We Got This Corner, We're Not Giving It Up

Travis provides a first-person account from the Rideau & Sussex intersection.

Travis’ truck is on the left. The sign in front reads: ‘This is not about your health. This is about control.’ The sign on the right-hand truck reads: ‘Respect the Charter.’

Travis arrived in Ottawa around 4 pm the first Saturday of the Freedom Convoy protest. The police guided them downtown along the western bank of the Rideau Canal. "They let 20 trucks go," he remembers, "And then they blocked the road." Travis' group of 20 trucks found themselves trapped south of Confederation Park, south of City Hall, more than six blocks distant from Parliament Hill.

After chatting on the radio, he says, "We all went bumper to bumper, parked our trucks, and walked. The cops were telling us there was too many people on Sussex." But it soon became apparent,

there wasn't anybody there. I was livid. Livid. I turned around, went back to that cop. I said, 'I don't know who's bullshitting who, who's telling who to do what, but we're going through.' That was all I said. The rest of it, he said.

He said: 'So you're telling me if I don't move, you're gonna run over me?'

I said: 'I'm not telling you that, but we're coming through.' So he got in his car and drove away. As soon as I told him we were going through, he drove away.

Being from Atlantic Canada, none of these truckers were familiar with downtown Ottawa. Travis says the vehicles that went straight through ended up being directed across the river into Gatineau, Quebec by the police. He himself took a turn and spent the next hour navigating side streets, evading concrete barricades, and snaking through the Byward Market.

"And then we just come up to that intersection at Sussex and Rideau. We were in. We got in before they realized it." He laughs. "That's when we figured: 'We got this corner, we're not giving it up.'"

About halfway through the protest, he says, the authorities persuaded them to shift their trucks onto Wellington Street. "We'd negotiated in good faith. We were gonna move, and then they brought those frikkin' barriers in," he says, referring to a design embedded with metal spikes.

Travis explains,

When we got up in the morning, they had those barriers up that if you drive on them, they flip up and ruin your rad or your engine. They put them in front of us overnight.

Okay, now we're not going anywhere. You lied to us, you tried to trick us, you tried to damage our equipment. We're done.

At the Emergencies Act inquiry held in late 2022, a great deal was said about the obstinate, allegedly scary truckers at Rideau Street and Sussex Drive. Dozens of intersections were shut down by Ottawa police for the duration of the protest. This was the only one blocked by the truckers. (Elsewhere, the policy was to keep one lane open for local traffic and emergency vehicles.)

Travis says the drivers on that corner were a close knit group who made sure that "if somebody needed to, they could get out." On one occasion, an ambulance attended to a homeless person. "So me and Norman, Guillaume, Guy, and Mike we all worked together. Yes, we had it blocked, but in two seconds we had it open. There was an ambulance right in the middle, there."

Professional photographer Martin Broomfield took a fabulous, 360-degree panoramic photo of the Rideau-Sussex intersection during the protest. He apparently felt no sympathy for the truckers’ cause, but never mind about that. Click here to take a look.

next installment: The Love, the Hugs, the Handshakes
Part 1: What Were People Thinking?