We're Trying to Build a Country Here

'This isn't tiddlywinks. We need to take this seriously.'

Part 1: Seizing the Excavator

The beginning of Brad’s public statement regarding his $75k USD donation to the truckers. Click image to read the whole thing.

Brad Howland, the president of Easy-Kleen Pressure Systems in New Brunswick, says the day the hacking story broke it "was mayhem here. We got maybe hundreds of phone calls." Many were supportive, but others were profanity-laced rants. "Yeah, I was very surprised at how people could behave," he says.

You know, the unvaccinated are just 10%. But we're people. And we love our country. We love our fellow man. How they could be so cruel? Someone picks up the phone and it's all swear words. Which doesn't bother me, but our girls answering the phones were unhinged for a few hours there. It was then I realized that people really have lost their respect for individual rights.

Brad says he wouldn't criticize others for naively taking a rushed vaccine. "I wouldn't trample on them, but boy are there people out there who'd trample on my rights."

The company wrote out a script for those answering the phones, he says,

And when my response letter came out it kind of calmed the waters. So it was just a couple of days there. A lot of people called us up, telling us they were going to buy their pressure washers from us, and they did. So business, which was good before, has been better ever since.

Currently his donation is in legal limbo, pending the outcome of the class action lawsuit filed on behalf of Ottawa residents. "I don't know all the legalities of it," he says. "It bothers me that the truckers didn't get the money. It was a protest in a free nation, and the cost to them and their families was great. Books will be written about this government and how it acted against its own citizens."

In March 2023, Brad was added as a named defendant in that same lawsuit. Paul Champ, the lawyer who launched it, convinced a judge to declare Brad the official representative of tens of thousands of people from more than a dozen countries who’d made online donations to the Canadian truckers. Should this long shot lawsuit be successful, Brad may one day be found liable for millions in damages.

Photo taken by me in the Easy-Kleen parking lot, July 2023.

Sitting behind his workplace desk in July 2023, dressed in blue jeans and a plaid shirt, he smiles. "I'm sure there's good people in Ottawa, and they're our fellow Canadians. I mean, people sue nowadays for anything. It's one of them things I don't worry about. I really only think about it when someone brings it up."

On her 16th birthday, Brad began dating the person who later became his wife. He himself was 19 at the time. After 35 years of marriage, their union has produced three children and five grandchildren. It's all about working toward a strong and prosperous future, he says. "We're trying to build a country here. This isn't tiddlywinks. We need to take this seriously."

In his view, the vaccine mandate for truckers was a senseless provocation on the part of the federal government. "That was a big red flag to me. Why would someone want to push that button?" he asks. Why jeopardize the paycheques of an estimated 12,000 unvaxxed Canadian truckers?

Then there's the economic fallout. In his words, "When you have less trucks, then you have to pay more for freight, cuz that's just the way it works. That effects every person in Canada when they buy food or whatever. So yeah, we wanted to support them."

Brad’s office window overlooks the Trans-Canada highway. He nods in that direction, "Every day you hear truckers going by, blowing their horns," saluting the company that stood staunchly behind them. "So it's a bit of a thing here, still."