Best Social Experiment Ever (Part 6 of 6)
'You’ve got people kissing, hugging, no masks, not obeying any of the COVID restrictions. And your COVID counts are dropping?'
Part 1: The Government Went Insane
Two years after the Freedom Convoy, a central figure at the Coventry supply depot is annoyed that Marco Mendicino, then Canada’s public safety minister, implied under oath that Coventry was a scary place run by former military personnel and former police officers. Some of the security volunteers fit that description, says Karl, but the core group did not.
“No f**king way he didn't know that Coventry was ran by a truck driver, a millwright, a hockey mom, an office worker, a chef, a carpenter, a master electrician, and a retired civil servant. No military or police ran Coventry at all. We were just regular citizens.”
Three different police forces, at a minimum, “knew who I was, for sure,” he continues. “The RCMP knew, they were just down the street. Mendicino’s the one talking to the cops, getting briefed by them. Who’s who, and what’s what. There’s no way he didn’t know.”
Preposterous is the word Karl uses to describe media accusations that the truckers took bread out of the mouths of the homeless. “How am I stealing food? I’ve got reefers full of it. I’ve got so much, I’m turning donations away.” Shortly after “those pure lies” were reported by government-financed news outlets, Karl says he told Shelley, who managed and organized their food donations, to “Send it. Full send. Women’s shelters, homeless shelters. We sent a transport trailer of food out. To the point where they’re like, ‘Stop bringing us food.’ All the shelters.”
What the media failed to talk about, says Karl, is how Ottawa’s COVID cases fell off a cliff while the Convoy was in town. “When I got there, I purposely took a screenshot” of the official numbers online, “and all the way along, until the third week. I was like, this is gonna be the best social experiment ever. You’ve got people kissing, hugging, no masks, not obeying any of the COVID restrictions. And your COVID counts are dropping?”
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By the time the protest came to an end, “we were cooking 800 breakfasts every morning,” Karl remembers. “The vans would be ready, one after the other,” as meals were loaded and driven downtown. “We’d pay the gas for the volunteers, who didn’t have jobs at the time.” In his view, government “created the perfect storm.” So many people were still barred from working, “They had all the time in the world to come and stand proud for Canadians.”
When the police crackdown on the truckers parked downtown began, Karl says he got a call from one of the liaison officers, telling him Coventry needed to disband. “I’m not moving,” was his response. “Nicholas Street got nailed,” he remembers, followed by Rideau and Sussex. “So I’m paying attention to that. I’m continuing to send fuel and food, whatever I can. I’m just holding that line, I’m holding back, holding back.”
Friday afternoon, two people got trampled by police horses near the Chateau Laurier. “I thought for sure she got crushed,” says Karl, “that the hoofs stomped on her head. I thought she was done. I’m like, oh my friggin God, they just killed someone. I thought for sure it was going to stop.” On their Twitter feed, Ottawa police claimed they’d been attacked. In Karl’s words, “the cops said somebody threw a bike at the horse.”
“You lying piece of,” Karl pauses. “I said so many colourful words.” The person who suffered a shoulder injury was Candice Sero, a 49-year-old resident of Tyendinaga Mohawk Territory, a two-and-a-half hour drive from Parliament Hill. The alleged bicycle was her mobility device (walker) on which she was leaning at the time (see photos here). Had a Conservative government been in power when police horses put a peacefully protesting aboriginal woman in hospital, it would have been front page news for days. Instead, journalists engaged in classic misdirection. They told the public it was fake news that police had killed someone, and then stopped talking about it. Many Canadians have no idea these events even occurred.
The next morning, when it became clear the police were closing in on the main stage downtown, Karl made his call. “OK, it’s time.” He rang up the liaison officer. “I’m pulling out, I need seventy-two hours.” The cop said he couldn’t promise that. “You’ve got the cameras on me, you’re gonna see f**king movement in five minutes.”
Karl remembers walking into the main tent, “Sorry, guys. It’s time to break it up.” Not everyone agreed, he says, but those people hadn’t rented all that equipment. Trailers full of food needed to be unloaded so that their owners could retrieve them. Hay bales were shoved into the stalls of the heated washrooms, before those got towed to Gloria’s farm. “We got the garbage bins pulled out, brought the saunas to Exit 88.” A small tanker, on a boat trailer, couldn’t be hauled safely, so “I had to offload all the fuel out of there, too. I pumped it out, gave it away to whoever needed it.”
Not much more than twenty-four hours later, Karl says, “it was basically just the tents, a few odds and ends. We cleaned up the whole, entire site.” Firewood got stacked in a corner, along with a lone bin that hadn’t yet been retrieved. “There was no debris left. The parking lot was spotless except for some straw that fell off. I drove the telehandler to the Canadian Tire parking lot so the truck could pick it up there. If they were coming to raid us, I didn’t want it to get seized.”
Shelley gave him a ride back. “She literally drops me off, and a sea of green was coming. They were waiting for me to pull out, the cops, in their high-vis vests. I get in my truck, they give me a piece of paper, whatever. ‘I’m out, see ya.’”
Karl says there were still a dozen or so holdouts in the adjacent parking lot, folks who didn’t want to leave. “They wanted to make their last stand. They stayed there and basically they all got arrested.”
A week later, money that had been donated to Coventry was used to cover impound fees. “We paid for a lot of those trucks, trailers, cars,” says Karl. “People either paid out of their own pocket and brought us the receipt, or we got the impound number and then e-transferred the cash directly.”
When he finally made it back to the rental company in London with all the tents, concrete blocks, tables, and chairs, the owner “was good enough not to charge me for it,” says Karl. Rather than paying for a month’s-long rental, the Freedom Convoy was the recipient of a massively generous loan. “Without him, it wouldn’t have happened the way it did.”
Regarding the few things that were missing – the tables and chairs that had been delivered to the stage were never recovered – he says the business owner additionally and personally “took a hit for a grand or two.”
In Karl’s opinion, the government shot itself in the foot. “It was the worst and best thing they could have done,” he says, citing the contempt of those in power, their refusal to even talk or listen. The extended, 23-day-long protest that resulted “brought Quebecers together with Albertans.” It brought east coasters together with west coasters.
“Everyone was there, working together. Individuals became friends. They hugged each other, liked each other, loved each other.”
Bless 'em all!!!