Were the Police Internally Conflicted?

BC trucker says he hopes some cops asked themselves hard moral questions after they violently shut down the peaceful protest.

Part 1: The Flatbed with the Roof Truss Sign

Random photo taken by me in Ottawa, February 2022. Please note the empty lane to the right of the parked trucks. Traffic continued to flow, and no emergency vehicles were obstructed. However, I couldn’t get near our hotel to unload our luggage because entire streets had been blocked off by the police .

Bern says he wishes every Canadian could have felt what it was like to be in Ottawa during the trucker protest. There was, he says

such a feeling of patriotism and brotherhood. It was infectious, you know…It was overwhelmingly positive and good…That they were trying to portray us as violent and disruptive. And yeah, we made noise. Early on, when we were still allowed to blow our air horns. But we also shoveled sidewalks. The streets were clean. Garbage got picked up.

We had great interactions with a lot of policemen that were kind of policing our block. It’s Ottawa, so you have constant protest, right? You have demonstrations all the time. So [one cop] said this is the best one he’d had to look after, yet…It was just a peaceful protest. And they sat around for those first couple weeks, they sat around looking really, really bored. Cuz there just wasn’t anything to do. Drank a lot of coffee and made a lot of overtime.

And some of them, and I mean we wouldn’t have gotten a badge number or name, but they would outright say, ‘Yeah, we’re on the same team. We want what you want. We want our lives back, we want our lives to return to normal.’

So, you know, they’re normal, good family men that have some of the same values that we do. They’re not all the enemy. It’s unfortunate that it went the way it did, where a lot of officers were asked to do things that I think went beyond their Code of Conduct…

Bern himself wasn’t part of the crowd of protesters who faced off against the police in parallel lines on the street, urging them to reconsider their actions, singing the national anthem and saying things such as “we love you, please don’t do this.” But Paul, a buddy of his, did so:

He's like, ‘You could tell there's some officers there, they're wound up, like this is what they're here for…they were enjoying the moment.’

But he did see people with tears on their faces, and a lot of officers that could not make eye contact. They did not want to be there. They did not wanna be pushing up against peaceful people..So there must have been a lot of conflict inside.

Bern says he hopes Ottawa served as an awakening for some of the officers present,

You know, every one of us needs to make a stand. Every one of us needs, we have a moral line, things that you do and things that you don't do. And so, when in the line of work you have to cross that line, isn't it on us to stand up and say, ‘No, we can't do that…this is not right.’

There were rumours, says Bern, that one of the reasons so many cops from forces elsewhere in the country were being shipped into Ottawa is became many officers with the local force were taking sick days as a means of protesting what was going on.

Next, I’ll tell you about Bern’s arrest. There were occasions beforehand, he said, when everything got tense, or eerily calm, and the truckers expected that might occur. “But I mean, until it happened, it just wasn’t happening,” he says. “So you didn’t get too wound up.”

next installment: Arrested, Handcuffed, Charged