Why the Dog Breeder Went to Ottawa

Denied access to her dying mother, Saskatoon woman traveled 3,000 kilometers in her husband's truck.

Part 1: Freedom Puppies
Part 2: Animal Cruelty

trucker Jake and wife Lynnette; screen capture from video interview (click image)

Why did Lynnette Klassen join the Freedom Convoy? Why did this Saskatoon dog breeder accompany her trucker husband all the way to Ottawa, bringing along a very pregnant canine? That was a 3,000-km (1,900 mile) journey, at a time of year in which ice and snow make long drives potentially dangerous.

In an interview conducted a month after the protest had been dispersed, Lynnette says “Our story is a little bit different from everybody else’s.” Much of her personal motivation is connected to the demise of her parents.

Lynnette says she cared for her mother and father during the final 12 years of their lives, including during times when they were hospitalized. Prior to the arrival of COVID-19, she says hospital staff welcomed her involvement. “I was always praised for how well I looked after my parents. They loved families like ours. They listened to me.”

Her dad died just before COVID hit, she says, “which caused my mom to crash really hard.” In October 2021, after her mother was transported to hospital by ambulance, relations with staff were “altogether different.”

Lynnette says there were “a lot of lies,” and that medical personnel were no longer interested in her input. She believes the care her mother received was dictated more by COVID protocols than by the needs of individual patients:

I was her primary caregiver and her registered [Power of Attorney]. And even at that, they wouldn’t let me in because I wasn’t double-jabbed…then they said they would let me in for five minutes, but then I had to leave the hospital and I couldn’t come back for 14 days.

…basically, she lived six days - a horrible, horrible six days…she trusted me to look after her and I felt I failed…she passed away October 22nd…

Following her mother’s death, Lynnette was angry. She says she did little but sit on the couch and watch videos of dissident virologists and epidemiologists arguing that decision makers were profoundly mishandling the pandemic. She wanted the world to make sense again.

It appears that the weeks she and husband Jake spent in Ottawa a few months later have aided Lynnette’s healing process. In her words:

It was amazing. It was absolutely unbelievable…Your heart could hardly contain it.

Adds Jake:

You cannot explain it in words what we experienced in downtown Ottawa. It was just fantastic.

The interview with Lynnette and Jake begins at 1:17:43 here.