Full Comment - The whole truckin' story behind the Freedom Convoy

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00:01:58.720 Hello, I'm Anthony Fury.

00:02:05.500 Thanks so much for joining us for the latest episode of Full Comet.

00:02:08.140 If you haven't already, please consider subscribing.

00:02:11.120 The Freedom Convoy that traveled across Canada to take route in downtown Ottawa in opposition to pandemic mandates continues to be an extremely divisive topic.

00:02:19.700 Despite the fact it's been over for months, it remains very much a point of public discussion and debate.

00:02:24.040 And I think this will only continue.

00:02:25.840 Because the Emergencies Act inquiry doesn't wrap up until its report comes out in early 2023.

00:02:31.560 And 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.

00:02:39.020 We recorded a great episode when it all happened with Rupa Subramanya, who was on the ground at the time.

00:02:43.880 We had a constitutional expert to join us to discuss the invocation of the act.

00:02:47.260 But 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.

00:02:58.500 Whatever your perspective of the Freedom Convoy.

00:03:00.380 Andrew Lawton has been a radio show host and newspaper columnist with a number of outlets.

00:03:04.960 He's now the senior journalist with True North.

00:03:06.900 And he has a new book out called The Freedom Convoy.

00:03:09.620 The inside story of three weeks that shook the world.

00:03:13.760 Andrew Lawton joins us now.

00:03:15.300 Hey, Andrew.

00:03:15.660 Great to have you.

00:03:16.640 Hey, thanks for having me on, Anthony.

00:03:18.040 Good to talk to you as always.

00:03:19.080 Inside story.

00:03:20.980 That's what really interests me here about this book.

00:03:23.520 Very meticulously researched.

00:03:24.980 And 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.

00:03:38.340 And you hear the same thing.

00:03:39.460 You've been hearing it months nonstop.

00:03:41.200 What 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.

00:03:49.280 Yeah, I think part of the problem is that for a lot of people, this thing just happened.

00:03:55.660 The trucks just showed up.

00:03:57.580 Maybe 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.

00:04:05.800 But for a lot of people, this convoy just started when the trucks rolled up and parked on Wellington Street.

00:04:11.820 And it was grassroots.

00:04:13.200 It was organic.

00:04:14.180 For a lot of the truckers, they did just show up.

00:04:16.260 They weren't part of any organized group or organized movement.

00:04:19.940 But what was fascinating to me, and I saw this when I was in Ottawa covering this, is they developed an organization.

00:04:26.620 You had this group of people.

00:04:29.000 Some of them were truckers.

00:04:30.040 Some of them were political activists.

00:04:31.340 But 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.

00:04:41.300 And there were so many different layers of it happening off the streets, beneath the surface, that just wasn't captured in the media coverage.

00:04:49.140 And 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.

00:05:00.440 No, absolutely.

00:05:30.440 And 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.

00:05:44.580 Yeah, 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.

00:05:57.480 People were looking at this thing and coming to wildly, wildly different conclusions.

00:06:02.220 And a lot of the media coverage, I think, was very affirming in that way.

00:06:05.820 People 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.

00:06:20.980 And 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.

00:06:29.640 And convoy organizers, as I talk about in the book, were very aware of that.

00:06:35.340 I mean, things like people that were involving themselves that really were inviting a lot of negative coverage and stuff like that.

00:06:41.360 But as this went on, you had, you know, the Justin Trudeau fringe minority with unacceptable views side of things.

00:06:47.920 And then you had the, you know, freedom fighters fighting against COVID mandates side of it.

00:06:52.640 And 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. 0.96

00:07:02.980 I 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. 0.89

00:07:09.420 Like, actually using all those phrases, you're like, what? 0.97

00:07:12.240 What is going on? 0.94

00:07:13.020 And 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?

00:07:21.460 You 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.

00:07:30.820 It's like, okay, you know, what does that mean?

