The Freedom Convoy was a group of trucks that set out on a three-week trek across Canada in protest of pandemic mandates. They were stopped by the Canadian government, and a federal grand jury investigation was opened into what happened to them. But what was really going on inside those trucks? And why did they have to travel across the country to protest? In this episode of Full Comet, we talk to journalist Andrew Lawton about the events that took place inside the trucks, and how they changed the course of history.
00:02:05.500Thanks so much for joining us for the latest episode of Full Comet.
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00:02:11.120The Freedom Convoy that traveled across Canada to take route in downtown Ottawa in opposition to pandemic mandates continues to be an extremely divisive topic.
00:02:19.700Despite the fact it's been over for months, it remains very much a point of public discussion and debate.
00:02:25.840Because the Emergencies Act inquiry doesn't wrap up until its report comes out in early 2023.
00:02:31.560And because legal processes are still winding their way through the courts for some of those persons who were charged in relation to their involvement in the convoy.
00:02:39.020We recorded a great episode when it all happened with Rupa Subramanya, who was on the ground at the time.
00:02:43.880We had a constitutional expert to join us to discuss the invocation of the act.
00:02:47.260But now that the dust has settled, maybe it's time to revisit some of the lesser known or overlooked facts that are so vital to understanding what it is that really went on.
00:02:58.500Whatever your perspective of the Freedom Convoy.
00:03:00.380Andrew Lawton has been a radio show host and newspaper columnist with a number of outlets.
00:03:04.960He's now the senior journalist with True North.
00:03:06.900And he has a new book out called The Freedom Convoy.
00:03:09.620The inside story of three weeks that shook the world.
00:03:24.980And the conversation we've been having sort of nationally on Twitter or at the coffee shop has been really a certain set of, I don't know, dare I say, like prepackaged facts or just a couple of competing narratives.
00:03:39.460You've been hearing it months nonstop.
00:03:41.200What you've written here is, I think, a lot of things that people would be surprised to learn or just have not previously been a part of the discussion.
00:03:49.280Yeah, I think part of the problem is that for a lot of people, this thing just happened.
00:03:57.580Maybe they heard a little bit of it or saw something on social media when the trucks were on their way starting in B.C. and making the trek across the country to Ottawa.
00:04:05.800But for a lot of people, this convoy just started when the trucks rolled up and parked on Wellington Street.
00:04:30.040Some of them were political activists.
00:04:31.340But this group of people that came together and formed an organization and later on a literal corporation, a not-for-profit corporation to support this protest.
00:04:41.300And there were so many different layers of it happening off the streets, beneath the surface, that just wasn't captured in the media coverage.
00:04:49.140And my thinking on this was that, you know, whether you support the convoy or not, I think this is a tremendous part of Canadian political history that people, I think, would be fascinated to learn all that went into.
00:05:30.440And when you talk to two different people about what was the freedom convoy, you're going to hear, like, not just different facts that they choose to accentuate or amplify, but totally contradictory realities as well.
00:05:44.580Yeah, I mean, one of the chapters is called dueling narratives for that reason, because we really did see these complete, like, parallel track narratives and stories where it was like a Rorschach inkblock test.
00:05:57.480People were looking at this thing and coming to wildly, wildly different conclusions.
00:06:02.220And a lot of the media coverage, I think, was very affirming in that way.
00:06:05.820People that hated the convoy would look at the coverage or, as in the case of a lot of mainstream media malfeasance, create the coverage, and they would do it focusing on these isolated things that really cast the convoy in the worst light.
00:06:20.980And I think the flip side of that is you had some people that were supporting the convoy that were dismissive, I'd say perhaps excessively so, of some very legitimate criticisms.
00:06:29.640And convoy organizers, as I talk about in the book, were very aware of that.
00:06:35.340I mean, things like people that were involving themselves that really were inviting a lot of negative coverage and stuff like that.
00:06:41.360But as this went on, you had, you know, the Justin Trudeau fringe minority with unacceptable views side of things.
