to misconstrue the gilet jaunes’ opposition to the gas tax as anti-ecological, Bejar-Garcia (2020) encourages us to view it as a protest against ‘unfair climate policies that targeted the lower-class while leaving the upper-class largely unaffected’. Instead, the gilets jaunes favoured policies that simultaneously tackle climate change and economic inequality (Kipfer, 2019; Mehling, 2018).

Yellow vest protests quickly spread around the world, though they had very little in common with the original or with one another except for the symbolism of the vest (Lucardi & Brancati, 2019). In Canada, the symbol was quickly claimed by the right. Active from December 2018 and now dormant, Yellow Vests Canada (YVC) demanded looser environmental regulations on the oil and gas industry and stricter immigration policies. The movement attracted members of far-right hate groups like the Proud Boys and the Soldiers of Odin, and the activity of YVC Facebook groups drew controversy for their racist and violent discourse (Mosleh, 2018). At the height of the movement, Evan Balgord, the Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, believed that YVC had the ‘greatest potential for radicalization leading to violence’ in the country (Mussett, 2019).

This chapter focuses on the ‘crescendo’ of the movement: the United We Roll convoy, which drew national media attention when YVC activists drove transport trucks from Red Deer, Alberta to protest outside the Canadian parliament in Ottawa, Ontario. The chapter is divided into four main sections. In the first section, I contextualize Canada, and the province of Alberta in particular, as a place where fossil capital plays a hegemonic role in the political economy. ¹ In the second section, I advance an argument about the origins of the YVC movement, contending it was a ‘subsidized public’ with two main tributaries: ‘extractive populist’ groups funded by fossil capital, and far-right anti-immigrant groups emboldened by the ‘Trump effect’ (Gunster et al., 2021; Malm & the Zetkin Collective, 2021; Perry et al., 2019). ² In the third section, I show how fossil capital began to lose control of the very movement it subsidized: YVC represented the fruition of fossil capital's extractive populist strategy of mobilizing a base of pro-oil and gas activists, but, as the base asserted its agency over the direction of the movement, pushing it further right, fossil capital lost control over demands and messaging, posing significant public relations risks. In the fourth section, I propose dividing fossil capital into class fractions based on size, and argue that doing so is useful for analysing fossil capital's relationship to the far right. I reflect on why ‘big fossil capital’ distanced itself from YVC, while segments of ‘small fossil capital’ funded and participated in the convoy. I conclude with brief notes on how the alliance between fossil capital and the far right has morphed in the years since United We Roll.

Fossil capitalism in Canada

The landlocked western province of Alberta is Canada's largest producer of natural gas, conventional oil and coal, and, most famously, is home to the third-largest proven oil reserves in the world in the form of bituminous sands, also known as oil or tar sands (Natural Resources Canada, 2016). Given the importance of oil to the province, Alberta is sometimes referred to as a ‘first world petro-state’ or ‘petroculture’, terms that attune us to the ways in which the economic dominance of oil in Alberta has ripple effects at the levels of politics, culture and ideology (Adkin, 2016b: 3; Wilson et al., 2017).

A key aspect of fossil capital's hegemony over Alberta is the premise that fossil fuel extraction is in the best interests of Albertans and Canadians in general, a concept captured by the phrase ‘the Alberta Advantage’. According to Adkin (2016a: 78), the term, which was coined by conservative Premier Ralph Klein (1992–2006), is essentially a euphemism for neoliberal governance that stresses low taxes, limited government and a business-friendly regulatory environment, especially with regards to the oil and gas industry. The Alberta Advantage, a boisterous celebration of a neoliberal political culture premised on extractivism, lends credence to the widespread belief that Alberta is the ‘heartland of Canadian conservatism’ (Stewart & Sayers, 2013: 250). ³

The political project of conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper (2006–2015), who came out of the Alberta-based right-wing populist Reform Party, has been characterized as the ‘“Albertization” of Canada’ (Shrivastava & Stefanick, 2015: 19). Writing in the collection Petrocultures: Oil, Politics, Culture, Darin Barney conceptualizes the Harper era as an effort to graft oil extraction onto Canadian identity writ large, remaking the country into a ‘pipeline nation’ (2017: 88). While there is certainly a large segment of the Canadian population who embraced this material and ideological project, it also encountered intense opposition, especially from Indigenous peoples and environmentalists. ⁴

