Preserving the Testimony

Photos, videos & social media posts documenting the Convoy are ephemeral.

Recently, I mentioned that photos and videos posted to Instagram demonstrate that members of the Sikh community participated in and supported the Freedom Convoy. We’ve heard about Sikhs bringing food to Gloria’s farm. Clayton has told us about the life-changing relationship he developed with Hark, a Sikh gent, while protesting in Ottawa.

The more one looks, the more evidence emerges regarding the role of the Sikh community.

Current graphic at the top of the Sikh Freedom Alliance’s Twitter/X profile page (click image)

Trucking for Freedom (Chapter 1) a documentary film available on Rumble and YouTube, includes this image in its opening credits:

Opening credits of Trucking for Freedom, Chapter 1

Unacceptable Views, another documentary film now on Rumble, includes a sequence in which a Sikh chap describes the Ottawa protest as a racism-free “heaven on Earth.”

Screen capture from video (click image)

A brief amateur video on Rumble, above, shows a group of Sikhs holding up a sign in Ottawa that reads “Coercion is not consent…No means no.” They distribute rice and what appears to be daal (cooked, seasoned lentils) to passersby on the street. One of them tells the videographer they feed the homeless in Toronto’s Moss Park every Sunday.

A short video posted to YouTube during the first week of the protest features Palminder Singh talking about Convoy love and unity. Palminder’s Twitter/X account demonstrates the ephemeral nature of things. When I wrote about him 16 months ago, there were tons of Ottawa photos. Most have now disappeared - including this image that was then at the top of the page:

Formerly the top photo on Palminder Singh’s Twitter profile page.

(Practically every day I backup material on Archive.org and Archive.is by copying the Internet address and pasting it into one or both of these websites. I think I’m the person who backed up the photo directly above, preserving it as part of the historical record. These bits and pieces matter.)

Sikhs were amongst those who lost their jobs after declining COVID vaccines. Imagine belonging to a racial and religious minority, being fired, protesting alongside fellow Canadians in the Freedom Convoy, and then being smeared as a ‘white supremacist’ by politicians.

The video directly above (click the image to activate) was recorded in early February 2022. Four men - from British Columbia, Alberta, Manitoba, and Ontario - are interviewed at length. Hardeep and Khushwinder, who had both spent time with the Convoy in Ottawa by then, wax poetic about the festive, inclusive vibe.

Then things turn serious. Aneel, who himself lost his job due to a vax mandate, points out that immigrants struggling to find their feet in a new country are especially vulnerable to vaccine coercion. In his words, “It’s very disappointing to immigrants. We came here to be free…”

Kanwaljit points out that unvaxxed new immigrants from his community are trapped in Canada, unable to travel back to India due to the vaccine requirement for air travel. Such people dare not complain, he says, in case it affects their citizenship application down the road. “They are afraid,” he says. “They are in fear.”