(LifeSiteNews) — Hundreds of thousands of citizens gathered across Canada last week to support the Freedom Convoy that trucked across the country to Ottawa to non-violently protest what have become, for some, the most oppressive and fickle health regulations in the world. Our Prime Minister denounced them all yesterday as swastika-carrying inciters of violence who promote “hate rhetoric” and are “abusive towards their fellow citizens.”
I was on one small vein of the massive convoy, departing from the Maritimes, in one of our smallest eastern provinces of Nova Scotia last Thursday.
The Fire Hall in Berwick, a small farming community of about 2,500, was jammed with cars crowded around and behind a huge transport truck. It was dark. It was snowing. It was minus-18 degrees. And it was just after 4:30 a.m.
Across the street, there were 20 or 30 more vehicles parked in front of Wheaton’s gift shop – those were just some of the people who were gathering on the overpass to see the convoy off.
I pulled into the back of the line and cars continued pulling in behind me. A young lady jumped out of the car behind me, so I hopped out to chat.
“Hi! This is way bigger than I thought it would be,” I said.
“It’s awesome,” she smiled back. “I have three little kids in the back.” They looked all under five, in car seats. I waved to them.
The truck sounded a horn and we jumped in, put on the hazards, and followed the blinking line of cars in the dark, horns sounding. People lined the sidewalk waving Canadian flags and cheering the convoy along, all the way down the road to the overpass. Not far from the overpass was a tractor with its lights on in a frozen field of snow to the right, a “FREEDOM” banner draped across the front, several figures cheering in the dark around it. Fireworks shot up from another field in front. It was like a beautiful, surreal dream. This wasn’t the Canada of three weeks ago when hope of ever escaping endless draconian COVID diktats was fading fast.
Vehicles merged into the convoy from towns like New Minas, Greenwich and Windsor on our way out of the Annapolis Valley. We pulled into a big truck stop near Halifax. It was still before sunrise and the parking lot was jammed with hundreds of trucks and cars, and people were milling about in a jubilant atmosphere.
The lady in a 4×4 next to me said her name was Rochelle and she works in a hair salon. She was going all the way to Ottawa. “I asked my boss for the time off and he said, ‘I fully support your right to protest. Have a great time!’ So here I am. I am sooo excited!”
My son and I walked around the crowd of people in parkas and hats, their breath vaporing in the sub-zero air. The buzz was like a Canada Day parade – only happier, and at 6:30 a.m. People were dancing and cheering. Someone was on a megaphone saying tyranny was about to end. That this wasn’t just to end vaccine mandates for truckers, but for all the people of Canada. People cheered and slapped high-fives. It was joyful and it was the pure joy of seeing each other. People were greeting each other like old high school buddies who hadn’t seen each other in years – shaking hands and hugging. More hugs, and for strangers, than we’d given in two years.
We didn’t know there were so many other people who feel the same about the longest lasting government emergency ever. We are all people who have been oppressed by a government that meets the definition of an abuser – a tyrant who issues relentless diktats telling us where we can go and what we should wear, who shames us for not doing as it says because it’s for our own good, punishes us for breaking the unlawful rules that it changes on a whim. An abuser that tells us that we are stupid and selfish, and no one agrees with us.
And there we all were. And there were so many of us! Not a swastika in sight. No one looked any odder than what you’d see at any Christmas parade. How could we not know there were so many of us, except that there is an overbearing media doing the abuser’s bidding, like a mother ignoring a stepfather’s child abuse. Or worse, a Big Media version of Ghislaine Maxwell sadistically taking part.
“The sleeping giant awakens, huh?” I grinned to a middle-aged lady named Wendy at the coffee bar in the station.
She looked moved to tears, but she was smiling. “I haven’t been out in so long. It’s been so unfriendly; I hardly go anywhere. It’s just so amazing to see.”
Some truck horns sounded and cheers went up in the parking lot. People hustled to their cars to join the line, but it was slow going out. Hundreds packed the overpass and cars lined the highway, supporters standing outside their pickups and cars waving maple leaf flags and homemade signs. “Thank You Truckers,” “United We Stand” and “True North Strong and Free.”
Fireworks fizzled as dawn broke, and from our place in it, the convoy was a twinkling line of orange lights that was too long to see where it began or ended. Virtually every single overpass along the Trans Canada was lined with Maritimers braving frigid temperatures, waving flags and banners, hooting and cheering.
There wasn’t five miles of road without some show of support for the truckers –skidoos riding alongside the convoy in the snow, a light plane flying overhead, people standing in the middle of a field of snow waving the red and white and waving.
The following day, the government of Nova Scotia issued an “emergency” directive banning all protests on the interprovincial highway in support of the Freedom Convoy. Just confirmation of the absurd dictatorial politics that Canadians are opposing.
At a truck stop in New Brunswick, the crowds swelled again. There were some near bumps in the parking lot, but everyone was yielding, and laughing. There were proud kids giving away homemade ham sandwiches and brownies made for the truckers.
New Brunswick children gave out homemade sandwiches for the truckers.
An Acadian woman handed out $10 gift cards for Tim Horton’s (a multinational corporation that capitalizes on Canadian lifestyle but closed its doors to the tens of thousands of protesters in Ottawa). People proudly showed other identities – there were Nova Scotia, Metis and Every Child Matters flags – but they were all flying with the maple leaf.