This opposition helped foment an anti-Harper voting bloc, which coalesced around the Liberal Party of Canada, led by Justin Trudeau, who became Prime Minister in 2015 (Gibillini, 2015). While Trudeau has been superior to Stephen Harper on the climate file, his approach is characterized by what has been called a ‘grand bargain’, referring to Trudeau's insistence that Canada can simultaneously reduce its emissions and continue to develop the Alberta oil sands (Ballingall, 2021). Trudeau's approach to the climate crisis has therefore been characterized as ‘the new denialism’, meaning a form of climate denialism that does not deny the existence of anthropogenic climate change, but denies the policy implications of adequately mitigating it (Daub et al., 2021; Klein & Daub, 2016). In 2021, Trudeau's ‘new denialism’ resulted in Canada acquiring the dubious distinction of being the only G7 economy whose emissions have risen since signing the Paris Agreement, with the oil sands being largely to blame (Austen & Flavelle, 2021). And yet, despite his explicit support for the oil and gas industry, including the nationalization of the Trans Mountain oil sands pipeline, Trudeau's modest (and inadequate) climate policies have been met with fury from Canada's right wing.

Extractive populism and the Trump effect: subsidizing the Yellow Vests

For Gunster et al. (2021: 198), extractive populism is ‘an emerging effort to position extractivism as under attack from elites, as an economic and political project that demands popular mobilization to defend, and as a democratic expression of the public will to fight for an industry that serves the common good’. Gunster et al. trace the origins of extractive populism to the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, the largest oil and gas industry association in Canada, which, in 2014, created a campaign called ‘Canada's Energy Citizens’ (CEC). Wood (2018) shows how CEC marked a conscious shift by the Canadian fossil fuel industry, which historically had relied primarily on lobbying to secure political influence, towards ‘grassroots’ mobilization. ⁵ The idea was to counter the environmental left by adopting its tactics and tools: petitions, letters to politicians and protests. Canada Action (CA), founded in 2010 as a small company making pro-oil and gas t-shirts, has grown into the most prolific extractive populist group in terms of the number of protests and events it has organized. Despite claiming to be ‘grassroots’, CA is backed by fossil capital, which donates to it, bulk orders its ‘I Love Canadian Oil and Gas’ merchandise, and encourages its employees to attend CA rallies (Linnitt, 2020; Markusoff, 2018).

Following Wood (2018) and Gunster et al.'s (2021) interpretation of CEC, I conceive of these extractive populist groups not as ‘astroturf’ (i.e., fake grassroots) but as a ‘subsidized public’, a term coined by Walker (2014) in his study of the political influence of public consultants and PR firms in the US. For Walker, the term ‘subsidized public’ refers to a phenomenon wherein ‘corporations, trade associations, wealthy advocacy organizations, and campaign groups utilize the services of public affairs consultants to lower the costs of participation for targeted activist groups’ (2014: 10). While the term ‘astroturf’ may be politically useful for drawing attention to the CEC and CA's corporate origins, it implies that participants in such groups are ‘dupes, or hired guns’, and ignores the extent to which such campaigns are willingly picked up by citizens (Wood, 2018: 78). Rather than view participants in such campaigns as victims of ‘corporate ventriloquism’, as Schneider et al. (2016: 5) term it, the concept of ‘subsidized public’ ascribes political agency to both the corporate backers of subsidized campaigns and the participants themselves, thereby encouraging researchers to explore participant motivations alongside those of corporations.

Throughout 2018, these extractive populist campaigns were holding increasingly well-attended rallies, especially in Alberta, where they counter-protested and outnumbered anti-pipeline protesters on a number of occasions and were picking up significant mainstream media attention (CBC News, 2018a, 2018c; Rieger, 2018). Towards the end of the year, when the gilets jaunes movement erupted in France, the extractive populist movement in Canada was reaching new heights in terms of on-the-ground organizing capacity and mobilization. In Alberta, truck convoys became a common form of protest in November and December, with attendance ranging from a few hundred vehicles to over a thousand at one particularly large event where Andrew Scheer, then-leader of the Conservative Party of Canada (CPC), spoke (CBC News, 2018b; Issawi, 2018, 2019). The main Yellow Vests Canada Facebook page was launched in early December, and soon many protesters were wearing yellow vests to attend these extractive populist protests, often organized by Canada Action, in addition to organizing their own weekly yellow vest protests every Saturday (Doherty, 2018; King, 2018).

