(LifeSiteNews) – The public broadcasting of the Emergencies Act inquiry has brought the Freedom Convoy to the forefront of national and international news again. For the past few weeks we have witnessed the examination and cross-examination of participants, officials, and witnesses to the event with an uncanny amount of transparency, thanks to the solemn nature of the investigation.
In January and February it was all media narrative and spin-doctoring of sound bites and video clips, but now it is raw unedited footage of the players involved.
So, what have we seen?
Well, we had one woman say that “phantom honking” was a sort of syndrome that lasted after the trucks stopped honking. One wonders why truckers don’t suffer from phantom honking syndrome considering they are around honking trucks every day.
And we have seen the testimony of various police officials who have sounded as might be expected, which is to say largely emotionless and without offering much of an opinion.
Today, however, begins the examination of the prime organizers of the Freedom Convoy, including Chris Barber and Tamara Lich.
Barber’s testimony and responses to examination are in total contrast to how the legacy media has portrayed the truckers since the winter.
He has been soft-spoken, humble, and as personable as one could imagine. This morning, he shared a story that brought back some teary-eyed memories from those halcyon days as we watched the Chariots of Patriotism inch closer to Ottawa on snowy highways.
What an amazing time the Convoy was.
Such wonderful people involved pic.twitter.com/5OiqlgnKxC
— Kennedy Hall (@kennedyhall) November 1, 2022
He relayed the story of how a group of Christians from Manitoba went literally hundreds of kilometres out of their way to ensure that thousands of Convoy participants had a hot meal in the freezing cold.
While working with the RCMP, Barber and Lich had organized a location to park for the night, but the convoy had grown to be too big for the original spot. So, for safety reasons, they worked with the RCMP and drove further into Ontario and parked in a better spot. A group of Canadians – Hutterites to be exact – drove from the Winnipeg area to Kenora, Ontario, a 230km distance, to feed thousands of people they had never met in the heart of winter in one of the most freezing and snowy parts of Canada.
As Barber recalled, “It was cold as can be, and they had the barbecues out and the slow cookers. It was quite amazing.”
I remember being at a similar event when I reported for LifeSite from the London, Ontario convoy departure location. It was almost impossible to go 5 minutes without someone offering me hot coffee and donuts, without having someone to embrace, and without sharing a tear or two with patriots of all walks of life who loved their nation more than any globalist media shill will ever understand.
At that event I met a trucker who was vaccinated but was joining the convoy because he wanted to support the conscience rights of his colleagues. Funnily enough, he was not native to Canada but loved this country and did not want to see its values destroyed.
He was kind enough to allow my children to sit in his truck and honk the horn. As you can imagine, their little hearts soared with the sound of that thing.
I met another man with a small baby who had been severely injured after his first jab, and he wanted truckers to have the right to say no to something that had almost killed him.
No one cared if someone else wanted to take a different medicine; they just wanted Canada to be the tolerant place it had always been.
Speaking of tolerance, despite the messaging that the convoy was some sort of white-nationalist or far-right fascist thing, organizer Chris Barber admitted in part of his testimony that he had in the past posted things that could be considered racist, but the Convoy itself had changed him.
“It changed me…. It humbled me.”
Convoy organizer Chris Barber says the “love” he witnessed during the convoy changed him and how he communicates. pic.twitter.com/PF15HtAFE6
— Andrew Lawton (@AndrewLawton) November 1, 2022
All of this is to say that, through all the noise, through all the spin-campaigns from Big Government and Big Media, we Canadians – and even people abroad – need to remember what heroes these people were and still are.
My colleague Dorothy Cummings McLean relayed to me recently that she shed tears of joy and gratitude as she watched the Convoy; border mandates had stopped her from returning to Canada and visiting her family, as she feared she would not be allowed to board a plane to her home in the UK to reunite with her cancer-survivor husband.
This nation has its problems, but the truckers are not one of them.
Hopefully, as it is now manifestly clear that Trudeau’s government went too far, we can watch what the convoy leaders have to say and remember why we love this country so.
