The Daily Signal - Bonus: What This Reporter in Canada With Truckers Is Seeing

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

Nate Hochman is on the ground in Canada reporting on the unfolding situation with the Freedom Convoy protests. He joins this bonus episode of the Daily Signal Podcast to paint a picture of what’s really going on, regardless of what the corporate media says. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey Daily Signal listeners, Doug Blair here. Today, we're excited to share with you a bonus episode of the Daily Signal podcast. We recently had the opportunity to talk with Nate Hockman. Hockman is a reporter with the National Review, and he's actually on the ground right now in Ottawa, Canada, covering the Freedom Convoy protests. We had the opportunity to talk with Nate about all the stuff that's going on there to get his bird's eye view of what's going on right now in Canada. We hope you enjoy. My guest today is Nate Hockman. SIFI Fellow at National Review, currently in Canada covering the protests.

Nate, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. It's good to be here. I mean, this has been such a wild story, and I'm so curious because you're on the ground right now with the truckers. And I want to know, when did you arrive, and what has surprised you the most about what you've seen so far? So I got here late Sunday afternoon, kind of got into Ottawa and settled Sunday evening. And I went out and just checked out the convoy that night, and it was. You know, 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. I mean, 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, you know, I went into this supporting the cause, but thinking that maybe a lot of these guys were going to be sort of cooks and crazies. And that's not the case. I mean, 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. What do these people look like? I mean, we're getting one image from the mainstream media, but what are these people actually like? Well, they're, I mean, the core group is truckers. So they look more or less like what your sort of stereotypical trucker would, what you'd expect

them to look like. I mean, these are blue collar working class guys. They work with our hands. You know, the group is sort of expanded from the initial trucker groups to a lot of different blue-collar professionals who are all kind of getting battered by the vaccine mandates. I've talked to a lot of folks who got fired, you know, volunteer firefighter, trash cleaners, you know, all the really sort of 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 now, you know, you're getting, now that it's gaining momentum, you're getting protesters flock in from all across Canada, taking three, four-day trips, hitching multiple rides with different truckers to get here. And so it's expanding to be this larger and larger and more diverse group of people from all across the massive country. And, you know, it's really beautiful because it's these people from all different walks of life. It's true diversity, right? Not the sort of 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 Justin Trudeau are trying to do. Could you give us a picture of what downtown Ottawa looks like right now? Are the trucks like right in the middle?

Are they off to the side? Can people still move around the trucks? What does it look like downtown Ottawa right now? Yeah, they're smack in the middle. Tough to miss a bunch of 18 wheelers posted up around Parliament Hill, which is where they settled. So Ottawa for folks who don't know, it's the, it's way. where the Canadian capital is. And the Parliament building, which is actually a really beautiful building,

is where they've set up these little mini communities. They're sort of little encampments. They're organized around the big 18-wheeler's that have settled along these blocks around Parliament Hill. But those have sort of flowered into these spontaneous communities where people have built tents, people have built makeshift plywood houses on the back of their 18-wheelerers. One encampment built in outdoor GEOPLE.

with a barbell looped through two fuel cans to use his weight in a bench press. And they all have sort of separate DJ booths and music and free food. It almost is this weird intersection of a music festival and a Christian worship service. You know, that's the other thing is it's a very Christian movement. There's a lot of prayer, spontaneous prayers. They say the Lord's Prayer in French and English every night at 7 p.m. And it is this sort of intentional community that has come together without really being organized in the hierarchical structure. It's all sort of spontaneous, but it is remarkably clean.

I mean, they're cleaning up after themselves. You have truckers out there shoveling the streets to keep the snow off of it. You've got designated trash cans all around. Like this is pretty much the polar opposite of what we're used to seeing from watching left-wing protests the last couple of years where people are burning buildings down. These people are actually trying to build something up, which is one of the reasons I think they're so successful. Now, what are the truckers saying to you're out there talking to them? What are they saying about this protest, what it means to them, why they're still here? Like, what are they saying? Well, they're really saying that they're fighting for the Canadian way of life.

I mean, that's the language that you hear a lot. There's thousands of signs that have been plastered up all around these different encampments and on the fences alongside Parliament Hill. And what you see time and time again, what you hear from these folks, is, you know. is that they're fighting for the freedoms that are supposedly given to them in the Canadian Charter. You know, it's the Canadian system of government. They don't have quite the same robust civil liberties protections that our constitutional Bill of Rights gives us. But they have something similar. I mean, they share a British inheritance, which means that they're supposed to have this wide sphere of liberties.

And those liberties, just like ours, have been crucial for dictating what it means to be a Canadian. and a large part of the Canadian pride that you can feel emanating from these protests has to do with their rights and their freedoms. So when Trudeau is, and all these provincial governments, too, are waging war on those freedoms with things like mandates, school closures, continue lockdowns, Canada's had much worse lockdowns than we have. I mean, they've persisted well into the end of 2021. You know, that's not just an assault on some abstract liberty or freedom. Like, 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.

