I had already photographed the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa the weekend prior, but I happened to be in Quebec City for the Carnaval de Quebec. It seems my crappy journalism luck couldn’t shake off disruptions regardless of where I went.
Quebec City’s new mayor, Bruno Marchand, said that he wouldn’t let protestors interfere with the daily life of locals. To his credit, it worked out pretty well. He was brave to put his reputation on the line to make that promise given that Ottawa had been occupied for a week by then. Traffic was slow, but I managed to get in and out of the area around the National Assembly by car in about 20 minutes.
Now, I have to say that the Freedom Convoy isn’t actually a “convoy.” It’s more like a network of organizers in each province who coordinate occupations than a rolling convoy that travelled all the way across one of the largest countries in the world. Why do I say this?
For starters, if it was one unified convoy, which by definition has to be a group of vehicles traveling together, they wouldn’t be able to be in two places at once. I drove on the Quebec autoroute 40 on the way up and Ontario highway 417 on the way down, traffic was light. It was definitely not one 400-kilometre long line of trucks. Second, most of the vehicles in the Ottawa protest had Ontario plates and most of the vehicles in the Quebec City protest had Quebec plates. If it really were a convoy, there would be more cars and trucks from Alberta, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba.
The two related but separate protests were just as loud and just as profane. But I think the one in Quebec had more expressive creativity and less racial diversity. But the latter is probably due to demographic differences.
