The Flatbed with the Roof Truss Sign
British Columbia trucker's journey to Ottawa was a round trip of more than 5,000 miles.
Bern Buechert (pronounced BU-Kart) was born and raised in Fort St John, British Columbia. That part of Canada is known as Peace Country, after the Peace River - a 2,000-kilometre waterway that flows out of British Columbia’s Rocky Mountains into Alberta.
Fort St John isn’t just a 14-hour drive north of Vancouver. It’s north of Edmonton, north of Grande Prairie, and north of Dawson Creek.
Prior to departing Fort St John, Bern - who earns his living as a flatbed trucker - strapped an enormous sign with four-foot-high capital letters to the back of his highboy trailer. Seen from the driver’s side, the 40-foot-long sign said ‘Mandate freedom.’ From the passenger side it proclaimed: ‘True North strong & free,’ a line from Canada’s national anthem.
Constructed by locals who build roof trusses for a living, over the next several weeks Bern’s truck would be filmed and photographed by amateurs and professionals alike. Two years later, its iconic status is beyond dispute.
After taking part in a local trucker protest in Fort St John on January 23rd, Bern drove through the night, full across Alberta, catching up with a western arm of the Freedom Convoy in Lloydminster, on the Saskatchewan border.
He says it was there, and then in North Battleford (90 minutes northwest of Saskatoon), that he began to appreciate how widespread public support for the Convoy actually was. In total, from Fort St John to Ottawa and then back again, Bern drove 8,500 km (5,300 miles) to protest coercive COVID vaccine mandates.
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