Juno News - February 24, 2023The Freedom Occupation： The Movement That Fuelled a Nation
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Summary
In this episode, we talk about the Freedom Convoy, a group of truckers and their supporters who took to the streets of Canada on January 26th, 2022 to protest against Canada's new mandatory use of chemical preservatives in vaccines.
Transcript
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Growing anxiety this morning about the COVID-19 trend in Canada as we take a look at the numbers.
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The CDC said it is working on new guidance from mask wearing.
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Before you go anywhere, you're going to need a poll.
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The federal government is warning the rules may change again.
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Mayor Jim Watson is declaring a state of emergency to give the city more flexibility.
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The city of Ottawa has declared a state of emergency.
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That's because of ongoing protests there by truck drivers and their supporters.
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It's being blocked by truckers protesting vaccine rules.
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But what's currently happening there is unprecedented.
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So over the last two weeks have tried tactics never seen before in Canada.
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People were coming out and supporting this because they knew they had to.
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The convoy is attracting supporters with a wide range of views.
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And I thought to myself, well, they really misjudged the moment.
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The folks who live in the downtown core were terrorized.
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It was clear there was no justification for it.
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You don't just show up with all these trucks and take over downtown.
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I don't believe it became illegal until the Emergencies Act was actually put in place.
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They needed to use the Emergencies Act to declare the protest illegal.
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Yeah, I can describe what it was like pulling into Ottawa with a convoy.
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It was unbelievable. The emotions were crazy busy, trying to be organized, not knowing how many trucks, cars were behind you was an awesome feeling.
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The excitement level was really high for everybody. I had my son in the truck with me and yeah, he wanted the horn being honked all the time.
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It was just an emotional wow in the fact that there were so many people with flags standing on the bridges.
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And yeah, it brought emotions out that my wife and I will never experience again.
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had this growing segment of the population that was absolutely tired of COVID restrictions,
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not just from the federal government and the provincial government, but I think a lot of
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the narratives around them that we saw increasingly with the convoy even. I mean,
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Justin Trudeau calling them a fringe minority, going back early in Ontario to being called a
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bunch of yahoos. So people felt like they were increasingly being excluded from society.
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And the convoy wasn't just a protest against the restrictions themselves, but I think also
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the media's depictions of the people that were forming the convoy. I'm here because on January
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26, 2022, I lost my nursing job after 12 years. Yeah, when the truckers first arrived,
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it was more of a novelty. And the reason is, is I think most people were under the impression,
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I wouldn't say to what extent they'd been led to believe, but they were under the impression that
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this was going to last a weekend. I really didn't know if it was going to last more than a weekend
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or not. From my mind, it was 50-50. There were folks who seemed a little bit less committed to
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the cause, who wanted to come out and protest against vaccine mandates, in cases against vaccines,
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against lockdowns, against masks, mask mandates. And it wasn't clear whether or not the majority
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were folks who were more dedicated, more hardcore, more willing to sacrifice,
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or whether it was folks who just wanted a big public demonstration, a protest, some civil
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disobedience, but really could have gone many different directions. A lot of people are losing
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their jobs and their livelihoods. That's not okay, so. I'm here because I would like to see change
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happen and I want to see it done in a peaceful manner. I think this is a great way to do it.
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This is democracy. This is what democracy is all about. People believe that the government has
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overstepped with mandates and they're here to exercise their democratic right.
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Yeah, I joined the convoy because we've been having a frustrating two years. Society has been,
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COVID definitely has been tough on society and the restrictions have been tough as well.
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As the information comes out, we can see that they're not working. They actually are doing more
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harm than good. So that's why we decided to join the convoy, thought it was a protest that we could support.
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That was incredible. It's hard not to look back and just smile about that, right? There was joy, peace, kindness.
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Canadians are just beauties. I mean, at the end of the day, that was like Canada Day on steroids.
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This is affecting all of us. So it's a widespread thing. It's not just one community.
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I think a lot of Canadians are worried about what's happening with our country and are worried
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about the direction that policies are heading. Don't be controlled by the government. We are the
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ones that control ourselves. Because if it's lost, you know, the next generation won't be around.
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This is not what happened. These people came with very big machines. They came with huge trucks. Most
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of them had big, they were transport trucks. They were big. And the potential for destruction
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was huge. Like I remember thinking that if ever anything happened, if ever any of these people
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decided that they were going to be violent, the damage would have been enormous. And what I mean is
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if you have these trucks, they can easily be destroying buildings, destroying Parliament Hill.