00:07:32.360 And you've got one Nazi flag, but you've got two pride flags, so does the two cancel out the one? 0.50

00:07:36.200 And it's like, oh my God, but yet you're only supposed to focus on one and not the other.

00:07:40.520 And, 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.

00:07:50.040 But they just kept moving forward with, to your point, the dueling narratives.

00:07:54.000 Yeah, and I think on the note of the diversity of the crowd, that was the one thing I found the most striking.

00:07:59.060 Being 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.

00:08:12.140 And 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.

00:08:23.900 And not just diversity of political opinion, which there was.

00:08:27.380 I mean, not everyone agreed on every aspect of this, let alone the strategy of doing it.

00:08:31.680 But 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.

00:08:52.040 I mean, all of these people found something in the truckers that they resonated with.

00:08:58.040 Yeah, 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.

00:09:04.800 So much earnestness, so much raw passion for various different reasons.

00:09:09.080 Like you said, whatever is going on with their lives.

00:09:11.260 And 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.

00:09:19.660 And one wishes that we could have been a bit more sensitive to that.

00:09:24.300 Yeah, they should have.

00:09:25.860 And it was actually quite shameful that it wasn't happening.

00:09:30.200 I mean, you mentioned in your introduction Rupa Subramanya, who did tremendous work.

00:09:34.060 And 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.

00:09:45.160 And 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.

00:09:52.580 And 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.

00:10:06.360 And 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.

00:10:14.520 All right.

00:10:15.160 Talking 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.

00:10:26.120 We 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.

00:10:39.120 And 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.

00:10:49.260 What's this about, August 2021?

00:10:50.680 Yeah, 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.

00:11:14.020 But the idea of using a convoy to Ottawa for political protest existed.

00:11:19.260 So 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.

00:11:30.900 And I don't even know how many there were.

00:11:32.920 I think it was a few dozen and the whole thing was done in a day.

00:11:36.100 They made a point.

00:11:36.900 They got a couple of headlines and that was that.

00:11:39.300 And there was one guy in Canada who had said on Facebook when that story came up, you know, what about a convoy to Ottawa?

00:11:46.300 And that was it and had a little bit of traction.

00:11:48.940 And 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.

00:11:57.840 She'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.

00:12:04.900 And in December, she was driving from the U.S. to Canada.

00:12:09.600 The vaccine mandate for truckers didn't exist.

00:12:12.100 And she doesn't wear a mask.

00:12:14.240 She has asthma.

00:12:15.520 She has some post-traumatic stress because of violence that she was the victim of.

00:12:20.540 She doesn't like having her face covered.

00:12:22.120 And 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.

00:12:33.520 And she found this whole thing very.

00:12:35.940 Sorry, and when was this?

00:12:37.160 This was in December.

00:12:38.960 Oh.

00:12:39.400 So the vaccine mandate didn't exist yet.

00:12:41.940 And 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.

00:12:52.780 And afterwards, it really affected her.

00:12:56.540 And then she kind of just had this idea of doing a convoy.

00:13:01.000 And she didn't know what it was going to look like.

00:13:02.920 She had never organized anything like this.

00:13:04.780 But she had this idea, and she linked up with a couple of other truckers on TikTok, of all places, and really pushed this.

00:13:11.360 And it came together.

00:13:12.420 That was the track that I think really morphed into what we know as the convoy.

00:13:17.840 But then she linked up with James Botter, who was the one who had paid attention to the Australia case.

00:13:23.860 And 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.

00:13:31.420 Tamera 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.

00:13:43.200 I guess her name was always attached, but initially it was just her attached to that GoFundMe account.

00:13:47.140 And, of course, the person, she was charged.

00:13:49.560 And now she's finally gotten some of her bail conditions released.

00:13:53.840 But sort of the most prominent individual.

00:13:55.400 I did not expect you would begin the story with this lady named Bridget, who I've never heard of before.

00:13:59.980 How do we transition from Bridget to Tamera?

00:14:03.520 That's a great question.

00:14:04.860 And 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.

