Stephanie of Coventry (Part 1 of 2)

The solely French speakers & the solely English speakers needed help understanding one another.

Screen capture from a video recorded at Coventry around 8:30 pm, the first Saturday of the protest - 29 January 2022.

In the months leading up to the Convoy, Stephanie performed her office worker job from home, via computer. Her nearest co-workers were miles away, and contact with members of the public happened over the phone or by email.

Their department had a mountainous backlog. Clients were being kept waiting. Stephanie was working seven days a week, the maximum number of hours permitted by law - atypical behaviour in her workplace. One minute her manager was praising her for going above and beyond. The next, she was exiled - placed on leave without pay.

Required to indicate whether she’d submitted to COVID vaccination, Stephanie says,

I never even clicked on the little link to go and report what you were. I refused to say anything. You had a certain date. When the date came, they made you watch a propaganda video of seventeen minutes. With ‘experts.’ The same junk they put on the news. How it was good for the community, and you were protecting yourself, and protecting others. It was just not true.

Stephanie had been attending protests against heavy-handed COVID measures for a while, even travelling to the nation’s capital to do so. But the turnouts were small and discouraging. After hearing about a trucker protest online, she made plans to drive to Ottawa with three other people. Two were strangers, one she knew slightly. Their vehicle became part of the Convoy when the truckers passed through northern Ontario.

Much of that journey took place after dark, yet citizens were cheering on the side of the highway “in every single little town,” she remembers. “Flags everywhere. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my life. It was Canada Day on steroids.”

Stephanie and her companions shared an Airbnb weekend rental, a half-hour walk from Parliament Hill. When they finally made it to the protest, she couldn’t stop crying. “The tears just kept rolling down my face. It’s jam-packed, with people everywhere. I was like, Oh my goodness. Finally! It was so exciting.”

Returning home on Monday, she was at loose ends. Stephanie is in her late thirties and bilingual, with French being her first language. In a francophone group online, she read that people were preparing food in their own homes and bringing it to the truckers parked at what became known as Coventry - Ottawa’s baseball stadium, at 302 Coventry Road.

People who could cook were needed at Coventry, she read. “I’m like, OK, that’s cool. I’m pretty good at making food. Tuesday morning I told ’em I was going to be there in the afternoon.” By the time she arrived, others had already stepped forward. “I ended up staying there the whole time,” she says. But except for one occasion, late at night, “I never made a sandwich, never made any food.”

The Coventry story is one of continuous adaptation. Early on, things rarely stayed the same for more than a few hours. Stephanie began serving as an interpreter. The solely French speakers and the solely English speakers needed help understanding one another. She estimates at least half the volunteers at Coventry were francophone. “There were a lot of Quebecers,” she says, “a lot of Quebecers.”

Soon she’d become “kind of an administration person. I had lists and lists of people. It's just crazy, the amount of people who said, ‘I can help with this, I can help with that.’ People were offering their homes” so that truckers and volunteers “could go sleep on a couch, or have a room, or have a shower.”

On the first Saturday of the protest, cooking was still being done outdoors at Coventry.

Toward the end of the protest, she says, Coventry “was a well-oiled machine. We had a morning crew that would go out and deliver hot breakfasts” to the trucks downtown. “The breakfast crew came in at four or five in the morning, so they would be packing up breakfast at six, seven in the morning. Then we had a dinner crew, and a night crew.”

One of the Coventry volunteers, Martin, was an electrician. “Everything was up to code,” says Stephanie. “We had big [electrical] panels in our tents, there was nothing dangerous. The gas was away from the tents, we made sure it was safe.”

to be continued