Time to Move On!
Manitoba dispatcher drove to Ottawa to fight for his drivers who couldn't cross the border.
Valentine's Day 2022, a few hours before the Prime Minister invokes the Emergencies Act. In a hotel room near the Ottawa airport, Sheldon Beckman is telling an interviewer he's in town to fight for the rights of his drivers, half of whom "can no longer cross the border."
The Manitoba dispatcher "didn't even know what a podcast was." Yet there he was talking to a chap from British Columbia about how he'd driven halfway across the country in a blue Kenworth with a sign that read "Time to move on!!" attached to his 53-foot trailer.
Sheldon had been parked on Nicholas Street, on the far eastern end of the protest footprint, since January 30th. "I've never been involved in a protest in my life," he told podcaster Kevin Willeboordse. Which meant that he and the dozen similar truckers on his block were well "out of our comfort zone."
Then aged forty-four and standing six-foot-three, Sheldon describes himself as a "typical farm boy from Manitoba." Growing up there were fifty head of beef, twenty milk cows, and 500 chickens to butcher each summer. "I always wanted to be a trucker," he says. "I still consider myself, to this day, to be a truck driver before I consider myself a dispatcher. I love trucking."
His first jobs involved livestock. "I cut my teeth in the industry hauling cattle and pigs. But when the Mad Cow disease kicked in in 2003, I had to switch out of livestock. A few years after that, I started decking." Step deck trailers are similar to flatbeds, but have two sections. The first eleven feet of the deck is higher, covering the front wheels. After that, the deck drops lower, which allows for the hauling of tall machinery such as "dozers, excavators, combines, tractors, implements that get pulled behind farm tractors."
Five years prior to the Freedom Convoy, Sheldon became a dispatcher. He'd spent seventeen years on the road by then, and his kids were approaching their teens. It seemed like a good time to switch gears. Working out of his rural home office, his days are filled with "finding freight and keeping my drivers busy."
They appreciate him, he says, because "I don't dictate. I know the roads they've been on. I know the crappy situations they deal with. So I can empathize. Even when they screw up, I encourage them. Because guess what? I screw up all the time, and I let them know that, too."
Sheldon was managing seventeen step decks when the cross-border vaccine mandate took effect. "That's not just seventeen trucks," he explains, "that's seventeen drivers. Almost all of them have wives or girlfriends, or have children. So it's a whole bunch of people." He and his boss decided "we gotta go. We gotta stand up and be a voice for the people we're responsible for."
The step deck he drove to Ottawa was equipped with ramps and is owned by his employer, who himself made the journey in a three-quarter ton diesel truck, pulling a 20-foot enclosed tool trailer behind. Yes, they were taking time off work and losing income, but a larger threat loomed. In the name of battling a virus, governments were preventing skilled people from earning a living, from feeding their families. "If we can't cross the border," said Sheldon, "we might have two businesses that we can't run anymore."
Before departing Manitoba,
we put a little pickup on my trailer so when we were in Ottawa, we could run around. Just as we were all leaving Thunder Bay as a group, there was a lady who apparently spent the night in her vehicle in the ditch, cuz she had hit the ditch and broke down.
We were asked to pull over and pull her vehicle out. So we yanked it out with our little 4x4 truck, and pushed it up on top of the trailer, too. Because this lady was traveling all the way to Ottawa, she hopped in a van with somebody else. Then, when we got close, we just dropped it off at a GM dealer so she could get the vehicle fixed.
I have no idea what happened to her after we dropped her vehicle off, because everybody went in their own directions.
Prior to departure, Sheldon was amongst those who'd cheered the western Convoy thirty minutes east of Winnipeg. "We were at the centre of Canada," he says, referring to a small park that identifies the geographic midpoint of the nation,
I was one of the people sitting in their pickup truck, on the side of the highway, watching the Convoy go by. It came through Manitoba on Tuesday, and we decided we were gonna leave Wednesday. So we seen it go by and that Convoy was long. It took forever, and it was just amazing.
I had my wife and kids in there and they were like, 'Yeah, you gotta go.' So we left mid-Wednesday. You know, you're driving fast, catching up. And by the time we caught everybody, we were in Thunder Bay on Wednesday night.
next installment: Shirtless in a Canadian Winter