00:14:16.340 And the answer to that question, as the book tries to explain, is that no one was really in charge.

00:14:20.780 This was very grassroots.

00:14:22.740 Organizer is a very loosely defined term in the book and also among the people that I would call organizers.

00:14:28.800 And, you know, who's an organizer and who's a volunteer.

00:14:31.840 But Tamera Leach was early.

00:14:35.240 She was involved very early on when this thing started to come together.

00:14:40.360 And what happened with Tamera is she said, listen, you guys are great.

00:14:44.740 You're talking about this on TikTok.

00:14:46.200 But you've got to be very cognizant of social media.

00:14:49.500 You've got to have a unified message.

00:14:51.380 You've got to set up a Facebook page so that people know where they're going to get information about the convoy from.

00:14:57.040 And she said, maybe we can raise some money.

00:14:58.680 And she was thinking, like, $20,000 to buy some truckers, some sandwiches, and maybe a bit of fuel.

00:15:04.260 Well, wasn't that the goal on the first GoFundMe?

00:15:06.500 That's what they wanted to get, $20,000.

00:15:08.760 Yeah, and that was what she was thinking.

00:15:10.580 And it was Chris Barber who was, along with Bridget Belton, they were the two that really drove this idea, no pun intended.

00:15:17.380 Chris Barber said, well, maybe we should set it at, I think it was $100,000 or it might have been $250,000.

00:15:23.540 And Tamera thought, like, you're crazy. 0.57

00:15:25.100 That's insane. 0.98

00:15:25.780 I'm not doing it.

00:15:27.060 And I think she eventually settled on $100,000 but, you know, would have been happy with $20,000.

00:15:31.880 But I'm getting ahead of myself here because the whole point is that all of these people just kept coming forward.

00:15:36.880 And anyone who wanted to help out would.

00:15:39.320 Tamera Leach, she got involved because she wanted to be the voice of the convoy. 0.91

00:15:43.500 Because remember, Bridget and Chris Barber, who, again, was another more prominent organizer of this, they were driving truck.

00:15:50.580 They were on the road.

00:15:51.640 They were on the road when this thing was happening.

00:15:53.900 And they didn't have the ability to just sit down in front of their computer all day.

00:15:58.040 So Tamera came on as someone who wasn't a trucker and someone who said, yeah, I really want to make this work.

00:16:03.200 I really want to talk about this and be the voice of the convoy.

00:16:07.620 And that has been, I think, the face that most people associate with it.

00:16:11.700 Well, another face that's associated with the convoy, rightly or wrongly, is a fellow named Pat King.

00:16:17.300 And he has faced a number of charges.

00:16:19.120 I believe when it includes the counts of perjury and obstruction of justice that were added to the mix in, I guess, in April.

00:16:27.040 He has over 10 charges that he is facing right now.

00:16:29.700 And he's going through that legal process.

00:16:32.060 There's controversy, I guess, as to whether or not it's fair to even call Pat King an organizer or leader of the convoy,

00:16:38.200 as a lot of people did and as a lot of news stories did.

00:16:40.660 But 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.

00:16:49.720 Yeah.

00:16:50.000 I 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.

00:16:59.560 And some you could say, OK, maybe it was taken out of context.

00:17:02.120 But a lot of stuff that he said that I don't think is defensible and I don't agree with.

00:17:06.880 And if you were looking to delegitimize the convoy, he was an easy way to do that.

00:17:11.180 And it's undeniable that he was involved at the very beginning.

00:17:15.360 He was involved from the ground level.

00:17:17.480 And 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.

00:17:28.320 So Pat King was very much involved.

00:17:30.260 He was never steering the ship, though.

00:17:32.120 I mean, he was a booster of it.

00:17:33.560 He was a promoter of it.

00:17:35.160 He was never an organizer.

00:17:36.800 But he did have an audience and he did have a following.

00:17:40.160 And for this group that really just wanted to get the word out, certainly that following was helpful to them.

