Who Supported the Truckers?

'If COVID don’t kill me, losing my business will.'

When people tell me their Freedom Convoy stories, they frequently mention third parties. You should meet so-and-so, they say, who took such good care of the truckers.

That’s how I learned about Jane (not her real name, see the bottom of this post). She runs a breakfast-and-lunch restaurant on the main street of a small Ontario village. What started as a dream became a reality in 2016. Not by magic, but because Jane worked hard at it.

Dozens of online reviews of her restaurant attest that she pours her heart and soul into her business. People praise the delicious home cooking, the large portions, and reasonable prices. But most of all, they talk about the friendly atmosphere and Jane’s engaging personality. She does the serving.

The lockdowns and ever-changing rules were brutal for small businesses like hers. By February 2021, she’d already endured a full year of disruption. Nothing about the future was certain. Long before the Freedom Convoy got rolling, her exhaustion and demoralization were evident in a 9-minute video she posted to her restaurant’s social media page.

“If the Government only knew how they are really affecting us,” she wrote under the title: I am so heartbroken. On screen we see a middle-aged woman sitting at her kitchen table. She’s wearing designer glasses and has more than one fashionable facial piercing. Looking straight into the camera, her monologue begins this way:

Well, I took a ride out to the restaurant, thinking that we’re probably going to be opening up on Tuesday under ‘Orange Zone’…come to find out they changed all the colour codes. So now we’re only allowed 25% [capacity] in the restaurant. Including me and my staff. So I’m only allowed to serve eight people at a time.

How does this make sense? That is not even going to pay my [electricity bill], my propane.

Exasperated, she goes on to say she’s done everything that was asked of her. She’s followed numerous pandemic rules conscientiously for a year. But her business is in distress and her life is a shambles.

She doesn’t have the budget of a Costco or a Walmart, she says, to fund all the new government-imposed requirements. Whatever financial assistance is available to her disappears instantly. After covering her rent and other costs, there’s nothing left. Worse, these government loans will need to be repaid.

“How do we have to pay you back,” she rhetorically asks the government, “when you shut us down?”

All she wants is to return to work. “I’m going nuts,” she says. “Nuts.” Given that a third wave of the virus is reportedly on its way, she wonders: “You gonna keep us open for one month? One month, and then you’re gonna shut us down again?”

The lives of small business people are being ruined, she declares. How is she supposed to survive? “I don’t even know what to do anymore.”

Struggling with her emotions, she says some people have advised her to close down the restaurant for good:

But I don’t want to. I worked friggin hard for that place.

I’ve spent a long year. A lot of tears, a lot of tears…If you only knew.

And if COVID don’t kill me, losing my business will.

to be continued

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I’m not publishing Jane’s real name because I fear she’ll be targeted by the sort of people who believe that fighting for the right to make your own decisions about your own life is somehow stupid. ‘Look at those ridiculous truckers and others demanding freedumb,’ sneers this crowd on social media.

Whatever happened to empathy and compassion? Whatever happened to treating other people with dignity - to walking a mile in their shoes?