00:06:47.920And then you had the, you know, freedom fighters fighting against COVID mandates side of it.
00:06:52.640And both of these groups, for the same three-week period, were looking at the same events, and everything was still, I think, very reinforcing of their existing views of it.
00:07:02.980I mean, that famous tweet from Trudeau where he's like, okay, the convoy people, they're racist, they're sexist, they're transphobic, they're Islamophobic.
00:07:09.420Like, actually using all those phrases, you're like, what?
00:07:13.020And I know everyone was, the people who wanted to malign them, they always reference, I guess there's this one Nazi flag on the periphery, and it's like, what's that loser doing?
00:07:21.460You know, I went and watched a Toronto event that was in solidarity, I guess, with the Ottawa One, and there were two pride flags that two gentlemen were holding, two rainbow flags.
00:07:30.820It's like, okay, you know, what does that mean?
00:07:32.360And you've got one Nazi flag, but you've got two pride flags, so does the two cancel out the one?
00:07:36.200And it's like, oh my God, but yet you're only supposed to focus on one and not the other.
00:07:40.520And, you know, obviously there was a huge multiracial component to what was going on in the streets of Ottawa, and that is not consistent with Trudeau's tweet either and his framing of it all.
00:07:50.040But they just kept moving forward with, to your point, the dueling narratives.
00:07:54.000Yeah, and I think on the note of the diversity of the crowd, that was the one thing I found the most striking.
00:07:59.060Being in Ottawa, the weekend the convoy got there, as you had French Canadians and Alberta independence people and Indigenous people and Ontarians, and you had people from all over the country, from all walks of life.
00:08:12.140And for all that, you know, Justin Trudeau and the government like to talk about diversity being our collective national strength, there was not a lot of appreciation for the diversity that this protest brought out.
00:08:23.900And not just diversity of political opinion, which there was.
00:08:27.380I mean, not everyone agreed on every aspect of this, let alone the strategy of doing it.
00:08:31.680But even just these different sectarian groups that were all coming together because they had been affected by COVID mandates in different ways, whether it was an Indigenous person that was distrustful of government imposing medical treatment or an Ontario business owner who had lost years of revenue because of shutdowns and lockdowns and restrictions.
00:08:52.040I mean, all of these people found something in the truckers that they resonated with.
00:08:58.040Yeah, and I found that what we saw or what we should have seen, but a lot of people plugged their ears to it, was a deeply human experience.
00:09:04.800So much earnestness, so much raw passion for various different reasons.
00:09:09.080Like you said, whatever is going on with their lives.
00:09:11.260And they came to Parliament Hill to articulate that, to vent that, to just lay it all on the table and just throw all those emotions out there.
00:09:19.660And one wishes that we could have been a bit more sensitive to that.
00:09:25.860And it was actually quite shameful that it wasn't happening.
00:09:30.200I mean, you mentioned in your introduction Rupa Subramanya, who did tremendous work.
00:09:34.060And I've said that Rupa, it shouldn't have been so groundbreaking what she did, which was literally just walking around talking to people and trying to understand who they were and why they were there.
00:09:45.160And even as someone who had covered the convoy in the course of interviewing people for writing this book, I was asking a lot of them.
00:09:52.580And I was amazed, even as someone who had covered it, with how much new information I was learning about why people got involved and how people got involved and people who've never been part of a political protest in their life that ended up taking on key roles.
00:10:06.360And in some cases, people who had never even voted or hadn't voted in years that were involved in what was a very political protest.
00:10:15.160Talking about all the new things that you've unearthed, or at least the terrain that hasn't been well trod by the public discussion, let's go back to the beginning of it all, how it came about, the organization of it, as you alluded to.
00:10:26.120We know that this was predominantly or most vocally in response to a trucker mandate that only came into effect in January 2022 and was probably only conceived by the liberal government, I'm going to guess, like a few weeks before it happened.
00:10:39.120And yet in the book, you write that the idea for this came about in August 2021, probably before they even knew that they were going to do a trucker vaccine mandate.