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They could destroy anything. Nothing will stop these trucks. And I remember walking from my car
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where I was parked because obviously I couldn't come downtown. So I was parked in the market and I would
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walk and I was walking. And I remember, and it didn't take very long, that it was tantamount to a war zone.
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I don't know if it's fair to say that Ottawa residents were genuinely concerned for their safety
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with it. I think certainly there was an uncertainty when this all started of what it was going to look
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like. Because you had the media that was advancing this narrative of a January 6th style insurrection,
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of some violent protest. Look at what happened in the states on January 6th. What happened?
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A bunch of people decided they were going to storm, to storm Congress, which is what they did. Now,
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what is the difference between that situation and ours? At first they came for the pastors,
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and then the owners of the businesses, and then the frontline workers. And now they have touched
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the nerve because here are the truckers. I tend to agree with CSIS's assessment, the Integrated
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Terrorism Assessment Center, which is kind of an open source reporting mechanism that reports to
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police, reports to domestic law enforcement agencies. It basically said there was no concrete
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threat. There was nobody proposing an attack, but that the possibility of an individual going rogue,
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an individual committing attack was present. At no point did I see any of the organizers, any of the
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organizations at the core of this talk about any sort of direct state violence, or start putting
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together the pieces that would be necessary to carry out an attack like that. Nothing I saw there led me
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to believe that an attack was imminent, but the conditions were right for someone to lose it.
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Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! And I remember that there were these
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individuals, these individuals that were on different corners, all of a sudden they'd step
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out of a car and their purpose was to intimidate me. I remember them looking at me, trying to give
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the impression that they were sort of in control. To what extent did I have a right to be there?
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And that was scary. It was scary because when that would happen, I was always thinking it wouldn't
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take much and it wouldn't take long. And I mean that because when you look at all the violence
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that has occurred, great moments of violence in the history of Canada and North America,
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it all starts with a little something happening. And that little something could have happened
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any time and the consequences would have been huge. Yeah, the residents of Ottawa feeling unsafe,
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I just have a hard time understanding where that came from. I feel like they should have
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come to the protest and seen it for themselves. They must have been listening to too much of the
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legacy media because you couldn't have been there and felt there wasn't a sense of peace.
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Lord, we ask that you would undertake. Father, you are able to do it, dear Father. Help her, dear God.
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When I got to Ottawa, I flew into Ottawa because I just didn't know if I'd be able to drive in
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or drive out. With the traffic, my taxi driver was nervous about driving downtown because he had heard,
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and he was listening to CBC radio, which may have contributed, but he was nervous and said,
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well, I might not be able to drive you up there. Not because of traffic, but because of safety.
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So I think that people were being told to be a lot more worried than the situation warranted.
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One of the big frustrations I had is that the media's coverage of the convoy went through
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different stages. At first, they just completely ignored it. And then they were speaking about it
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in a way that made it clear they didn't really understand what it was about. I mean, some of the
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early coverage, anti-vaccine protests, which was never the case. It was an anti-vaccine mandate
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So large sections of the mainstream media failed to cover the protests objectively.
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They were pushing a narrative, an agenda, which was contrary to anything that I had experienced
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for the three weeks of the protests where protesters were here. There was a dereliction of duty.
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This was an important moment in this country's cultural history, and they were not covering it.
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In this current crisis with Russia, I don't know if it's far-fetched to ask, but there is concern that
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Russian actors could be continuing to fuel things as this protest grows, but perhaps even instigating
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So it was clear that they were missing the mark at every stage of it. When I started covering it
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and was comparing what I was seeing on the ground with the media coverage I'd see when I went back
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of my computer, I was astonished at how two people could look at the same situation and draw such
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vastly different conclusions. And I think one of the biggest examples of this is the media's focus
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on these little outliers that really didn't characterize the convoy story, like the Terry Fox
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statue or, you know, the so-called stealing food from the homeless incident or the stuff at the war
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memorial or this attempted arson in an apartment building. All of these things that either did not
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happen or did not happen in the way that they were reported.
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So the attempted arson story was, I think, a turning point in the protests because a few days later,
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the prime minister decided to invoke the Emergencies Act because the incident spoke to the safety aspects
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of the protests where residents said that they were afraid of stepping out of their homes.
