A cold winter's birthday in Ottawa
We're not done here. Why we need to finish what the truckers started.
Today, January 29, is my cousin’s birthday. Or it would have been—if he hadn’t died while snowboarding at a British Columbia ski resort.
It was in December 2021, his first day on the slopes after a family vacation in Mexico. My cousin had dropped his son off for a lesson then headed out on his own. Someone spotted him a few hours later, deep in a ravine.
The news reported a snowboarding accident. A man had ventured out of bounds alone and perished in complex terrain. What the news reports did not say was that he had decades of experience riding in the back country or, like far too many healthy men that year, he “died suddenly” of coronary causes.
His family was heartbroken. My cousin was 48.
Today, January 29, is also the second anniversary of the day the Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa. This author was there and it was glorious. Yes, it was loud, with much honking, hugging, and celebrating. Parliament Hill was packed, despite the cold. Faces were bare. Protesters sung the national anthem at the Rideau Mall food court, even blew past the cordoned-off area that admitted only those with papers. People dared to sit down to enjoy their lunches.
It was like the end of the White Witch’s reign in Narnia.
Canadians had suffered one of the longest, cruelest, strangest COVID regimes anywhere, until the truckers stepped in and broke the spell. Audibly. Thousands came out to the highways and overpasses to cheer them on. Canadians showed up en masse, donating millions to break what seemed like an hostile, alien regime.
My sister and I thought of my cousin. It would have been his 49th birthday. It seemed his kind of scene.
My cousin had always been daring. A thrash metal fan, he was always one of the first to enter the mosh pit. He’d pull stunts, like the time he sent a garter snake under the locked bathroom door to entertain my sister inside. He once scaled up a water slide, Gollum-like, ahead of me and laughed maniacally as I clipped him on the way down.
Every summer vacation, our mothers got us together for weeks. It seems now like an enchanted Gen X movie reel: We fought over whose turn it was on the Atari, snuck in viewings of Fast Times at Ridgemont High. We honed our moon walks, languished in the ball pit of the West Edmonton Mall as our mothers shopped interminably.
I still have his last texts to me before he left on that holiday in Mexico. He had wanted me to pick up a saltwater travel casting rod and send it to him for his trip. He didn’t need the rod in the end, but thanked me anyway. “You’re a good cousin,” he wrote.
Good bye, Cousin. What killed you, actually? You couldn’t have left the country without those two shots. Nobody could as of November 2021.
It was a policy worthy of the East German Socialist Unity Party, when leaving the country became a privilege overnight. Two years later, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the lower court’s finding: assessing the constitutionality of the federal travel vaccine mandate is moot, of no public interest, as Canada repealed it in June 2022.
As of January 2024, the plaintiffs are appealing that ruling to the Supreme Court. We can hope it will hear the case—but we are probably on our own. The recent Federal Court decision holding that cabinet illegally invoked the Emergencies Act against the Convoy was a refreshing bit of jurisprudence, but it rejected only the government’s hammer response. It did not touch the protest’s cause.
No, if recent COVID court decisions are a guide, it will fall again to us, the people, to put a stake through the heart of the COVID emergency regime.
We won’t find it in any briefing note or press conference, but know it in our bones: those travel mandates came down because the truckers came that winter. The federal government waited five months, of course, lest the population conclude that the protest it had villified saved what is left of our democracy.
Now, though, we face the “mistakes were made” crowd, even among freedom lovers. Here’s a recent post on Twitter.
To which one can respond only: We’re not done here.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Malcolm. We’re still deep in the authoritarian jungle.
To this day, our governments continue pushing shots they knew could kill us back in summer 2021. To this day, two provincial governments still refuse to hire or rehire unvaccinated health care workers. Even today, the Public Health Agency of Canada is building an interoperable data platform to share immunization information across provinces. Too many of us are dying, but our governments don’t appear to care.
This is unfamiliar territory in the land of Peace, Order, and Good Government. Yet here we are.
So let’s adjust accordingly. We’ve got skills to acquire, forebears to study: heroes of non-violent resistance. Ancient and modern, Western and non-Western: we’ve got insights to translate from their contexts to ours.
But that’s future music, as the Germans say.
Today is for the truckers, those doughty liberators who arrived in our nation’s capital two years ago to break the ever-tightening grip of the authoritarians that govern us.
And today is for someone dear to me, who would have turned 51 this year.
Happy Birthday, Cousin. Wish you were here.
My condolences, Jodi. And this was a wonderful piece.
Excellent piece! I love the combo of the personal with the informational, the casual with the professional. You have a great writer voice and I will look forward to reading more of your work!