Juno News - November 08, 2025The Untold Stories Behind Canada’s Freedom Convoy
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Summary
For many, the Freedom Convoy was more than a protest. For many, it was a psychological jailbreak. And the truckers who rolled into Ottawa in 2022 were cheered by Canadians from coast-to-coast to coast to coast. Then the government decided to crush them.
Transcript
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They were heroes during the lockdown. Then, overnight, they became criminals.
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The Freedom Convoy was more than a protest. For many, it was a psychological jailbreak.
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And the truckers who rolled into Ottawa in 2022 were cheered by Canadians from coast to coast to coast.
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This episode of Disrupted isn't about Tamara Litch or Chris Barber.
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It's about the forgotten individuals, people like Guy Meister or Robert Donnell.
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Working-class Canadians still trapped in courtrooms years later, punished for honking the wrong way.
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The Emergencies Act may have expired, but the political retaliation didn't.
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My guest is journalist and author Donna Laframboise.
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And her new book, Thank You Truckers, captures the movement as it really was.
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It wasn't the threat to democracy that journalists and politicians would have you believe.
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It was a celebration of freedom, of national unity.
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Like Donna says, the real extremists weren't in the trucks.
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Your book came across my desk, Thank You Truckers, Canada's Heroes and Those Who Helped Them,
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which documents the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests and highlighting the public support of the movement
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and also criticizing the government and the media response around the trucker convoy.
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So I would love to talk about this with you today.
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So why don't you first start, maybe give us an overview of your book and what you talk about in there.
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So this is the only book so far that documents ordinary people's stories.
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So there have been some really fabulous books written about the convoy up to this point.
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And they've either been this big picture, this is what happened, then this is what happened,
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then this is what happened, or they've been the personal stories of organizers or spokespeople.
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And those are all really important historical documents and part of, you know,
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a very important part of documenting what went on.
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And my book, I just went out and interviewed ordinary people.
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So they weren't famous and they just got in their trucks and I wanted to know why and then what happened next
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and what happened in Ottawa and what happened afterwards.
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So I went to Ottawa actually as a photographer because something historic was going on
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and I wanted to just take my camera and document that historic moment.
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And I spent a week there walking around and I talked to some truckers,
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but most of the time actually I was standing back because I was photographing how the public was interacting with the truckers.
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You know, the people were coming up and thanking the truckers and begging them not to go
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and handing them cash and handing them, you know,
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here's a donated barbecue so you can cook outside and here's a generator to run your lights
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and here's food and here's mittens and here's hats.
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And it was this huge love fest with all of these Canadians just saying,
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we're behind you and we've got you back and can we do your laundry and we'll bring it back tomorrow
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And, you know, when else has that ever happened in a protest when you have people coming to Ottawa
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and then all of these thousands of other Canadians saying, we're here for you, we're going to help you,
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we're going to make sure that you can get the message across to the leaders.
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So I was documenting that and I went home and I was very concerned when I was in Ottawa.
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I went with a friend who's not very political and we would walk around together
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and, you know, people would be laughing and dancing and hugging
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and there was so much love and so much joy and then we'd go back
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and if you turned on the television news, you heard about far-right racists and terrorists
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and who were holding the city hostage and it was just nothing like what we had just experienced on the street.
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And that was sort of a moment for my friend who just said,
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well, what's the point of watching the news? It's all bullshit.
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So, you know, that was a really important moment for her that, you know, she wasn't expecting.
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And when I went home from the convoy, you know, and I did the second week
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and we didn't know how long it was going to go on and, you know, there's only so long you can pay for a hotel room
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So I wasn't there for the terrible stuff that happened at the end.
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I expected once, you know, calmer heads are going to prevail, there's a little time has passed,
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we're going to start having now an accurate and an honest conversation about what happened in Ottawa.
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And then it was at that point that I decided that I guess I should be documenting these people's stories
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So afterwards, I had to sort of struggle a little bit to get names and numbers
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because I hadn't actually collected that many because I'm just taking photographs, right?
