Three key ‘Freedom Convoy’ organizers pull back the curtain on the hopes, tension

and infighting that marked the occupation

The movement that became an unprecedented disruption for Canada’s capital faced
turbulence and disagreement from the inside, too

By Alex McKeen
Vancouver Bureau
Sat., March 26, 2022
The Toronto Star

Brigitte Belton was never in any of the headlines and, when the “Freedom Convoy”
press conferences were given, she flanked the speakers instead of taking the mic
herself.

But in what may come as just one little-known fact of many in the story of the
convoy’s origins, there’s no doubt the 52-year-old from Wallaceburg, Ont., was
among the first to get the headline-grabbing protest rolling — and that she helped
keep it going.

She says it amazes her how the movement she started talking about to the selfie
camera in the cab of her truck eventually spread to a surge of sentiment that has
seemingly come to define populism in Canada today.

“I have never in my life protested ever,” Belton told the Star. “I never thought
there was something so serious that I needed to risk my job. Risk my criminal
record.”

After the convoy, Belton was not arrested or charged. She remains defiant and sees
the work of the convoy as unfinished.

“Am I going to go back to Ottawa? I can’t say I won’t at this point,” she says.

The whole movement raised and lost more than $10 million twice, pulled together a
cacophony of populist sentiment from across the country, and subjected the nation’s
capital to blaring truck horns and street occupations for a month before Prime
Minister Justin Trudeau evoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in its
history. Police arrested 230 people and laid 118 charges related to the event.

By the time bank accounts were frozen and police swept in to clear Ottawa streets
of the remaining protesters and vehicles, observers all over the country were left
wondering how much of it even had to do with its initial, advertised mission —
getting rid of vaccine mandates for truckers and everyone else — and how much of it
had become a meeting ground for all manner of quasi-organized anti-government
agitating.

The convoy was surely about different things to different people. Three of its
organizers, who all came to the movement with different backgrounds and goals,
agreed to speak to the Star.

They are Belton, who along with Chris Barber is the reason the convoy was a trucker
protest to begin with; James Bauder, who stage-managed the routes across Canada and
sees the whole thing as part of his “Canada Unity” movement; and Tom Marazzo, a
former military man who tried to take a leadership role when things started to get
heated.

Together, they painted an image of a movement marked by massive organizational

challenges and a load of internal strife. The organizers agreed that they wanted
COVID-19 mandates, including the requirement that truckers be vaccinated to cross
the border into Canada, gone for good. But beyond that, ideas clashed and tensions
flared within the inner apparatus of the convoy about what they were there for and
how far they should go to accomplish their aims.

They came together, but never fully coalesced, and while most plan to continue the
work of the convoy they have disparate views of what that work is and how to pursue
it.

Chapter one: The truckers

Behind the scenes, Belton quietly embodied some of the movement’s roots while
watching as it mushroomed into a populist coalition far beyond her — or anyone’s —
single grasp. She represented, at least in its earliest days, everything the convoy
was said to stand for.

Belton is a trucker. She’s unvaccinated and unable to do her regular work crossing
the U.S. border because of it. Through the pandemic and before it, she has been no
fan of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and lays blame for the mandates on him more
than any other politician. She remained out of the spotlight while disparate groups
with different agendas hitched their trucks, RVs and tractors to the convoy
coalition.

Even though she calls the attempts to keep so many disparate groups on the same
page “one of the most bizarre things I’ve ever experienced in my life,” Belton said
she’s proud of what she views as the convoy’s best parts.

“The best thing that came out from Ottawa was I was no longer alone,” she said.
“I’ve been told I’m a horrible person for not taking a vaccine that I didn’t
believe in. I saw that I wasn’t alone in that.”

Although Belton was not clearly a spokesperson for the movement, every other
organizer who spoke to the Star recognized that she and Barber together formed the
core of the committee organizing the actual truckers who came to protest.

