Jordan Kinder

Jordan B. Kinder is a Métis and settler-British media studies and environmental humanities scholar from what is now known as northern British Columbia, Canada. He studies the cultural politics of energy, infrastructure, media, and environment. His current book project, titled Petroturfing: Refining Canadian Oil in the Age of Social Media, examines the pro-oil movement in Canada’s use of social media to refigure Canadian oil as a socially, economically, and ecologically progressive force.

Title and abstract:

Jerry Can Imaginaries: Fossil Fascist Horizons and the Politics of Combustion

Some two weeks into the 2022 Freedom Convoy’s occupation of Canada’s capital city of Ottawa, the Ottawa Police Service announced that those transporting fuel into the red zone could now be charged and arrested. Recognizing petroleum and diesel as the occupation’s lifeblood, representatives of the repressive state apparatus sought to halt the flow of fuel as a determinant move to dismantle the blockade. Protesters responded by carrying empty jerry cans in an effort to overwhelm police capabilities in enforcing the injunction. A sea of red and yellow converged into the red zone of Ottawa’s Centretown, resulting in seven arrests and over 100 tickets. 

This paper centres the jerry can to examine the politics of combustion that underwrite a growing fossil fascist creep in Canada whose most recent eruption has been the 2022 Freedom Convoy. This convoy saw primarily white, rural peoples descend upon Ottawa with stated aims to protest vaccination mandates and other COVID-19 restrictions, call for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s resignation, and more. Few objects carry as much symbolic weight as the jerry can in the setting of a demonstration that mobilizes the truck as a tool of resistance, truckers as a primary political subject, and the communal roadtrip as political praxis. As much as the convoy was about what its participants perceived as tyrannical government overreach into their daily lives through pandemic restrictions and mandates, it was equally about the maintenance of the current fossil-fuelled order. The convoy itself is a petrocultural form as the combustion of diesel and gasoline enabled demonstrators to travel to and occupy the city that most sharply represents the divide between a perceived urban, Eastern elite and a rural, Western working class that occupies the Western Canadian imagination. This paper explores the contours of the politics of combustion as an early endeavour in naming the fossil fascist creep as it links the 2022 Convoy with the 2019 United We Roll Convoy alongside state-level modes of material and cultural support for the oil and gas industry from Premier Jason Kenney. A jerry can is a materialized contingency plan that ensures continued travel fuelled by combustion without interruption. In the current conjuncture overdetermined by the uneven distribution of the costs and benefits of the fossil economy, the jerry can imagination and the politics of combustion that underwrite it is a last resort in maintaining business-as-usual on a warming planet.