What Did You Want Me To Do? Lose Everything?
'I was asking for help. Nobody listened. Nobody helped.'
Part 1: Scorning the Little People & Their Cries for Help Part 2: What Did You Want Me To Do? Lose Everything? Part 3: The Warning Signs Were Here
While many people spent much of the pandemic working from home, Brigitte Belton didn’t have that luxury. Last month, this cross border trucker told an Emergencies Act hearing that the same businesses she was helping to keep afloat - by delivering their supplies - wouldn’t let her use their toilets. COVID rules, she was told.
During the many months in which governments forced businesses to close fully or partially, she says life was miserable for truckers:
We had no bathrooms. We had no showers. We were refused everywhere we went. You have no idea what it's like to pee in a park…You have no idea how demeaning those COVID measures were to our industry…
In late 2021, around the time Brigitte and her husband (also a truck driver) were finalizing the purchase of a rig of their own, the Canadian government announced that cross border truckers would need to be vaccinated beginning January 15, 2022.
Unvaxxed American truckers would be turned away at the border. Unvaxxed Canadians would face a two-week quarantine each time they re-entered Canada - making it impossible for them to earn a living. (Yes, the the US government announced a similar measure. But the truckers I’ve spoken to insist it wasn’t enforced. Canadian truckers had no difficulty driving into the US, they say. The problem was getting back into their own country.)
After being designated as ‘essential’ for two years, truckers unwilling to roll up their sleeves for COVID-19 vaccines were unceremoniously tossed onto the trash heap. Government had spoken: comply or else.
Brigitte, who declined the vaccine, told the Emergencies Act hearing the mandate put her household at risk of bankruptcy. She tried to find Canada-only work, but some trucking companies were imposing their own mandates on drivers, pay rates were lower, and working conditions more dangerous. Hauling freight through Northern Ontario into Manitoba, she says, involves “some of the worst roads you'll ever drive.”
When asked what she expected to happen after the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa, she replied:
I actually believed that the Prime Minister wouldn't run away and he would come and meet with us. I believed that our voices would be heard, I believed…that after two years maybe somebody would care.
A bit later in her testimony, she declared: “I just want everybody to know that we weren't there to disrupt” Ottawa residents. Rather, she said, she wanted “to be heard.” She testified that although she wrote 32 emails to Canadian MPs and MPPs,
Not one of them did anything for me. I followed how things are supposed to go. You first go and you complain. You try again. You try again…what did you want me to do? Sit down? Lie down? Lose everything over a mandate…That's what my country was asking of me. That's what Canadians that were supporting vaccine mandates were asking of me, to lose everything…
A bit later, when questioned by another lawyer, Brigitte asked rhetorically, “What do I need to do to have my government, that is elected, talk to me?” When she wrote to those politicians, she says:
I was asking for help. Help, I wanted help. I wanted someone to help me. Some of those messages I believe start with ‘9-1-1. "Help. I need help.’…I went federal, I went provincial. Nobody listened. Nobody helped.