00:10:50.680Yeah, well, it was interesting because there were a couple of different tracks that all sort of merged together because different people had the idea of a convoy, which had been done before in Canada a couple of years ago in 2019 with the United We Roll convoy, which, you know, raised a six figure sum of money, made a bit of a splash, but wasn't really as earth shattering as the freedom convoy was.
00:11:14.020But the idea of using a convoy to Ottawa for political protest existed.
00:11:19.260So what had happened was in Australia in August, there were a group of truckers that decided to do a little bit of a jam up on the highway to make a stink about COVID mandates.
00:11:30.900And I don't even know how many there were.
00:11:32.920I think it was a few dozen and the whole thing was done in a day.
00:11:36.900They got a couple of headlines and that was that.
00:11:39.300And there was one guy in Canada who had said on Facebook when that story came up, you know, what about a convoy to Ottawa?
00:11:46.300And that was it and had a little bit of traction.
00:11:48.940And then there was another aspect of this, which I focus a little bit more on in the book, a woman by the name of Bridget Belt, who is in southwestern Ontario.
00:11:57.840She's a cross-border trucker who, like many of them in Canada, is no longer able to cross the border because she's not vaccinated.
00:12:04.900And in December, she was driving from the U.S. to Canada.
00:12:09.600The vaccine mandate for truckers didn't exist.
00:12:15.520She has some post-traumatic stress because of violence that she was the victim of.
00:12:20.540She doesn't like having her face covered.
00:12:22.120And she was threatened with arrest at the border in Windsor, Ontario, I think it was, for not wearing a mask while sitting in her truck alone talking to the border officer.
00:12:39.400So the vaccine mandate didn't exist yet.
00:12:41.940And she was just so rattled by it because this was capping off just two years of restrictions, of lockdowns, of feeling like a second-class citizen in her own country because she wasn't vaccinated.
00:12:52.780And afterwards, it really affected her.
00:12:56.540And then she kind of just had this idea of doing a convoy.
00:13:01.000And she didn't know what it was going to look like.
00:13:02.920She had never organized anything like this.
00:13:04.780But she had this idea, and she linked up with a couple of other truckers on TikTok, of all places, and really pushed this.
00:13:12.420That was the track that I think really morphed into what we know as the convoy.
00:13:17.840But then she linked up with James Botter, who was the one who had paid attention to the Australia case.
00:13:23.860And then all of these people started coming together that were all at different parts of their frustration but all believed that something had to be done.
00:13:31.420Tamera Litch, one of the most, I think, visible organizers of the convoy appearing at the press conferences, the person whose name was initially attached to the GoFundMe.
00:13:43.200I guess her name was always attached, but initially it was just her attached to that GoFundMe account.
00:13:47.140And, of course, the person, she was charged.
00:13:49.560And now she's finally gotten some of her bail conditions released.
00:13:53.840But sort of the most prominent individual.
00:13:55.400I did not expect you would begin the story with this lady named Bridget, who I've never heard of before.
00:13:59.980How do we transition from Bridget to Tamera?
00:14:04.860And one of the challenges is that there are a lot of people that were, throughout the course of the convoy, really, I'll say, uncertain about who was in charge.
00:14:16.340And the answer to that question, as the book tries to explain, is that no one was really in charge.
00:16:19.120I believe when it includes the counts of perjury and obstruction of justice that were added to the mix in, I guess, in April.
00:16:27.040He has over 10 charges that he is facing right now.
00:16:29.700And he's going through that legal process.
00:16:32.060There's controversy, I guess, as to whether or not it's fair to even call Pat King an organizer or leader of the convoy,
00:16:38.200as a lot of people did and as a lot of news stories did.
00:16:40.660But tell me about the controversy around King and the support and then both opposition to him that came from the other leaders of this movement.
00:16:50.000I mean, Pat King was, if I'm being perfectly frank here, the weak link for the convoy because he has said a lot of things that really do not stand up.
