The Day that Freedom Reigned

Trucker Freedom Convoy

This story unfolds on a snow-packed shoulder of a cold Canadian highway.

This was the unlikely place that freedom reigned in 2022 when a hodgepodge group of truckers picked up the mantle of leadership for Canada.

Photo Brooke Flemming, Trucker Freedom Convoy on Highway 401

The runaway success of the Trucker Freedom Convoy surprised nearly everyone, including the truckers. As Tamara Lich, the first Canadian to board the convoy with it’s founder Chris Barber said, they believed ‘it would be a success if they arrived in Ottawa with 10 trucks.’ What happened next would engulf those expectations.

Nobody could have predicted how the convoy would change the course of history when it first set out from British Columbia. It wasn’t obvious who exactly was coming down the highway or precisely why. But that didn’t matter. It struck our hearts. It’s raw energy was enthralling. It was understood that the convoy was coming for us, that it was necessary and that it was our last ditch effort for freedom in Canada. Within hours of it’s departure it caught fire across the country.

Convoys started sparking everywhere - PEI, the North West Territories, the southern border - each one pulling our hopes into it’s draft.

I had never imagined that talking in public or walking in the park could be painted as high crimes, yet this is where we were. The idea of a freedom convoy was surreal by any normal measure, but in context to the dystopia we found ourselves in, it was the most real thing we had felt in years.

To the millions of Canadians abused by the covid regime the Trucker Freedom Convoy became a symbol of restoration. We had to renew our social contract with our government and we needed escape velocity from covid’s terminal social contagion. This would be our vehicle. The first move would be objecting to the injustice of Covid at the doorstep of parliament.

To the founders of the convoy it was also a gamble. ‘Civil disobedience’ was uncharted territory for Canadians. We were ‘Locked-down’ and meeting in public was ‘restricted’. More uncertain still was how Canadians would react. Protesting, even towards injustice, was an alien concept. Canadians are famously nice. We don’t push back. We ‘grin and bare it’. But as support erupted across the country it was clear that civil disobedience was understood to be our only path. This was not about self interest. After all many Truckers had already been vaccinated. The incoherence of vaccine mandates may have tipped the scales to action but the linchpin was the realization that we had nothing to lose - we had already lost everything that we knew and loved about our country. Our governments and institutions had prodded us like cattle. Their indifference to our suffering was shocking. Injustice had been piling up on good hard working people. Backs were snapping all around us. When we petitioned for relief the automatic response from our institutions and elected officials was ‘shut up and sit down.’ The gaslighting, name calling and abuse from the managerial class had become the norm.

To the Canadians waiting on the side of the highway the Trucker Freedom Convoy represented a restoration of basic human dignity that had been exiled from public life. It was an end run around the media. It was a repudiation of the heavy handed experts who had abused our trust. It was a final plea to our elected leaders to honour our social contract. And it was the first gruelling step to free a nation in bondage. The Truckers were taking the voice of the people directly to a government who - for reasons that have yet to be explained - had long stopped listening.

From where I stood watching their high beams light up frost bitten faces, smiling ear to ear and jumping with the joy of life - I witnessed a liberation. The weight of the world was lifted off our shoulders when we realigned our hearts with each other. I looked around at this magnificent triumph of the human spirit and wondered to myself ‘how did we find ourselves here?’ How had we let this all slip away? How was it that our Truckers were now the de facto leaders of a nation under fire?

The Crossroads

It seemed liked a sea change had taken place in Canada over the last ten years. Since 2017 it was near impossible to turn on the TV without catching a glimpse of a march or riot in some corner of the world. By 2019, Canada was fours years into a top down progressive cultural revolution. Between Trudeau’s ‘post-national’ experiment, Trump’s ascendance, the ‘antifa’ phenomena and cancel culture, a simmering political divide had gripped us. The Canadian psyche was hyper agitated and ripe for a crisis. The table was set.

When the formless threat of a ‘pandemic’ descended through our lives there was no resistance. It knocked down our institutions, captured our media and easily replaced reason and rituals with fear. A disturbing inclination to overreact began to animate public life.

Soon after a ‘novel virus’ was announced in January of 2020, the airwaves were consumed with panic. The drumbeat of isolation and infection were normalized. By March ‘lock-downs’ were announced. Kids would not return to school after spring break. Most jobs were ruled ‘non-essential’. A population that had been living check to check would start to worry. But with the mandates there came two assurances: ‘we were in this together’ and we would sacrifice ‘two weeks to flatten the curve’.

The costs of lock-downs were incalculable. Churches were closed. Gyms were closed. Parks were closed. All structure and routine evaporated.

