Public Support Didn't End when the Protest Did
'If the rest of the world was like this lady, there’d be no trouble in the world.'
Officials for the city of Ottawa spent three weeks urging Freedom Convoy truckers to go home. These goodwill ambassadors couldn’t get rid of the truckers fast enough.
Yet after Guy and Mike were arrested and their trucks were impounded, they were unable to head back to Nova Scotia for an entire week. You see, it wasn’t sufficient to remove the trucks from the downtown core. The city then kept them locked up, inaccessible for a full seven days while charging their owners storage fees of $200 per day. And that’s seven days to the hour. Don’t come by the impound yard looking for your rig at 9 am, if it wasn’t seized until the afternoon.
Released from police custody, Guy and Mike were warmed and fed by the Capital City Bikers Church. That night they stayed with an Ottawa local, someone employed by the federal government. “Really nice lady,” remembers Guy. “She brought us to her place and showed us where the shower was and everything. We stayed there until the next morning.”
Another woman they’d met during the protest also stepped up. “When they took our trucks, they took everything we had,” says Guy. “Well this other lady she went to the store and bought us knapsacks, pants, deodorant, everything. If the rest of the world was like this lady, there’d be no trouble in the world.”
Then it was the turn of the Montreal couple who’d been bringing them their morning coffee:
Very nice people. They come, picked us up, took us to an Airbnb. Paid for it for a week. And they wouldn’t take money for it. Just me and Mike, and we stayed there. They kept bringing food over and we tried to pay for something, but they wouldn’t let us.
I’ve been to their place a few times now. One of the trips, I went back to Ontario cuz we get trucks at the auction up there sometimes. I bought a dump truck, and these people needed a load of gravel.
A year after the peaceful protest was violently suppressed, Guy was able to repay some of the kindness that had flowed toward him like a river.
Always foremost in my mind ... what would today look like if those trucks had not rolled in the cesspool that Ottawa is under the current careless takers.
So lovely to hear of the generosity of those people who were there to help the truckers.