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And they attributed this to the protesters in very explicit terms. And very quickly, as soon as this
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post became viral, the politicians, including the mayor of the city, several journalists also gave oxygen
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to this allegation that the protesters were behind this attempted arson. The police hadn't even begun
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their investigation at this point. It was still very early days, but already this narrative had taken hold
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that residents of the city were unsafe and that the protesters were going around setting buildings
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on fire. Yesterday, we learned of a horrific story that clearly demonstrates the malicious intent of
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these protesters occupying our city. At 5 a.m., and this was captured on the building's video,
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on Sunday morning, two young people in the lobby of the building on Lisker Street, where they proceeded to light
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fire starter bricks near the elevators before taping up the door handles so residents would struggle
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When the police concluded their investigation, they said that the alleged arsonist had nothing to do
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with the protesters or the truckers. So that story was effectively debunked. And I can think of several
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other such stories that just, you know, were debunked in very similar ways.
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There was a story early on, I think it was like the first day or the second day when the convoy had arrived in Ottawa,
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that there was a report that convoy protesters had been stealing food from a homeless shelter.
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And I mean, certainly it's entirely possible that a couple of people that arrived at the convoy went to a homeless shelter
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and caused damage. But what was missing from that story is that as soon as convoy organizers learned
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that there was a supposed incident, they flooded this shelter with food. They brought so much food that
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to this and other shelters that they said, we can't accommodate all of this. And then they were firing up grills
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on the street and feeding the homeless for weeks. And in some cases, even housing homeless people.
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So it was a very significant misrepresentation of the atmosphere that the convoy supporters and organizers
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tried to cultivate, which was one of giving, not taking.
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Oh, peace and love out here. Nobody's been disrespectful at all. You got people walking around
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picking up garbage that's on the ground. Everybody's had fun smiling, enjoying seeing people's faces.
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Think about the Terry Fox story. What the media did with the Terry Fox story is just indescribable, really.
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Somebody put a sign on him and a Canadian flag. How many times have we not seen Terry Fox dressed
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in other protests? It's a bit of an unfair, yeah, I guess, description.
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There was times when the coverage lacked curiosity, where you had reporters who would hear one of the
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organizers say, I'm not against vaccines. And then the mainstream press would go and say, well,
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the organizers aren't necessarily against vaccines. We know that's nonsense. Without fail,
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every single one of the organizers, the main organizers, the main influencers in this convoy
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were anti-vaccines and spread anti-vaccine misinformation. So I think in some cases,
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the mainstream media was not critical enough of the convoy, the organizers, the influencers.
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But there was also a ton of instances where mainstream coverage was critical to a lazy degree.
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You saw this rhetoric that foreign money, that maybe Russian disinformation,
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was feeding the convoy. There's virtually zero basis for that. I don't think we've identified a single
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dollar of Russian money that wound up anywhere around the convoy or the occupation.
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I've seen nothing since the mainstream coverage of the media to lead me to believe that what was
00:17:03.440
being covered was not true. In fact, what I've seen is I've seen more of an attempt by the organizers,
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organizers, and I use the word organizers loosely, those that were the face of the protest,
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trying to, in fact, change the narrative as to what was actually being said and being done
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at the time the convoy was in place or was basically anchored here in Ottawa.
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There was also instances where it was reported sort of without caveat that the whole movement
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was leading insurrection or that the entire occupation was there to overturn the government.
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There's a lot of nuance required when you introduce an idea like that, because yes,
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at the core of the convoy was a document that basically sought to supplant the democratic
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government of Canada. That is accurate. There are individuals who wanted to remove the government
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and try them for treason. There is a running theory inside the convoy that the government was
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illegitimate or undemocratic or ought to be deposed. You can report on that. But to just say writ large,
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the entire aim of the movement is to overturn the government, to lead an insurrection. It's not
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factually accurate. People give the government the power to act in accordance with their values.
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Nobody should be forced to take an experimental treatment. And, you know, it's a matter of personal
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choice. The government does not have any independent power. It is us that confer the power on the
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government. And where they overstep, the people have a right to voice their opinions.
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So there's a lot of questions need to be answered about public health in this country.
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What I think about the Nazi paraphernalia that came to the protest is you're going to have a bad
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apple in every crew. I don't, I cannot imagine a single protest where you don't have a goofball.
