Freedom Is Good For Citizens. It’s Not So Good For The Supply Chain.

You’ve probably followed the Canadian Freedom Convoy story closely. Much of the coverage has focused on the demands of the truckers for relief from COVID passport restrictions and the response of the government, which has been not to meet with the truckers.

Instead, the government of Canada has arrested truckers, frozen their bank accounts, and gone after the bank accounts of anyone who contributed to one of the online crowdfunding sites.

The two sides are dug in and this confrontation won’t be over soon. But, there’s another story behind the story with possibly far greater significance as reported in this article.

Global supply chains were already breaking down before the Freedom Convoy started. Now, the protest is making things much worse.

This is happening in numerous ways. The truckers blocked the Ambassador Bridge in Detroit, which carries 30% of U.S./Canada trade. The bridge has now been cleared after about a week of protest, but the damage was done in terms of major car manufacturers including Ford and Honda having to shut down production for a time.

Highways are snarled in and around Ontario as truckers are parked on major roads and some truckers come and go from the main convoy.

Finally, the truckers who are in the protest could be on the road making deliveries, but they’re not. Supply chains are delicate. When you remove truckers as one of the key logistical links, it has ripple effects at warehouses, distribution centers, ports, and big box stores that depend on truckers to keep supply lanes open.

Things will only get worse as the U.S. version of the Freedom Convoy takes off later this week. Trudeau could probably solve this just by meeting with the truckers and making some modest changes in his policies.

Those changes are happening anyway in certain Canadian provinces and other countries around the world, but Trudeau’s too dumb to notice. For now, get ready for more bare shelves in the stores. Sometimes, we all have to find the cost of freedom.

Corporate leaders and institutional fiduciaries looking to incorporate state of the art predictive analytics to their risk mitigation and strategic analysis should click the link to learn more about Raven Predictive Analytics®.