00:16:59.560And some you could say, OK, maybe it was taken out of context.
00:17:02.120But a lot of stuff that he said that I don't think is defensible and I don't agree with.
00:17:06.880And if you were looking to delegitimize the convoy, he was an easy way to do that.
00:17:11.180And it's undeniable that he was involved at the very beginning.
00:17:15.360He was involved from the ground level.
00:17:17.480And it was on his show that he does on Facebook when this idea with Bridget Belton, with Chris Barber, with a couple of others was first presented in any public way.
00:17:36.800But he did have an audience and he did have a following.
00:17:40.160And for this group that really just wanted to get the word out, certainly that following was helpful to them.
00:17:45.720And they had a lot of people that came to them because they heard about it on Pat King's channel.
00:17:51.480But what was interesting is how early on organizers really tried to distance themselves from Pat King because the media was writing about him right up until the end of the convoy.
00:18:01.960And I think even still now, but the organizers had on the way to Ottawa, I'll give a little bit of a juicy bit that hasn't been reported before, except for in my book.
00:19:13.380Andrew, one of the most, I think, strongest claims made against the convoy and its participants is that they were basically engaging in sedition because they wanted to overthrow the government.
00:19:22.980And the government was happy to amplify that.
00:19:28.080You didn't really hear that from them at their press conferences.
00:19:31.140And it wasn't really what people were saying, walking out and about in the street or doing the dance parties or the bouncy castle.
00:19:37.760But there was a memorandum, a manifesto that was circulating, calling for something like that to happen for the governor general to get involved.
00:19:44.940What was the real deal with this thing, this memorandum?
00:19:47.700Where did it come from and what role did it play?
00:19:51.260So James Batter, James Batter, who was the gentleman I mentioned earlier, who had really come across this idea in August of doing a convoy and tried to do a convoy in December on his own.
00:20:03.520But it didn't really gain any traction.
00:20:05.260But he had, again, played a role early on.
00:20:08.520And he was someone that I would say in the beginning was an organizer.
00:20:13.400He had said, we need a central place of information that we can post the routes in the itinerary and we need to plan the maps and book accommodations.
00:20:20.420So he came to the table and said he was prepared to do that.
00:20:23.420And again, all of these people, including people that have lives and jobs that are on the road, are saying, yeah, you're offering to help.
00:20:29.980And one of his pet projects was this memorandum of understanding, which, in short, he thinks is a contract that if enough citizens sign, they can enter into an agreement with the governor general and the Senate and form a citizen crown committee of sorts that can have some sort of a direct influence over policy.
00:20:51.060And he's written this thing in legalese and he cited statutes and treaties and all of that.
00:21:33.960And early on, Benjamin Dictor, who another gentleman that was one of the so-called official spokespeople of the convoy who Tamara Leach brought on, he was the one that really tried to put the kibosh on that and say this is – we do not want anything to do with this.
00:22:32.820If you were to talk to, like, Tamara Leach and B.J. Dictor and Chris Barber, they're like, oh, it's not that thing James meant.
00:22:38.120Like, it was never actually a reality for the people involved in the convoy except for James.
00:22:44.560James talking about the people out on the street, what we actually saw, the main event, part two of your book titled The Block Party.
00:22:53.960And it's quite an interesting title, The Block Party, because I know the celebratory factor of it as, well, you couldn't ignore it because it was what was happening.
00:23:01.200Although there's obviously debate about the tone and the actual happenings on the street, both daytime and nighttime.
00:23:07.320Why did you title part two The Block Party, the story of what actually went down?
00:23:11.240And I was trying to capture the essence of what the convoy was to the people there.
00:23:21.140And that was the thing I found so striking, because when I got to Ottawa that first weekend, I was staying at the Sheridan, which is just a couple of blocks from Center Block on Parliament Hill.
00:23:31.340And you walked in, and the first thing I noticed is, oh my goodness, the mask mandate in Ottawa is dead, because everyone there was just walking around mask-free.