00:17:45.720 And they had a lot of people that came to them because they heard about it on Pat King's channel.

00:17:51.480 But 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.

00:18:01.960 And 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.

00:18:11.400 They told him to go home.

00:18:13.080 They told him to go home.

00:18:14.440 They went to him.

00:18:15.260 I forget the city it took place on.

00:18:17.040 And they said, Pat, get in the car and go home.

00:18:20.020 And it sounded.

00:18:20.740 Tamara swore at him. 1.00

00:18:21.940 Yeah, she did.

00:18:23.360 Yes.

00:18:23.660 I won't say it on the podcast, but you can read it in its uncensored glory in the book.

00:18:27.740 And they thought that they had broken through to him.

00:18:31.940 And then they saw him at the next city and realized, oh, he's he's still here.

00:18:35.800 He's doing his own thing.

00:18:36.800 And that was really the the pattern that stayed around is that, you know, they could distance themselves from Pat King.

00:18:42.960 They could disaffow and denounce him.

00:18:44.460 But he was his own man and he was doing his own thing.

00:18:47.260 But but he was never embraced as an organizer by the actual organizers.

00:18:52.480 We'll be back in just a moment with more full comment with Andrew Lawton.

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00:19:13.380 Andrew, 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.

00:19:22.980 And the government was happy to amplify that.

00:19:25.580 Yes, this is going on.

00:19:26.600 This is their intentions.

00:19:28.080 You didn't really hear that from them at their press conferences.

00:19:31.140 And it wasn't really what people were saying, walking out and about in the street or doing the dance parties or the bouncy castle.

00:19:37.760 But there was a memorandum, a manifesto that was circulating, calling for something like that to happen for the governor general to get involved.

00:19:44.940 What was the real deal with this thing, this memorandum?

00:19:47.700 Where did it come from and what role did it play?

00:19:51.260 So 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.

00:20:03.520 But it didn't really gain any traction.

00:20:05.260 But he had, again, played a role early on.

00:20:08.520 And he was someone that I would say in the beginning was an organizer.

00:20:12.080 He had a website.

00:20:13.400 He 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.

00:20:20.420 So he came to the table and said he was prepared to do that.

00:20:23.420 And 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.

00:20:29.080 That's fine.

00:20:29.640 Do it.

00:20:29.980 And 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.

00:20:51.060 And he's written this thing in legalese and he cited statutes and treaties and all of that.

00:20:56.120 But in short, it's nonsense. 0.60

00:20:57.680 It's legal nonsense. 0.96

00:20:58.800 It's gobbledygook.

00:20:59.740 It means nothing.

00:21:01.060 But if you don't know better, it looks convincing because it's written and structured in the way of all of these things.

00:21:06.660 And it's not people taken in by it.

00:21:08.660 Were there people actually calling for this, reading it and saying, let's OK, this is what we want.

00:21:13.020 Yeah, I mean, people did sign it like people did sign it.

00:21:15.460 I don't know how many of them read it or how many of them were just trusting people, but people were signing it.

00:21:19.740 But he was promoting this long before the convoy.

00:21:22.140 And when he was involved in the convoy, he said, yeah, maybe we can use this as well.

00:21:26.040 And he did promote it and push it in there.

00:21:29.520 And I spoke to some of the organizers who were saying, yeah, I mean, it was just this thing he was doing.

00:21:33.320 I don't know.

00:21:33.960 And 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.

00:21:50.520 We need to make our message clear.

00:21:52.000 What we believe is that we changed governments through elections.

00:21:56.320 But even then, the convoy wasn't looking for a change in government.

00:21:59.320 They were looking for a change in policy, which is, I think, really what the protest is all about.

00:22:04.840 So once they got through these growing pains, they did get rid of James Bowder.

00:22:09.700 They did get rid of the memorandum of understanding.

00:22:12.280 James himself had rescinded it at one point, although then a couple weeks later he republished it again.

00:22:17.860 But it was one of those things that, to the media, became the story and the essence of the convoy.