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Um, I have a hard time believing that it was a true protester. I, I believe it was probably a
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plant. I'll never be able to prove that, but they didn't stick around long. So you have to imagine
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that it was there for the photo op and carry on. They're almost under the impression, it seems to
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me, and that's what they're trying to portray, that what we're looking at in this whole, in the
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hearings under the emergency act is we're trying to determine whether or not what they did was
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justified. That's not at all what's going on. It's clear that what they did was not justified.
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The question becomes, was it sufficient what they were doing that was not justified to invoke
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After discussing with cabinet and caucus, after consultation with premiers from all provinces
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and territories, after speaking with opposition leaders, the federal government has invoked the
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emergencies act to supplement provincial and territorial capacity to address the blockades and occupations.
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So on that Friday of the last weekend, basically the last Friday of the convoy, I was quite taken by
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how slowly it was moving in the morning. Obviously, police were showing up from all across the country.
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They were moving themselves into formations. And starting a few blocks east of Parliament Hill,
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down at the Rideau and Sussex area, police were moving forward, but it was ever so slowly.
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They'd advance, you know, maybe six, eight feet every 10 to 15 minutes. And they would do this all
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morning, so much so that it took hours and hours and they had barely covered any ground at all.
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The people who hate you and want police defunded. And they'll Monday morning quarterback every arrest you ever make.
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So looking at that, a lot of the protesters were saying, well, we've got all weekend there. I mean,
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they're not going to even get to Parliament Hill this weekend, let alone break it up. Obviously,
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On the Friday morning, most of the interactions I saw between police and protesters were fairly normal.
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Police had their line. They were moving people forward. Every now and then, you'd get a protester that didn't want to move back.
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And they get pushed back with a baton, at least.
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But it looked fairly standard for, you know, riot policing. And I don't mean riot describing it, but just the way that police call it.
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And that, by the afternoon, had changed. More people had shown up in Ottawa. There had been more tension. There was more law enforcement. It stopped looking like a standard policing operation.
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And to a lot of people started looking like a military operation, just because of the formations and the uniforms and the refusal by a lot of police to even, you know, speak to protesters. There was just this stone-faced approach.
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Police in Canada are too quick to use force in crowd control situations.
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I think the use of mounted units, officers on horseback, is one of the most stupid and
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dangerous things a police service can do in a volatile crowd situation like this.
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It was done to try and push back a crowd in a way that was completely not warranted and
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I mean, we've all seen the viral video of Candice Serro getting trampled by the horses.
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She had her mobility walker knocked down and she was trampled and she sustained injuries.
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My office is looking into that matter and there's more details that we have to uncover before
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I can tell you that the police in Ottawa, while not perfect, used force at a significantly lower
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rate than I've seen most police forces in this country use force against large crowds.
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I don't think peacefully protesting warrants being pepper sprayed.
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I think anyone that was being violent with police, anyone that was pushing back against police
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obviously is fair game for police to respond and try to de-escalate that situation.
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But the reality is people who were doing their best to get out of the way were getting caught
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These tactics are supposed to be used when police are trying to clear a space.
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If people are already moving, people are already walking back, there's no justification to deploy them.
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Certainly there was police violence and people can argue about whether it was justified or unjustified, but we know from the incident of police horses trampling a woman, from protesters getting pepper sprayed, from
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from tear gas being fired into the crowds, absolutely there was violence, and I know personally that you didn't need to be committing violence to be targeted by it.
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It's hard to answer that question because I think the police have their training and they know how they would normally act.
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But in addition to having their training and their judgment and their discretion, they also have their marching orders from the higher ranking officers.
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There was virtually no, in fact, I think zero use of tear gas by the Ottawa Police Service.
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In fact, there was tear gas used by the protesters against the Ottawa Police Service.
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There were instances where officers used, I believe, the butt of the rifles or batons to hit people who were not moving along the front lines.
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There were some projectile, I think, bead bag rounds fired into the crowd.
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I think each one of those instances should be investigated about whether or not that was an appropriate use of force because I think we should hold the Ottawa Police Service to the highest possible standard and use this event as the baseline.
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This is about Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his failure.
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I do not believe that the government had had any right to remove protesters at all.
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We have the right to protest, especially in our capital.
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And the narrative that the government and the media wanted to push that businesses couldn't be open is absolutely nonsense.
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There was not a business that was blocked from being open if they had a desire to be open other than the police's own concrete barriers.