It didn’t take long for a creeping paranoia to settle in. Information and news were centralized. The only sources connecting us to the amorphous threat outside the door insisted that disease was ‘lurking around every corner’.

We were cut off from the tools of self reliance and bombarded with fear. Nothing was certain except the message of uncertainty, interupted only by the promise that technology would save us. This was our new normal.

Canadians began to fixate on the strangest levers of control. It seemed our world began to obsess over dubious hygiene rituals and ‘daily active case numbers’ - that meaningless figure that found it’s way into every headline and every conversation.

‘New infections’ replaced greetings and weather and sports and politics and just about every other thing we cared about. Sharing fear became the only ritual we could depend on.

By the winter of 2021 the othering of anyone not marching in perfect lockstep with lock-downs and vaccinations had reached a fever pitch. Trust between citizens and government plummeted. The feeding frenzy on courage, science and skepticism was unbearable. The front lines in Canada’s fight for our constitutional rights desperately needed reinforcements. This was the Canada from which a rag tag convoy of patriots emerged.

The Calvary Rolls In

January 28 2022, the convoy was due to arrive in Ontario. They had been on the road for four days since their departure from Vancouver, B.C. They were met with overflowing support on the ground and scorn in the media all across the country.

By the time they reached the border, we had taken to the streets by the tens of thousands from Sault Ste Marie to Ottawa, waiting with an ember of hope burning under heavy hearts. The main stream media was running heavy interference and cities had turned off their highway live feed cameras. It wasn’t clear when they’d arrive or what we would see.

As we stepped onto the side of the road we connected like antennae with millions more people across Canada and around the world who were hanging on this moment with us - locked down in their homes, clenching their phones, huddled around their TV. For those elastic moments time slowed down as though the world was waiting for the Trucker’s Freedom Convoy to arrive.

Within hours the trucks appeared with the force of a thousand chariots charging into battle. Their sheer energy enveloped our hearts. In one fell swoop they broke us free from our terminal hypnosis. This was the moment covid was over.

Awakened and uplifted thousands of Canadians dropped everything, jumped in their cars and joined the convoy on the spot. Tens upon tens of thousands poured into downtown Ottawa on the doorsteps of parliament in defiance of the covid mandates. They communed without hesitation or stigma and just like that, the myth of the 6 foot bubble, magic masks and single direction grocery isles vanished everywhere and all at once. The central covid narrative that your neighbor was diseased and a threat to your family ceased to make any sense. Fear was vanquished and love and hope were super-spreading across the country.

It was so wholly and completely enthralling, there was nothing as important as sharing the good news.

That night I was compelled to share the news of the convoy with Heather Heying and Bret Weinstein, who had been an important voice covering it from their home in Portland. Heather published that letter of our experience here.

The Cavalry Rolled In

The Trucker Freedom Convoy had imbued Canadians with a sense of identity and purpose. For days on end people in every community flocked to the roads to meet each other and wave their flags.

Cars and trucks paraded around towns to celebrate in solidarity with the Truckers in Ottawa. It was the spirit of love and hope and truth uniting a country.

The single most important act for everyone was simply touching each other as though to reach through the fiction and verify the moment - transferring hope and love and compassion.

Hand holding, hugging, dancing in the street was the most ordinary thing - 6 feet be damned.

The same words gushed out with tears in every deeply satisfying physical embrace with strangers: “I am here to stand up for my child, my parent, my brother and my sister and I am once again proud to be Canadian.”

I walked up to a man who stood out above the others with his broad shoulders and imposing figure towering over me. He carried a homemade sign and a Canadian flag. I asked him what the convoy meant to him. He told me with measured words and a gentle cracking voice that his family had survived residential schools, then went on to serve Canada in the military overseas. He didn’t have any children of his own, but this community was his home and he was there to stand up for my children and our neighbor’s children, so that no child would have to suffer like he suffered, when no one was there to stand up for him. My heart panged. This was our Canada.

The Trucker’s Freedom Convoy brought the Spirit and love back to our hearts and pulled our country back from the brink. It gave us hope and purpose and it united those who suffered with those who cared. It restored a sense of dignity to a nation reeling in self-disgust. It dispelled our fear, quelled our pride and replaced our guilt. It renewed our spirit and reminded us where we came from and what we cared about.

Our identity was forged in the moment by answering the call for those who needed help. Being Canadian was understood to be doing the hard thing because it was right.

With the greatest of fanfare I have ever witnessed, Canada rose to the occasion when it mattered most and charted a course to restore freedom to our country - one heart and one mind at a time.

What happened on the side of the road that day changed the course of history.