Smack Dab in Front of Parliament

The police directed Bill there.

Part 1: The Church in the Greenhouse (trucker Bill’s story)

Photo taken by me, 9 Feb. 2022.

On Friday afternoon, the cops are directing traffic when Bill arrives in Ottawa. "They stopped us," remembers his wife, Elisabeth. "All of a sudden the police said, 'No, you can't go that way.' So that's how Bill got to be in the front. Because they directed him there."

Bill wound up on Wellington Street close to Metcalfe, parallel with the Terry Fox sculpture. He was in the second row of trucks, smack dab in front of Parliament, facing east toward the Chateau Laurier hotel. His white Peterbilt remained in that spot for three weeks.        

But their entry into the city was wasn't all chocolates and roses. "We were at an intersection," recalls Bill. "I was just about ready to go. This guy had a Dodge van—"

"He just pulled right in front of Bill," says Elisabeth. He had the red light, Bill had the green. He just jumped out and went crazy."

She plays a video on her phone, having only managed to record the end of the encounter. Truck horns are blaring. A man in his forties is shouting, "How many cancer patients have you killed?"

"Get the F out of my city," Bill recalls the man saying. "What the F are you doing?"           

"Too bad I didn't get all of it," says Elisabeth. "He just went nuts."

Eventually a large male pedestrian intervened. Elisabeth says he told the other man "'You either get off this road or I'm going to physically remove you.' And that's when two female cops came, and they ushered him away and that was that. Crazy, eh?"

What they'd expected to be a two-day protest turned into something far longer. Elisabeth stayed for much of the first week, caught a ride home with one of their daughters, and returned later with their son. Based on her own experience, she says the police were great. "We would talk to them. They said we weren't a violent group, so they were good with us. They treated us respectfully, they were very decent."

Sitting in the truck with Bill, she witnessed firsthand the gratitude of the public. The Prime Minister, the mayor, and the journalists kept insisting "the whole town wanted us to leave," she remembers. But that's not what she saw. "We had people knocking on our door, saying, 'We live here. Right here. We don't want you to go, please stay.' And they told us their whole neighbourhood agreed with them."

On one occasion, a woman named Janet who was visiting the city with her seven-year-old son asked if they could warm up inside Bill's truck. 'And Bill said, 'Sure, come on in.'" At the time, attempts were being made to find a hotel room. Elisabeth was fielding phone calls, and at one point was told nothing was available,

This girl, Janet, she hears that. 'I'm in that big hotel,' she says. 'I've got a room with my son, please join us.'

When I said we couldn't do that, she said, 'No, I'm serious. You can take the bed. We insist. We are so happy you people are here, doing this for us. We love you guys, we just love you.'

Then somebody contacted us, and told us we had a room.

Bill nods, "A young lady we'd never met." On other occasions, he says "I had men with tears in their eyes, coming to me. Polish and Romanian, in broken English, telling me 'Don't go. I come from Communism. That's where Canada is headed.'"

next installment: They’re So Proud of Their Dad