(The Star reached out to Barber, who was arrested at the Ottawa protests and
released on bail the next day. He faces four charges related to the protests,
including counselling mischief and to obstruct police. Barber declined to comment
for this story, citing court conditions for his bail, but he suggested the Star
reach Belton.)

Here’s the untold story of how the beginning of the convoy came about, from
Belton’s perspective.

When she complained about the impending trucker vaccine mandate to the couple of
hundred people she usually reached on her TikTok account in January, a sympathetic
trucker from Swift Current, Sask., named Chris Barber messaged her and they formed
a friendship.

With Belton’s story and Barber’s rising TikTok fame (he made deadpan, self-
described “trolling” TikToks about trucking life and his dislike of Trudeau’s
government), the pair started sharing the idea of a truck convoy to protest
mandates. On Jan. 1, Belton started sharing what looked like a standard-sized
poster reading “CONVOY TO END MANDATES” on her own TikTok, with Barber promoting
the idea, too. They wanted to target roads along the border with slow rolling
trucks, starting Jan. 23.

As that idea gained attention on TikTok, others took notice.

“When we started this, you have to remember, it was Chris and myself,” Belton said.
“Then there was Canada Unity that came in, then there was Pat King that came in
with his friends. And, you know, I mean before you know it there are a thousand
groups within the one group.”

Belton said she left Ottawa before the police enforcement happened to avoid arrest
and take care of her dog, who was with her. She said her bank accounts were also
not frozen. Belton credits the fact that police didn’t seem interested in her due
to the quiet role she played relative to another female organizer: fundraiser and
spokesperson Tamara Lich.

“It seems like because of all the stuff that surrounded Tamara, I was kind of put
in the background, which was OK,” Belton said. “Because being in the background, I
got work done. I got stuff done. And I didn’t have as much notoriety or fame as she
did.”

Belton’s main role, she said, was organizing truckers themselves, helping them to
get supplies and answering their calls at any time of day.

One of the earliest meetings showcasing what would become the mixed bag of convoy
leaders came on Jan. 13, on a livestream hosted by King, a right-wing social media
personality interested in conspiracy theories and anti-government protesting.

The meeting opened with a video of a long-haired man in jeans and a T-shirt singing
a kind of love song to freedom on the beach, and had a handful of people present —
including King, Barber, Belton and James Bauder, who had been involved in the 2019
United We Roll convoy for oil and gas before going on to start his own group.

All talked about the convoy as a nascent but invigorating idea, joking with one
another and discussing plans for more than an hour.

It was a show of cohesion that wouldn’t last.

Chapter two: The convoy

James Bauder would become one of the most recognizable figures in the convoy, not
because he was at the centre of press conferences (he is quick to point out that he
never was), but because he brought organizational help — things such as maps,
schedules and chains of communication — to a motley group.

It was Bauder’s website, Canada Unity, that became the key organizational tool for
those wanting to join the convoy, laying out route maps and displaying the phone
numbers for convoy contacts from across the country. Bauder called it “Operation
Bearhug” and reused organizational tactics of United We Roll and other smaller
convoys.

Bauder himself remained relatively quiet throughout the month that trucks and other
protesters stayed parked in Ottawa. But he is also the author of one of the
infamous documents associated with the protest: the Canada Unity Memorandum of
Understanding.

He had attempted to deliver the MOU to Senate officials in December of 2021 during
an earlier anti-restrictions convoy and later posted the document to his website —
the same website where all the route maps and convoy contacts were posted.

Written in legalese and bizarrely addressed to the Senate and Governor General —
but not the government of Canada — the MOU was seen by many as evidence of the
convoy’s nefarious intentions. Bauder, who has called COVID-19 restrictions a
“crime against humanity” and “treason” on his website and social media, says he
believed the pseudolegal document could be used as a direct appeal to Canada’s
upper house and head of state.

