We're Going Downtown

Truckers from eastern Canada thwarted police attempts to corral them in a parking lot away from the action.

Bottom left: RCMP headquarters. Top right: the Department of National Defense. Centre-right: baseball stadium parking lot. Screenshot from Google maps (click)

When Freedom Convoy trucks arrived in Ottawa from eastern Canada, the police directed them to the parking lot of the baseball stadium on Coventry Road. Ten minutes distant from Parliament Hill, this semi-industrial neighbourhood includes a Canadian Tire, a Best Buy, and a couple of hotels. The national headquarters of the RCMP is straight across the Vanier Parkway to the west. Directly to the northeast is the Department of National Defense.

Known as 'Coventry' amongst the truckers, this was a useful supply depot. But it wasn't an effective place to protest. A group of Nova Scotia truckers I interviewed say those from Quebec clued in first. “The police were herding us like cattle,” says Sam the mechanic - who accompanied his buddies in a pickup truck, pulling a trailer loaded with tools behind him:

We all had CB radios, so we were talking. You could hear the Frenchmen that were from the area. They're like, ‘That’s not downtown. We’re not going there, we’re going downtown.’ And you'd see them cut out of the line of trucks and head in a different direction.  

In Sam’s words, Coventry was “a bad spot. That's not why we all packed up and left home - to sit in a parking lot in high idle and be hidden from the people.”

His pal, Nova Scotia trucker Jeff, only spent 15 minutes at Coventry. “I said I’m not staying here. I’m going downtown or I’m going home.” It took Jeff more than an hour to navigate his Western Star through the one-way streets and narrow alleyways that had no police presence. “A lot of jigging around tight corners and dodging my stacks under branches and low wires,” was involved, he says. “Still have dents in the top of my stacks.”

Eventually, he ended up on Kent Street. After a police cruiser departed in the early hours of the morning, a “French guy that I met up there” urged him to shift in tighter. “There was a sidewalk and a sign. It didn’t look like a truck could fit through.” Expertly guided by his new friend, he and a few others managed it. “Only had inches to spare,” he remembers.

Meanwhile, two other truckers from that Nova Scotia group secured spots at the infamous Rideau and Sussex intersection. Guy, who drove his vintage Mack to Ottawa, says the police wanted him to leave. “I was turned around, pointed out. But every time the cops were looking the other way, I’d back up 20 feet.”

He laughs, “It took about six hours to go two blocks, but I made it.”