From Hero to Zero: Dan's Story
After prepping humanitarian flights to China, this aircraft mechanic was barred from working.
Part 1: Frozen Ketchup and Brand New BBQs Part 2: Three Men and a Van Part 3: Frozen Bank Accounts Part 4: Why Aircraft Mechanics Went to Ottawa Part 5: Why Aircraft Mechanics Went to Ottawa (Part 2) Part 6: From Hero to Zero
In early 2020, when much of the world was advised to remain at home due to a scary, poorly understood virus, Dan didn’t have that luxury. As an aircraft mechanic, he’s an essential service. His employer gave him a letter to show police, should he ever be stopped and questioned while travelling to and from work.
In the early days of the pandemic entire planeloads of personal protective equipment (PPE) were rushed to China via chartered aircraft. Dan, now aged 50, helped make those flights happen.
When charters fly into places in which the aircraft company has no maintenance contract, a mechanic must be brought along. Dan volunteered for one of the Shanghai flights. He was fully prepared to fly into the storm half a world away rather than remain safely back in Ontario.
In the end, someone else did the flight, but Dan was on board later when mobile hospital units were delivered to Puerto Rico after flooding caused a major disaster. He recalls flying to Chile and half a dozen other destinations early on.
During the first year of the pandemic, therefore, Dan was a hero. Praise for ‘essential workers’ such as himself was widespread and effusive.
How quickly times change. Toward the end of the following year he became a zero - discarded, barred from his workplace after declining to provide proof of COVID-19 vaccination. Aviation is federally regulated in Canada, and the Prime Minister made vaccination mandatory for everyone in that industry as of October 30th, 2021.
When Dan climbed into Rich’s van, when these two aircraft mechanics drove to Ottawa behind the Freedom Convoy, Dan had been on ‘leave without pay’ for months. Money was tight. He didn’t have much of a data plan for his mobile phone, for example.
He describes himself as a straightforward, practical guy who expects things to make sense:
You could go into Walmart or Costco [as an unvaccinated person], but you couldn’t go to your kids’ sports games. There was a lot of different scenarios like that that just didn’t add up to me…And the [mandating of the vaccines] made me question a lot more.
My wife works in a hospital. She saw firsthand. A lot of the stuff that was coming in was not normal…all the myocarditises, blocked arteries. Perfectly healthy triathlete coming in with a heart attack.
…What’s in this vaccine? I’m not a sheep. I don’t just follow because everybody else is. If I think that something is odd about it, I question it. I hold back a little.
Part 2: The Kindness of Strangers
read about Rich, the owner of the van in which they spent three weeks, here
Not a sheep ... different from more than half of Canadians .. radically different from all of our compliant backbench politicians. Truly, there is hope for this country , embeded in the minds of those our leaders call 'deplorables'.