Now, you do elaborate on that in your National Review piece. You say that the truckers themselves aren't anti-vax, but they're anti-mandate. Is that something that they're still really pushing hard on this, or has it kind of expanded past that? So it's because it's a decentralized protest, you're going to get all kinds of people, right? So to be totally clear and honest about what's happening here, like, of course, with all of these movements, when you're bringing in thousands and thousands of people, you get some wing nuts. I think I mentioned in my National Review piece. I was in a coffee shop the other day, and there's a woman earnestly telling a bunch of very skeptical-looking truckers about how Justin Trudeau is a Satan worshipper who drinks children's blood or something like that, right?

But that is, those people are few and far between. Like what the mainstream media coverage has been doing is going in there and finding the three, you know, people carrying like a Nazi flag or something. They found one person who is carrying a Nazi flag in the mass of thousands and thousands of people. And that's the story, right? Because that's what they want to depict it as. But anyone who actually spends time on the ground there in good faith realizes that that is not the ethos of this movement. The truckers are really there. because they're standing up for freedom and rights and consent and being able to live their life as they choose.

They're not anti-vaxxers. In fact, another thing that I mentioned in my National Review piece was that something you hear a lot from left-wing politicians like Trudeau is that 90% of Canadian truckers are vaccinated. And he is touting that number as if to say that the convoy is not representative of trucker opinion. But actually, it's the opposite, which means that, most of the truckers here are vaccinated. They're not anti-vaxxers. They are just really infuriated at the fact that Trudeau is trying to force them and their colleagues to be vaccinated. That's unacceptable to them. And that's why I think it's so noble that vaccinated and unvaccinated

Canadians are linking arms here to stand up for their rights. What has the response from the truckers been to Trudeau invoking the Emergencies Act? I mean, it's really hilarious. They're just, they just laugh at him. I mean, you know, I'm actually a little more worried about it than I think the guys on the ground are. I remember after he invoked, you know, the emergency order, I went out to talk to these guys and asked them, you know, are you worried? He seems like he's really going to start cracking down and they said, let him try. You know, everyone here is so determined to be here until every single pandemic mandate is lifted. There is just an absolute 100% confidence that there's nothing that Trudeau can do to get these guys out of there. And they're probably right. I mean, he can wage financial warfare on them, which could be effective, which is what he's doing now with freezing bank accounts and going after donors. But as far as actually trying to move in and physically remove these guys, it's next to impossible. I mean, I was talking to one of the truckers the other day, and he was pointing out that to actually get a bunch of 18 wheelers out of these relatively narrow streets by Parliament Hill, they would need heavy-duty military equipment that, first of all, local law enforcement doesn't have. but also the Canadian military probably doesn't have.

It's the kind of military equipment that the U.S. military has, so they'd have to call in U.S. military to get these guys out. And you can imagine what that would look like as far as a public relations special. So as long as they can keep managing to keep the funding rolling in, which is the real threat to what they're doing, you know, the threat of the sort of idle saber-rattling of cops coming in and moving these guys out, I think, is probably not going to materialize. Knock on wood.

As we've been watching this protest unfold, there have been some fascinating moments of Canadians coming together to support these truckers. One of them that comes to mind for me is when there was the ban on providing supplies to the truckers and there was this imagery of Canadians walking across the streets with all these gas cans, bringing them to the truckers to keep them supported. Have you been around for any of those moments? And what was the mood like during those moments? So I haven't been around for the big moments where they're moving in the fuel. but I have been around for various sort of small showings of solidarity. You know, it's interesting. Ottawa is a city, it's the capital, and like America,

the sort of geographic divide between rural and urban also breaks down ideological lines. So it's a very blue, or I guess blue is their conservative party. So it's a very left-wing liberal city, which means that you do have a lot of local residents who are really upset about the truckers and, you know, think they're sort of all far-right conspiracy theorists, and you've seen some smaller counter-protests pop up.

There's a left-wing counter-protest where they blockaded the blockade for a day on Sunday. But they're not really making a dent. And part of why they're not making a dent is because even though a lot of the native population in Ottawa isn't on the trucker's side, you have people streaming in from across Canada who are on their side, who are bringing them everything they have. They're sending money if they can't get there or they're coming in to help out if they can get there. And that kind of support is also shared on the ground by a lot of, very quietly by a lot of the working class cops. One of the reasons that you have seen the cops sort of be really reluctant to enforce a lot of the orders they're getting about confiscating fuel and not letting fuel through is because they're sort of quietly on,

I don't want to get the truckers in trouble by saying this, but something that it's very clear if you spend time here is they're quietly on the trucker's side because they're working class. blue-collar guys too. And these guys are fighting for them. And they have a lot more solidarity with the guys on the ground than they do with the chief law enforcement officers who are lined with Trudeau, who are telling them to go in and get these guys. You mentioned in your piece, and you mentioned a little bit earlier in this interview, that there's a strong religious component to this protest. Could you expand maybe on how that's playing out?