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Where we were at by the second week of February needed serious action.
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I think the way it was deployed was relatively reasonable.
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I think the orders the federal government wrote to go with the act were irresponsible.
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They allowed far too much latitude and jurisdiction for the federal government to seize and freeze assets.
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It was so geographically wide that I think it gave them nearly limitless power to break up demonstration anywhere in the country.
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I think at the end of the day we're going to conclude that it was the right thing to do.
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I don't believe it became illegal until the Emergencies Act was actually put in place.
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They needed to use the Emergencies Act to declare the protest illegal.
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Because in Canada a protest is not illegal until it becomes a riot.
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And that could have been covered under the Riot Act of the Criminal Code.
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The fact that they couldn't use the Riot Act in the Criminal Code indicates to me that it was not an illegal protest until they invoked the Emergencies Act.
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Also, it's important to note that during the protests, Ottawa police actually said that street crime had come down in Ottawa.
00:28:52.240
And that makes a lot of sense to me because you had a lot of people walking around and, you know, in the city.
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And it wasn't desolate like it usually is in the dead of winter.
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One of the requirements to invoke the Emergencies Act is that the existing tools, laws, enforcement agencies,
00:29:13.980
that those existing tools had to be inadequate and incapable of addressing the so-called emergency.
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So there needed to be an emergency and the existing laws needed to be inadequate.
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And yet every single charge that has come from the arrests laid that weekend have all been under existing laws.
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And powers that the police officers used were existing powers.
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Well, to me the protest was always legal in the fact that when we first got there,
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it was the Ottawa police that escorted us onto these streets.
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It was the Ottawa police that ensured that we kept roads open, which we did at all times.
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There was always lanes open for emergency vehicles to get through.
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And even on the Monday, which I believe was Valentine's Day,
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I helped with a couple other of the organizers with the Ottawa police escort 15 more trucks up onto Wellington.
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So that was the Monday before the Friday where they said we were illegal.
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Nobody knew what happened or what was going to happen when we started, when we invoked the Emergency Act.
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It ended up being that finally there wasn't as much violence as might have been anticipated.
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But if when we start, when they started, when the police started to basically remove the protesters,
00:30:48.880
if the protesters would have decided to put it in high gear and be as violent as they could,
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all of the powers that had been given to them by the Emergency Act would have been needed.
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And that's why, to me, it's clear there's no issue the government had to invoke the Emergency Act.
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Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for political purposes.
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The purpose of the Emergency Act, again, is to have a tool when existing tools don't work.
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And Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act basically to appear strong in the public eye.
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But as you could see that a few days after he invoked it,
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he didn't follow through with having the Emergencies Act ratified in the Senate
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and ultimately withdrew his use of the Emergencies Act.
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We were not playing a game, but it seemed like the other team was not playing within the rules.
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Saturday morning, the police started smashing windows on trucks and really beating people up.
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So we decided to leave and we did end up having a couple trucks stuck in
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and getting towed and window smashed and everything.
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I think at the time that the Prime Minister rescinded the Emergencies Act,
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it was clear there was no justification for it.
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And not that there had ever been a justification, but certainly days later,
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the supposed blockades that were in place to justify the Emergencies Act had been disbanded.
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And I think he was very worried about what the Senate was going to do,
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which hadn't voted on it at the time, and also what Canadians were going to do.
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Because it's one thing if you concoct an emergency to justify all sorts of measures that the government put forward.
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It's another thing when you indefinitely keep that in place, when there's nothing that even resembles a crisis.
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More and more often, I'm coming to the conclusion that the evidence that the government used to justify invoking the Act
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is news reports from the public sphere that are public information.
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And if they didn't have some sort of smoking gun evidence to justify the use of this Act,
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and we're basing it completely off of news articles, many of which have had to be retracted since we found new evidence
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that indicates that it was false information, false allegations,
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I think that's going to be a big problem for the government if that's the evidence that they relied upon.
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I think it certainly was upsetting in a country like Canada where, you know, we have a lot of freedoms
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to see police, you know, pushing protesters out on the streets.
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And I think what a lot of Canadians, certainly what I think, is how could we have let this get to this point in the first place?
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Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
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There was a point where I think a lot of people, myself included, were hopeful that the government would look at the truckers
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and say, maybe we miscalculated, maybe we misjudged this.
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Some of these people are living in a fantasy land of constructed conspiracies.