The document, which asks that those two bodies intervene to end federal COVID-19
mandates and, failing that, trigger a referendum to launch a new election, sounded
not just outlandish (the Governor General and Senate do not have this power) but
potentially insurrectionist, prompting some to equate the document with a written
intention by Canada Unity — and therefore the convoy as a whole — to overthrow the
government.

Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s national security adviser, repeated that claim, saying there
was “no doubt” protesters wanted to overthrow the government.

In an interview with the Star, Bauder said that the MOU was broadly misinterpreted
and that he never wrote about or held intentions to try to overthrow the
government. Still, he says, he stands by the document and doesn’t regret releasing
it. He talks about the MOU like a kind of jacked-up petition that, had it been
signed by the five million Canadians he was aiming for, would have been impossible
for the government to ignore. He said the first priority of the document was just
to apply pressure to lift the mandates, and believes that it could have been used
to compel the Governor General to trigger a referendum on mandates if the
government refused to lift them (the document got about 350,000 signatures before
he took it down, according to the counter on Bauder’s website).

What Bauder does regret, he says, are some of the alliances he made in the early
days of the convoy when he got on phone calls like the one on Jan. 13 with King,
Barber and Belton.

“Lessons learned,” he said. “Be careful who you partner with.”

“I have learned so much and been so deceived. With respect to receiving those phone
calls, I wish that I could have gone back and said no.”

From the earliest days of the convoy, Bauder’s aims were related but separate from
those of the Freedom Convoy 2022 organizers, according to both himself and the
other organizers. Even though his website was instrumental in organizing convoy
routes, Bauder says he was never a part of the Freedom Convoy 2022, which later
formalized itself as a not-for-profit organization with the help of lawyer Keith
Wilson.

Instead, Bauder’s project was (and still is) Operation Bearhug, which he sees as an
ongoing movement using tactics such as slow-roll convoys, rallies and “mask-free
shopping” events in an attempt to rally support against restrictions and for his
MOU, which he still believes could be a tool to pressure the government into ending
the last of the mandates.

He’s currently working on a version of Operation Bearhug in British Columbia, with

a smaller convoy of vehicles camping on a private property in Delta, near
Vancouver. They’re planning a variety of protests as well as lawsuits, and dreaming
of eventually leveraging the movement into its own political party.

Police in Delta said they haven’t had any issues with the group gathering in B.C.
so far.

Here’s where Bauder’s and Belton’s stories diverge.

From Bauder’s point of view, the Ottawa convoy was a part of his Operation Bearhug,
with Belton and Barber signing onto his pre-existing plan. He said he felt that way
until some truckers got to Ottawa a day earlier than scheduled, began occupying the
streets of Ottawa under the encouragement of people like Pat King, who proposed
blockades in front of politicians’ residences and said on a livestream: “This is so
much fun, we have all of Ottawa gridlocked.”

Bauder said that’s when he decided to “step back” from the core organizing
committee, while Belton and Barber say he was always at arm’s length from their
efforts.

The money raised and who had control over it was another source of contention. The
$10 million raised first through GoFundMe and then through the Christian charity
site GiveSendGo was being managed by Tamara Lich under the direction of the Freedom
Convoy 2022 team: truckers such as Belton and Barber.

No one who spoke to the Star had any issues with Lich, who was described neutrally
as either the fundraiser or the accountant.

Every organizer reached also said that even though they were upset the money raised
didn’t go to protesters’ expenses, they’re glad the fundraising platforms
ultimately returned the money to donors instead of donating the funds somewhere
else.

But Bauder saw the fact that the fundraisers were under control of those other
leaders as evidence that his movement had been “co-opted,” perhaps for political
purposes. He disliked Lich’s affiliation with the Maverick Party, the western
separatist ideas of which he sees as antithetical to his “Canada Unity” movement.

He didn’t like that “Freedom Convoy 2022” seemed to be forming as a separate entity
from Operation Bearhug, his brainchild. Freedom Convoy seemed to Bauder to be
loosely affiliated with separatist parties, while he saw his whole effort as a
“unity” movement.