Yeah, so that's one of the really interesting, more recent developments. I mean, the convoy descended on Ottawa January 28th, and it started as this core group of truckers. But since then, because of the momentum, it's expanded to become this anti-mandate pro-freedom protest that is drawn people from across Canada. And one of the main constituencies who aren't truckers who have come in to help out and aid and really sort of provide a lot of the legwork for building this up is Christian groups. And it's not even, I mean, I was talking to some of the guys, it's not even Christian groups. I mean, a lot of the guys were telling me there's no sort of churches that are organizing this. It's just Christians. It's just sort of individual Christian Canadian patriots who saw what these guys are doing and felt like they needed to be there, felt like they were called to be there. So there's this thing that I reported on called the Jericho March that they're doing at 9 a.m. every single morning and 7 a.m. on Thursdays, which is when they do a lap around Parliament Hill.

On Thursdays, when at 7 a.m., they do 7 laps. And what that refers to, anyone who's sort of familiar with the Bible knows the story of Jericho and marching around. around and God bringing down the walls when they blew a horn. So they're bringing these horns with them and they're marching around Parliament Hill and they're praying the whole time, they're singing hymns. You know, this Christian ethos that has been injected into the convoy has taken on this really powerful sort of 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 on to 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 out of worship service there. There are people sort of hugging each other spontaneously. I've been hugged by strangers, you know, 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, you know, acting in good faith. and it has imbued this with a sense of spiritual purpose as well as its initial sort of political aims. The jubilant atmosphere that you're describing is so diametrically opposed to what the corporate media has been reporting on this. Are there any other instances where you can say, hey, you're telling me it's this way, but my experiences on the ground are showing me that it's the complete opposite?

that? The more sort of easy answer question to answer would be what am I seeing that is being reported honestly by the media? Because pretty much every aspect of it is being represented dishonestly. But again, you know, I think just the general tone that the media is taking, if you read any of the media coverage, you'd think that this was a hotbed of frothing at the mouth right-wing extremism with a bunch of violent radicals at the helm, which it could not be further from the truth. I mean, I think it's not hyperbolic, you just call that lying, because it's just not what's happening here. And a lot of what you've seen in the media coverage is they bring in these so-called experts,

you know, national security experts or extremism experts, you know, kind of like the Canadian version of what we have here with like the Southern Poverty Law Center, where they're just left-wing activists who are brought in, who haven't actually spent any time on the ground, a lot of them aren't even in Ottawa, to talk in the abstract about how they found one Twitter post from someone who's at the convoy that said, something racist and you know that's proof that really this is galvanizing the far right or something like that i mean it's all just nonsense and the truckers are actually taking it in stride i find that i'm more upset about it than they are there the atmosphere here is so positive that there's they sort of just

brush it off they just smile and and sort of take it in stride i'm you know in my hotel room reading media coverage and getting you know my blood's boiling and getting really frustrated about it but the guys out here one of the really one of their great strengths is uh the positive and being able to sort of brush off all the threats and the saber rattling and the dishonest coverage. One final question for you. As you mentioned, your blood is boiling in your hotel room, but it certainly doesn't seem like the weather is boiling out there.

It looks like it's real cold. Do you think that the truckers are going to be able to staying out in the cold and push through this? Or do you think that maybe this is going to dissipate soon? Yeah, I don't think, at least as far as the cold goes, these guys are Canadian through and through, you know. So my sort of fair American disposition has not necessarily fared well in the negative six weather out here in Ottawa, but these guys, this is their life. This is what they've been doing.

They're sleeping in their trucks, and they're perfectly happy to do so. So the cold isn't an issue at all, and one thing that they're saying is that depending how much longer this goes on for, it's going to get warmer and warmer. And as it gets warmer and warmer, that actually gives it momentum in and of itself. because, you know, on weekends, particularly when thousands of people flock in, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it really takes on this feeling of being sort of a, like a music festival. I mean, there's parties, everyone is out there dancing. And when that becomes even more attractive as the weather gets more tolerable, so the cold isn't going to stop them. The thing that would stop them would be if Trudeau and the federal government working with these big corporations and payment processors and banks was actually able to just cut off their, their, their, um, their supply of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of, of That's the really worrying thing for me because obviously if they do that and Trudeau is smart enough to know that that's what they need to target, that could really cripple these guys. But until they managed to do that, I think these guys are here to stay. Thank you so much. That was Nate Hockman, an ISI fellow at National Review, currently on the ground in Ottawa, Canada covering the trucker protests.

Nate, I really appreciate your time. Yeah, thanks for having you guys. And that'll do it for today's bonus episode. Thanks so much for listening to the Daily Signal podcast. You can find us on Google Play, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and IHeartRadio. If you haven't already, please review and leave a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts and encourage others to subscribe. Thanks so much for listening, and we're back with you all tomorrow. The Daily Signal podcast is brought to you by more than half a million members of the Heritage Foundation.

It is executive produced by Virginia Allen and Kate Trinko, sound designed by Lauren Evans, Mark Geinney, and John Pop. For more information, please visit DailySignal.com. Thank you.