‘What do you think about Ottawa now that the convoy’s gone? Back to dead?’ I was watching a YouTube video by Zot, one of the livestreamers who built up a following during the protests against Covid vaccine mandates that took over the city for three weeks in February, with the help of a large convoy of trucks. Two middle-aged guys – ‘Fun Travel 69’ and ‘Live from the Shed’ – called in to the show to exchange dark inferences about the mainstream media (MSM). Someone asked Zot what made him join the protests. ‘I’m from Ottawa,’ he replied. ‘Nothing ever happens in Ottawa.’
Like Zot, I grew up in Ottawa (some call it ‘Ottograd’) and know what it is to long for disruption, upheaval, anything to shake up the town. The closest thing we had was the invocation of the War Measures Act by Pierre Trudeau in October 1970, after a series of kidnappings by Quebec separatists. Soldiers with machine guns were posted across the city. Now, more than fifty years after his father called in the army, hundreds of enormous rigs were rolling into town and Justin Trudeau was trying not to repeat his dad’s heavy-handedness. All three levels of government – federal, provincial and municipal – studiously avoided confrontation (except with one another). You could see why. Close up, the trucks were massive: two storeys high with five, six ladder rungs to reach the cab.
The brainchild of Western Canadian right-wingers who had staged a similar protest two years earlier – the pro-pipeline, anti-environmentalist United We Roll convoy – the Freedom Convoy’s message resonated. Following the first critical mass of truckers, blocking off downtown streets, the people the occupation brought out were an extraordinary mix, though overwhelmingly white: born-again Prairie Christians, anti-communist Eastern European immigrants, New Age anti-vaxxers (‘my body, my choice’), loudmouth hockey mums, free-thinking Mohawks, dreadlocked weed-smokers, curious small-towners and their snow-suited kids, all brandishing the red maple leaf and other flags. The more fun it looked, the more people came out. Walking down Wellington Street a week into the occupation you could feel the giddiness, the elation. A mass of people who had never set eyes on one another, unless perhaps briefly online, were meeting in the flesh after all the lockdowns. No wonder they were hugging and dancing.
The giddiness only increased when the protesters saw what they could get away with. Not just stopping all traffic, blaring horns day and night and belching diesel fumes, but swarming unmasked into stores, harassing locals, and generally behaving like drunken frat boys. As the days passed, the party atmosphere gave way to greater organisation and less pissing in the streets. Volunteers built a stage across from Parliament Hill, a soup kitchen in Confederation Square and a fuel depot for distributing jerry cans of diesel to keep the trucks running in the freezing weather. A couple of parking lots on the outskirts of town were commandeered for use as encampments and staging posts. The organisers had said they wouldn’t budge until all vaccine mandates had been repealed, and it looked like they meant it. As the numbers grew, the declarations became more grandiose: they were going to bring the city to its knees, get rid of the government and – so the signs said – FUCK TRUDEAU! In response, the city laid on rows of porta-potties. No one knew how it would end.
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