00:23:41.360And the hotel, which had been dutifully trying to hand out masks to people, had given up at that point, because they had taken over the town.
00:23:48.520They had taken over the hotels and the restaurants and the streets.
00:23:50.960And they were living the life, what I felt was anyway, the life that they felt they had been robbed for the last years, without mask mandates, without being able to gather, without being able to go into places, without your vaccine passport and stuff like that.
00:24:07.240And that was the atmosphere, and all of these little absurdities that people latched onto, like the bouncy castle, or the hot tub, or the pig roast, or the pizza oven, or the saunas.
00:24:18.340I mean, all of these things were oddities in a way, but they were part of this general atmosphere that people were there for the long haul, and they were there for a good time.
00:24:27.020And it was a protest, but the way they protested was just by living, by just living in this little space of a few square blocks in Ottawa that they had taken over, and were really governing, in a lot of respects, the way they thought the country should be governed, which was just people doing what they wanted.
00:24:42.160Let's talk for a moment about the honking, and where that came from, because I think even people, I know, even people who were supportive of the convoy, supportive of ending the mandates, were like, well, yeah, I guess if I kind of lived there, I'd be kind of frustrated at the honking, too.
00:24:59.720And the honking was almost the most debated part, and you saw those videos of people running onto the street, almost literally, there was one guy, I think he was tearing his hair out, literally, screaming, stop the honking, please.
00:25:12.820I mean, I don't know where it came from.
00:25:15.600I mean, it might just be that they're trucks, and that's what trucks do, they honk.
00:25:19.500I mean, I remember as a kid, I remember as a kid, you know, when you drive down the highway, you do the little, like, you know, pull down with your arm as though you had a string to get a truck that you pull.
00:25:27.620I don't know if kids still do it today, but to get a truck beside you to honk, and it's just kind of a fun thing.
00:25:32.800And what I did notice in Ottawa was that it was just a celebration at first.
00:26:10.420Yeah, it was the long honk where even after the honking stopped, you still just keep hearing it burning into your ears.
00:26:18.320But what was interesting, and I found this fascinating, there was an injunction, a legal battle, where the residents of Ottawa filed a class action suit, which was widely reported.
00:26:27.780And a judge gave the injunction to stop the honking, which largely happened.
00:26:33.040I am not actually aware of anyone being charged with breaking that injunction.
00:26:36.720But what I found fascinating, every single organizer I asked about it said they were so grateful when that injunction came because then they could go to the trucks and say, yeah, you've got to stop or they'll arrest you because they all hated it too.
00:26:51.340Like, they were all tired of the honking as well, but they didn't want to go around telling people what to do.
00:26:56.080But the injunction gave them an excuse to.
00:26:58.460But yeah, that was the funny thing is that even the convoy people hated the honking.
00:27:01.780I mean, one of the most interesting aspects of this, the confluence of personalities, is that you had the people who had lost the most from dealing with COVID-19.
00:27:13.000Whatever you think of whether one should or shouldn't get vaccinated, I mean, the people's situations that brought them to Ottawa were such that they felt they had lost so much and it was worth it.
00:27:21.160And so many of the residents of Ottawa, and I say this is someone who lived in Centre Town for a number of years, very familiar with the Glebe area, where a lot of the, I think, the most firmest anti-convoy sentiment was.
00:27:34.660These were people who were most insulated against the damages of lockdowns.
00:27:40.900Public servants, senior public servants, people who are making six figures a year, who have guaranteed wage increases, as has been reported on all the raises that public servants got.
00:27:51.400I mean, it's an interesting dichotomy to bring those two sort of, not just opposing perspectives of what happened during the convoy, but opposing types of persons of what their whole pandemic experience was.
00:28:03.500Yeah, I think you're right about that.
00:28:06.620And one of the big challenges, and I didn't really get into it in the book because I was trying to focus on the narrative of the convoy more than the, you know, broader philosophical implications of it.
00:28:16.900But there was something to be said about what Ottawa's place is in Canada, because to people outside of Ottawa, Ottawa's a symbol.