00:22:25.000 If you were talking to a trucker on Wellington Street and you said, hey, how about that memorandum of understanding?

00:22:30.300 They'd be like, what?

00:22:30.940 What's the moo? 0.99

00:22:31.660 Like, what?

00:22:32.820 If 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.

00:22:38.120 Like, it was never actually a reality for the people involved in the convoy except for James.

00:22:44.560 James talking about the people out on the street, what we actually saw, the main event, part two of your book titled The Block Party.

00:22:53.960 And 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.

00:23:01.200 Although there's obviously debate about the tone and the actual happenings on the street, both daytime and nighttime.

00:23:07.320 Why did you title part two The Block Party, the story of what actually went down?

00:23:11.240 And I was trying to capture the essence of what the convoy was to the people there.

00:23:18.320 And to them, that's what it was.

00:23:21.140 And 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.

00:23:31.340 And 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.

00:23:41.360 And 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.

00:23:48.520 They had taken over the hotels and the restaurants and the streets.

00:23:50.960 And 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.

00:24:07.240 And 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.

00:24:18.340 I 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.

00:24:27.020 And 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.

00:24:42.160 Let'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.

00:24:58.580 Maybe they should stop that.

00:24:59.720 And 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.

00:25:08.540 Where did this idea come from?

00:25:10.720 The incessant honking.

00:25:12.820 I mean, I don't know where it came from.

00:25:15.600 I mean, it might just be that they're trucks, and that's what trucks do, they honk.

00:25:19.500 I 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.

00:25:27.620 I 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.

00:25:32.800 And what I did notice in Ottawa was that it was just a celebration at first.

00:25:38.580 I mean, you had people just honking.

00:25:39.900 It was, like, their way of applauding from within their trucks when people were speaking and whatnot.

00:25:44.520 But it was bad.

00:25:46.060 I mean, the first day, I think people had a bit more tolerance to it because, okay, it's new, it's exciting, we're all here.

00:25:51.800 But that night, I mean, I did not get a wink of sleep for hours and hours until I could finally, like, tune it out.

00:25:58.040 And even then, I, like, bolted awake at, I think, 3 in the morning because I heard a honk.

00:26:01.840 And I don't even know if it was a real honk.

00:26:03.640 There's, like, this phenomenon now called, like, phantom honking where people in Ottawa were saying that people were honking.

00:26:09.040 It's like long COVID, long honk.

00:26:10.420 Yeah, it was the long honk where even after the honking stopped, you still just keep hearing it burning into your ears.

00:26:18.320 But 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.

00:26:27.780 And a judge gave the injunction to stop the honking, which largely happened.

00:26:33.040 I am not actually aware of anyone being charged with breaking that injunction.

00:26:36.720 But 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.

00:26:51.340 Like, they were all tired of the honking as well, but they didn't want to go around telling people what to do.

00:26:56.080 But the injunction gave them an excuse to.

00:26:58.460 But yeah, that was the funny thing is that even the convoy people hated the honking.

00:27:01.780 I 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.

00:27:13.000 Whatever 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.

00:27:21.160 And 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.

00:27:34.660 These were people who were most insulated against the damages of lockdowns.

00:27:40.900 Public 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.

00:27:51.400 I 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.

00:28:03.500 Yeah, I think you're right about that.

00:28:06.620 And 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.

00:28:16.900 But there was something to be said about what Ottawa's place is in Canada, because to people outside of Ottawa, Ottawa's a symbol.

00:28:25.820 It's the nation's capital.

00:28:26.860 It's a place where you can go and have your voice heard in front of where government sits.

00:28:31.840 But it's also a city, and people live in that city.

00:28:35.060 And it has a municipal government and municipal services.

00:28:37.820 And 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.

00:28:46.860 But you are right about that.

00:28:48.460 I mean, Ottawa is overwhelmingly a city inhabited by public servants.

