The following is from an interview with a reporter who had been on the ground with the truckers in Ottawa.
Hochman: I got here late Sunday afternoon, got into Ottawa and settled Sunday evening. And I went out and just checked out the convoy that night.
And things are a lot more crowded on the weekends than they are during the week, so I only caught the back end of the really crazy weekend, which is when you have thousands and thousands of protesters streaming into the city. But I’ve been there since then and I’ve been talking to a lot of the folks on the ground and it’s just the core group of truckers, which is still hundreds and hundreds of people.
And it’s amazing, these people are, I think, patriots in the most authentic sense of the term. They’re weathering not just insane cold temperatures and sleeping in their trucks to fight for their freedoms, but also now a full-on frontal assault from their federal and provincial governments.
So I have nothing but respect for these guys. They’re some of the kindest people that I’ve ever met. And I don’t say that just because of my ideological priors. I went into this supporting the cause, but thinking that maybe a lot of these guys were going to be kooks and crazies, and that’s not the case. These are really decent, fundamentally good people who are fighting for their basic freedoms and their rights and their way of life. And it’s a really wonderful thing.
These are the people that Trudeau has characterized as extremists, racists, etc. The media tried to smear them as violent radicals.
Blair: What do these people look like? I mean, we’re getting one image from the mainstream media, but what are these people actually like?
Hochman: Well, the core group is truckers, so they look more or less like what your stereotypical trucker—what you’d expect them to look like. These are blue-collar working-class guys. They work with their hands. The group has expanded from the initial sort of trucker groups to a lot of different blue-collar professionals who are all getting battered by the vaccine mandates.
I’ve talked to a lot of folks who got fired, volunteer firefighter, trash cleaners, all the really manual laborers who make their society run, who have lost their jobs for refusing to show their vaccine cards. Some of them are vaccinated actually and just refuse to show their vaccine cards on principle, which is, I think, even more impressive.
….
And it’s really beautiful because it’s these people from all different walks of life, it’s true diversity, not the progressive sense of diversity where it’s skin color but everyone thinks the same. But they have different ways of life, different backgrounds. And they’re all unified by a shared love of their country and their way of life and a desire to save it from what people like [Canadian Prime Minister] Justin Trudeau are trying to do.
This is why Trudeau and his lackeys have reacted the way they have. They see power slipping away from them. The reaction to fear is the attempt to exert more control over the people. Another aspect is the fact that Trudeau has used this emergency law basically without pretext. Trudeau believes that it will be easier next time to do this again. And there will be a next time if Parliament and the Canadian courts do not slap him down hard.
Trudeau, and all these provincial governments, too, are waging war on those freedoms with things like mandates, school closures, continued lockdowns—Canada’s had much worse lockdowns than we have, they’ve persisted well into the end of 2021—that’s not just an assault on some abstract liberty or freedom. For a lot of these guys, it’s a real assault on the core, the heart of Canadian identity, which is why they’re so righteously, in my opinion, upset about everything.
What is very telling about this whole mess is that Trudeau has refused to even talk with these people. Trudeau knows that he is taking away people’s freedoms. He admires dictators. He wants subjects not citizens.
Christianity is a threat to all of this for Trudeau. I am not talking about the ministers per se although they are present and involved. I am just referring to bona fide Christians. Hochman notes:
This Christian ethos that has been injected into the convoy has taken on this really powerful, spiritual feel. And the whole convoy now, the whole protest movement, if you walk around there, you see Christian imagery everywhere. You see bits of Scripture written onto the sides of trucks and on signs. People are constantly praying. They’re constantly talking about Christ. It’s taking on this real Christian feel.
And one of the beautiful things about that is, you sort of feel like you’re at a worship service. There are people hugging each other spontaneously. I’ve been hugged by strangers, 15 or 20 times unprompted. Which was a little weird at first, but I’ve sort of gotten into it because you realize that all these people are really acting in good faith. And it has imbued this with a sense of spiritual purpose as well as its initial political aim.
This is what Trudeau truly fears. People paying more attention to God than to him. The more that it gets out that these are ordinary everyday people standing up for their rights as Canadian citizens, the less support that the government has for the atrocities that they are visiting on the truckers and their families. And, yes, I said families. Many of the truckers have families with them.
Why wouldn’t Trudeau meet? We now know why. He is afraid that his evil nature will be exposed for all to see. Hopefully soon he will no longer be in power. A vote of no confidence is overdue. If that does not happen, then most of the Canadian parliament has been corrupted.
The entire interview can be found here.