Then Cops Threw a Flashbang Above Our Heads

People around me said, ‘Say you love them. Let’s sing O Canada.’ (Part 5 of 6)

Part 1: Snowbird 3

Postma family in Ottawa, 16 Feb. 2022. Photo provided by Bart.

In Ottawa, Bart, Lisa and the kids spent two nights in a hotel room, and three nights in the motorhome. When its propane heater started acting up, they retreated to a friend’s house, thirty minutes out of town. On Saturday, February 18^th, the second day of the police crackdown against the Freedom Convoy, Bart returned with his sister, who wanted to witness the protest firsthand,

My sister was crying when she finally saw it. You couldn’t get into town. You had to park way out and walk in. You could see all the tow trucks lining up.

But we did get up to the police line. The crowd wasn’t letting people scream and yell. That’s when I was really worked up, telling them ‘You’re following illegal orders.’ People around me said, ‘Be quiet and say you love them. Let’s sing O Canada.’ Which we did. And then the cops threw a flashbang [concussion grenade] right above our heads, Kaboom!

Bart didn’t witness any arrests, or people being shot with rubber bullets. “I think my timing was just divine,” he says. “Because I am, admittedly, a bit of a hothead if pushed up against the wall. I probably would’ve got in trouble. I attribute it to the big guy upstairs looking out for us.”

Driving home, after leaving Ottawa. Photo supplied by Bart.

Back at home, Lisa remembers, “I couldn’t function properly. I was in a daze, thinking, ‘Did that really happen?’ Things were so amazing, so amazing. Being there in Ottawa, walking around with the kids. And the music. Bart said it was the first time he saw me smile that big in a long time. It was wonderful.”

Then the police turned violent. “You don’t even believe it,” she says,

And while it’s sinking in, you just can’t live your normal life. It was really hard to function for several days. But there’s the kids, and I’ve got to get meals. People were stuck there. Their vehicles were impounded, their windows smashed in, they had no money to drive back. And no one could send any money, because their bank accounts were shut down.

Asked why she declined to wear face masks from the earliest days of the pandemic, Lisa insists they’re worse than useless. She used to be a script supervisor in the film industry. When they shot footage in a parking garage full of automobile fumes, occupational health and safety experts “came in and fit everybody, all my co-workers and me, for a full-on respirator.”

Only trained people know how to do such fittings, she says. They use specific criteria to decide who can and cannot wear a mask. The fact that such experts were speaking out against widespread masking, and were being ignored when they said cloth and surgical masks don’t work, was a big red flag.

Early on, Lisa purchased a carbon dioxide detector with a sensor attached. “So we put on a mask and we stuck the sensor in there,” she says. “And we discovered that putting on a mask actually creates an environment that violates health and safety guidelines. Any employer would be required to put a respirator on their employee.” She laughs,

Hello! The government was pushing employers to violate their own laws. Obviously, those parameters are in place for a reason. You can’t breathe that in. There’s studies on kids in schools, when there wasn’t proper air circulation, and how their grades went down. I was a little bit obsessed with reading about this stuff, Bart can attest to that. I stayed up way too late at the very beginning of COVID, reading.

I know how to look things up. I’m not a dummy, I can read. Not only did I know it was not healthy for me, or anybody, but as a Christian I’m not going to acknowledge this lie. I’m not going to do it.

They used grocery pickup services, she says, and “went into as few stores as possible.” Early on, “I would get looks, and people would say, ‘You know you have to wear a mask.’ And I would just say, ‘I’m exempt.’ That’s it. There were some stores that were awful about it, but others just understood that if you don’t have a mask on at the height of COVID, it’s probably for a good reason.”

As time went on, she continues, “the employees would know. Oh, that’s the crazy lady that doesn’t wear a mask. And I found a lot of people were actually very friendly and wanted to chat. I just went on like everything was normal, because it should have been.”

Alita, Bart’s mother, is in her early seventies and now lives with them. She has driven school bus for the same company since the 1980s, but lost significant income during the pandemic. In essence, she lost her job.

“They took the keys away from me,” she says. “I would put the mask on when the kids started coming on the bus, but I would take it off again. Then I started not wearing it, and teachers started giving me dirty eyes. Then they got little guys that are going through school for police, standing there at the school, watching. Is that bus driver wearing her mask?”

She didn’t think it was healthy to be breathing in her own breath, she explains. “And it made me hot. I had to concentrate on driving.”

Alita also declined the COVID vaccines. “I read on the news about these injections. They were trial injections, they don’t even know yet what it will do. But we just gotta obey the government, they’re looking out for you. People are very naïve. And I thought, ‘Well, I’m not gonna do it. If they have to put me in jail, I’ll go to jail.”

She laughs softly, “At that time I was on high blood pressure pills. And I said to Bart, ‘If I do, make sure you bring me my pills.”

Alita had never received so much as a parking ticket. Nor had she ever attended a protest. But for months during the dark days of COVID, she gathered on Saturday mornings with a dozen or so others at the town square in Goderich, Ontario. “We even had homeless people standing with us,” she remembers. “We had free coffee and donuts up there, so we gave it to them and they stood with us.”

One of her homemade signs, on neon-green Bristol board, read ‘Freedom’ on one side, and ‘No Mandates’ on the other. A second sign said, ‘Canada strong and free, do not fear’ and ‘Trust God, not government.”

At home one morning, her nine-year-old grandson was visiting. “We were just sitting on the porch here, enjoying the weather. We were gonna throw some balls. And this police officer came walking around the corner, with her hand on her gun. She says, ‘Alita Postma, you are fined $2,000. Here's your ticket.’ And my grandson started crying and screaming. I'm Beppe, that's Dutch for Grandma. ‘Beppe, Beppe, what's the police lady want?’ He was just shaking and hanging onto me. He thought they were going to take Beppe away.”

Two police cruisers were in the driveway. The second officer remained near his car, standing there with his arms crossed. “They don't even have the courage to give tickets at the event,” Bart says. Instead, they wait “until a little grandma is at home. Then they send the police cars, with their guns. It was an intimidation tactic. I used to be a Support the Blue person, for sure. But I have zero respect for the police anymore.”

In both the military and the police, he stresses, there’s a concept known as lawful orders. “They give you that class day one. You are responsible if you follow unlawful orders. If you're ordered to kill the prisoners, you don't do it. If you're ordered to beat up the prisoner, you're responsible, not your general who told you to do it.”

Alita says she was offered a compromise. “They would put it down to $1,800 if I would plead guilty and do community service. I said No. Then the next thing, they put it down to a thousand and said if you don't do that, we're gonna take your driver's license away and your car.”

She says Rebel News provided them with a lawyer. “We fought all that to the end, and it got thrown out. But some people really got scared. You know, they couldn't lose their license. They’d lose their job or their business.”

final installment: The Most Fun I’ve Ever Had in an Airplane