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But eventually people would say, oh, you have to talk to so-and-so, you have to talk to so-and-so.
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So it became very easy, actually, to, you know, to learn the experiences.
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One of the – so you also wrote an article for the CSTC Journal,
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which is what explains the book to me and the stories of the individuals who were at the protest,
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not necessarily just the truckers, but people who were there in solidarity and so on and so forth.
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And it really reminded me of the story – I don't know if you know the story of Daryl David.
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In the 1980s, he befriended members of the KKK.
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And it all happened because these members of the KKK were – I think they were in a bar one night.
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And this, I guess, friendship blossomed or they started getting to know each other.
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And all ended up in several of the members giving up their robes at the end.
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And so it's a story of how – how can you hate me if you don't know me, I think is really critical here.
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And in this case, with the way your article described it,
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is the government, the KKK in this story, hating without understanding?
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And I also listened to another podcast you did recently with Tom Nelson.
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And you brought up that a police chief had said,
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anyone bringing food or money to the truckers will be hunted down.
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Again, how can you hate me if you don't know me?
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you said that you thought perhaps the media would change their tune.
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I mean, we know that Pierre Polyev did go meet some of the truckers
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But I'm not sure any of the other politicians have.
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We have this – we have this thing going on in society now
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where if a politician – if the political class and the media say that you should hate someone,
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then many, many people just kind of follow that.
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And they don't actually make any attempt to understand or to do some research on their own
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And so, yes, there was this incredible demonization.
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Before the truckers even got to Ottawa, we had our prime minister calling them, you know,
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You haven't even had a conversation with them yet.
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You are putting them outside of normal conversation.
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It undermines, you know, us understanding each other.
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Canada is a big country with many different regions.
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And, you know, it used to be that the CBC used to claim that its role was to help Canadians,
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And instead what happened was the CBC, amongst other media outlets, just decided to, you know,
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to adopt the very, very hateful, and I don't use that word very often, but a very hateful perspective of the government.
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But what's very interesting is that during the course of these interviews, I spoke to a number of truckers who said,
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I gave an interview to the CBC, or I gave an interview to CTV, and they told me I was going to be on the news.
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And then either I wasn't on at all, my interview had totally been shut down, or they took half a sentence of something I said.
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And in one guy's case, he said, they made me look like a psycho because they only, you know, quoted me this.
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I had given them a 15-minute interview, and I had answered a lot of questions, and they use one tiny little bit in a way that's very deceptive.
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And in another case, you know, the trucker was sitting there on Wellington in his blue Peterbilt, and his wife is in the passenger seat.
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So when the CBC crew comes up to his window, there's the cameraman, there's the sound guy, there's the journalist asking the questions.
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She filmed it. She filmed it. And I got to see that video afterwards. So that CBC crew did a very proper job.
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They asked questions, they let the trucker answer, you know, they did their job.
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And then that film footage went back to the studio, and almost none of it made it on air.
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I think that, again, he said three words, three words that this man said out of this entire interview got on the air.
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So things were happening in the editorial suites, in the, you know, they were being sliced and diced in the studio,
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even though journalists on the street had done their proper job.
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So there, you know, what went on there is very, very alarming on many dimensions.
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And, you know, it's something we should be talking about, but we're not.
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Source of the, with the resignation of Trevor Dunraj recently, who was at the CBC,
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has essentially come out and said that there are these editorial issues, that these decisions are being made at the top.
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And I think we're going to hear a lot more about that over the coming months and years,
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which I, for one, am looking forward to getting to understand a little bit better.
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Now, what your article does, and I imagine what your book also does, is, like you're saying,
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really humanizes the individual stories of people who were defending Canadian life,
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were defending freedom, their own personal freedom.
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And one of the points that I really enjoyed in the essay is pointing out that for nearly two years,
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these essential workers, you know, these, whether they're nurses or, you know,
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people who work in grocery stores or truckers even, were lauded as heroes of the country.
