A lawyer who was on the ground in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy to represent the main organizers and who was involved in negotiations with authorities says that truckers never intended to stay that long but did so due to popular support.
“This is a very important point, and I don’t know that it’s come out yet, is a lot of people who were there, the truckers, never planned to stay that long,” attorney Keith Wilson told the Public Order Emergency Commission on Wednesday.
“But the Canadians they met along the way, and the stories and the heartache that they heard, and the trust and plea that they heard from those people, many of the truckers I talked to felt this obligation to stay as long as they could.”
Wilson gave an example of that support by explaining how the main organizer Tamara Lich would walk down the street and be stopped by people who wanted to speak with her.
“When we were moving from one location to another, it was remarkable the people that would come up and stop her and politely ask if they could have a hug and the tears would just start to flow,” said Wilson.
“And I would hear these these incredibly tragic stories that these people would share, and the grown men, about how they‘d lost children to suicide, they’d lost their businesses, they'd lost their marriage, and it was ... seeing what Tamara was doing that had given them hope.”
The truck convoys started arriving in Ottawa on Jan. 28 and settled in the downtown core. The protest was dispersed after the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14.
Wilson spoke of the plan he was involved in with the city to move the trucks and said it was also intended that some trucks would leave Ottawa to go to staging areas in rural areas outside the city.
He said this was the “more dominant theme of the plan.”
Wilson said truckers needed “a way to leave gracefully and respectfully.”
“One of the things we recognized was that if 75 percent of the vehicles were going to be given an opportunity to leave and go either to Embrun or Arnprior that some would actually use it as an opportunity to go home and do so respectfully.”
Eventually some trucks were moved on to Wellington as part of the deal made with the city on Feb. 12 and 13, and others left Ottawa, but it could not completely bear out due to a number of obstacles.
Testimonies at the commission so far indicate there was a breakdown in communication among police, which was coupled with the Emergencies Act being invoked on Feb. 14 and the Ottawa police chief being replaced on Feb. 15.
