The Freedom Convoy

The Inside Story of Three Weeks That Shook the World

By: Andrew Lawton

Narrated by: Frank Block

Length: 4 hrs and 55 mins

Publisher's summary

In January 2022, a small group of Canadian truckers fed up with nearly two years of COVID restrictions and a new vaccine mandate for cross-border essential workers decided to take their frustrations directly to the nation's capital. The Freedom Convoy quickly took on a life of its own as hundreds of trucks and thousands of protesters made the journey to Parliament Hill. For the next three weeks, the trucker convoy led a protest unlike any other, complete with bouncy castles, pig roasts, and late-night dance parties. But to the media and government, it was a hate-filled insurrection requiring the unprecedented invocation of the federal Emergencies Act.

In this timely and provocative book, author Andrew Lawton combines his own on-the-ground reporting and countless hours of interviews with the Freedom Convoy's organizers and volunteers to tell, for the first time, the whole story of the convoy.

©2022 Andrew Lawton (P)2022 Sutherland House Books

great read

andrew did a fine job here of securing an accurate narrative of the events into the historical record.

while his bias is clear and unmasked, I feel like I could give this book to someone with a cbc-level of understanding of the events, and if they had a reasonably open mind they would be able to be informed and challenged by the tale.

Important record of a major COVIDcrisis milestone

A chronological account of the Canadian Freedom Truckers’ Convoy Protest against the COVID vaccine mandate. This book does an excellent job of untangling both the events and the actors. Whether you followed the events of the convoy live while it was ongoing or found out second or third-hand and want to know more, it’s worth picking up. It’s also a genuinely encouraging read about what ordinary people can accomplish when they’ve had enough and refuse to comply. Given the publication date, it couldn’t cover the ongoing legal abuses by the Canadian government against the organizers, which deserve their own epilogue section in a second edition.

The last 20% of the book, detailing how the protest was broken up and the streets were cleared, was stressful and frustrating to read because of how easy it was to visualize (a testament to the writing), and how dirty the Trudeau regime actually fought, and how the peaceful protestors exercising basic inalienable individual rights were ultimately left with few options, of which absorbing the abuses of law enforcement officers who were “just following orders” was their least-bad alternative from a pragmatic perspective. That made the conclusion summarizing events and putting them into perspective and highlighting the protest’s many successes even more important.