The Canada We’d Become
'Everyone went quiet. I’ll never forget that.'
Part 1: Internationally Trained, Rooted in Canada
The two weeks that Alberta barber Calvin Isaac Maltin spent in Ottawa with the trucker protest were a roller coaster. “I did a lot of stuff,” he says,
I wasn't just the barber. I was busy the whole time, helping out. I would shovel sidewalks. I was shoveling right in front of Parliament there, the square. There was like, oh golly, I'd say at least a dozen shovels that had been donated to clean the sidewalks. It was just before the weekend. I was shoveling with my friend, Seb, who I'd met. He’s from Quebec.
And just making it perfect. I mean, absolutely spick and span. Like it was gorgeous, right off a postcard. And this 6-foot-5 guy, very built, in a long pea coat comes out of nowhere. And he comes right up into my face. And he’s like, ‘What are you doing?’ Long story short, he tried to get in a fight with me, like a fist fight. Yeah. To start shit.
And Seb was like, ‘Calvin, no, no. Just walk away, just walk away.’
Because I'm all like, ‘What's your problem?’
And Seb’s saying, ‘No. That's one of them. That's a provocateur.’
Calvin thinks the incident occurred around 9 pm one evening, about a week after he arrived. While the media painted a one-dimensional portrait of a city under siege by the protesters, the reality on the ground was somewhat different. Trucker Jeff talks about escaping injury when a cold-blooded stranger tossed a sealed tin can into a fire barrel. Mechanic Sam describes a person aggressively banging on a row of trucks until he was confronted. Commercial fisherman Mark talks about broken mirrors, and soft-ball sized rocks lodged in a row of nearby trees.
All of that being said, there was still magic in the air. Calvin remembers losing one of his expensive, Salmon Arms designer gloves:
It's a beautiful glove. And I was like, ‘Oh, darn, that’s gone forever.’ Because if you've ever been to a music festival and you lose something in the crowd, it's gone. And this was a weekend, too. We’re talking thousands of people.
So I lose it. It's been hours. And I'm walking back along Wellington, and not a word of a frickin’ lie. Somebody had picked my glove up and placed it on this dry piece of cement along a fence for me to find. There was my frickin’ glove. That’s just a testament of how kind and good-hearted people were.
On Calvin’s last day in Ottawa, the police were out in force. One incident is burned into this memory:
This guy must've been seven feet tall. He was a literal giant. A huge monster man from Quebec, straight from the forest, out of a f**king movie. I hope someone got a photo of him. He walks through the crowd. In broken English, he says ‘I can't even buy wood glue.’ Because, in Quebec, he wasn't allowed into Home Depot because he wasn't vaccinated.
And everyone went quiet. I’ll just never forget that. This powerful moment. The cops are standing in front of us. And this giant, he can't buy f**king wood glue. That's the Canada we'd become. The whole reason we were there was to stop these stupid mandates, these gestapo laws. So this guy could get his wood glue.
During the years he lived and worked abroad, Calvin says he’s seen a few things. “I’ve met gangsters. Just scum of the Earth. I’ve looked into their eyes.” But he says he’d never felt actual fear before he encountered “these thugs, these hired government goons” who were on the streets in Ottawa “with their guns and their shields. I looked into their eyes and there was nothing there. There was no f**king soul. I’d never experienced that before.”
It was a strange moment in Canadian history, he says. “Draconian laws” had been implemented for extended periods of time. Ordinary people were in distress, they were being pulverized by discriminatory measures. Yet somehow the politicians, the media, and the police thought the truckers were the real crisis.
Your MP just got another raise today...for their excellent work 'servicing' the public...like hookers do