Truckers Have Led the Way
'We’ve had enough of the mandates. It’s time to move on.' (Part 4 of 6)
Part 1: Snowbird 3
Bart’s uncle needed to return home soon after they arrived in Ottawa with the Freedom Convoy. Afterward, Bart was eager to get back to Ottawa. “We knew a guy from a church we’d gone to a couple times. He said they needed somebody to help with security at Coventry. I had no idea what it was, no idea what they were talking about. And if it’s security, I don’t know if I want the kids.”
Driving directly there, Bart arrived at the city’s baseball stadium while a police raid was underway - after dark, on a Sunday evening. “As I was pulling in, the police had it all blocked off,” he says,
They were like, ‘Get out of here.’ So I pulled off, found the wife of the guy who’d asked me to help with security, and checked in with her for a little while. After an hour or two I went back. All the dust had settled, and it was pretty late. So I just parked in the parking lot, called home, and got ready for bed.
The next morning, Bart connected with his contact. What do you need? “He’s like, ‘People are coming in here, and there’s bad actors. There may even be police coming in to flatten our tires. We basically need somebody to run a security team.’”
Bart was given a list of names of volunteers, and was advised he was now head of security. He laughs, “I’m like, OK. So I pulled my camper in, and told everyone it was now the security office. They were all very nice, keen guys. A lot of paranoia, though,” due to the raid only hours earlier but also because “we were right by a hotel, and you could see it filling up with police officers. Busloads of obvious police officers were getting dropped off there. Everybody just calm down.”
That first day, an independent filmmaker recorded a 90-second video of Bart addressing the camera. “We just want our freedoms back,” he said,
Freedom to choose what you do with your body. I don’t think that’s too much to ask for…The truckers have led the way for us, and it’s now about all Canadians. Make your way to Ottawa, let your voice be heard. We’ve had enough of the tyranny and we’ve had enough of the mandates. It’s time to move on.
When he uploaded the footage to YouTube, filmmaker Ben Amaral described Bart as “head of security” in a manner that suggested he might hold that position not merely at Coventry, but with the Convoy overall. That wasn’t the case.
Bart says he formed security teams and drew up shifts to patrol the perimeter 24/7. Members of the public were “coming up to the gate with cash, food, all sorts of things,” he remembers, but there were plenty of volunteers to keep an eye on things. “So, at the end of the second or third day, I just said, ‘You guys have things under control. I really want to go downtown.”
On his way to Parliament Hill he ended up behind a couple of bobtails. “I must have convoyed around with them for two, three hours. All through the downtown, just honking the horn,” he says. “Then it was starting to get dark, and I happened to be right at the intersection in front of a Tim Horton’s. There was a French lady, with a heavy accent. ‘Are you looking for somewhere to park? They just left, you can go right here.’”
It was a perfect spot, he says. Through the windshield, “I could just see the edge of Parliament. And then you hear on the news, ‘Oh, downtown Ottawa, the truckers are blocking roads and businesses.’ It's like, what are you talking about? I was just driving around for hours. The Tims right beside me was open. I was even getting Wi-Fi from there.”
At the back of his motorhome, Bart had a metal basket cage with two, 100-liter tanks with their own wheels and pumps. “You pull them like luggage,” he says. One held diesel, the other gasoline. “A lot of people parked there were just sleeping in their cars, for goodness sake. They needed heat, and would be down to a quarter of a tank. So I would just fill them up. Sometimes I would get people that were driving by” to take the tanks to a service station. That way he didn’t lose his parking spot. “Fill them up, here's money.”
A commercial pilot friend came to Ottawa for a few days. “We went to the hockey rink a couple times, played hockey with the kids,” says Bart. “We sat near the bouncy castle. They had this cool structure made out of bales of hay, and they were giving out hot chocolate.” He still marvels at the vibe, “You couldn't be there and be angry. The atmosphere was just so good and positive and loving that, if you're a Christian, you're like, ‘This is what Jesus is. If Jesus were here, he'd be so happy.’”
Lisa chimes in, “And then you came home, and picked us up, and we all went.” There was already talk, Bart says, of making it illegal for children to be at the protest. “How dare they.” Discussing it between themselves, Bart wanted the kids to see Ottawa. “Even you,” he says to Lisa, “didn’t really understand it until you got there, how wonderful the experience was.”
She agrees, “Complete strangers would stop us and say, ‘Can we pray with you?’” Toward the end of the final week of the protest, they walked around Ottawa as a family - dressed in snow pants and thick mittens - pushing a double stroller. A photo of them appeared in the Ottawa Citizen newspaper, under the headline, “Convoy families with children defy emergency laws as downtown occupation continues.”
The subheading was a quote from Lisa, “My husband served in the military for almost 25 years and he is being told he can’t bring his kids to the nation’s capital? If people don’t take issue with that, that is a serious problem."
next installment: Then Cops Threw a Flashbang Above Our Heads
