I Came Together with the People

At every stop en route to Ottawa, crowds greeted the Convoy.

Photo taken by me, February 2024.

Luis Chen has been transporting automobiles with his 75-foot, double-decker auto hauler for twenty years. Cars sold at auction in Toronto need to be delivered to purchasers in Ottawa, and vice versa. Loading up is a demanding, five-to-six-hour process. Each automobile must be positioned expertly and secured carefully. Unloading at the other end is a breeze: forty-five minutes and done.

As Luis was preparing for a quick run to Windsor one morning in January 2022, a fellow trucker asked if he was joining the protest. "What kind of protest?" he inquired. "Against the vaccination."

"No, I don't hear about that," he replied. The other driver sent him a TikTok video that changed everything. Luis' wife and daughter had both been compelled to take COVID shots in order to keep their jobs in a factory and a hospital. He himself had hauled general freight into the US years earlier and could easily have been one of the truckers thrown out of work on January 15th.

At dawn, his plans for that day had been clear: drop the load in Windsor, load up again near Toronto, and head down the highway toward Ottawa. "I was thinking, what can I do?" he remembers. "This is very important. But I don't want to lose my job. Because I'm under the company's insurance, right. If they told me to stop, I have to stop."

Broad and barrel chested, Luis isn't much more than five feet tall. Born in Guatemala, he is of Mayan descent, with his surname being common amongst that nation's indigenous peoples. Having come to Canada in 1989, English is his second language, so his grammar isn't perfect. He jokes that he speaks Spanish and "a little bit of English."

On the return journey from Windsor, he pulled into the Flying J service station at the south end of London. "I saw a lot of people there honking the horn," he remembers. "And then I said, 'I think I better go with these people.'" He chuckles, recalling the telephone conversation with his wife,

'Hey, listen, I have to go.'

'Luis, Luis you have to think about that. If they kick you out from the company, my salary is not enough.'

 'No, no. I have to go.'

 'Luis, you have to think about that.'

He told her he'd spent too long thinking about the crazy things going on in the world. "Now it's time, I have to go with these people."

A truck stop near his home was sold out of Canadian flags, so he called his son. "Go to the Canadian Tire, buy my flag. He buy six." Each one was three feet wide. Luis attached four to his truck and two to his trailer. He'd expected the protest to be over in a few days, but it took a couple just to reach Ottawa.

"I came together with the people," he says. "We stop in Ingersoll, we stop in Port Hope, and again in Prescott. Everywhere, waiting people. Everywhere, meeting people. And then at one o'clock, two o'clock in the afternoon we left the truck stop and went to Ottawa."

That was Friday, January 28th, and he was amongst the first group of trucks to be directed downtown. "This is a surprise to me. I don't understand. I was almost the first, with only five truck drivers ahead of me.

The police asked for his name. After some confusion and mixed messages, he ended up on Wellington Street, "maybe fifty feet east of Kent. It was very hard to drive, with a big truck and trailer. Lots of cars. But nice people, they open the road for me and I go very close to the Parliament."

With two lanes of protest vehicles to his left, Luis was in the third lane. "I was on the edge," he explains, beside the "empty one for the ambulance."

next installment: It’s Just Wrong