In addition to these extractive populist groups, the other main tributary to the Yellow Vests Canada movement was a network of far-right anti-immigrant groups, emboldened by what Perry et al. (2019: 144) call ‘the Trump effect’, which refers to the increase in violent hate crimes and hate group activity in Canada following the election of Donald Trump in 2016. Indeed, according to Evan Balgord, Executive Director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, YVC ‘is unique in that it is bringing together the anti-Muslim, alt-right neo-Nazi and ultra-conservative elements that make up the far-right movement but don't always play nicely together or overlap’ (qtd in Metcalf, 2018). However, the Trump effect in Canada also refers to the rightward shift of mainstream electoral politics, especially with regards to the CPC, who seemed to view Trumpism with envy, and wished to emulate it (Perry et al., 2019: 158–159). In September 2018, the People's Party of Canada (PPC) splintered off of the CPC to form Canada's first far-right populist national political party, led by Maxime Bernier, who resigned from the CPC in 2017 after narrowly losing the leadership race to Andrew Scheer. In this context, with the electoral success of Trumpism and additional right-flank pressure being applied by the PPC, the CPC drifted further rightward, as exemplified by their opposition to the non-binding UN Migration Pact in late 2018, which they erroneously argued would infringe on Canada's sovereignty, thus playing into far-right conspiracies of a ‘one-world government’ and bringing such ideas to the mainstream (Coyne, 2018).

From Yellow Vests to United We Roll

In the discussion section of CA's Facebook event page for a 17 December 2018 rally, one participant commented, ‘I'll be there. Are we doing the yellow vests thing?’ CA responded, ‘No yellow vests please. That's not what we are promoting!’ One participant's response is instructive: ‘ouch! The very people wearing the yellow vests are who truly support the pipelines.’ CA did not want to be associated with the yellow vests, but the public they had subsidized into action insisted on heading in that direction. Against CA's wishes, yellow vests became a regular appearance at CA-organized protests (Antoneshyn, 2018).

CA spearheaded the original plan for a pro-oil and gas convoy to Ottawa, initially calling it the Resource Coalition Convoy (Brooks, 2019). When YVC made plans to support the convoy with their own contingent, CA would once again try to distance themselves. When asked about his movement's connections to YVC, Cody Battershill, the founder and lead spokesperson for CA, responded, ‘There's been many things said by people wearing yellow vests that I think are horrible. There's no room for racism …. We gotta stay focused on staying positive, respectful, and non-partisan’ (EnergyNow, 2019). Despite this, Canada Action intended to proceed with the convoy, knowing full well it would inevitably be joined by the yellow vests, as so many of their rallies had that winter (Jaremko, 2019).

Thus, Canada Action appears to have entered into a phase of trying to discipline and coordinate the messaging of the YVC convoy so as to avoid embarrassment for associating with them. In another interview, Battershill, referring to the YVC convoy, said, ‘They've assured us that they're very much focused on energy and resources and pipelines, and I've just expressed to them that … for me personally I just look at the yellow vests as being a French thing from France. And I think we should stay focused on Canadian symbols’ (Rieger, 2019). Battershill here belies his refusal to work with YVC, suggesting that he had been in dialogue with YVC activists to collaborate on messaging and symbolism. As we shall see, despite receiving assurances of YVC's willingness to stay on a united message with Canada Action, Battershill would be let down by his decidedly unpolished allies.

Battershill was not alone in making efforts to control the messaging of the twin convoys. He was joined by a chorus of elites, including journalists and politicians of all stripes, who aimed to discursively separate the ‘good’ elements of the movement from the ‘bad’ by encouraging the groups to focus their demands on energy and avoid the issues of immigration, the UN, ‘globalism’ and son on. Even Alberta New Democratic Party (NDP) leader, then-Premier Rachel Notley, participated in this discursive project of disciplining the movement. When asked by a reporter, ‘What concerns do you have about the growing militancy of the yellow vest movement in Alberta?’, Notley responded:

That even Notley would come out in support of Canada Action's convoy displays the extent to which fossil capital has captured Albertan politicians. Notley tried to distinguish the ‘good’ convoy from the ‘bad’, refusing to concede the degree to which the two overlap. In doing so, Notley lends legitimacy to an industry-funded organization, name dropping and applauding the efforts of Canada Action (falsely claiming the group provides a forum driven by working people, rather than fossil capital) while failing to understand their role in fomenting the extractive populist movement that would soon sweep her from power.

