By Yvonne Cunnington
In the winter of 2022, a groundswell of working-class Canadians drove across the country to Ottawa through bitter cold and blinding snow. As the convoy got underway, an extraordinary thing began to happen: scores of people stood in the freezing cold along country roads and on highway overpasses to wave flags and salute the trucks driving by.
The long line of trucks, many bearing maple leaf flags, became a symbol of hope for weary Canadians who were reeling after two years of lockdowns, job losses, curfews, school closures, strict masking rules, and some of the most draconian vaccine mandates in the world—all with no end in sight.
Independent journalist Donna Laframboise describes what happened when she went to Ottawa to photograph the protest: “Public support was extraordinary, unlike anything we’ve ever seen before. But many Canadians knew nothing about that—because mainstream media coverage was indistinguishable from government propaganda.” The three-week-long protest drew so many people, particularly on the weekends, that a party atmosphere took hold.
For Laframboise, witnessing the outpouring of love and support in Ottawa became the spark for documenting what she immediately recognized as a unique contemporary working-class uprising. It was one of the most peaceful mass protests ever in the world, but the Canadian government and media characterized it as hateful and bigoted.
As social critic Toby Rogers put it on X (formerly Twitter): “The Canadian trucker protest was the largest working-class uprising in the developed world in a generation & the supposed heroes of the left — Naomi Klein, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Noam Chomsky, etc. either stayed silent or actively supported the fascist Trudeau response.”
This book is the result of three years of interviews done to set the record straight. Laframboise interviewed 20 truckers who were on the ground in Ottawa (not the leadership, some of whom have their own books out) and many of the hundreds of people from all walks of life who came out in support.
Some of the most enduring images from the protest show children playing in bouncy castles. While city politicians and the media condemned the inflatable castles as a clever tactical propaganda tool, the reality is that a young mother and professional event coordinator from Quebec made that magic happen with her own energy and money. Her story, along with many other equally compelling stories, is finally told in Thank You Truckers!
Buy on Amazon in soft cover or Kindle: amazon.ca/Thank-You-Truckers-Canadas-Heroes-ebook/dp/B0DWQY9L97
