Now that some time has passed and half of us have gotten over the PTSD of being kept up every night for a month by random fireworks, assholes honking their horns 24/7 and random screams of “Freedom” in your face from breath that smelled of whisky and donuts; and the other half have completely forgotten whatever narrative it was they had been reading online that made them think their worlds were collapsing under the tightly fisted clench of a drama teacher named Justin I find I can think back on the Freedom Convoy and give it some thought.

I have to be honest, right up front. I was not a fan. Their mission was insane, their motives were internet horse crap and generally being around them was about as comfortable as flirting with a fella in an Alabama 1% biker bar while in drag.

So what was it?

A completely astroturfed social movement? Sure.

Canada’s Tea Party Moment (in that the only thing they accomplished was the destruction of the moderate Conservative wing of the party for a more radical right?) Sure. In fact, it was the deluxe version. The Tea Party took years to effect that change in America. They had the game down here.

An insane pain in the ass for a guy who both worked and lived downtown at the time? Absolutely.

For my money, there were four groups of people in the Convoy.

1. The actual truckers who thought they were trying to create change. Not all of them were sure of what change they were trying to create, but that’s okay. It was their jobs they thought were under threat and I had to agree with one fact more than any other: shutting down all the rest stations along the highways must have made 20 hours on the road pure torture.

2. A radical right wing blogosphere group that hijacked the movement to overthrow the sitting Government and maybe kick the crap out of the Prime Minister while they were at it? Yea. These guys were the cause of all the problems. Not a thing they were fighting for existed outside their internet fever dreams but, when in the bubble of gas, it’s hard not to get high and to look good to the people in the bubble with you.

3. The usful idiots who treated it as a kind of Winterlude meets Canada Day. A Family Outing! A thing for the kids! The city had been locked down for a long time. No Winterludes. No Canada Days. So a lot of people went out in daylight and treated the Convoy as some sort of spontaneous winter fair. All those quotes about it being Full of love and A great coalition of Canadian minds you heard on the evening news came from this group.

4. And the hundreds if not thousands of 18-29 year olds who realized the police weren’t doing shit about any of it and turned the downtown core of Ottawa into a month long outdoor party. Most of the property damage, fires, drunken disorderlies and general unpleseantness of the whole thing came from this group.

I can’t speak to anyone else’s experiences with the Freedom Convoy and I have no particular desire to get into the right and wrong of the movement or the message because that ground has been covered hundreds if not thousands of times. I can only speak to my own experiences; and they were not good. I dread to think what it would have been like if I weren’t six feet tall and two hundred and thirty pounds of Irish growls. I was male, white and had a beard. If I dressed in my usual street clothes I was greeted as a brother. If I wore my nice clothes… well… these are the photos I managed to take before some of the lovely Freedom loving folk destroyed one of my cameras and took some swings at me thinking I was a government narc or something.

If you hear horns in the back of your head, close the page. And sorry for the PTSD. To this day I still grind my teeth when I see a Canada flag on a pickup truck. Nothing personal if you’re patriotic but they did a really good job of subborning some of our symbols and making most of us who live in Ottawa really grow to hate our own flag.

And that’s fairly unforgiveable some say.