Fired for Taking Part in the Freedom Convoy (7 of 7)

Trucking company threatened with the loss of its business license.

Part 1: Grave Financial Peril

This photo appears in the video compilation described below.

Seated outdoors, there's a hardcover book about education in front of O'Jay. "By profession, I'm actually an accountant," he explains. "That's what I studied in school. I used to do receivables, that kind of thing," for the distribution arm of a prominent Jamaican fruit juice company. "We had issues with drivers. That's how I went and got my trucking license." When the need arose, he was able to step in and "just go and get the load."  

After arriving in Canada as a landed immigrant in 2012, "they wouldn't take my credentials." His trucking license was more readily transferable. "It was the easiest to get it into. Driving is something I really love, and there's nothing else that I can do right now that would, you know, accept me." 

Three weeks after the end of the Ottawa protest, O’Jay and a handful of other truckers were interviewed on a livestream. He’d pulled over. Pinned up behind his driver's seat were a Canadian flag and a Jamaican flag.

The host began by playing a 30-second video supplied by O'Jay himself. With Bob Marley's One Love as background music, we see a compilation of still photos, including one of a handmade sign with a line from another Bob Marley song, "Get up, stand up, stand up for your rights."     

There's a photo of O'Jay holding a child's drawing: different-coloured hearts, along with text that reads, "We love you. Thank you truckers." Another photo shows a smiling child and her mom, looking up in admiration from the sidewalk below.

O'Jay told the interviewer he was on his way to Montreal. What he didn't say is that his participation in the Freedom Convoy had cost him his job. "When we were in Ottawa, the company I was working with had the Ministry of Transportation call them and say that they were going to revoke their operating license if they didn't fire me or have me leave there," he explains. "But because of our contract, they had to give me thirty days notice."

(It’s worth observing that a Conservative government was in power in Ontario at the time. It was a Conservative transportation ministry demanding that people be fired for taking part in a peaceful protest.)

Screen capture from a video recorded by Ivana. A francophone woman holds her child close to the truck window, so the child can hand them a bag of treats.

Had he not covered the company logo on his truck door with a Canadian flag (see this photo), "they would have pretty much fired me right there. When I came back, they gave me those loads from Montreal." But it was short-lived, overflow work and "within three weeks, there were no more loads."

Ivana picks up the narrative, "Luckily, one of my friends that I went to high school with saw us in Ottawa. We catch up quickly, and he's asking me what's gonna happen to O'Jay now. I said, 'Well, this is it. We have to figure something out.'"

The friend worked as a dispatcher for another trucking company. "As soon as you come back, you call me and I'll have something for him," they were told. O'Jay has been employed by that firm since late March of 2022. The work is local, and doesn't pay as well. "But it keeps the food on the table," he says. These days he leaves home around three in the morning and often doesn't return until four or five in the afternoon.

"It's mainly containers I'm running right now. Import, export, sea cans," he explains. He typically hauls two twenty-foot trailers, each loaded with a container. "So it's extremely heavy. If they're coming off the train, we call it imports. A customer is waiting for their goods." The export side involves picking up containers full of soya beans from farms and delivering them to the train, after which they'll get transferred to ships bound for other countries.   

Ivana sighs, "I feel strongly that we were put to a test. After the Convoy, one door, another door, third door. Everything just kept falling into place. There's no doubt in our mind that we made a right decision."

In O'Jay's view, the truckers who'd kept goods moving during the first two years of the pandemic deserved more respect. Many of the people who shook his hand in the nation's capital "thought we should have had a lot more say."

Ottawa, he says, was his own personal statement. "I'm standing up for what I believe in, and I'm making it known. What I saw there reignited my belief in humanity. Because at one point I thought it was dead."