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And I don't know if I had hoped that maybe they had broken out of some of those between the end of the convoy and today,
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To be honest, at that time, you're tired. You want to go home.
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We woke up the world, first of all, and it actually still was giving people hope
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that something would change, that things would get better.
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But then the reception that we got in Niagara was unbelievable.
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Yeah, the support that we got from the community meant an awful lot.
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And having all these people on the side of the road, standing there, waving the flags again,
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saying thank you for doing what you did, gave me a little bit of closure,
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but you still wish that things would have gone different.
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Yeah, I do feel like the convoy accomplished actually more than what we set out for.
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Obviously, the mandates, the federal mandates are still there,
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but the community, at least here in Niagara region, is super unified.
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I believe the mandates were there to try to disunify our country and keep people apart,
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and it's done the exact opposite with the convoy.
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It's deeply concerning that we have a significant number of people in this country
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who have detached from reality, but again, I get why people wind up there.
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They lost friends to suicide, they lost family members to illnesses,
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and they couldn't go visit them in the hospital.
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They couldn't go to their family member's funeral, their friend's funeral,
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and that was really tough on them, and I get that.
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I've been there too. I think a lot of us have been there,
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and they've been looking for explanations for how we got here.
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And they look at somewhere like the federal government,
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where the prime minister frequently attacks his critics as being conspiracy theorists
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and frequently belittles and demonizes people who are not settled on the science,
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Our media, the health experts, they're not interested in what's good for every Canadian.
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They're just interested in what's good for their narrative,
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and there's a lot of things going on that we as Canadians need to realize.
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You can't trust the media, let alone your own government anymore.
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I mean, Trudeau, anytime someone has thought that he was just done
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So people shouldn't underestimate Justin Trudeau.
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He may not have the massive, massive Trudeau mania 2.0 popularity he had in 2015,
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a big part of what he was offering Canadians was more restrictions on the unvaccinated.
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He campaigned on firing public servants if they didn't get the COVID vaccine.
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He campaigned on banning unvaccinated Canadians from air and rail travel.
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So he's been quite transparent about what it is that he wanted to do and Canadians rewarded that.
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Now, you can talk about whether this is because the Conservatives didn't put up their best and brightest,
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but clearly the scandal and frustration that a lot of people see in Trudeau
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isn't necessarily representative of how Canadians as a whole have seen him up until the last election.
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Now, whether that's changed since then is a different story.
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And I think a lot of it is going to ride upon the inquiry and the parliamentary review.
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And I think if it can be proven that the government inappropriately used the Emergencies Act,
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I think it's going to be remembered as a time when the government overreached on Canadians' rights.
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And it's going to look very bad on the current Liberal government.
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I think the Freedom Convoy is going to be fairly divisive for a lot of people in how they remember it.
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Certainly, I've talked to a lot of people in my own work on this that think it was just the greatest moment of their lives.
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It was this time when, you know, the peasants took over the castle in a way
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and ordinary people stood up and said, we're not going to take it anymore.
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But still, the narratives that were being passed off by the government, by the media are still baked into a lot of people's perceptions of the convoy.
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And those people, as we've seen in a number of other stories that have come up since,
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are still very committed to this idea that it was a violent protest, that it was a lawless rebellion,
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I think the convoy is going to be remembered very negatively.
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You know, I think it will be seen as an outgrowth of the intense frustration and alienation
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that we all experienced during the pandemic, right?
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I don't think this will be our January 6th, right?
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I think that will be remembered very particularly in the U.S.
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I think this is going to be remembered as the sort of culmination of a kind of, you know, intense anger
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and disenchantment and disaffection that, you know, came to a head in 2022.
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And that in some cases is understandable, in some cases is really out to lunch.
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But I don't think it's going to be remembered particularly well.
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I think the freedom convoy will be remembered by most Canadians as a very important moment in this country's history.
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The people who obviously supported the protest will romanticize the protest.
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And the people who oppose the protest will try to delegitimize it and denigrate it.
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But I hope that there's a mass of people in the center who will objectively sift through the facts and make up their own minds.
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And I personally think that it was an important moment in the fight for individual liberty and freedoms.
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And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.
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And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.
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And we've lost a bit of that during the two years of the pandemic.
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We've lost a bit of that during the three years of the pandemic.
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We've lost a bit of thebelial niveau for the pandemic.
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And we've lost an infinite number of the pandemic.