Credit: Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs Twitter
By Scott Taylor
I will begin this column with the personal disclosure that I am a long-time downtown resident of Ottawa. As such, my family and I have been fully immersed in the noisy chaos of what is now widely known as the “freedom convoy.”
We are not participants in this protest. But given the reality that the parked trucks and crowds engulfed our home, this means that simply commuting to work puts us out on the same streets and in the middle of the action.
The incessant noise of truck air horns blaring was reminiscent of the 2010 world cup in South Africa wherein spectators across the globe learned to detest the steady hum caused by thousands of people blowing their vuvuzelas. We can now understand what it would be like to toil inside an active beehive for days on end.
It has also been abundantly apparent that this same crowd of anti-mandate, anti-vax protestors are also very pro-marijuana. The pungent clouds of second-hand pot smoke has noticeably increased our family’s craving for snack food, and even our cat has never been so ravenous.
Again, in the interest of full disclosure, I am double-vaxxed and boosted, I wear a mask in public, practice social distancing and I still sing ‘happy birthday’ twice when I wash my hands. That said, I am also a firm believer in freedom of speech and I endeavour to be tolerant of differing opinions.
The original genesis for the freedom convoy was to protest against the new imposed requirements cross-border for truck drivers to be vaccinated or face quarantines.
Many of the protest proponents argued that this mandate was adversely affecting the livelihood of many of those same drivers who had so selflessly ensured that vital necessities were delivered to us during the past two years of the pandemic.
However, it did not take long for truck drivers associations to point out that over 90 per cent of truckers are already vaccinated, and that the new mandate would only affect a small minority of their profession.
Worse was yet to come, as by the time the truck convoy began rolling into Ottawa, it was clearly evident that virtually every fringe element with a beef against the government was hitching their wagons to the so-called “freedom convoy.”
One of the first images to emerge from the burgeoning protest was of someone flying a Confederate flag from their pickup truck. This was soon followed with photos of protestors brandishing swastikas and one individual carrying a red-white-and-black maple-leaf flag meant to symbolize a Nazi-Canada.
Once the crowd had fully assembled, we had ignorant drivers parking their vehicles at the National War Memorial, protestors dancing atop the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, while others urinated at the very same sacred space honouring those soldiers who fought for our country’s freedom.
The media reports focussed on these disrespectful misdeeds and the presence of fringe minority groups caused the “freedom convoy” organizers to offer up hollow-sounding explanations that these individuals and isolated acts “did not reflect the true nature of the protest.”
One of the lame excuses offered by convoy organizers for the visible presence of swastika flags was that the individual’s carrying these symbols wanted to illustrate the fact that the Trudeau government’s vaccination mandate is equitable to Hitler’s policy of mass genocide in World War II.
Not only is such a comparison ludicrous in the extreme – and insulting to those who suffered the horrors of the Holocaust – it also fails to recognize what the swastika has come to symbolize.
The fact that someone would have one in their personal possession is one thing. That they would think they could brazenly display such a vulgar flag in the midst of a large crowd without recrimination is another level of offensive altogether.
Ditto for the knucklehead who attached a Confederate flag to their pickup truck and drove horn-a-blazing through the downtown Ottawa core.
There is no ‘interpretative’ wiggle room for a flag that symbolizes the ultimate white supremacist policy of historic Black enslavement.
The problem for the freedom convoy organizers and participants is not that some fringe loonies attempted to hijack the media attention generated by this mass gathering of big-rig trucks.
What the gathered mob failed to do was to self-police their own event to ensure these crazies understood that swastikas, Confederate flags and public urination on war memorials would not be tolerated.
On the fifth day of the protest, my friend – a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces and an affected resident of Ottawa – took it upon himself to photograph the various license plates of the protest trucks parked in front of the Canadian War Museum.
Within minutes, an angry protestor had confronted my friend, demanded he surrender his phone and then revised this demand to that of a deletion of photographs.
When this request was also refused, the protestor, now backed up with fellow truck drivers, menacingly reminded my friend that he was “all alone” and might wish to reconsider their demand.
Thankfully that incident ended without violence, but it also stopped short any further recording of license plates.
I suggest that had the majority of Freedom Convoy participants taken an appropriate amount of offence to the swastikas and Confederate flags, they too would have quickly disappeared from the crowd.
Freedom is not anarchy and freedom of speech does not include hate speech.
