Dave Goes to Ottawa
HVAC technician remains in the capital, brings truckers food & fuel, becomes a YouTuber.
Part 1: Jay, the Trucker Who Brought the Shed
Toward the end of the second week Jay was in Ottawa, with The Shed on the back of his truck, cameras began livestreaming what was happening on the ground. A team of people who’d only just met each other worked together to make that a reality. One of those people was an HVAC (heat, ventilation, air conditioning) technician named Dave, who resides near Kitchener, Ontario.
Interviewed a few weeks after the protest was shut down, Dave explained why he went to Ottawa and how he inadvertently became a YouTuber:
He told interviewer Viva Frei he got off work early on Thursday, January 27th, the day the Niagara arm of the Freedom Convoy left for Ottawa. The overpass he mentions is the one at which the 401 meets Highway 6. In his words:
I’d heard about what was happening on the overpasses, so I went out to an overpass, not sure if there’d be just me or there’d be other people. I pulled up and I got emotional right off the bat when I saw at least a hundred to two hundred people all lined up at this overpass over the 401. The flags, the signs, the horns…the patriotism in me just got fired up.
And so I went and stood on that overpass in minus 20. It was a crazy cold day. And I waved a flag and I said to myself, ‘I gotta go to Ottawa. I gotta see what’s going on.’ So we watched the truckers go by and when I got home I texted a friend of mine who’s a truck driver and said, ‘Hey, man, we gotta go to Ottawa, like this is crazy.’
And we reached out to a few other buddies and we drove to Ottawa that Friday. And ended up right down in the middle of it all.
Dave met Jay soon afterward:
I hopped in his truck to warm up, and we hit it off right away. And I was just so moved by the passion of these drivers…they came down there to take a stand for all of us.
So I hopped in his truck and got to know him, and started networking and by the end of the weekend I told my friends that I’d come down with, I said ‘I gotta stay here, this is too important.’
So I contacted my boss. Thankfully, he was willing to give me some time off. And I stayed. And then…I started delivering fuel. Which is the great crime that it became. And bringing food to drivers. And just helping to take care of them…I ended up basing out of the back of Jay’s truck, in The Shed.
Later on, he says, it seemed like cameras would be a good idea, “just for the truckers’ safety and security. So it started with one little webcam that I bought. And we threw it on the back of the truck. And then I started learning how to livestream because I’d never done that before. We burned through the data pretty quick.”
After the donated Starlink satellite was installed, he says, “I bought a 360 camera. I mounted that up, and then we tried to [livestream] 24/7 as best as we could.” Their equipment, which wasn’t designed for extended use in sub-zero weather, was running off generators. “It proved difficult at times,” Dave remembers, But that’s how we started broadcasting.”
On one occasion, alone in The Shed in the wee hours and unable to sleep, he turned on the microphone and began chatting with viewers who happened to be online at the time. “They seemed really interested, and they’re asking all these questions.” His transition to an on-air, YouTube personality had begun.
The day the police violently shut down the protest, making arrests and impounding the trucks at that intersection, The Shed cameras captured two hours of key footage. At the beginning of those two hours, we hear Dave reading thank you notes from kids that had been pinned inside The Shed, as he waits to get arrested (I wrote about that here).
A week later, in another video (click images below), Dave provides the voiceover as he accompanies some of these truckers to the impound lot. The Shed’s door has been left open, as have the windows in the cab of Jay’s truck. Dave reaches inside, “So here’s my laptop,” he says, picking up a device covered in snow. “Oh, there’s the microphone…expensive microphone, hopefully it works still. No sign of my 360 camera, yet.”
Sam, who described the installation of the Starlink satellite equipment yesterday, reports that that hardware made it back to the Quebec engineer who so generously donated it to the cause.
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Sam’s account of how The Shed got Starlink is a richly detailed, firsthand account. Dave’s version differs slightly. At the time in which he gave the Viva Frei interview, he thought the person who’d donated the equipment had driven a couple hours to his home in Quebec to fetch it (I reported that here, nearly two years ago).
