Lee Bates, who is shown at a truck stop in Calgary, drove his semi truck to Ottawa earlier this year to take part in the convoy protest that occupied areas around Parliament Hill for more than three weeks. . Todd Korol / The Globe and Mail
One interesting thing about the convoy of Lee Bates and Sandy Williams and Luke Kendze and many others once they returned home from Ottawa is that they remembered it as a revolution. i a revelation, and not only in the religious sense, though it was also true. Now that the pandemic has killed 15 million people worldwide, now that the CSIS has revealed how alarmed it was (and is) by the northward drift of “ideologically motivated violent extremism” during the occupation of ‘Ottawa in February, now that support for the convoy may be a requirement to lead the Conservative Party, could help find out what was left with the people who descended on the Canadian capital. Are Lee, Luke and Sandy permanent converts to the populist cause? What did they take away from Ottawa, beyond the memories of barbecues and bouncy castles?
The three returning warriors are currently sitting in front of a snowstorm at the Roadking truck stop on Barlow Trail, in the tangled southeast quadrant of Calgary, one of the scene points where the convoy took shape. at the end of January. It’s the first week of March. Lee and Luke arrived home a few days ago in Ottawa. Sandy is still on her way to Slave Lake in northern Alberta tonight.
The Roadking Dining Room is located in front of a hallway from the Roadking Slot Machine Room. The dining room is Irish brown. Three pieces of fried chicken and sauce are priced at $ 13.99. It is also a kind of magnet that removes the memories of the convoy of boys for the last time before they take the yoke back from their daily lives. The convoy began as an anti-Trudeau protest in Western Canada (a creation of James Bauder, a conservative and conspiracy theorist born again in Calgary); evolved into a march against the vaccine mandate; then it became a propaganda festival again for a moaning group of interest groups: right-wing populists and anti-fascists, libertarian anti-vaxxers and anti-communists, indigenous and family protesters, ecological warriors and drugs. smokers, Proud Boys and anarchists, not to mention thousands of others, happy to be able to return to the party without being ashamed to wear a mask. Lee and Luke and Sandy believe they were part of the story.
In fact, the story is another reason they are here at Roadking: to talk to Monique Young, a 41-year-old real estate agent from Thunder Bay, who got into her four-wheeled vehicle to follow the convoy to Ottawa and is now compiling an oral history of the walk, Journey to Freedom. The convoy is one of the highlights of his life: his Selma, his Woodstock, his March of Women, his 6th of January.
You may not agree. You may be one of the majority of Canadians who overwhelmingly supported vaccine warrants and the wearing of masks, who opposed protesters’ demands to a) end all pandemic restrictions and b) dissolve the federal government. .. Maybe you’re part of the roughly 70 percent of the country that didn’t agree with it convoyslaw-abiding tactics, honking horns, flaunting flags and thinking they were, to quote a common description on Twitter: “a bunch of yahoos.”
But this story is not about you, my privileged, sanctimonious friend who carries a laptop. This story is about a good handful of them, the other outlaws, once they returned home, and how their strange, daring, ridiculous, polarizing, and highly successful convoy looks at them at rest. They hijacked the national conversation for three weeks, hoping to change the way we think and speak, and therefore who we are and how we live.
Did it work? They seem as surprised as the rest of us.
Protesters dance and hug on Wellington Street on Feb. 17, the 21st day of the blockade in Ottawa. Organizers arrived in the capital with a manifesto calling for a coup against the Trudeau government by the Senate and the governor general. Justin Tang / The Canadian Press
Crowds on Parliament Hill on January 29, the first weekend of the protests. Lars Hagberg / AFP / Getty Images Protesters soak in a hot tub in Wellington. Justin Tang / The Canadian Press
Lee and Sandy did not know each other before parking their vehicles on Albert and Kent streets in Ottawa, a few blocks south of Parliament Hill. There they created a community of their own. This is always fun. Cooperation, camping, and shared mission, as well as having to stand side by side in a confined space, made them feel like they were companions, together.
