It was six degrees below zero and I couldn’t feel my hands. My flight arrived in Ottawa the night before and I had forgotten to bring gloves. I’d only slept three hours, after a saga of circumventing Canadian border restrictions—Covid-19 screening, proof of vaccination, installation of the ArriveCAN app, and detailed quarantine plans in case I got infected on the other side of the road. border. The customs agent looked with disdain at the American before him. “What do you intend to do in Canada?” Cover the truckers’ protest for a magazine. “What magazine?” The National Review. He gestured yes with his head. “You have to see the bathtub they built.”
The truth is that the truckers’ camp around the Canadian parliament even had a bathtub, plus several DJs, food and drink stalls, barbecues, two costumed mascots and even a bouncy castle. Instead of falling into the tub, however, I found myself in the morning chill participating in the Jericho March, a biblically-inspired march around Parliament that a dozen courageous protesters held daily at 9 am. “The excitement is incredible. It seems that more and more people arrive every day,” said Benita Peterson, organizer of the march.
“I felt like I was being asked to come here,” Peterson told me. She stopped for a moment to hold back tears and before giving me a hug. “I think if the call is for you to act lovingly and peacefully, it’s a call from God. And that’s beautiful.”
In its third week, the movement that went to Ottawa to protest against the restrictive measures imposed in the country turned into a demonstration of music, dance and prayers. The train looks like a version of the 1967 Summer of Love, without the LSD and with many layers of clothing too much. The camps sprang up on several blocks around Parliament, each with its own lifestyle, food and DJs. A truck driver built a makeshift house with sheets of wood on the back of an 18-axle trailer. Another set up an outdoor gym. “The trucker groups have become a family,” Greg Wieler, who is attending the protest with his wife, told me. “They’ve committed to sticking together until the end.”
There was, however, a strange conspiracy theory circulating among the crowd (although rarely among truckers). Yesterday, a lady sitting next to me in a cafe was telling a group of truckers that “they” – and the pronoun was very vague – “have been planning this pandemic for a hundred years” and that Justin Trudeau drinks the blood of children as part of a satanic ritual. “It all started with the Titanic,” she said, full of certainty. “Trust in me”.
Even the craziest look like the usual stereotypical Canadians – so polite it takes a moment to identify them as nutty. Talking to a middle-aged lady at the hotel reception, the first 30 minutes dealt with her annoyance with vaccination passports and her frustration with the press coverage of the protest – in other words, a common conservative opinion. But then she told me that the vaccines were actually mind control microchips installed by Bill and Melinda Gates. “I did a lot of research on this,” she said. “Tomorrow I can show you what I have if you want.” I nodded and smiled.
But these crazy theories are not the point here, and conspiracyists are not in the majority in Ottawa. The protest – a movement that has already spread around the world, from Germany to Australia, via France and Israel – is not even a movement anti-vaccine.
Politicians and journalists leftists repeat that 90% of Canadian truck drivers are vaccinated, as if to suggest that the demonstration does not represent the sentiment of the category. But that would only be true if the movement was against vaccines, not against mandatory vaccinations.
The movement seeks above all to put an end to the restrictions created in the pandemic, and not to spread conspiracy theories and extremism, as the Trudeau government claims. (The now famous mockery of the prime minister, who said the movement was formed “by a marginal minority”
seems to have been adopted in the same way as the “deplorables” mentioned by Hillary Clinton. That is, speech is displayed on T-shirts, hats, posters, and on truck doors). The posters pasted in Parliament don’t talk about satanic rituals or microchips, but about freedom, rights and consent. “Freedom” is sometimes used as a greeting. On my first night there, a man was walking ahead of me when he saw two women draped in Canadian flags coming in the opposite direction. “Freedom,” she said. “Freedom,” they replied in unison.
On the main stage and in private conversations, protesters say they are defending their way of life. “It has nothing to do with the vaccine,” said Peter van Oordt, a former volunteer firefighter from a small town in Ontario who was fired for refusing to show vaccination passport at work. “Vaccines could have been wonderful. Even if the government wanted to make me drink a glass of distilled water… I don’t argue that distilled water is not harmful to my body. That’s not the point. The point is, they have no right to oblige me to do anything. Full stop”.
All of this is a very different portrayal of the truckers movement portrayed by the press as a sinister far-right movement.
Maybe it’s something minor, but I was impressed by the cleanliness of the makeshift community. Organizers pick up the garbage and truck drivers remove the ice from the streets every morning. Christian groups provide food to Ottawa’s homeless people, thanks to money received from donors around the world. When the police supposedly prevented cleaning services from taking care of the movement’s chemical toilets, organizers placed the toilets on the truck bodies and replaced them with new ones. Now they’ve found a way to “use the dump truck,” a truck driver who helps organize the protest told me. “They come every day.”
“I say this to cops every day: I understand,” he told me. “I’m not angry with you. I’m angry with the police, but not with the police. I tell people that cops are people too. Some of them couldn’t go on vacation and had to come here to work. And they don’t want that. Like, they’re human beings too. That’s why I tell people to be polite as much as possible.”
Truck drivers have faced criticism for their actions, such as the block the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit to Windsor, and which disrupted trade and routes for other truckers. In Ottawa, however, the lively atmosphere is different from other protests held recently in Canada. The protests by the Canadian Black Lives Matter group took place on a smaller scale than in the United States, but were marked by the violence and undoing. Last summer, after news broke, already deniedthat mass graves in a school contained the remains of native children, protesters burned Catholic churches.
Ottawa truckers are angry with the government — but they’re not burning it down. A Jericho March participant told me how he made some people “switch sides” the day before. “The best way to disarm someone is with a smile,” he said.
This seems to be working. Although Trudeau recently invoked emergency powers, the protest won victories in the ultimate goal of ending restrictions and mandates in Canada. “Several provinces quickly lifted their restrictions in the face of pressure from protesters,”
according to the Associated Press. “Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Prince Edward Island announced plans to withdraw or ease some measures, while Alberta (…) stopped requiring vaccination passports in places like restaurants and committed to lifting the mandatory use of masks until the end. of the month”. The newspaper Calgary Herald reported that “Canada is lifting its border restrictions”. On February 28, “Canada will return to random screenings” and “vaccinated travelers will not need to be quarantined”. The truckers seem to be facing something big. Participants talk about making history. Here in this unbearable cold, surviving on soup and cheap beer, and motivated by faith, the smell of diesel and the polite patriotism typical of Canadians, they are winning battles.
Nate Hochman is a reporter for the National Review.
©2022 National Review. Published with permission. original in english
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