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As for the prime minster, doubtless he is being briefed by the minute but at the moment he is in Africa seeking votes for a temporary seat on the UN Security Council, a vanity project of surpassing importance in Rockcliffe and the Glebe but about which all other Canadians could not care less. If anything like the time and brain power that have gone into planning our UN campaign have also been devoted to an effective response to the putting up of barricades across the country, we should be fine. But am I the only Canadian who suspects they haven’t been?

Although fundamentally similar, Thatcher’s problem was different from ours in several important details. Canada is larger and more spread out. Power is divided between federal and provincial governments. Our critical infrastructure is vulnerable at hundreds, probably thousands of places. There is a racial dimension (if that word is permitted) to the current confrontation, even if many protesters are not actually First Nations people.

There is one crucial similarity, however. As Thatcher always insisted, the basic disagreement was between miners who understood their industry had to change and their union leadership, which resisted any change whose terms it couldn’t dictate.

Our current difficulties similarly divide the Indigenous community. As the Federal Court of Appeal noted in its Trans Mountain decision last month, 120 of 129 affected Indigenous communities have signed on. In the case of Gas Link, elected chiefs and councils are OK with the project, but some hereditary chiefs are not. I don’t know if native culture contains a direct analogue of game theory’s “the holdout problem,” but it would be surprising if it didn’t: the last few people not giving their consent to an initiative that requires all to sign on is a difficult problem of logic that likely transcends culture.