This was a great swath of hard-working, salt-of-the-earth Canadians that Toronto Star columnist Bruce Arthur smeared as our “angriest citizens.” These kids. These moms pushing strollers on overpasses. The 82-year-old retired trucker who’d come out in freezing New Brunswick because his heart was swelling with pride. The families who stood in the snow. The tens of thousands of truckers who are heroes to them because they know right from wrong and are willing to risk everything for the difference.
The Toronto Star’s Arthur seethed at this beautiful spirit of unity and freedom that spread across this land last week, calling it “giddy inchoate rage” and “dangerous.”
The Associated Press in Toronto outright lied, claiming there was “little sympathy in a country where more than 80% are vaccinated.” Most in the crowds were probably vaccinated. “Three shots & I still can’t get a haircut,” one man’s homemade sign said. This was about freedom. And a people sick of moving goalposts.
“Many people were outraged by some of the crude behavior,” the AP lied. But there was no crude behaviour. It was lying.
Our Prime Minister did this too. He smeared millions of Canadians – not just those in Ottawa, but the hundreds of thousands who waved them on and the ones who wished they could or hadn’t heard about it. Soccer moms. Children. Teens. Natives. Restaurant owners. Shopkeepers. Hairdressers and tow truck drivers.
He’s condescendingly called them a “fringe minority” and “tinfoil hats” who hold “unacceptable views.” Stupid people with stupid thoughts and no one agrees with them. The leader of a country to his people. A man who says that hate speech against any group of people should be prosecuted.
People greeting the Freedom Convoy near Fredericton, NB
He slammed these citizens, most of whom have lost so much these last two years – their livelihoods, their freedom, their peace, their hope. He called them Nazis who “spew hatred” and hold abusive attitudes tor their fellow citizens.
An abuser does that. He projects his crimes onto his victims.
Our mainstream media, which has played his game with him, is now lying about the crowds they saw. They embarrassingly preface their questions with obsequious lines like “We know how despicable this all is but … ”
There were reportedly two or three bad actors in the crowds of tens of thousands in Ottawa, like the one who stood out in the crowd – in full balaclava and carrying a brand spanking new confederate flag. Even the media pictures claiming this was proof of the widespread racism didn’t show his face because it was just too embarrassingly obvious that he was a provocateur.
The media reported on these “radicalized” and “dangerous” crowds against their backdrop footage of cheering, hooting Canadians; like a flipside of their reports of the “fiery but mostly peaceful” BLM protests. Of course, Trudeau said yesterday that BLM was an “excellent example” of the sort of protest he agreed with.
The CBC’s dangerous protest of ‘extreme rhetoric’
The “mostly peaceful” BLM protests Trudeau called an is “excellent example” of protest he agrees with.
The Associated Press lied that there were people urinating on sidewalks and some who were carrying signs and flags with swastikas, but strangely there were no images. Most stooped to stock photos as illustration for their misinformation about these thousands of quintessentially Canadian citizens as racists – swastikas must have been hard to find in the sea of maple leaves. In fact, the one photo that drew all the righteous indignation was a drawn-on symbol on the flag similar to the one waved right in front of Trudeau’s face at a 2018 Town Hall Meeting.
“Thank you for coming, Sir,” he said to the guy with the upside-down Canadian flag (a nautical symbol for a ship in distress) scrawled with a swastika, labeling Canada the “Evil Empire.”
Trudeau: “Thank you for coming, Sir” to a man with a swastika on the Canadian flag, in 2018.
One CBC panelist, without a shred of evidence, almost hilariously suggested the whole trucker convoy was instigated by Russia.
The media was outraged at the “defacing” of a statue of national hero Terry Fox. Citizens had draped him in a Canadian flag, placed a “Mandate Freedom” sign in his hands and a ballcap on his head.
Does that meet the definition of defacing? BLM protesters that Trudeau supported toppled a statue of our country’s first Prime Minister Sir John A. MacDonald. Which looks more like defacing to you?
Not all defacing is alike: The flag-draped Terry Fox at the Freedom Convoy vs. Trudeau’s BLM attack on Sir John A. MacDonald.
While police reported no incidents of violence or hate, Trudeau said Monday that Canadians are “shocked” and “disgusted” with the actions of some of the protesters. We haven’t heard details about what we’re supposed to be shocked and disgusted with, but we’re just told that’s what we should feel right now.
A minority of people who have lost nothing from the lockdowns, who have not suffered or watched their children suffer, will continue to obey. Some white-collar bureaucrats whose livelihoods have only been marginally impacted (or improved) by endless COVID restrictions may swallow the media lies. Their businesses weren’t bankrupted. Some people want mask mandates to stay forever. Coerced “warp speed” injections are reasonable to them. The noise on Parliament Hill is disrupting their comfort, however, and they want the nasty working-class people to go home and take their boosters.
For those of us who have seen Canada transformed from a free nation to a tyranny, however, we have seen the others now – and we cannot unsee them. We see the lies. And we know the truth. We are the majority. And in the words of one homemade sign to the Freedom Convoy: Justin Trudeau has divided us in 2 years. Truckers have united us in 2 weeks.