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They were keeping everything going at a time where we're all locked down.
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And all of a sudden, after the vaccine mandates, then suddenly they became the enemy of the country.
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They became, you know, the, like you said, the people with unacceptable views.
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And this really is a betrayal of the Canadians.
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And then the Canadian flag became the symbol of far-right hate, right?
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It was misogynists, often racists, and so on and so forth.
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And I was recently in England doing a report on migrant protests.
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And although they didn't have the same jubilant feel to it,
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it certainly was a similar situation where these are working-class individuals
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who are affected by policies of the government and they're expressing themselves
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by raising their own flag and saying, we are celebrating our own country.
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They are being treated as far-right racist and all this stuff.
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The local council where I was in Norwich, just as I was leaving,
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made a decision to criminalize people, not just raising the flag,
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but if you'd said something hateful while you were raising the flag.
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It became a non-crime hate incident or a hate incident.
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So there's a lot of similarities between the using of the flag
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or turning the flag, a national symbol for people, into this symbol of hate.
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And I know this is not necessary to do with a trucker protest,
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but I'd be curious to hear your views on that, because Canada's reversed that now.
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Now it's become a national symbol of pride again.
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So when people went out to the overpasses to cheer on the truckers,
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there were all sorts of Canadian flags being waved.
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Americans, you know, have a lot of flags in their front yard,
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and they wave flags a lot, but Canadians, not so much.
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And it's the first time, you know, other than an organized Canada Day celebration,
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it's the first time I can remember people using the Canadian flag as a symbol
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And, you know, a lot of the signs on those trucks
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and on just handmade signs that people brought to Ottawa
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talked to, you know, quoted the national anthem,
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You know, there were these lines from the national anthem that were,
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And also the other thing that came up was the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
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People would put that on a protest sign, you know, and walk around with it.
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Or there'd be copies of the Charter in the windshields of the parked trucks
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So we were basically, you know, as Canadians saying,
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these are all of the things, our Charter, our flag,
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we're supposed to be standing on guard for our country.
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And that was the context in which their, you know,
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I don't think it was, it was at all threatening, but you're right.
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You know, people who were opposed to this message
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very good at labeling people and shutting people down
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and hearing the concerns of someone who's not like you.
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but that's, that's the discourse in the UK right now.
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And they kept telling me how important discourse is,
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but then that discourse never really happened at all.
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And there was a lot of national, I'll bring it back.
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There's a lot of national unity around the flag,
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And over time, it seems like some of that unity
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around Canadian patriotism has sort of dispersed a little bit.
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And I'd be curious to know if you, if you feel,
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or if you see a possibility for that unity to come back.
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Well, I'm going to be always hopeful for unity to return,
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a lot of farms had a Canadian flag at the end of the driveway.
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So when you're driving by on the small little highways,
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pushing back against the government's mandates,
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pushing back against all of that pandemic stuff.
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and we have to rally around the liberal prime minister
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that the Canadian flag meant something very different.
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So it's an interesting time in Canadian history.
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who is mistaken for the world's top climate expert
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on Climate Change's policies and its processes.
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I discovered that I was looking up this information
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for my own personal reasons in going into that.
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but the policies behind that can be very suspect.
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The delinquent teenager book is 14 years old now, actually.
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and then I sort of started blogging about climate issues
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just as a private citizen who was a bit concerned
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and then I discovered that there's this UN body
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that I've never heard of before called the IPCC,
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And that's important because intergovernmental,
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you know, is the clue that this is governments.
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to write a report about what's going on with the climate.
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The journalists just kind of took the press release
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and said, oh, this is, you know, this is what they do.
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And they never bothered to do really simple fact checking.
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So when I turned my attention to that organization,
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Well, there were some very esteemed scientists,
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They say they rely entirely on peer-reviewed literature
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Well, I started looking at the back of the references
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that were not in fact peer-reviewed literature.