Unlike the industry-funded convoy, whose message could be highly disciplined since it came from a hierarchical top-down structure using professionally made protest signs and messaging, YVC was a leaderless movement with activists who were often explicitly bigoted, conspiratorial and violent in their messaging. A typical CA sign, for example, might say, ‘Bill C-69 is All Risk & No Reward’, whereas a typical YVC sign might say, ‘Trudeau for Treason’ and depict a man hanging from a noose. While CA and elites like Notley clearly tried to discipline YVC's messaging, the latter proved impossible to control. Thus, on 14 January Canada Action cancelled the Resource Coalition convoy, leaving the YVC convoy to go it alone. Many activists who had signed up for the Canada Action convoy promptly switched to the YVC convoy after the former was cancelled, further demonstrating the fluidity and cross-pollination between the movements (Keller, 2019).

The YVC convoy itself, however, would quickly experience further divisions, as the key organizer, Glen Carritt, owner of an oilfield fire and safety company, split off to start yet another convoy to Ottawa. Carritt expressed a desire to make the rally accessible to all individuals, not just yellow vests, so left the YVC convoy and founded the United We Roll convoy. Carritt's project would end up attracting more support, and eventually the YVC convoy was cancelled altogether, and folded into United We Roll. Though the name change certainly suggests an attempt to distance the convoy from the yellow vests, on 9 February Carritt made it clear that, ‘We still stand behind the “yellow vests,” but whether you want to wear the yellow vest or not, we welcome all respectful, hard-working Canadians’ (Keller, 2019). Despite yellow vesters still clearly being a welcome component of the movement, conservative politicians lined up in support of United We Roll and both the leaders of the CPC and PPC went on to give speeches at the final rally in Ottawa.

Cillia & McCurdy (2020: 673–675) observe that the mainstream media provided similar social cover for the convoy. While right-wing outlets like Post Media explicitly praised the convoy, liberal mainstream media followed a pattern that echoed efforts to separate the good parts of the movement from the bad, providing some critical coverage of the convoy's associations with the xenophobic and far-right YVC movement, while providing generally uncritical coverage of the movement's association with industry, and thereby upholding the hegemonic interests of fossil capital. The Canadian Anti-Hate Network, on the other hand, argues that the mainstream media's coverage of the convoy ignored the hundreds of examples of overt racism and death threats directed at Muslim Canadians on YVC social media, and thereby whitewashed the convoy as driven by ‘legitimate economic concerns’ and not hate (Canadian Anti-Hate Network, 2019). However, this latter critique overlooks the extent to which climate denialism and its twin, fossil fuel boosterism, are far from being expressions of legitimate economic concerns, but have instead become central to the political project of the contemporary far right, as recent scholarly research has begun to uncover (Forchtner et al., 2018; Hultman et al., 2019; Malm & the Zetkin Collective, 2021). By trying to separate out the movement's racism from its fossil fuel boosterism, politicians and mainstream media dangerously legitimized the climate denialist aspects of the movement. Inversely, in its attempt to discredit the movement, the Canadian Anti-Hate Network strategically downplayed its fossil fuel boosterism, and claimed the movement was mainly an anti-immigrant one. The downside to this strategy, though, is that it does not challenge the legitimacy of fossil fuel boosterism and climate denialism, and overlooks the extent to which they have become key planks of the far right's political worldview, and themselves constitute a type of fascistic politics.

On the role of small fossil capital

Fossil capital needs ideologies of racialized and gendered hierarchies to complement its drive for accumulation, and so the far right is, in some ways, a logical political home for it. Preston (2017), for example, describes the tar sands as ‘racial extractivism’, drawing attention to the ways in which tar sands extraction is predicated on the white supremacist and settler colonial dispossession of Indigenous peoples. Similarly, Daggett (2018) uses the term ‘petro-masculinity’ to highlight the ways in which misogyny, whiteness and fossil capitalist extractivism are materially and ideologically linked. As she puts it, ‘privileged subjectivities are oil-soaked’; the combustion of fossil fuels has historically been primarily to the benefit of white men, and they are relatively well insulated from the immediate effects of climate change, so it only makes sense that they form the core demographic of climate denialism (Daggett, 2018: 27; Krange et al., 2019; McCright & Dunlap, 2011).

