The Long Conversation of the Truckers

This week I happened to click on a video of Mike Rowe in an interview with John Stossel, back in December of 2021. They discussed student loan forgiveness.

Something Stossel said stood out for me. When Mike Rowe drew a comparison and questioned why construction workers would not get loan forgiveness for equipment they purchase, on credit, to do their jobs, Stossel replied, “I imagine it’s because the guys that go to college talk better. They participate better in the public’s debates. The people who are in the construction business are less likely to do that.” This was followed by a clip of of an articulate single mother with $200,000 in student loans speaking into a microphone and saying, “I am here to fight, no matter how long it takes, for full debt cancelation and an education system that treats us with dignity….”

I had just finished watching the October 19 posting, LILLEY UNLEASHED: Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Watson putting politics into Emergency Act inquiry, and thought to myself, this is it. The truckers spoke in the way they knew how, by parking their big rigs in front of parliament and blowing their horns. This was their way of saying they wanted to be part of the debate.

Brian Lilley believes it was ultimately the responsibility of the mayor of Ottawa and the Ottawa Police to keep the big rigs out of downtown Ottawa, or to force them to move. I actually think the police force could not help but be sympathetic, on some level, to the plight of truckers who, overnight, lost their ability to provide a living for their families. This would be the normal response of any reasonable person.

It turned out to be a very long and one-sided conversation as the truckers were left waiting, indefinitely, out in the cold. The inquiry is trying to frame this as a “siege” or “occupation” but nobody knows on what day the “siege” actually began because there never was a siege. It was just the truckers not knowing how long they would have to wait until someone came out to talk to them.

The Emergencies Act was implemented on February 14. The inquiry reveals that on February 8 Ottawa City manager Steve Kanallakos was approached by Ottawa’s Police service with a request to meet with convoy organizers. In Lilley’s video he says, the Police, “thought it might help to diffuse the situation and lead to some positive outcome. Kanallakos went to Ottawa mayor Jim Watson to talk to him about this and get his feelings. This is what Kanallakos told the inquiry: He (Mayor Jim Watson) was very reluctant. His initial reaction was we shouldn’t and thought that doing that was going to put pressure on the federal government in terms of, you know, if we meet with them, then someone else would have to meet with them.”

There you have it. Nobody was going to meet with the truckers and talk to them. Instead they went after their funding. Tens of millions of dollars came through GoFundMe and GiveSendGo donations as a show of Canadian support for what the truckers were doing. Twice the CBC had to retract an article falsely claiming these donations were from bad foreign actors.

The inquiry will not reveal that this was a “terrorist organization” —the false premise upon which the government froze the funds and prevented the money from ever reaching the truckers. The Emergencies Act gave the government further, unprecedented, liberty to go after individual donors to freeze their accounts as well. Yes, instead of having a conversation, a story was manufactured to justify the Emergencies Act in response to a non-sensical “terrorist occupation.”

For two years truckers had delivered essentials across the country during the worst of the pandemic. Canada was over 80% vaccinated but strangely this was not enough. Seemingly arbitrarily, Prime Minister Trudeau decided to penalize the few remaining Canadians who didn’t get on board with the vaccination program. When he slapped a vaccine mandate on truckers he knew some of them would lose their livelihood and he knew the supply chain would be affected. He didn’t care.

Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, cannot imagine how our Prime Minsiter can be so cold hearted and short-sighted. We saw the vaccinated step up and speak on behalf of their fellow citizens. If one entity could lose their freedom, we were all at risk under this government.

Let’s be clear. Those who wanted to be protected from COVID-19 could get the vaccine. Protection was freely available to anyone who wanted it.

Let’s also remember that the average age of death from COVID-19 is over 85. Doctors have increasingly tried to get the attention of the officials by pointing out that the risk/benefit ratio of vaccination needs to be taken into account and may indeed tilt toward vaccination risk. Curiously, we are now being told of similarities between symptoms of long covid and vaccine injuries. Even if we ignore the evidence pointing in this direction—and we clearly shouldn’t—we still have the matter of bodily autonomy to contend with. The message from the governenment was, give up your bodily autonomy. Give up your personal freedom. In a very real sense the truckers drove to Ottawa on behalf of all Canadians. They were, as they claimed, the Freedom Convoy.