“It just disgusted me deeply inside to see egos, greed and politics jump in and co-
opt our movement,” Bauder said.

As for King, Bauder saw him initially as someone who could publicize what they were
doing, but that ultimately his livestreams encouraging protesters to stay on the
streets and occupy “did a lot of damage to the movement.”

It is clear that hard feelings remain about King’s style and approach to the
movement.

“We’re like, this is interesting stuff we were doing behind the scenes while
everybody’s making a fool of themselves with their live feeds and Pat King there,
eh,” Bauder said. “I tell you, personally, I think he should stay in jail.”

All the organizers eventually distanced themselves from King, with Lich being one
of the people clarifying that the Freedom Convoy fundraiser on GoFundMe had nothing
to do with King.

King was arrested as part of the Ottawa protests and remains in jail facing 10
charges, including mischief, counselling mischief and intimidation. The Star has
reached out to a lawyer who has spoken for King in some of his court appearances
for comment but did not hear back.

Belton denied Bauder’s implication that she and Barber were “co-opting” the
movement for political purposes.

“The convoy was not there for political purposes. I said it in interviews, that if
people were coming for political purposes, they needed to go home,” Belton said.
“We were not there as a political party. We were there to have the mandates
dropped.”

And she downplayed Bauder’s role.

“He’s a nice man … but he needs to feel that he is the leader of the pack,” she
said. “Which is not the truth.”

Chapter three: The occupation

None of the organizers the Star spoke to on or off the record denied the reality
that the convoy, whatever it started out as, became illegal when it parked on
Ottawa’s streets and occupied them.

They did offer some explanations or deferrals of responsibility. Belton said they
wanted the trucks to keep moving or park only in front of Parliament. Bauder said
he never wanted protesters to stay parked in town at all.

But the person who became responsible for sorting all of this out was a newer
addition to the organizational crew. Neither an original “Freedom Convoy 2022”
organizer, nor a Canada Unity organizer, retired Canadian Forces captain Tom
Marazzo says he came onto the convoy scene as an independent volunteer and ended up
taking on “the biggest leadership challenge of my entire life.”

“I wasn’t signing people’s paycheques. Nobody had to listen to anything that I had
to say,” Marazzo told the Star shortly after the protest ended.

In the end, sometimes they did and sometimes they didn’t.

Marazzo appeared suddenly on the convoy scene on Feb. 7 as the movement’s new
spokesperson, when he gave an impassioned speech about how he’d meet with any
elected official from any party, since Trudeau had repeatedly refused a meeting
(some critics interpreted this as an expression of support by Marazzo for Bauder’s
MOU, which Marazzo says he has never read).

Marazzo’s role with the convoy, as he describes it, was to speak on behalf of the
group of organizers, and to try to work at a high level with police and public
officials to keep the protest running smoothly. He was recognized by other convoy
organizers for his affiliation with the Police on Guard group, a collection of
retired and current police and military members who opposed vaccine mandates and
other COVID-19 restrictions. He says his military experience is why he was asked to
take on a leadership role.

It was a balancing act. Marazzo admits there were illegal occupations happening,
but also asserts they had a right to keep protesting and wanted to make sure that
could happen. Marazzo said he quickly realized how many different organizations had
attached themselves to the convoy and the challenge he would have not only to
simplify the message, but to try to direct traffic when so many of the people who
had shown up had their own pre-existing affiliations.

“I remember being in a meeting with various members of different organizations and

I said, ‘Listen, we are not Canada Unity, we’re not Taking Back our Freedoms, we
are not part of any of the social media darlings that are going around and saying
all these things,’” he said. “’We are here for the Freedom Convoy 2022. We’re here
to end the mandates.’”

Marazzo said that, to Bauder’s credit, Canada Unity did seem to go off and do
“their own thing,” reducing the noise within the core of central organizers.

