The Non-Emergency (Part 5 of 6)

'You won’t talk to your own civilians? You won’t have a conversation?'

Part 1: The Government Went Insane

This sign, at Coventry, captured the central themes of the trucker protest. Freedom. Choice. And the exasperation felt by millions of Canadians following two years of regimented daily life.

The police raid wasn’t the end of that Sunday evening’s excitement. Suddenly, one of the Coventry dumpsters caught fire. Karl remembers flames three feet high. The last thing they needed was another visit from the fire department. He grabbed a shovel and started shoveling snow.

“The flames died down a bit. I jumped inside, cuz now the fire’s going in between all the garbage bags,” he says. “I'm pulling apart garbage bags, I'm chucking them outside so people can put them out. The next thing I know, I'm being bombarded by snow, just pelted by shovel loads while I'm stomping on the fire.”

As the last embers were extinguished, a chap named Mark approached with a five-gallon pail. “I'm like whoa, whoa,” Karl remembers. “It was black stuff. He’d gone to a port-a-potty and turned the dump valve - a three-inch line, four-inch line, whatever. To get water quick. He's laughing, ‘I was just about to throw it!’ Thank God he didn't. That was gross.”

In the short term, Karl says the police raid “changed the mood quite a bit.” But big picture, the protesters were more than a match for the cops. “Whenever they gave us problems, we found only solutions,” he says. One day a team from Coventry tried to deliver hay bales downtown so that a play area could be set up for young kids. When police stopped their vehicle two blocks short of its destination, Karl says bystanders came to the rescue. “Hey, everybody, grab a hay bale.” Dozens of people did so, and the hay was delivered in no time.

A trailer loaded with chairs and tables headed for the main stage was also blocked. Never mind. Someone disconnected the trailer from the truck that had been pulling it. Voila! it’s a wagon now. “Human power pushed it all the way down the sidewalk. The cops were just throwing up their arms,” Karl laughs.

“Oh, and firewood.” After police barred vehicular traffic on a bridge, protesters parked in Gatineau were obliged to walk across into Ottawa. On one memorable occasion, members of the public spontaneously formed a human chain. “Just hand it off to the right, hand it off to the right,” remembers Karl. That’s how firewood from Quebec arrived in Ontario. “They emptied I don't know how many trucks full of firewood. The cops couldn’t do anything about it.”

While politicians loudly accused the Convoy of homophobia and racism, Karl says some of the Coventry volunteers “were friggin gay. We had black people, Chinese, Koreans, Ukrainians. I had every nationality you can imagine.”

Looking back, Karl is bemused by how the authorities responded. The city of Ottawa was the first to declare an emergency. “I'm like, what the hell?” Then the province of Ontario did so. “Holy crap, we're really causing trouble, I guess. But it's a festival. How is that so wrong? Why do you condemn your population for doing something so joyful? This is defiant, but it's not evil.”

As time went on, Karl was amongst those who became exasperated by the refusal of Canada’s Prime Minister to engage. “I figured we were going to get a politician to come talk to us. As a minimum. We go to war-torn countries and talk to dictators, but you won’t talk to your own civilians? You won’t have a conversation?”

In sharp contrast to the antipathy of the political class, the public lavishly supported the Convoy “The Polish community brought in $10,000,” says Karl. “They’d give us chunks of money. If we needed food, they’d rally up and bring it. If we said hamburger, they’d bring us ten boxes of ground beef.” Coventry was wholly sustained by donations, he explains. “Anything extra would go to the truckers.” Cash first got counted in the presence of witnesses, then it got recorded. There was a ledger, in which everything that went in was tracked, as well as everything that went out. Standard practice was that someone would record these proceedings with their mobile phone. “I’m videotaped unlocking the box,” says Karl. “We always needed two witnesses, no matter what. We’d both sign on it, in the ledger.”

He nods, “We went through a lot of money, a lot of money. Just doing all the electrical inspections, putting in hydro panels, wires, the GFIs [ground fault circuit interrupters]. We made sure it was safe. All BX cable, armoured cables.”

The public responded to the freezing of the online fundraisers, he says, by bringing even more cash directly to the truckers. While those parked on Wellington received a lot, Karl says this wasn’t necessarily the case on the side streets. “So we’d send some money down to Kent Street, or Bank Street, or down to the Parkway. We gave lots of money to truckers. Sometimes they’d come in, show us their bills. We’d give them five hundred bucks, a thousand bucks, to keep their bills taken care of. We also knew the truckers were gonna need money to get home.”

final installment: Best Social Experiment Ever