00:28:52.260 The woman who filed the class action lawsuit, who represented the class, she was herself a public servant who worked for the government. 0.99

00:28:59.640 And there was a very significant divide there.

00:29:03.600 I 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.

00:29:16.360 And I don't want to be presumptuous.

00:29:17.920 I mean, some of them would have been denied the right to have their weddings or go to family funerals or visit people in hospitals.

00:29:23.240 But 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.

00:29:33.220 No, 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.

00:29:44.280 But, you know, there's something, there's an undercurrent to that.

00:29:47.560 There's something being said there.

00:29:49.140 I mean, I remember this, oh, we're going to shut your kid's school down for two more weeks, Fury.

00:29:51.940 No, I want my kid's school opened right now because you told me two more weeks, two weeks ago, et cetera, et cetera.

00:29:57.920 I want the local business to have the freedom to open right now.

00:30:00.640 Stop telling me this two more weeks thing.

00:30:02.320 And people would just, people who were very supportive of those lockdowns and measures would kind of laugh it off.

00:30:07.560 And 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.

00:30:14.840 Yeah, 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.

00:30:29.020 They didn't want to put harm on anyone.

00:30:31.160 They were actually trying to, in their view, liberate everyone.

00:30:35.080 I mean, that was the one thing that was so striking early on is they said, we're not protesting for truckers.

00:30:39.800 We're protesting for everyone.

00:30:40.940 We're protesting for everyone that's living under the mask mandates and the vaccine passports. 0.87

00:30:45.520 And, and that was why later on, the truckers were actually very receptive to the idea of moving off of residential streets.

00:30:53.560 And, 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.

00:31:00.980 They were on them because there was no room for them anywhere else.

00:31:04.500 And when the streets got jammed up and police started putting blockades in, a lot of trucks just had to stop where they were.

00:31:10.940 And that became their home for the next three weeks.

00:31:14.080 And for all of the organization that did go into the convoy, that was the one thing that was the least organized.

00:31:19.840 Trucks just were where they were.

00:31:21.600 And they stopped when they stopped.

00:31:23.440 They stopped when they couldn't advance any further.

00:31:25.520 And as a result, the residential streets around downtown ended up getting full, but that was never part of the plan.

00:31:31.300 This 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.

00:31:45.840 Yeah.

00:31:46.260 And I mean, this was one of the weird criticisms that people would make about the convoy.

00:31:51.060 They'd say, well, they aren't even truckers.

00:31:52.760 It's like, well, I mean, they have trucks, which I think is a pretty compelling argument that they are truckers.

00:31:57.480 But they did bring a lot of other people.

00:31:59.280 I mean, some of them were there living in their trucks.

00:32:02.020 Other people were there who've never been in the trucking industry but supported the message that the truckers sparked.

00:32:07.840 And they did come out because of that.

00:32:09.740 And it wasn't just political conservatives, as I mentioned earlier.

00:32:13.840 Like, there's one woman I talk about in the book very briefly who had a sign that said, fully vaxxed, BIPOC, pro-choice.

00:32:24.440 And 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.

00:32:39.540 And 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.

00:33:00.660 How do you think this is ultimately going to be remembered, Andrew?

00:33:03.660 Because right now the Emergencies Act inquiry is going to take a number of months to happen.

00:33:08.760 But I feel like a lot of the original arguments that at least the liberal government was making vis-a-vis what really went down.

00:33:15.260 Because, of course, to do the inquiry, the inquiry is really supposed to be about why did you invoke the act?

00:33:20.460 But 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.

00:33:38.560 Well, things that have been completely exposed is not correct.

00:33:42.600 I mean, I can just go, I don't have the time to go through the laundry list of things that are inaccurate.

00:33:46.740 That's going to be further, I think, ingrained into the public consciousness.

00:33:52.300 I mean, the question, how is it going to be remembered?

00:33:54.520 I have to put in the plug.

00:33:55.540 It depends how many people buy my book.

00:33:57.100 My hope is that it challenges that narrative a bit.