The men loved their camp. “Why was it called employment?” Lee will say. “I have no idea. We were quiet. We closed our horns at seven in the evening. We were respectful. The streets were cleaner than ever. Of course, you’re always going to piss someone off. It’s okay: we, as citizens of “In this country, we have the right to protest, to move freely and to gather. And that has taken us away.” The idea of civil society as a contradictory truce of compromises seems to bother him. He wants something clearer. “This has been happening since the beginnings of capitalism and the central bank system: they created these divisions. In Kent and Albert, we didn’t have these divisions. People realized that color, race, creed, political opinions “It doesn’t matter, we are all under God. Then your perspective begins to change and you become enlightened by the fact that we have been lied to.” The litany of lies is long: the major media and MK Ultra LSD experiments that the CIA conducted on unsuspecting topics in the late 1950s are just the first on the list.
Three weeks later, when the “beating” began, the three men hid together in Ottawa. They stopped in Kenora to visit local Legion veterinarians. (Lee also had a bad tooth extracted.) His convoy in the dump returned to idle in Steinbach, Man., To attend the funeral of a convoy truck driver who died two days after arriving at Steinbach’s home. Ottawa (“pneumonia, not COVID,” Lee insists), and back in Winnipeg at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, which Lee found amusing. “You need a mask to enter the human rights museum, which I consider a violation of my human rights.”
Then they went home. It was difficult to convey to their loved ones that the strength of the bond, the emancipatory sense of mission they felt in Ottawa awaited them. “It was a rough landing,” says Sandy, “just to be sure.”
Ottawa, February 19: Officers move to clean up protesters on Wellington Street. Ottawa police, whose initial slowness led to the resignation of Chief Peter Sloly, were able to wipe out the protests with thousands of reinforcements from the RCMP and other forces. Cole Burston / The Canadian Press
Ottawa, April 30: Protesters clash with police during the ‘Rolling Thunder’, a motorcycle rally in which supporters of groups included anti-vaccine and mask warrants. Police set up exclusion zones to keep vehicles away from places like Parliament Hill and war memorials. Spencer Colby / The Globe and Mail
His reasons for going to Ottawa had almost nothing to do with trucker warrants. Sandy Williams lives in Slave Lake, a three-hour drive north of Edmonton, where she has run a pasture-fed cattle farm, a hydraulic excavation truck business, a gravel supply yard, and a business. of construction with his father and brothers. since he went to work after high school. He drove to Ottawa because he considers the Trudeau government to be “corrupt.” He is a fan of The Jekyll Island Creature: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, which has been described as tearing off the cover “the great illusion called money … the most egregious scam in all history … you will never again trust a politician or a banker”. Sandy has two children, 15-year-old Kayden and 13-year-old Blake, with him on his platform. His wife educates her four children at home, so lack of class has not been an issue. He is now 45 years old: the convoy woke him up politically, made him feel less isolated in Slave Lake. He will return to Calgary in two weeks to join the Alberta Prosperity Project, which he believes “has no agreement for Alberta within the Confederacy.” They are not separatists. “His hope is that each province will stand up independently, but collectively.” The movement now has about 1,500 followers.
Lee is also 45 years old. He and his father grow about 8,000 organic acres near Stettler, Alta, two and a half hours northeast of Calgary. He also runs his own fertilizer business and a grain brokerage and land development operation, and recently bought an adventure sporting goods store in Stettler. It’s shaped like a fridge and has a flat haircut and a small patch of soul and a deep Vaderish voice and a smoker’s cough that sounds like a cold starter. Lee was one of the first people to take an interest in the convoy in late December. “I’ve never protested anything before,” he admits. Like Sandy and Luke, he didn’t decide to make the trip until a few days before the truckers left. “Everyone on that trip didn’t know they were going until they left,” Sandy says. “And people don’t do that, not in the middle of winter when it’s 30 below and you have business going on.” That was another converging detail that made everyone think they should be there.
Lee came together to expose “the coercion and corruption and the collusion of the federal government.” But most of all, it wanted to “shed light on the World Economic Forum,” the Geneva-based Davos favorite, which promotes stakeholder capitalism so that companies can partner with governments …