Police Seizure Backfires

Public support was so deep and so broad, supplies were replenished within hours.

In his book, The Freedom Convoy, Andrew Lawton describes a police operation that seized fuel from the truckers. Overflow trucks associated with the convoy had settled in at a park six kilometers (4 miles) from Parliament Hill after being directed there by police early on. This fuel distribution hub and trucker gathering place became known as Coventry.

In Andrew’s words, police snipers moved into position and:

Dozens of heavily armed police officers descended on the site in the evening, ten days into the convoy’s time in Ottawa, seizing a fuel tanker and removing a handful of vehicles.

But John, the person in charge of fuel distribution, had been tipped off in advance and had

immediately called for all-hands-on-deck at Coventry. The approach up to that point had been to ration fuel…With an impending raid there was a new plan. ‘Release all of it,’ John told his team. ‘…Every drop of fuel needs to be in a tank. I don’t care about the strategy. I don’t care where it goes. You see a tank, it’s not filled? Fill it up.’

By the time police arrived, therefore, most of the diesel that could be used in trucks had already been distributed or was in transit. And here’s the remarkable part: Support for the Freedom Convoy was so deep and so broad in the wider community, police efforts backfired spectacularly.

Andrew says as soon as news of the raid spread, new fuel started flooding into Coventry. In John’s words:

‘That very night within two hours, we had doubled the amount that they had seized…Every single time they reacted excessively like that, they shot themselves in the foot and we got double the amount of whatever we had.’