00:28:26.860It's a place where you can go and have your voice heard in front of where government sits.
00:28:31.840But it's also a city, and people live in that city.
00:28:35.060And it has a municipal government and municipal services.
00:28:37.820And that was, as we saw, one of the big themes that I think would challenge the convoy's legitimacy to people later on is the effect it was having on residential areas.
00:28:48.460I mean, Ottawa is overwhelmingly a city inhabited by public servants.
00:28:52.260The woman who filed the class action lawsuit, who represented the class, she was herself a public servant who worked for the government.
00:28:59.640And there was a very significant divide there.
00:29:03.600I mean, the people who had been heralded as the essential workers, the pandemic heroes, truckers, and other folks for the last two years all of a sudden were up against those who didn't lose anything to the pandemic.
00:29:17.920I mean, some of them would have been denied the right to have their weddings or go to family funerals or visit people in hospitals.
00:29:23.240But the economic harm that was really, really devastating for so many of the people protesting in the convoy, a lot of government workers were immune to that.
00:29:33.220No, and I know there was the meme or whatever, the slogan that convoy participants said, whether it was the honking or whether it was just the presence of the convoy, it said, oh, you know, just two more weeks, they would kind of tease at people.
00:29:44.280But, you know, there's something, there's an undercurrent to that.
00:29:49.140I mean, I remember this, oh, we're going to shut your kid's school down for two more weeks, Fury.
00:29:51.940No, I want my kid's school opened right now because you told me two more weeks, two weeks ago, et cetera, et cetera.
00:29:57.920I want the local business to have the freedom to open right now.
00:30:00.640Stop telling me this two more weeks thing.
00:30:02.320And people would just, people who were very supportive of those lockdowns and measures would kind of laugh it off.
00:30:07.560And I think a lot of people felt like this was symbolic of them getting their revenge rightly or wrongly, whether that was fair or not fair.
00:30:14.840Yeah, I think that was, that was certainly a narrative that formed and it was not something that I heard from the protesters themselves that, you know, they were not there, the ones that I spoke to for punitive reasons.
00:30:29.020They didn't want to put harm on anyone.
00:30:31.160They were actually trying to, in their view, liberate everyone.
00:30:35.080I mean, that was the one thing that was so striking early on is they said, we're not protesting for truckers.
00:30:40.940We're protesting for everyone that's living under the mask mandates and the vaccine passports.
00:30:45.520And, and that was why later on, the truckers were actually very receptive to the idea of moving off of residential streets.
00:30:53.560And, and one of the things I found so interesting, they weren't on residential streets because they were trying to protest on the residential streets.
00:31:00.980They were on them because there was no room for them anywhere else.
00:31:04.500And when the streets got jammed up and police started putting blockades in, a lot of trucks just had to stop where they were.
00:31:10.940And that became their home for the next three weeks.
00:31:14.080And for all of the organization that did go into the convoy, that was the one thing that was the least organized.
00:31:23.440They stopped when they couldn't advance any further.
00:31:25.520And as a result, the residential streets around downtown ended up getting full, but that was never part of the plan.
00:31:31.300This celebratory atmosphere, it definitely ended up bringing people from, from Quebec, from other provinces, other regions that really had, had nothing to do with the truckers.
00:31:46.260And I mean, this was one of the weird criticisms that people would make about the convoy.
00:31:51.060They'd say, well, they aren't even truckers.
00:31:52.760It's like, well, I mean, they have trucks, which I think is a pretty compelling argument that they are truckers.
00:31:57.480But they did bring a lot of other people.
00:31:59.280I mean, some of them were there living in their trucks.
00:32:02.020Other people were there who've never been in the trucking industry but supported the message that the truckers sparked.
00:32:07.840And they did come out because of that.
00:32:09.740And it wasn't just political conservatives, as I mentioned earlier.
00:32:13.840Like, there's one woman I talk about in the book very briefly who had a sign that said, fully vaxxed, BIPOC, pro-choice.
