It Doesn't Get Any More Canadian Than Us
'We bend, form, weld, and paint lots of Canadian steel. We're the real deal.'
Part 1: Seizing the Excavator
650 or so days after Brad's excavator was seized, he heard about a truck convoy headed to Ottawa from western Canada. In between, COVID vaccines had been aggressively promoted by health officials and politicians. Thousands of cross border truckers were told to submit to these shots or forfeit their jobs.
Brad was amongst the estimated 10 percent of the Canadian population that declined these vaccines. His wife studied virology at Dalhousie University, he explains. "She has her science degree, and she said there's no way they'll get it right. It's impossible. It's like hitting a moving target that you can't even see.
“Now I've been vaccinated with everything else," he adds. "And gone to Africa. So I was vaccinated with all the things that you have to get to go to Africa. Which I didn't look into. I just sat there and got the shots." In this case, however, his decision was firm. They'd have to chain him to a chair first.
For more than two decades, Brad has been president of a small business success story. Easy-Kleen Pressure Systems Ltd. was started by his father at the kitchen table in 1982, when Brad was 17. It now employees 170 people, and has offices across the country.
"When the government tells you to do something, the government's always wrong," he says. "When they get up behind their podiums and they speak, they may not know it, but generally they're wrong. I've been in business a long time, done business with governments, seen the way they act."
In his view, the game is rigged:
It doesn't get any more Canadian than us. We bend two miles of pipe a day. We bend, form, weld, and paint lots of Canadian steel. We're the real deal. And these people don't care. We bid to do a job for, say, $100,000. And they award the contract to someone who bid $200,000. They'd sooner support their buddy running out of their basement in Ottawa or Montreal who buys equipment from the US or Europe and then sells it to the Canadian army.
We've seen this more times than we care to talk about. To the point we don't bid on federal government contracts anymore. Â
However rampant anyone thinks government corruption might be, Brad says grimly, "multiply that by 10 or 20. Most people have no idea. If you're not in business, you really don't know. But we see it every day."
He describes the atmosphere in January 2022, just prior to the Freedom Convoy, as "a very bad time" for Canada. "I mean, we had someone in politics here say it's going to get harder on the unvaccinated. In the middle of January. And I'm like, 'Really? Harder? Get over yourselves. Enough is enough.'"
As Brad would explain in a public statement a month later, during the 40 years his company has been in business
truckers have delivered thousands of loads to our factory and hundreds of thousands of machines to our customers. Tens of thousands of truckers use our machines and are our valued customers. These truckers are salt of the earth people with the biggest hearts...We thank them when we can, but we rarely get the opportunity to support them when they are in need, and they are in need right NOW...Our company and my family are proud to stand with these men and women as they uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of our great nation.
On February 10th and 11th, Brad went to Ottawa to experience the protest for himself. "Me, my son, my nephew, and their friend - they're 26, 27. In a four-door pickup truck. We had the sleeping bags and the pillows. We just kept taking turns, drove all night."
After a quick nap in a hotel room, they spent the day walking around, shaking hands with the truckers, imbibing what his statement describes as an atmosphere of "love, peace and unity."
In his words, this was a "beautiful, legal, peaceful protest that overwhelmed us with emotion...an experience of a lifetime." Â
He remembers speaking to a police officer who told him it was a 'good crowd' that wasn't causing any problems. For his companions, Brad says the event was an epiphany.
"Because they were all unvaccinated and they were like, 'See, there's other people who will stand up.' You really couldn't explain it in words."
next installment: Protest the Government, Get Outed by the Media
Below is a portion of a CBC news story published three days before the western arm of the Freedom Convoy got rolling. The New Brunswick premier says mandatory vaccination is a possiblity, that patience with the unvaxxed is wearing thin, and that his province may follow Quebec’s draconian lead. Click the image to read the full thing.
In a different CBC article, published January 13, 2022 (10 days before the Convoy hit the road) New Brunswick premier Higgs declares:
We're going to do what is necessary to…compel people to get vaccinated.
Life will become increasingly uncomfortable and more difficult for those who are able to be vaccinated but choose not to be. [bold added by me]
next installment: Protest the Government, Get Outed by the Media
What a great post.
Than You