Getting everyone on the same page didn’t always work, especially on the roads
themselves, where Marazzo said he knew loads of people were parked illegally and
the top priority for a while became making sure emergency lanes remained open
everywhere.

“There were a lot of people there that, you know, were adamant that they weren’t
going to go home until these federal mandates were lifted. They didn’t want to use
violence, but they’re like: ‘No, I’m doing this. Maybe I’m illegally parked, fine.
I’ll accept that,’” he said. “There was a whole group of truckers that showed up
the day before the main convoy arrived and they took positions all around that
corner. And so this was a movement of several different people from all across
Canada that came together and basically found a parking spot in Ottawa.”

Belton arrived early in Ottawa, on the Friday, as did King. A pickup truck also
drove through Ottawa on that day waving a confederate flag which was quickly
denounced by Barber, who led the group of trucks that arrived Saturday, at the
time.

Marazzo described working with Barber, Belton and Lich, as well as other former
service members such as Danny Bulford most closely.

Jason LaFace, an Ontario organizer who spoke with the Star after the convoy and had
volunteered with Canada Unity, said that at some point in Ottawa COVID-19 went
around. LaFace said he was tested and tested positive.

“When I was in Ottawa, there’s a lot of us who believe that we got sprayed on the
first weekend we were there because there was some type of aerosol in the air,” he
said, without elaborating.

COVID-19 does spread through aerosols, but it is transmitted from aerosols given
off by people when they talk, eat and breathe.

The organizer, who initially worked with Bauder, also said that regardless of its
intentions, the MOU became too much of a distraction.

“To be honest with you, I would have never even brought (the MOU) to light. I would
have just went down there protested, protested properly,” LaFace said.

Marazzo described one circumstance in which he said he worked with officials from
the city of Ottawa on a plan to move trucks away from the downtown. News of that
deal was leaked Feb. 13 and it never came to fruition. Marazzo says it might have,
if only he had time to explain it fully to protesters before they read about it
online and dug their heels in.

A representative for the mayor’s office wouldn’t confirm that Marazzo was the
person in meetings with city officials.

As it happened, the occupation continued and police cleared the protests Feb. 18.
Marazzo was there, watching, and sarcastically cheering, he said, the officers
doing the enforcing, but clearing out of the way himself before he was arrested. He
had hoped the police were on the side of the convoy and wouldn’t make them go home
in this way.

But when he got home, he was grateful to be there, but furious at his bank for
freezing his accounts because of his connection to the protests.

“I don’t really know what is next. I’ll be involved in the convoy until I needed
and, if I’m not needed, I’ll go back to my life,” he told the Star shortly after
the arrests happened.
On Monday, he announced he would be running for Derek Sloan’s new populist party,
the Ontario Party, in the next provincial election.

LaFace said he’s running with the Ontario Party, too, and that he wants to tackle
the homelessness crisis.

“I’m going to run for provincial (office) here in Ontario because we need change,”
he said. “We should be able to go into government and resolve problems together.
You know, and get them done instead of dragging them on for decades.”

Belton expressed no political aspirations, but said she’s still using her voice to
argue against mandates, especially since she was not arrested and does not face
bail conditions as others do.

Bauder has already moved his attention toward British Columbia, organizing convoys
(that won’t be occupations, he says) in Vancouver and Victoria while vaccine
passports remain in place.

And as pandemic restrictions lift across the country, the organizers of the convoy
are trying to make sense of what the alliances they formed during those weeks of
sustained protest now mean.

For Belton, she’s still waiting to be allowed to cross the border and figures that,
one way or another, she’ll be protesting until the mandate gets lifted.

“If you’re vaccinated, you can cross both ways,” she said. “I’m still angry. And
until it gets fixed, I have no choice. I have to stand up.”

Alex McKeen is a Vancouver-based reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter:
@alex_mckeen