Lee Bates, shown at a truck stop in Calgary, drove his semi-truck to Ottawa earlier this year to take part in a protest by a convoy that has occupied areas around Parliament Hill for more than three weeks. Todd King / Globe and Mail
One interesting thing about the convoy for Lee Bates, Sandy Williams and Luke Kendze and many others, after returning home from Ottawa, is that they remembered it as a revolution. and a revelation — and not just in a religious sense, though that was true. Now that the pandemic has killed 15 million people worldwide, now that the CSIS has revealed how concerned it is (and is) about the northward diversion of “ideologically motivated violent extremism” during the February Ottawa occupation, now that support for the convoy it may be a requirement to lead the Conservative Party, it may help to understand what is left of the people who came down to the Canadian capital. Lee, Luke and Sandy are constantly turning to the populist cause? What did they take away from Ottawa besides the memories of barbecues and bouncy castles?
The three returning warriors are currently sitting in a blizzard at the Roadking stop on the Barlow Trail, in the tangled southeast quadrant of Calgary, one of the starting points where the convoy formed in late January. This is the first week of March. Lee and Luke returned to Ottawa a few days ago. Sandy is still on her way and is due to arrive in Slave Lake, in northern Alberta, tonight.
The Roadking dining room is opposite the passage from the Roadking slot machine room. The dining room is Irish brown. Three pieces of fried chicken and sauce are for $ 13.99. It’s also a magnet that takes memories of the convoy from the boys for the last time before they take on the yoke of their daily lives again. The convoy began as a protest against Trudeau in western Canada (the child of James Bauder, a newborn Conservative from Calgary and a conspiracy theorist); has become a march against the vaccine mandate; then became again a propaganda festival for a moaning board of interest groups: right-wing populists and proto-fascists, newborn anti-waxers and libertarian anti-communists, local protesters and family members, eco-warriors and drug smokers, Proud Boys and anarchists, not to mention for thousands of others, just happy to be able to party again without being ashamed to wear a mask. Lee, Luke and Sandy think they were part of the story.
In fact, the story is another reason to be here in Roadking: talking to Monique Young, a 41-year-old Thunder Bay real estate agent who jumped in her quad bike to follow the convoy to Ottawa, and is now compiling an oral story of the transition , Journey to freedom. The convoy is one of the highlights of their lives: their Selma, their Woodstock, their Women’s March, their January 6th.
You probably don’t agree. You may be one of the majority of Canadians who have strongly supported vaccine mandates and the wearing of masks, who have objected to protesters’ demands for a) ending all pandemic restrictions and b) dissolving the federal government. You may be part of approximately 70 percent of the country that disagrees convoys‘Tactics for breaking the law, horns, waving a flag and I thought they were – to quote a common description on Twitter:’ a bunch of yahoos’.
But this story is not for you, my privileged, sacred friend with a laptop. This story is about a handful of You, the Rejected Others, after returning home, and how their strange, daring, ridiculous, polarizing and extremely successful convoy looks 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 look as surprised as the rest of us.
Protesters danced and hugged on Wellington Street on February 17, day 21 of the Ottawa blockade. Organizers came to the capital with a manifesto that effectively called for a coup against the Trudeau government of the Senate and the governor-general. Justin Tang / The Canadian Press
The crowd on Parliament Hill on January 29, the first weekend of protests. Lars Hagberg / AFP / Getty Images Protesters soak in a hot tub installed in Wellington. Justin Tang / Canadian Press
Lee and Sandy didn’t know each other until they parked their cars on Albert and Kent Streets in Ottawa, a few blocks south of Parliament Hill. There they created their own community. It’s always fun. Collaboration, camping, and a shared mission, plus the need to understand each other from flank to hilt in a narrow space, made them feel companions in this together.
The men loved their camp. “Why was it called a profession?” Lee would say. “I have no idea. We were peaceful. We turned off the horns at seven o’clock at night. We were respected. The streets were cleaner than ever. Of course, you will always make someone angry. That’s good: we, as citizens of this country, have the right to protest , to move freely and to gather. And that was taken away from us. ” The idea of civil society as a controversial truce of compromises seems to upset him. He wants something clearer. “This has been happening since the beginning of capitalism and the central bank system: they created these divisions. Down in Kent and Albert, we didn’t have those divisions. People realized that color, race, faith, political views, whatever, doesn’t matter, we are all one under God. Then your point of view begins to change and you become enlightened by the fact that we have been deceived. ” The many lies are long: the mass media and the MK Ultra LSD experiments conducted by the CIA on unsuspecting subjects in the late 1950s are just at the top of the list.
Three weeks later, when the “break-up” began, the three men hid together from Ottawa. They stopped in Kenora to visit vets at the local Legion. (Lee also had a bad tooth extracted.) Their outflow convoy was again idle in Steinbach, Man., To attend the funeral of a convoy truck that died two days after returning from Ottawa (“pneumonia, not COVID”), Lee insists. ), and again in Winnipeg at the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, which Lee found amusing. “You needed a mask to enter the Museum of Human Rights, which I consider a violation of my human rights.
They were home then. It was difficult to convey to their waiting relatives the power of the connection, the emancipatory sense of mission they felt in Ottawa. “It was a bumpy landing,” Sandy says, “to be sure.”
Ottawa, Feb. 19: Officers move to clean up protesters on Wellington Street. Ottawa police – whose initial slowness led to the resignation of Chief Peter Sloley – managed to clean up 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 whose supporters include groups that oppose vaccines and mask mandates. Police have set up exclusion zones to keep vehicles away from sites such as Parliament Hill and military monuments. Spencer Colby / The Globe and Mail
Their reasons for going to Ottawa had little to do with truck mandates. Sandy Williams lives in Slave Lake, a three-hour drive north of Edmonton, where he has run a grass-fed cattle operation, a hydro-mining truck business, a gravel warehouse and a construction company with his father. his and his brothers since he went to work after high school. He left for Ottawa because he considered the Trudeau government “corrupt.” He is a fan of The Creation of Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, which is described as tearing off the cover of “the great illusion called money… the most outright fraud in history… you will never trust a politician or a banker again”. Sandy has two sons, Kaiden, 15, and Blake, 13, with him in their gear. His wife teaches their four children at home, so skipping class is not a problem. He is now 45: the convoy woke him up politically, making him feel less isolated in Slave Lake. He will return to Calgary in two weeks to join Alberta’s Prosperity Project, which he believes “there is no deal for Alberta within the Confederacy.” They are not separatists. “Their hope is for each province to stand up on its own, but collectively.” So far, the movement has about 1,500 supporters.
Lee is also 45. He and his father cultivate nearly 8,000 acres of organic produce near Stetler, Alta, two and a half hours northeast of Calgary. He also runs his own fertilizer and grain brokerage business and land development operation, and recently bought an adventure sporting goods store in Stettler. It is shaped like a refrigerator and has a flat hairstyle and a small patch of soul, a deep Vaderish voice and a smoker’s cough that sounds like a cold appetizer. Lee was one of the first to take an interest in the convoy in late December. “I have never protested against anything before,” he admits. Like Sandy and Luke, he did not decide to make the trip until a few days before the truck drivers left. “Everyone on this trip didn’t know they were leaving until they left,” Sandy said. “And people don’t do that, not in the heart of winter, when it’s 30 below and you have work to do.” That was another similar detail that made them all think they should be there.
Lee joined in to expose “federal coercion, corruption and collusion.” But he specifically wanted to “shed light on the World Economic Forum”, the Geneva-based Davos pet that promotes stakeholder capitalism so that corporations can partner with governments …
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