The story of how Ottawa failed to deal effectively with the three-week “Freedom Convoy” protest in January 2022 is a particularly Canadian story. As with so many problems we can’t fix, it involves jurisdictional overlap that allowed officials to do nothing because they would not be blamed for doing nothing.
When Canada announced that, as of January 15, 2022, no unvaccinated truckers could cross the border into the United States, it was a major challenge to an industry that had been under intense pressure since the start of the pandemic. Many truckers had a tough time during COVID-19, when businesses closed their bathrooms to them, leaving them struggling as they did their vital work between two stricken countries. “We worked eight months with no sanitizer, no face masks, nothing, smack dab in between Windsor and Sarnia,” Brigitte Belton, a trucker from Wallaceburg, later told the Public Order Emergency Commission. “We had no bathrooms. We had no showers. We were refused everywhere we went. You have no idea what it’s like to pee in a park on your way home from work.”
