It's Magical
Convoy-built soup kitchen in Ottawa park was inundated with donated food.
Photojournalist Beth Baisch shot these two videos in Confederation Park in downtown Ottawa on Friday, February 4th. It had been a full week since the first truckers arrived.
That park is a 7-minute walk from Parliament Hill. Most of the background conversation in these videos is in French. The gentleman who explains matters in the one above speaks in a French accent. He says:
This is actually a great example of the community spirit…for decades, for centuries, Anglophones, Francophones, First Nations, Natives we’ve all been divided. And now this event is like the turning point where all people are coming together.
…[gesturing expansively] So all this is free food. It’s all been donated by all sorts of people helping out. There’s tons and tons of food…so we can last here for weeks, months, until the Spring…if necessary.
Take a moment to let that sink in. In a matter of days, members of the public had inundated Freedom Convoy participants with massive amounts of food. The gent in the video further points to “hundreds of dollars” worth of donated firewood to help keep people warm.
Here’s an important and serious question: What other group of protesters - in the entire history of Canada - has ever received this magnitude of community support?
Turning back to the gent in the video, he says it took protesters a few days to get organized, but now “it’s magical.”
Three days after these videos were shot, the Ottawa Citizen reported the park had been “fully cleared and fenced” by police.
Good Canadians have led by example for sure.