00:32:24.440And she, BIPOC being Black, Indigenous, Person of Color, so she was an ethnic minority, a left-wing, pro-choice person, fully vaccinated herself but said, we need to stand against vaccine mandates because pro-choice means pro-choice.
00:32:39.540And this was a woman – I interviewed her at the time when I saw her in Ottawa whose story and whose connection to the convoy I think would be shocking to Canadians that were just reading the CBC and Toronto Star version of it who want to just cast these people as the knuckle-dragging, racist, white supremacist, anti-science troglodytes.
00:33:00.660How do you think this is ultimately going to be remembered, Andrew?
00:33:03.660Because right now the Emergencies Act inquiry is going to take a number of months to happen.
00:33:08.760But I feel like a lot of the original arguments that at least the liberal government was making vis-a-vis what really went down.
00:33:15.260Because, of course, to do the inquiry, the inquiry is really supposed to be about why did you invoke the act?
00:33:20.460But clearly the liberal government wants to make it a sort of re-litigation of the whole thing, the idea that this wasn't grassroots, that this was like shady foreign operation, like various shadowy NGOs or whatever from other countries running all of this, that it was just, you know, not diverse at all.
00:33:38.560Well, things that have been completely exposed is not correct.
00:33:42.600I mean, I can just go, I don't have the time to go through the laundry list of things that are inaccurate.
00:33:46.740That's going to be further, I think, ingrained into the public consciousness.
00:33:52.300I mean, the question, how is it going to be remembered?
00:33:55.540It depends how many people buy my book.
00:33:57.100My hope is that it challenges that narrative a bit.
00:34:00.780And even if it doesn't turn people into convoy supporters, which is not my intention and not the way the book is written, that it will shine a light on who they were and why it happened and why they did what they did and how.
00:34:12.760But, I mean, you raised an important point.
00:34:14.660And I think a lot of it depends on how this public inquiry actually unfolds and whether it does get into the meat of what was happening and why.
00:34:24.340And there also needs to be some accountability from the government on this because the government justified the Emergencies Act by talking about all of these things that really did not materialize and no evidence has supported, such as violent conspiracy and organized groups and foreign influence and foreign money.
00:35:04.400And even when that was debunked, when Ottawa police finally came out, you know, months later and said, yeah, yeah, that said nothing to do with the convoy.
00:35:11.680But even when that happened, the person who initially set the narrative, the guy who I think lived in that building and tweeted about it, he wouldn't back down.
00:35:20.240He said, well, the convoy created a culture of lawlessness that allowed something like this to happen, which is there is zero, zero interpretation of reality that would support that conclusion.
00:35:32.900People desperately wanted it to be true.
00:35:35.060And when you trace back the media coverage about this, as I did early on in the book, you see that the prediction of violence came before the convoy was even in Ottawa.
00:35:45.340It came long before then because people needed it to be true to delegitimize it.
00:35:50.600They were seeing this movement that was gaining momentum, that was attracting a broader coalition than just the normal anti-lockdown, anti-COVID mandate protesters.
00:35:59.400And I think the people that wanted to delegitimize it started sowing this idea of extremism and violence, which never in the course of the three weeks materialized.
00:36:08.860The people, name names, and that primary name is Justin Trudeau.
00:36:11.840I remember those statements, those tweets from cabinet ministers.
00:36:14.760Oh, we hope there isn't a January 6th-style insurrection.
00:36:18.680We hope this doesn't, you're like, really, you hope it doesn't happen?
00:36:24.640Because nobody's saying that these are their intentions, but you seem to be gearing up for it.
00:36:28.540Yeah, but it wasn't just Justin Trudeau.
00:36:31.440It was a lot of media coverage as well.
00:36:33.580I mean, there was one that I talk about in the book where they quoted an expert saying that, you know, all the people that are donating to it might be strung up on terror financing charges.
00:36:41.960Now, and she was not saying that as a prediction, although with the Emergencies Act later on, she might have been closer to the money than I thought she was initially.
