Barn Dance & Birthday Cake

Local musicians joined the truckers at Gloria's farm.

previous installment: It Turned into This Big, Huge Thing

Photos supplied by Gloria

Gloria, whose farm welcomed Freedom Convoy truckers, says that after Tammy asked for volunteers to help distribute coffee and muffins, "a bunch of people joined in. They started bringing sandwiches, donuts," and other necessities such as toilet paper.

In Tammy's words,

we had food coming out of our ears. Packs and packs of bottled water. And granola bars. Just about everything you could imagine. Oh my gosh, we had a lot of local people dropping it off. And there were some Sikhs that came from Montreal. They brought us butter chicken, rice, and samosas. I mean, there was tons of it. And it was so good.

For the better part of a month, this farm hosted the truckers. So much food was donated by the community, some got shipped into the city. But three hot meals were served daily, and coffee was abundant. Gloria, in her late seventies, says:

a lot of them would go to Ottawa for the day, and then they'd come back and stay here at night.

Because we'd been shut up for two years almost, it felt so good to get out and see people. You could hug a person, you could talk to people. Before you were just sitting at home watching the TV all the time. Dr [Theresa] Tam on the radio three, four, five times a day. It was sort of sickening.

As time wore on, she says, the garage was needed for other purposes. "So they put a big tent out back where they had a cookhouse, and people could go eat." Often, there was a police cruiser stationed nearby. "They stayed right in the corner there," says Gloria. "They talked to me and said, 'If you have any trouble whatsoever, we're right here.' I've still got their phone numbers and cards, I think. They weren't there to hassle us, just to make sure nothing happened."

Did she ever have concerns? "Only once," she replies. “There were two different guys from two different convoys that sort of got into a little scrap, but nothing serious. Differences between whatever and whatever. That was it."

Gloria and her husband are well known in the community. In addition to being full time farmers, they had a traveling restaurant for 40 years. “It was a big barbecue restaurant,” she says:

We went to the fairs. We served a special hamburger. We called it the Big Ron, with bacon on it. That was our specialty. We started that many years ago, and now everybody has bacon on their hamburgers.

And breakfasts. I used to serve breakfast to the farmers that showed cattle at the fairs. Six o'clock in the morning, bacon and eggs. Yeah, a full breakfast. And then we had the Morning Glory. Bacon, cheese, and tomato on a bun. That was like a rush breakfast. We sold a lot of them, too. 

She and her husband declined the vaccines. "We never got the injection, and we never got sick, touch wood. Cuz I didn't believe in it. I believed it was serious, but I didn't believe the shot was a good thing to take. People thought that those of us that were for the Convoy didn't understand the science. But we just did our own thing."

She remembers a woman from British Columbia who'd driven across the country to support the truckers. "She was here for three weeks. She did go and stay at another farmer's place. They took her there, cuz I think she was sleeping in her car. She had lost two sons to suicide during the pandemic. The stories that you heard."

A local woman Gloria knows cashed her paycheque and then drove into Ottawa to distribute it to the truckers. For her part, Tammy fondly remembers a husband-and-wife team:

They were from New Brunswick, probably in their forties. She'd been a truck driver longer than him, I believe. They spoke pretty good English, but mostly they spoke French. He wore mukluks, the Canadian Indian native boots. They made up t-shirts, and they actually gave me a sweater. While they were in Ottawa, I kept calling her to make sure they were OK.   

Gloria doesn't understand the government's cross-border vaccine mandate. "A trucker, driving by himself," she says. "He's alone in his truck. Why does he have to have an injection?" She still keeps in touch with some of the people who stopped in at her farm. Scrolling through photographs on her iPhone, she says "Here's the dancers, the fiddlers. A local family, they're dairy farmers. The wife quit her job because she didn't want to get the injection. So they were into it pretty heavy, and they're fiddlers. So I just said, we should have a barn dance one Saturday night."

Often, "there was so much going on you didn't know who was coming or going. It was kind of overwhelming. I had a birthday at the time, too. So the truckers bought me a cake. Actually, four cakes."

Large-sized, supermarket cakes. The message reads: ‘Happy Birthday Gloria, Freedom Fighter. We love you, the Convoy.’ Photos supplied by Gloria.

After the Emergencies Act was declared, Gloria says people began worrying about their bank accounts. Her son, who had a big rig with Canadian flags parked on a side street in Ottawa, was concerned enough to transfer most of his funds elsewhere. In the end, his account wasn't seized.

"I think that was the stupidest thing the government ever did," she says. "People were taking money out. Everyone was, even ourselves. Not big amounts, but to have cash in your pocket in case something happened."

Gloria says she fully understands why some truckers have sold their rigs in the wake of the Convoy and moved on, "No wonder. With all this carbon tax and stuff, people can't afford that. It's terrible what's happening to our country. I have three granddaughters. You wonder what's going to happen."