A Different Kind of Revolution

Ottawa — Jenna slept in a truck here the other night. Not her truck, mind you; the 20-something Vancouver native crashed in an 18-wheeler owned by a friendly fellow convoyer. If she can’t find a better place to sleep soon, she says she’ll find a different truck to sleep in. I ask if she’s a little worried about that arrangement. She shrugs. “I just feel safe here. I trust them.”

Helen, seen on Jenna’s Instagram story later that night, says she’s from Ottawa and “felt unsafe walking down the streets at night” before the convoy arrived to protest pandemic restrictions three weeks ago. “But I’ve never felt more safe before in my life — single girl, I’m 20 years old, and I’ve never felt more safe in my life. . . . I’ve been out every day, and every person I’ve met or passed by has hugged me or high-fived or smiled at me.”

This Ottawa convoy protest is different from some of the other media-attracting movements we’ve witnessed in recent years. As I wrote earlier this week, there’s an easy-going, happy-warrior feeling to it; music emanates from speakers in different encampments, free food and coffee is served out of makeshift booths, and truckers pray the Lord’s Prayer — in English and French — every evening at 7 p.m. It’s largely spontaneous: The makeshift community that has sprouted out of the initial trucker encampments was mostly unplanned and lacks any real hierarchy. “We got here last weekend with our signs, just walking with the people protesting for our rights,” said Hugo Baril, a young Ontarian with a heavy French accent who was fired from his job in asbestos removal for being unvaccinated. “And we just saw these two food stands here that couldn’t keep up with all the people. So we decided to get a stand together. We just took our own money that we had — the first weekend we only had $500 — to get this started.”

“So we borrowed a lot of this stuff,” Baril told me, gesturing at the food stand next to him. “It all came from our pockets, but we’ve had a lot of funds since with the donations. With the extra money we bought more pots and three burners. We got a couple of gift cards too that we’re going to hand out today to the truckers.”

It’s anarchy, in other words. But it’s a friendlier kind than we’re used to seeing in, say, Seattle’s CHOP zone — and an unusual scene in a nation founded on “peace, order and good government.” Baril said that he’s “never seen so much unity in my life. I mean, there’s nothing compared to what’s going on here.” Kristy Ford-Gariepy, an Ontario nurse helping Baril run the food stand, told me that “the first weekend we were drained, but at the end of the day our hearts were filled, and we felt like we did something really good. So it was like, we gotta do this again next weekend. So we’ve already been stocking up, getting everything ready for things to go crazy this weekend.”

During the week, the convoy is relatively tame, confined to the truckers and the core group of protesters who can afford to be full-time participants. But on Friday through Sunday, thousands more Canadians flock to Ottawa from across the country to join in the demonstrations. What follows is a 48-hour dance party of sorts, replete with a DJ booth and untold amounts of free booze. Videos from the first round of festivities were striking: huge crowds of Canadians, disproportionately from the younger end of the age spectrum, dancing to live music in front of the nation’s parliament building in ten-degree weather. Protesters say it’s drawing more attendees every weekend. “This one is going to be the biggest one yet,” Ford-Gariepy assured me.

Their ethos might help explain why the movement seems to be sustaining. Notably, polls show that the convoy here in Ottawa is unpopular nationwide. But the protest’s peaceful, overwhelmingly positive atmosphere makes it difficult for journalists and left-wing politicians to paint it as a violent extremist fringe, though they have tried. That puts leaders like Justin Trudeau in a bind; while his opposition to the convoy may have the passive majority of public opinion on his side, an aggressive intervention would almost certainly spark a public-relations disaster.

So instead, with or without a popular mandate, the truckers are steadily working their way through their country’s persistent Covid mandates. Since the convoy began, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec, and Prince Edward Island have all rolled back or entirely dropped their restrictions. On Tuesday, Canada nixed its onerous requirement that fully vaccinated travelers crossing into the country quarantine while awaiting test results. On Wednesday, Ontario premier Doug Ford announced that his jurisdiction would be joining the list of provinces that have dropped their mandates. “We’ve got to learn to live with this and get on with our lives,” he said at a press conference. “I bet if I asked every single person in this room, ‘Do you want these damn masks or do you want them off?’ They want them off. They want to get back to normal. They want to be able to go for dinner with their families.”

In an age of lockdowns and stern bureaucratic diktats, there’s a special revolutionary power to joy. It’s a quiet revolution, devoid of any violence or destruction, but it’s potent. And you can feel that here: Wednesday morning, I found myself drinking watery coffee from a plastic cup, given to me by a family sleeping in the truck nearby. Most of them only spoke French; one was able to choke out just enough broken English to offer me an extra pair of gloves. A dance remix of a popular Lana Del Rey song was playing from a speaker nearby. An elderly couple down the street swayed rhythmically to the beat. “My wife is going to be mad at me that I’m not back home yet,” a trucker behind me remarked.

His friend laughed: “Tell her you have a new family.”