The Christians Driving the Ottawa Trucker Convoy

As more protesters flock to the Ottawa trucker convoy to protest Canada’s pandemic restrictions, the movement has taken on an explicitly Christian tone. Signs, makeshift food stands, and truck doors throughout the event are covered in Christian iconography and passages of Biblical scripture.

This morning, I attended the protest’s daily “Jericho March,” which takes place every morning at 9 a.m. The assembled crowd, which attracted around 50 attendees despite the weather sitting at five degrees below zero, walked a lap around Parliament Hill, carrying horns and trumpets as symbolic tribute to the Biblical story of Jericho. “In the book of Joshua, the Lord guided Joshua and his army to march around Jericho,” Benita Peterson, the organizer of the Jericho March, told me. “So the simple version of it is, they marched around once a day for six days, and on the seventh day of the march, seven times — they blew their horns, and the walls came down.” (On Thursdays, the Ottawa march happens at 7 a.m., and protesters take seven full laps around Parliament Hill instead of just one.)

Religious faith colored the entire event, which kicked off with a series of short speeches, a prayer from a pastor, and a rendition of the Lord’s Prayer and the Canadian national anthem. “Our leaders have forgotten that this country recognizes God as supreme,” Peterson told the crowd through a bullhorn. “Even our Charter of Rights acknowledges the supremacy of God. And so our presence here is a way of reminding them of that. And our goal is that our actions today will contribute to a changing of minds and hearts. We’ve demonstrated peaceful protest for several days now. And every day they see us in peace. We march in peace, we dance in peace — we even play hockey!” (The last remark was punctuated with cheers from onlookers.)

The influx of Christians from across Canada is a new development, and a sign that the Ottawa protest is expanding beyond the truckers who initiated it. While some of the truckers are Christians, and Peterson says the two groups are “in communication” — “I still need to talk to some more truckers because we want to coordinate a special horn honking thing on Thursday,” she tells me — the growing congregant of Christians at the convoy is a distinct group. Many of the protesters I talked to this morning came from across the country, some embarking on multi-day trips just to get here. “I caught a ride with a trucker from Alberta to Ontario — the whole trip took me four days,” Peterson said. “Three days to get to Ontario, and then part way through Ontario, I caught a ride with a different trucker. And then I was here.”