00:34:00.780 And 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.

00:34:12.760 But, I mean, you raised an important point.

00:34:14.660 And 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.

00:34:24.340 And 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.

00:34:41.340 And my hope is...

00:34:42.560 Burning down an apartment building.

00:34:43.800 I mean, that was the wildest thing.

00:34:45.480 And people clearly wanted it to be true.

00:34:47.820 And there was an attempt to do it by two individuals.

00:34:51.900 And I know there was CCTV footage of these guys doing it, but they had nothing to do with the convoy.

00:34:57.460 But there's this desperate energy to say, no, a convoy tried to burn down a full apartment building with whatever, 500 residents.

00:35:04.320 Yes.

00:35:04.400 And 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.

00:35:11.680 But 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.

00:35:20.240 He 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.

00:35:31.580 But you are right.

00:35:32.900 People desperately wanted it to be true.

00:35:35.060 And 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.

00:35:45.340 It came long before then because people needed it to be true to delegitimize it.

00:35:50.600 They were seeing this movement that was gaining momentum, that was attracting a broader coalition than just the normal anti-lockdown, anti-COVID mandate protesters.

00:35:59.400 And 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.

00:36:08.860 The people, name names, and that primary name is Justin Trudeau.

00:36:11.840 I remember those statements, those tweets from cabinet ministers.

00:36:14.760 Oh, we hope there isn't a January 6th-style insurrection.

00:36:18.680 We hope this doesn't, you're like, really, you hope it doesn't happen?

00:36:21.520 Sounds like you want it to happen.

00:36:23.340 Why are you even talking about it?

00:36:24.640 Because nobody's saying that these are their intentions, but you seem to be gearing up for it.

00:36:28.540 Yeah, but it wasn't just Justin Trudeau.

00:36:31.440 It was a lot of media coverage as well.

00:36:33.580 I 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.

00:36:41.960 Now, 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.

00:36:50.680 But you just saw that there were people that desperately wanted this to be something that it wasn't.

00:36:56.140 And 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.

00:37:04.960 They were there to have a good time.

00:37:06.300 They were there to make a point.

00:37:07.640 They didn't get everything they wanted or even the main thing they wanted initially, which was an end to the trucker mandate.

00:37:12.700 But they did make themselves heard and seen.

00:37:17.660 Andrew, 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.

00:37:28.740 And then somebody took it and did a geolocation Google Maps of it where they plugged every household in the country that donated to it.

00:37:36.340 And something like six hours later, Google took it down because it was a violation of terms of service.

00:37:39.960 But 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.

00:37:47.600 So, okay, fine. It obviously wasn't majority of Canadians, but one person on every street in my downtown NDP writing.

00:37:53.900 And then I click and it would have the name. I go, this is a guy who lives, you know, 10 houses down from me.

00:37:58.440 And I didn't know the person and it was not, didn't seem to be a white supremacist.

00:38:01.860 I remember it was a Middle Eastern name. You go, who was that gentleman? Two streets away from me, all this person.

00:38:06.480 And 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.

00:38:13.860 And 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.

00:38:25.740 And 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.

00:38:39.960 But 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.

00:38:45.360 Yeah. 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.

00:39:02.740 And 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.

00:39:13.380 These 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.

00:39:27.260 And 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.

00:39:44.520 I 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.

00:39:53.540 If 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.

00:40:06.120 And that is not a judgment for or against. It's just a sense of the reality of the situation here.

00:40:12.180 And 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.

00:40:27.600 And they all took those skills that they had from their lives and put it into organizing this convoy.

00:40:33.900 And that was the most interesting thing I found is just how dedicated these people were to making it happen.

00:40:40.440 And 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.

00:40:52.900 Andrew Lawton, thanks so much for joining us today. Great conversation.

00:40:57.260 Hey, thank you, Anthony. Really appreciate it.

00:41:22.900 Thank you.

Full Comment - June 20, 2022

The whole truckin' story behind the Freedom Convoy

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