00:36:50.680But you just saw that there were people that desperately wanted this to be something that it wasn't.
00:36:56.140And they refused to accept, even when faced with the evidence, that these were a group of people that might have been rough around the edges, but they were not violent.
00:37:07.640They didn't get everything they wanted or even the main thing they wanted initially, which was an end to the trucker mandate.
00:37:12.700But they did make themselves heard and seen.
00:37:17.660Andrew, one thing that was so eye-opening for me and so illustrative of what was really going on in terms of the public support was when the list of the funders was released.
00:37:28.740And then somebody took it and did a geolocation Google Maps of it where they plugged every household in the country that donated to it.
00:37:36.340And something like six hours later, Google took it down because it was a violation of terms of service.
00:37:39.960But I looked at it. I said, wow. And I looked all across the country. I looked in my neighborhood and, you know, there's only one person on every street.
00:37:47.600So, okay, fine. It obviously wasn't majority of Canadians, but one person on every street in my downtown NDP writing.
00:37:53.900And then I click and it would have the name. I go, this is a guy who lives, you know, 10 houses down from me.
00:37:58.440And I didn't know the person and it was not, didn't seem to be a white supremacist.
00:38:01.860I remember it was a Middle Eastern name. You go, who was that gentleman? Two streets away from me, all this person.
00:38:06.480And I thought, well, what's going on in Ottawa? And I looked the next door neighbor of Justin Trudeau and I saw the comment the lady had put in Rockcliffe Park.
00:38:13.860And she was upset that her children had been denied schooling. And you went and checked in Vancouver and you thought, wow, it literally won on like every second street, whatever the writing, whatever the neighborhood.
00:38:25.740And it's like, folks don't, you know, maybe this isn't your cup of tea. Maybe you're against the convoy, but there's a lot of people who you're coming into contact with at your grocery store on your street, playing in your kid's park, who they felt like there was something and they were very different reasons to support it.
00:38:39.960But there was some reason there that they felt, I want to give 10 bucks or a hundred bucks to this thing. This speaks to me.
00:38:45.360Yeah. And you may remember when the emergencies act was invoked and the government started cracking down on funding. I remember the very real fear that people who gave $10 had that their accounts were going to be frozen just because of how vague the thing was worded and how little communication there was from the government.
00:39:02.740And people that did exactly what you did. They said, you know what? I like these truckers. I'm against vaccine mandates. I think they have, you know, got that Canadian spirit and I want to show them a little bit of support and, you know, chip in five or 10 bucks.
00:39:13.380These people that felt like they had ruined their life because of it, these people that felt they actually were going to have their accounts frozen and have a red mark on their credit report and all of that. And that was significant.
00:39:27.260And the fact that you had media that were systematically going through and calling these people up and doxing them, I think was shameful. And I still don't think there's been any real accountability from outlets that went down that road, including notably CBC for what they did there.
00:39:44.520I asked you, how do you think this will be event be remembered? A related question. What do you hope people take from your book? If they take only one thing.
00:39:53.540If they take one thing from my book, I hope it's an understanding that this was far more complex and sophisticated than a lot of people saw.
00:40:06.120And that is not a judgment for or against. It's just a sense of the reality of the situation here.
00:40:12.180And one of the big reasons for that, Anthony, is that you had people who had been laid off because of vaccine mandates, who were nurses, soldiers, police officers, firefighters that had skills, time on their hands and an axe to grind with the government.
00:40:27.600And they all took those skills that they had from their lives and put it into organizing this convoy.
00:40:33.900And that was the most interesting thing I found is just how dedicated these people were to making it happen.
00:40:40.440And there was a sophistication to it, even in a raw grassroots fly by the seat of your pants kind of way, that was really what got me writing this because I knew that people just weren't seeing that from the press coverage.
00:40:52.900Andrew Lawton, thanks so much for joining us today. Great conversation.
00:40:57.260Hey, thank you, Anthony. Really appreciate it.