We're Finally Doing Something!
'I couldn’t back out. Cuz my family was so supportive. They were so glad.'
Part 1: The Flatbed with the Roof Truss Sign
In January 2022, Bern received a text from a co-worker, along with a flyer describing a planned truck convoy. “Are we going to Ottawa?” the text asked. Bern’s immediate, off-the-cuff response was, “Yeah, we are!”
Things “just kind of ballooned from there.” In the end, the co-worker wasn’t able to make it, but by then Bern was “in past the point of no return.” He himself wasn’t affected by the cross-border vaccine mandate that was throwing truckers out of work, but the never-ending pandemic measures were harming his family. “Once I said I’d like to go, at that point I couldn’t back out. Cuz my family was so supportive. They were so glad,” he remembers. “I mean, honestly, one of the drivers of this whole thing for me has been my 10-year-old son.”
Bern and his wife had already concluded that they needed to “stop talking about COVID so much in front of this guy. He’s a sensitive guy and he was starting to get down, like really down. And man, this kid. When he realized I was doing this, he gave the biggest ol’ fist pump in the air. And he said, ‘Yes! Finally, we’re doing something!’”
Picking up his kids at school one day, Bern was chatting with another parent. She said her husband, with whom she runs a carpet cleaning business, would love to go to Ottawa. “He is so welcome to come,” Bern replied. Which is how Andy ended up in the passenger seat.
Some British Columbia truckers hit the road on Saturday, January 22nd, but a protest was scheduled for Sunday in Fort St John. “I had this big, beautiful sign on my trailer,” remembers Bern. “I wanted to use it around my hometown.” Departing afterward, around 6 pm that evening, they were soon crossing into Alberta. “It didn’t really make sense for us to dip down to Calgary,” Bern explains. “So we went through Edmonton” and then pointed their grey, long nose Peterbilt toward the Saskatchewan border.
Originally, they’d planned to brew their own coffee in the truck. But their coffeemaker leaked badly, which is how they ended up at a Lloydminster McDonalds the next morning. While pulling out of the parking lot, Bern heard someone ask over the two-way radio if anyone was going to Ottawa. “Before I even said anything, somebody else pipes up and said, ‘We’re on LADD2,’ on a different radio channel. I turn over to that channel, these guys were just getting ready to leave Lloydminster – and two blocks away. We thought we’d missed this bunch, so I wasn’t even looking at their schedule,” Bern remembers. Shortly afterward, “this big, beautiful sign was right at the front of the Convoy all the way to Saskatoon.”
There, their numbers swelled as more trucks joined in. By the time they hit Regina, people were cheering from highway overpasses. “We had no idea we’d get that much public support along the way,” says Andy. “I’ve never seen more homemade signs and more Canadian flags in my life,” agrees Bern. “Or more smiles, for that matter.”
In Regina, their group of trucks merged with hundreds arriving from BC and Alberta. Truck radios typically have a 20-kilometre range, but by then, says Bern, the main Convoy was relaying important messages down the line to ensure that those at the back knew what was going on.
next installment: Something This Country Desperately Needs
338 MPs guilty of using tax payer funds for coercion causing death. GUILTY