A Time of Coercion

The Freedom Convoy was a much-needed antidote to anguish and despair.

The past few years have been a time of state-sponsored segregation and coercion. Individuals have been pressured, browbeaten, and bullied.

• Into abandoning in-person church services (and therefore their spiritual support networks).

• Into wearing face masks for months and years.

• Into taking COVID vaccines as the price of admission (as visitors) to long term care facilities and hospitals.

People have been threatened. Grievously so. With the loss of their pay cheques and their pensions. With the decimation of careers they’ve spent decades building. With mortgage defaults due to a wholly unplanned inability to pay their bills.

Law-abiding citizens - many of them mere children - have been cruelly scapegoated. They’ve been punished in endless, ad hoc, petty ways.

When a society tosses the social contract into a wood chipper - when it openly embraces reprisal, stigma, and ostracism as official health policy - enduring wounds are inflicted.

As the truckers journeyed to Ottawa from many corners of the country, they heard numerous personal stories. During the weeks they remained there, they heard many more.

Members of the Freedom Convoy were given letters - sometimes multi-page letters. I’ve now examined dozens of those letters. Some are unsigned. Others are signed by entire families. Sometimes the identity of the author is unclear. Often the author is a woman.

So many of these letters are full of anguish. So many tell the convoy it was a lifeline for souls in despair.

Over the next few days, you’ll read about some of those stories here…