Despite fossil capital's need for these aspects of far-right ideology, there are political and reputational risks associated with openly allying with the far right, and these risks must be managed. Despite a decade of the Harper government shifting the country right, Canada maintains a commitment to and popular support for multiculturalism, which Ambrose and Mudde (2015) credit with preventing the rise of a Canadian far-right political party. While the creation of the PPC has ended Canada's exceptionalism in that regard, the party remains relatively marginal, having failed, despite a rise in its vote total, to win a single seat in the September 2021 election. Meanwhile, public polling continues to suggest the majority of Canadians support immigration (Neuman, 2021). In the context of popular support for multiculturalism, fossil capital risks being perceived as bigoted or even ‘un-Canadian’ by openly allying itself with the far right. This appears to have been part of the calculation made by Canada Action in navigating its relationship with the very public it subsidized. However, fossil capital is not a monolith, and, while Canada Action eventually chose to distance itself from the convoy, other segments of fossil capital got closer.

While fossil capital is a class fraction of capital (see note 1), fossil capital can itself be divided into further class fractions, and these categories have analytical importance for the study of the far right in Canada. Statistics Canada defines the size of a business based on how many employees it has: small (1 to 99 employees), medium (100 to 499 employees) and large (500 or more employees) (Government of Canada, n. d.). I propose that these demarcations could form the basis of an attempt to distinguish between small, medium and big fossil capital, and argue that these distinctions, particularly between big and small, are a useful heuristic for understanding fossil capital's relationship to the far right.

Most critical discussion of the industry's role in fuelling climate change (and climate denialism) focuses attention on big fossil capital. There are good reasons for this, and attention to the ownership of the Alberta tar sands demonstrates why. In 2017, the ‘Big Five’ companies of Canadian oil and gas collectively owned 79.4 per cent of Canada's bitumen production capacity (Hussey et al., 2021: 38). ⁶ Such production capacity means this ‘oligopolistic core’ of companies controls obscene levels of wealth (in 2017, their gross profit was greater than the province of Alberta's revenue for that year), which allows them to make investment decisions that shape the entire industry, ‘effectively exerting control over the myriad of small and medium-sized service firms that depend on their activities’ (Hussey et al., 2021: 40–41). Thus, from a climate perspective, big Canadian fossil capital deserves to be the focus of attention and admonition: the assets that big fossil capital controls could make or break Canada's climate change mitigation efforts, and, as we have seen, through its reach into civil society with extractive populist groups like Canada Action and the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers, big fossil capital plays a key role in fomenting climate denialism and delay. Less attention, however, has been paid to the role of small fossil capital.

Upon reviewing the many photographs I had taken on the day of the United We Roll convoy rally in Ottawa, I started to take note of the company names printed on the convoy trucks: the Big Four were nowhere to be seen. Instead, the convoy was dominated by small and medium-sized businesses. ⁷ In order to pull off a protest convoy of industrial vehicles, one first requires access to these vehicles, access that regular workers do not have. In at least one case that I know of, a driver was actually being paid by their boss to participate in the convoy. ⁸ Other drivers would either have received their boss's permission to take a company truck (an explicit sign of endorsement of the event) or were themselves small business owners. Indeed, one of the lead organizers of the convoy, Glen Carritt, owns an oilfield fire and safety company – OP Fire & Rescue – and drove the convoy's lead truck. In addition to drawing its participants from the ranks of small business, the convoy was directly funded by small companies, including many oil and gas service companies, who gave large amounts in their own name to the convoy's GoFundMe page. ⁹ The participation of small businesses in the convoy raises important questions for scholars of climate change and the far right concerning the role of the petite bourgeoisie in funding denial and supporting fascistic politics.

Scholars of fascism and the far right note the importance of the petite bourgeoisie as the class base for far-right political movements, including classical fascism and contemporary right-wing populism in the US and Canada (Davidson, 2015; Perry et al., 2019: 147). The list of businesses which participated in or donated to the convoy shows that the petite bourgeoisie of fossil capital did, indeed, form a key base of support for the far-right United We Roll convoy. Small fossil capital was seemingly more comfortable than big fossil capital with being publicly connected to the movement. As I have suggested, this is partially because big fossil capital has more to lose in terms of its reputation. It may also be because, as a registered non-profit, CA's activities need to be non-partisan; thus, YVC's constant demonization of and death threats towards Trudeau may have posed potential legal risks.

