The Government Went Insane (Part 1 of 6)
'I was ready to lose everything. I didn’t care. I wanted this country back.'
Recently, I told you about Stephanie - a northern Ontario office worker who was a core volunteer at Coventry, a Freedom Convoy supply depot set up in the parking lot of Ottawa’s baseball stadium (see Part 1 and Part 2). Below, a second person describes how matters transpired:
“I'm not a religious kind of guy at all,” says Karl, now aged forty-five. “But I definitely witnessed a higher power in Ottawa.” Whenever something seemed impossible, the hand of the divine tapped him on the shoulder. “One time it was the generator, the big generator that powered all of Coventry.”
Karl used to work for a trucking company as a diesel mechanic. These days, he earns his living as a millwright on construction sites. But he has friends who run big music festivals for a living, so he knows that behind any event involving thousands of people there are nuts-and-bolts, there’s infrastructure. Karl helped provide much of that infrastructure.
Prior to 2020, he’d never been politically active. “I didn’t care,” he says. Until “the government went insane.” He cites an infamous video of “the cops grabbing that kid on the ice” in Alberta, for the crime of playing hockey outdoors. He mentions another video, in which Quebec police forcibly removed someone from a house on New Years Eve after neighbours tattled that an unauthorized six people were inside.
Those were “crazy, crazy times,” says Karl, who was born near Montreal, and who spoke only French for the first decade of his life. “I never would have thought we’d have such a totalitarian environment in this country. Ever. I’m surprised nobody got hurt or even shot.” There were moments when he felt certain, “It’s gonna boil over. Something’s gotta stop. It was pure insanity. I voted for Trudeau,” he adds. “I didn't vote for him again. I give myself a promise, I'll do everything in my power to get him out.”
On social media, Karl started hearing about the Freedom Convoy early in January 2022. He knew something momentous was about to happen. “If you’ve ever watched a crystal, when water’s about to freeze, and you just touch it and there it goes – instant freeze. You could feel it. I just knew there was gonna be millions of people involved.”
After Albertan Tamara Lich set up a Facebook page and a GoFundMe fundraiser for the Convoy, Karl connected with her on Facebook. “I messaged her. I’m already in Ontario. I can take time off work, I can help with anything you guys need.” Soon he was participating in online Zoom meetings with the main organizers, who began talking about a thousand trucks arriving at service stations as truckers traversed the country.
Karl did the math. “I immediately called the first station where they’re gonna pull over. I find out they have 275,000 litres. Each truck takes 1,000 litres – so only 275 trucks get filled. I’m like, Oh my God. There’s your bottleneck. It’s gonna screw up right there.” Soon he was calling all “the overnight stops. How much fuel you got? You’re gonna have a sea of trucks coming.”
His main task was laying groundwork in Ottawa. A few hours after the western arm of the Convoy departed Kenora on Wednesday morning, a liaison officer with the Ottawa police sent a text message to another Ontario volunteer. The baseball stadium on Coventry Road had been secured, the text said, “for the convoy coming from the east. You can start working on a shuttle for them.”
At that point, Karl wasn’t familiar with Ottawa. “I thought it was closer to downtown,” he says, “but it didn’t work out that way.”
That afternoon, at a rental business in London, Ontario, he loaded up a 53-foot-trailer. “I had a few volunteers that gave us a hand, wonderful volunteers. We loaded four 20x20 tents, a 30x30 tent, and a 40-foot octagonal. I had 800 chairs, over 100 tables.” He had to sign on the dotted line for all of this equipment, worth in the neighbourhood of $180k. “I was ready to lose everything,” he remembers. “I didn’t care. I wanted this country back.”
The rental place recommended stabilizing the massive event tents by driving spikes through the asphalt. “It’s not our parking lot,” Karl explained, “we don’t want to damage anything.” So he had to bring along dozens of large concrete blocks and then rent a telehandler (a telescopic forklift) in Ottawa to position them. “I got my licenses for all that kind of stuff,” he says.
Their tractor trailer was borderline overloaded, he remembers. “I got a volunteer truck driver to come in a day early, I got him to leave on Wednesday night.”
next installment: Half My Convoy Just Got Taken Out
Another absolutely amazing story! What a hero - all those tents and tables and chairs! It is wonderful you are getting all of this documented Donna!