The Canadian Truckers Aren’t Extremists

Ottawa — It was six degrees below zero, and I couldn’t feel my hands. My flight had arrived in Ottawa the night before, and I had forgotten to pack mittens. I was running on three hours of sleep, following a late-night effort to navigate the drawn-out Canadian pandemic-border gauntlet — negative Covid test, proof of vaccination, special “ArriveCAN” phone app, and detailed plans for quarantine if I tested positive on the other side. The border guard eyed the disheveled American standing in front of him. “What’s your business in Canada?” Covering the trucker convoy for a magazine. “What magazine?” National Review. He nodded. “You should check out the hot tub they set up.”

As it turns out, the trucker encampment that has settled around the Canadian parliament building did have a hot tub (as well as multiple DJ booths, tents serving free food and drinks, barbecues, two mascots in full-body costumes, and a bouncy castle). But I instead found myself in the frigid Ottawa air Monday morning at the Jericho March, a biblically inspired lap around Parliament Hill that five dozen or so of the most cold-resistant protesters undertake at 9 a.m. daily. “The momentum is incredible — there seem to be more and more supporters coming in every day,” Benita Peterson, the organizer of the Jericho March, said.

“I felt a pull on my heart to come here to Ottawa,” Peterson told me. She paused for a moment to choke back tears, before reaching out to give me a hug. “I think in general, if it’s calling you to act in a way that is loving and peaceful, that call in our heart is God. And it’s beautiful.”

Midway through its third week of existence, the movement that descended on Ottawa to protest the country’s pandemic mandates at the end of January has transitioned into an outpouring of music, dance, and prayer. The convoy has a distinctly surreal feel — a winter version of the 1967 Summer of Love, minus the LSD and plus (many) more layers of clothing. Encampments have sprung up in different blocks around Parliament, each with its own distinct living quarters, food, and DJ booth. One built a makeshift house out of plywood on the back of an 18-wheeler; another set up an outdoor gym with a bench press, dumbbells, and a barbell looped through two fuel cans. “Each block of truckers has become a family,” Greg Wieler, who is attending the protest with his wife, told me. “They made a commitment — they made a bond with each other that says, we’re here till the end.”

To be sure, the odd outlandish conspiracy theory can be heard circulating among the crowd (although rarely among the truckers themselves): Yesterday, a woman sitting next to me at a coffee shop down the street from the convoy was earnestly telling a group of bemused-looking truckers that “they” — the “they” was not specified — “have been planning this pandemic for 100 years,” and that Justin Trudeau drinks the blood of children as part of a Satanic ritual. “It all started with the Titanic,” she nodded knowingly. “Trust me on this one.”

Even the kooks come across as stereotypically friendly Canadians — so friendly that it often takes a moment to recognize them as kooks. When I struck up a conversation with a nice middle-aged woman in my hotel lobby last night, the first 30 minutes or so concerned a deep unease with vaccine passports and a frustration with the mainstream media’s coverage of the protest — in other words, standard conservative opinion. Then she informed me the vaccine was, in fact, a mind-control microchip installed by Bill and Melinda Gates. “I’ve done a lot of research on this,” she said. “I can sit down with you tomorrow and show you if you’d like.” I nodded and smiled.

But those wild theories are not the point, and the theorists not the majority, here in Ottawa. The protest — a movement that has now spread across the world, from Germany and France to Israel and Australia — is not even anti-vax, by and large. Left-leaning politicians and journalists have repeatedly cited the fact that some 90 percent of Canadian truckers are vaccinated, as if to suggest that the convoy is unrepresentative of mainstream trucker sentiment. But that would only be true if the convoy were anti-vaccine, rather than what they are, which is anti-mandate.

Their movement is primarily directed at bringing an end to the pandemic-based restrictions, rather than spreading conspiracy theories and extremism as the Trudeau government alleges. (The prime minister’s now-infamous “small fringe minority” smear seems to have been adopted in much the same way as Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables”; it’s proudly displayed on T-shirts, hats, signs, and truck doors throughout the convoy.) The slogans plastered on posters across Parliament Hill refer not to Satanic rituals and microchips but to freedom, rights, and consent. “Freedom” is sometimes used as a greeting. My first night, a man walking in front of me saw two women draped in Canadian flags heading the other way. “Freedom,” he smiled. They answered in unison, followed by high-fives: “Freeeedoooom!”

On the main stage and in private conversations, attendees say they’re here to defend their way of life. “It’s not really about the vaccine,” said Peter van Oordt, a former volunteer firefighter from a small township in Ontario who was fired for refusing to show a vaccine card at work. “The vaccine could be awesome. Even if the government wanted me to drink a cup of distilled water — I don’t debate that the distilled water is fine for my body. That’s not the point. They don’t have the right to tell me to do that. End of story. Full stop.”

All this paints a starkly different picture of the trucker-convoy movement than its mainstream depiction as sinister right-wing extremism.

Perhaps it’s a small thing, but I’m struck by just how clean the makeshift community is; designated organizers pick up trash, and truckers shovel the streets every morning. The Christian groups serve free food to Ottawa’s homeless population, subsidized by the donations rolling in from around the world. When the police allegedly blocked cleaning services from accessing the convoy’s porta-potties, causing the toilets to overflow, organizers lifted the porta-potties onto a truck to transport them out and carried in new ones. Now, they’ve found a way “to get a pumper truck in here,” one trucker who helps organize the Ottawa convoy told me. “They can come every day.”

“I say to the police officers all the time — I’m like, I get it,” he said. “I’m not mad at you. I’m mad at policies, but not you specifically. I tell the people here, cops are people too. . . . Some of them have been denied their vacation now and are being forced to come out here and work. And they don’t want to — like, they’re humans too. So that’s why I tell people try to be as polite as you can.”

Protesting truckers have faced fair criticism for actions like the since-cleared blockade of the Ambassador Bridge connecting Detroit to Windsor, which disrupted trade and the routes of fellow truckers. But here in Ottawa, the upbeat atmosphere is a departure from other protests that have taken place in Canada in recent years. Canada’s Black Lives Matter protests occurred on a much smaller scale than in the U.S., but they were marked by many of the same instances of violence and destruction. Last summer, after a now-debunked story alleged that hundreds of unmarked graves at old Canadian residential schools contained the remains of children from the nation’s indigenous population, protesters burned down Catholic churches.

The truckers in Ottawa are angry at the government — but they’re not burning it down. One man at Ottawa’s Jericho March, who told me he works as a street cleaner, described how he greeted some people “flipping us off” the day prior: “The best way to disarm someone is a big smile.”

It seems to be working. Despite Trudeau’s recent invocation of emergency powers, the convoy has made considerable progress in a short time toward their stated goal of ending Canada’s pandemic mandates. “A rapidly growing list of Canadian provinces moved to lift their COVID-19 restrictions as protesters decrying such measures kept up the pressure,” the Associated Press reported last week. “Alberta, Saskatchewan, Quebec and Prince Edward Island announced plans this week to roll back some or all precautions, with Alberta . . . dropping its vaccine passport for places such as restaurants immediately and getting rid of masks at the end of the month.” Today, the Calgary Herald reported that “Canada is easing its border restrictions.” On February 28, “Canada will return to random testing” and “fully vaccinated travelers will no longer need to quarantine while awaiting results.”

The truckers appear to be on the cusp of something big. Participants here talk of making history. Here in the miserable cold, subsisting on crowdfunded soup and cheap beer, and powered by faith, diesel smoke, and good-natured Canadian patriotism, they are winning battles.