Boom Truck Ben (Part 1 of 4)

Used as a stage throughout the protest, Ben's truck revealed the melodramatic, parallel universe inhabited by Canada's political class.

Screen capture of Ben from a podcast/video interview with Ordinary Joe (click image)

Ben Froese did long distance, cross-border trucking for thirteen years before becoming a boom truck operator. His current rig is a flatbed equipped with a 100-foot (30-metre) mobile crane. He now earns his living in the construction industry, mostly lifting roof trusses into place on new buildings. "I like it," he says, "it's fun."

Aged forty at the time of the Freedom Convoy, he himself had plenty of work during the pandemic and faced no vaccine mandate. “But I could see that it was coming, so I just knew I had to go.” With his brother-in-law in the passenger seat, they joined up with other southwestern Ontario trucks on Thursday. En route, they stayed overnight in a Belleville motel room. A snowstorm had made driving treacherous, it was dark by then, and "we had kind of lost the majority of the trucks in front of us."

Approaching Ottawa's Wellington Street late the next afternoon, a police officer advised them to turn right if they intended to stay for the weekend, or turn left if they wanted the option of departing sooner. "We chose to go right."

Ben’s truck the first night, before it became the protest’s main stage. Photo supplied by him.

Parking a mile or so from Parliament Hill, Ben unfolded his crane that first night and hoisted a six-by-twelve-foot Canadian flag high into the air. People recorded videos of him doing so, and shared those videos on social media. Later, his Texas sister sent him one. "She had put the clip to music and it was kind of emotional watching it afterwards," he says. "I had chills up my spine."

In the video above, Ben attaches and raises his flag on the first evening. A second video is here.

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He remembers feeling a little nervous that first Friday evening. "Because, I mean, we were making a lot of noise. This wasn't something that you're used to, disturbing the peace, if you will." The following morning, He was asked if he'd "mind coming up to the main intersection in front of Parliament so that they could use my truck as a stage. They came and found me around 10 am. We went for a walk, just to see what I was up against. Shortly after that I packed up my truck and brought it up front."

At first, he parked across three lanes, with a row of big rigs as a backdrop. Less than 24 hours later, he swung his truck close to the north sidewalk, so that Parliament was behind him. After positioning his two outriggers (hydraulic stabilizers), that's where he stayed for the next three weeks.

He'd only planned to be in the nation's capital for a couple of days, he explains. "We had work scheduled the following week. But by the second day we could feel that this was much bigger than us, much bigger than our schedule."

Each night, before retiring, Ben would retract the crane and detach his flag. Each morning, he'd ceremoniously raise the flag again, often accompanied by the playing of the national anthem through the sound system on stage. The flag was secured to a length of cable dangling from the tip of the crane. At the bottom, a metal ball keeps the cable taut. Below that, there's a hook that gets attached to "whatever I'm picking up."

Countless photographs, along with hours of video show this ball - which weighs a couple hundred pounds - dwarfed by Ben's enormous flag. But that didn't stop influential people from calling it a wrecking ball, which typically weigh thousands of pounds.

On February 4th, the Globe and Mail's Marieke Walsh tweeted that "a wrecking ball with a Canadian flag attached" was threatening the Prime Minister's office across the street.

Ms. Walsh appears to have deleted this tweet. A Twitter search reveals no apology, correction, or explanation.

Jody Thomas, the PM's personal National Security Advisor, testified under oath that the protesters had become more aggressive by February 12-13, the third weekend. "We saw things like the wrecking ball on Wellington Street by then," she said, even though the boom truck had been there the entire time.

MP Matthew Green, while serving as co-chair of a Parliamentary committee examining the government's use of the Emergencies Act, likewise expressed alarm at the crane "set up in the middle of the street with a wrecking ball on it."

In addition to being the physical platform from which numerous speeches were delivered and numerous songs were sung, Ben's workaday truck exposed the melodramatic, parallel universe inhabited by Canada's political class. When they looked at the trucker protest, these people saw a distorted version of reality, a shared hallucination. There never was a wrecking ball. Yet to this day, they believe otherwise.

continues Friday

I’ve published bits & pieces about Ben before. More recently, we sat down for an extended interview.