Last Stand on Kent Street
'I'm not backing out of here.'
When Jeff first settled in on Kent Street in downtown Ottawa, he met Allain, who works for a trucking company in northern New Brunswick, not far from the Quebec border. A Canadian flag was draped across his front grill. Across the back, a large sign read “Convoi de la liberté / Freedom Convoy 2022.”
“Allain’s very French,” Jeff says. “I’m still good friends with him. I visited him last winter.” Their first night in Ottawa, these two truckers from different Maritime provinces, with different mother tongues, shook hands and made a pact. They were staying, they promised each other. Until the Prime Minister stepped down “or we went to jail.”
Their resolve got tested over the three weeks that followed, but they stuck it out. On Friday, February 18th, the cops began aggressively shutting down the Freedom Convoy protest. Word spread about police violence. Trucks windows were being smashed. Two people had been trampled by police horses ridden recklessly through a crowd.
Jeff believes between 200 and 250 vehicles were parked on Kent Street at one point - big rigs as well as pickups, vans, and cars. But by 10 am that Saturday morning only two remained - Allain’s white bobtail with New Brunswick plates, and Jeff’s black one with Nova Scotia plates.
There were concrete barriers in front of Allain, who was parked in front of Jeff. Not small ones, either, says Jeff:
These things were 20 feet long. I said, ‘Allain, if you want, I'll get outta your way so you can get outta here.’
He said, ‘You leaving, Jeff?’
I said, ‘No, I'm not leaving.”
“Well, we shook hands. I'm not leaving unless you do. We’re friends now, forever.’
The crowd that gathered early on - Jeff thinks there were a couple hundred people - “they’re all thanking us,” he says. A minister asked if he could pray with them and Jeff said sure:
We needed all the help we could get. I’m not a religious person, but I do go to church Christmas Eve and Easter. We had a lot of different people asking ‘Is it alright to say a prayer for you, cuz we think you’re going to get hurt.’
It’s like, OK. And I’d get out and hold their hands and close my eyes.
As the hours wore on, he remembers seeing a news crew. And watching a van load of police arrive and sit there, waiting. He remembers 40 to 50 cops in full riot gear - “They’d just finished clearing Bank Street.” Amongst his most vivid memories is a francophone woman in her twenties tearfully pleading with them to leave.
“I think we’re f**ked,” he told Allain.
He said, ‘I think we are. What do we do?’
I said, “Well, I'm not backing out of here.”
‘Neither am I.’
I said, ‘Well, if I get my bumper against the backend of you, it's not gonna do my bumper any good, but I don't care.’
He had a big moose bumper. We were gonna try to push the barrier aside and drive outta there. But there was a sheet of ice underneath us. You could barely stand on it. That ain’t gonna work.
A friendly police officer had gotten on the radio, asking for a payloader to come move the barriers “so these guys can drive out of here.” But there was no indication when that might occur. Lowering his voice, the cop had told Jeff and Allain, “You gotta go. Them guys, they’re crazy,” meaning the riot police.
By mid-afternoon, numerous people had urged the two truckers to leave. But Jeff and Allain adamantly refused to back out. Some of these people missed the point and offered to backup their trucks for them.
“I said to Allain, ‘Do you think we can turn these things around?’ They don’t turn on a dime. So we jigged them around on that one-way street. Finally, we got ‘em turned around. And we drove out of there.”
Front first, their heads held high. “We weren’t going out backwards,” Jeff says again. “And that little French chick was the only thing to get me and Allain out of there.”
The large piece of the protest that those who did not participate fail to consider ... the inseparable friendships that form between those who did. Thank you for working to keep those memories alive.