Arrested, Handcuffed, Charged
He felt a strange calmness.
Part 1: The Flatbed with the Roof Truss Sign
Bern was arrested at 7:30 in the morning. He was still in the bunk of his truck, with the doors locked, not yet dressed. He’d slept well, he says. A few minutes beforehand, a friend called to warn him police were approaching in massive numbers - an estimated 15 cops for every trucker.
He tried to respond when the friend asked for his wife’s phone number, while simultaneously trying to send a text to the other truckers in their group. “At that point I could tell I was really nervous,” he recalls. “My fingers weren’t as steady as they normally are.” And then the banging started. So forcefully that he was surprised not to find dents afterward. The police were shouting, “Get outta your truck, now!”
When he poked his head outside his bunk curtain, “there’s cops all around my truck.” He tried to activate a camera, but it malfunctioned. “I held my pants out the window. ‘I need to put my clothes on first.’”
His truck was running at the time. When he reached over to shut it off, the cop standing on his running board “grabs my hand and he turns it off himself.” After he stepped outside, he could see that the occupants of the trucks directly behind him were already arrested. “So I saw my brothers being walked down the sidewalk, in handcuffs.”
He says, “It was really, really cold and windy and snowy that morning. They just kind of rounded us up.” He felt a strange calmness. “And a lot of the other fellas said the same thing. Once it was happening, there was just this weird peace about it.” He spent a couple hours with his arms handcuffed behind his back, which was hard on the shoulders. By the time he was loaded into the paddy wagon, “I was so cold, I was just happy to have a heater.”
When the vehicle started moving, he intended to keep track of where they were going, but soon gave up. The driver
went around 35 different corners, and you just about got carsick cuz of the way you had to ride in there. [They] took us to a remote spot for processing. Processed us and wanted us to sign some papers. We didn’t. Fingerprinted us, kicked us out in the snowbank, essentially…
At that point we had our phones back, so then we called for people to come pick us up….It took the better part of an hour…Cross that off the bucket list.
Really, says Bern, “the only thing I was thinking of that morning was my son’s birthday…He turned 15 the morning I got arrested.”
I’ve previously asserted that Mike Jamieson and Guy Meister, from Nova Scotia, were the first two truckers to be arrested once the police crackdown began (see here, here, and here). I was wrong. Bern’s documents make it clear the police took his group into custody first, there on Nicholas Street.
Mike and Guy, who were close by at the Rideau & Sussex intersection, were arrested later that day, just before noon. My apologies for getting this wrong. To my knowledge there’s no official list of who was arrested, where, or when. The truckers themselves are frequently unsure of dates and times. All anyone can do is talk to lots of people, and attempt to piece things together.
The story that is coming out really emphasises the blind-follower problem of our society. if we all defied arbitrary authoritarian, wherever the showed up, none of this would have happened, A country that is governed by social engineering politicians has too much power when the courts and police are compliant to the leader rather than the law.
What a travesty! What shameful behaviour on the part of the police - well I guess the shame is on the part of whoever gave the orders for such ridiculous and maybe even unlawful arrests.