Is it possible, however, that small fossil capital (and perhaps privileged segments of what Malm & the Zetkin Collective (2021) call the ‘fossilized proletariat’) are more reactionary than big fossil capital? This is a puzzle for future research to solve, so I will only offer some brief speculation. For big fossil capitalists, ensconced in their glass office towers and removed from the spatial and temporal rhythms of extraction, the only goal is abstract surplus-value. Small fossil capitalists, on the other hand, who often own and operate their businesses, are on-the-ground: driving trucks, laying pipe, getting their hands dirty, enmeshed in and committed to the materiality of fossil capitalism as a way of life and as an identity. While much attention is paid to big fossil capital's role in fuelling climate denialism, big fossil capitalists are, by definition, few in number, and cannot by themselves muster the street forces required for something so ominous as ‘fossil fascism’ (Malm & the Zetkin Collective, 2021). Those studying the political ecology of the far right would do well to turn their attention towards the class fractions likely to make up the shock troops of fossil fascism. Small fossil capitalists, unable to accept the loss of livelihood and fearing for their class status, all too eagerly swallow climate denialist conspiracies. After one conspiratorial pill is taken, it becomes easier to take more.

Beyond United We Roll

Since YVC plateaued with the United We Roll convoy, the movement has largely abandoned the yellow vest as a symbol but has moved on to other campaigns and demands. When the CPC failed to unseat Justin Trudeau in the October 2019 election, anger in Alberta boiled over, fuelling Wexit (a pun on Brexit), a movement whose key demand is that western provinces separate and form a new country. The Wexit movement, whose slogan was ‘Make Alberta Great Again’, attracted many former YVC activists (including Wexit's founder, Peter Downing) and would fuel the creation of a number of new western separatist political parties, most notably the Wildrose Independence Party of Alberta, which at one point rose to 20 per cent in provincial polling (Fournier, 2021).

The United We Roll brand continued past the initial convoy. In February 2020, when the Indigenous-led anti-fossil fuel movement #ShutDownCanada was spreading across the country in solidarity with the Wet'suwet’en struggle against the Coastal GasLink pipeline, Canada Action spent $21,000 on Facebook ads denouncing the protest blockades, second only to Coastal GasLink itself (Rocha et al., 2020). Once again proving willing to be the street forces for big fossil capital, United We Roll planned to travel to and intimidate a rail blockade established by Indigenous and climate activists west of Edmonton. By the time they arrived on the afternoon of 19 February, other counter-protesters had already dismantled the blockade, forcing the Indigenous and climate activists to leave. United We Roll did a ‘victory lap’ around the vicinity and posed for a picture on the now-cleared rail line with Canada Action-inspired signs reading, ‘I Love Canadian Energy’ (Ramsay, 2020).

During the pandemic, many former yellow vesters became part of the anti-lockdown, anti-mask and anti-vaccine ‘Freedom movement’, which culminated in the Freedom Convoy in February 2022, labelled by the Canadian Anti-Hate Network as ‘United We Roll 2.0’ (Anderson, 2021; Canadian Anti-Hate Network, 2022). Extractive populist groups like Canada Action, on the other hand, held off on organizing protests and rallies during the pandemic. Even now, with almost all restrictions lifted, there are few signs that the pro-oil and gas street movement is close to returning to its 2018–2019 peak. There are some signs, however, that the Freedom movement is morphing into a movement against climate policies, such as a February 2023 protest in Alberta against 15-minute cities (Green, 2023). The innocuous urban planning concept, which aims to have all life's necessities and amenities within a 15-minute walk, has, like the carbon tax, the migration compact and public health restrictions before it, come to be seen by the far right through the lens of the globalist conspiracy theory – that is, as yet another manifestation of a tyrannical, socialist plot to restrict individual freedoms. At the time of writing, though, the Freedom movement in Alberta is largely focused on electoral politics; having successfully ousted Jason Kenney as Premier, they are working to ensure the UCP's new far-right leader, Danielle Smith, defeats the NDP in the May 2023 election (Magusiak, 2023). Regardless of whether she receives a mandate from Albertans, Smith's premiership and the social forces behind her rise will be a fruitful case for further studies of fossil capitalism and the Canadian far right.