They came. They idled. They left. What have convoy protesters been doing since they went home?

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One interesting thing about the convoy for Lee Bates and Sandy Williams and Luke Kendze and a lot of others once they got back home from Ottawa is that they remembered it as a revolution and a revelation – and not just in the religious sense, though that was true as well. Now that the pandemic has killed 15 million people worldwide, now that CSIS has revealed how alarmed it was (and is) about the northward drift of “ideologically motivated violent extremism” during February’s occupation of Ottawa, now that support for the convoy may be a requirement to lead the Conservative Party, it might help to know what stuck with the people who descended on Canada’s capital. Are Lee and Luke and Sandy permanent converts to the populist cause? What did they take away from Ottawa, beyond memories of barbecues and bouncy castles?

The three returning warriors are at this moment sitting out a blizzard in the Roadking Truck Stop on Barlow Trail, in the tangled southeast quadrant of Calgary, one of the staging points where the convoy took shape at the end of January. It is the first week of March. Lee and Luke got home a few days ago from their month in Ottawa. Sandy is still on his way, due to arrive in Slave Lake, in northern Alberta, tonight.

The Roadking dining room is across a passageway from the Roadking slot-machine room. The dining room is Irish-stew brown. Three pieces of fried chicken and gravy go for $13.99. It is also some kind of magnet, pulling convoy memories out of the lads one last time before they reshoulder the yoke of their daily lives. The convoy kicked off as a Western Canadian anti-Trudeau protest (the brainchild of James Bauder, a born-again Calgary conservative and conspiracy theorist); evolved into an anti-vaccine-mandate march; then hyper-morphed again into a propaganda-fest for a groaning board of interest groups: right-wing populists and proto-fascists, born-again anti-vaxxers and libertarian anti-communists, Indigenous protesters and family folk, eco-warriors and dope smokers, Proud Boys and anarchists, not to mention thousands of others just happy to be able to party again without being shamed into wearing a mask. Lee and Luke and Sandy figure they were a part of history.

In fact, history is another reason they are here at the Roadking: to talk to Monique Young, a 41-year-old real-estate agent from Thunder Bay, who hopped in her four-wheeler to follow the convoy to Ottawa, and is now compiling an oral history of the trek, Journey to Freedom. The convoy is one of the highlights of their lives: their Selma, their Woodstock, their Women’s March, their Jan. 6.

You possibly disagree. You may be one of the majority of Canadians who overwhelmingly supported vaccine mandates and mask-wearing, who objected to the protesters’ demands to a) end all pandemic restrictions and b) dissolve the federal government. You might be part of the roughly 70 per cent of the country that disagreed with the convoyistas’ law-breaking, horn-blasting, flag-flaunting tactics and thought they were – to quote a common description on Twitter: ”a bunch of yahoos.”

But this story is not about you, my privileged, sanctimonious, laptop-wielding friend. This story is about a handful of Them, the Outcast Others, once they got back home, and how their strange, daring, ridiculous, polarizing and hugely successful convoy looks to them in repose. They hijacked the national conversation for three weeks, hoping to change how we think and talk, and therefore who we are and how we live.

Did it work? They seem as surprised as the rest of us.

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Lee and Sandy didn’t know each other before they parked their vehicles at Albert and Kent streets in Ottawa, a few blocks south of Parliament Hill. There they created a community of their own. That’s always fun. The co-operation and the camping and the shared mission, plus having to get along flank-to-shank in a tight space, made them feel they were comrades, in it together.

The men loved their campout. “Why was it called an occupation?” Lee will say. “I have no idea. We were peaceful. We shut our horns off at seven o’clock at night. We were respectful. The streets were cleaner than they had ever been. Of course, you’re always going to piss somebody off. That’s fine: We, as citizens of this country, have the right to protest, to move freely and to assemble. And that was taken away from us.” The idea of civil society as a contradictory truce of compromises seems to upset him. He wants something clearer. “This has been happening since the inception of capitalism and the central bank system: They’ve created these divisions. Down at Kent and Albert, we didn’t have those divisions. People realized that colour, race, creed, political views, whatever, it didn’t matter, we’re all just one under God. Then your perspective starts to change, and you become enlightened to the fact that we’ve been lied to.” The litany of lies is long: The mainstream media and the MK Ultra LSD experiments the CIA conducted on unsuspecting subjects in the late 1950s are just the top of the list.

Three weeks later, as “the beatdown” began, the three men hied out of Ottawa together. They pulled over in Kenora to visit vets at the local Legion. (Lee also had a bad tooth extracted.) Their ebbing convoy idled again in Steinbach, Man., to attend the funeral of a convoy trucker who died two days after he got home from Ottawa (“pneumonia, not COVID,” Lee insists), and again in Winnipeg at the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, which Lee found hilarious. “You needed a mask to enter the human-rights museum, which I consider a violation of my human rights.”

Then they were home. It was hard to convey to their waiting loved ones the force of the bond, the emancipating sense of mission, they felt in Ottawa. “It was a bumpy landing,” Sandy says, “to be sure.”

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Their reasons for going to Ottawa had almost nothing to do with trucker mandates. Sandy Williams lives in Slave Lake, a three-hour drive north of Edmonton, where he has at various points run a grass-fed cattle operation, a hydro-excavation trucking business, a gravel supply yard and a construction company with his father and brothers since he went to work after high school. He drove to Ottawa because he considers the Trudeau government “corrupt.” He’s a fan of The Creature of Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve, which has been described as ripping the cover off “the grand illusion called money … the most blatant scam of all history …you’ll never trust a politician again, or a banker.” Sandy has two sons, Kayden, 15, and Blake, 13, with him in his rig. His wife home-schools their four children, so missing class hasn’t been a problem. He’s 45 now: The convoy woke him up politically, made him feel less isolated up in Slave Lake. He’ll be back in Calgary in two weeks to join the Alberta Prosperity Project, which believes “there’s no deal to be had for Alberta within Confederation.” They’re not separatists. “Their hope is for each province to stand up independently, but collectively.” The movement has about 1,500 supporters so far.

Lee’s 45, too. He and his father farm nearly 8,000 organic acres near Stettler, Alta., two and a half hours northeast of Calgary. He also runs his fertilizer business and a grain brokerage and a land development operation, and recently bought an adventure sporting-goods store in Stettler. He’s shaped like a fridge and has a flattop haircut and a small soul patch and a deep Vaderish voice and a smoker’s cough that sounds like a cold starter kicking over. Lee was one of the first people to get interested in the convoy at the end of December. “I’ve never protested anything before,” he admits. Like Sandy and Luke, he didn’t decide to make the trip until a few days before the truckers headed out. “Everybody that was on that trip didn’t know they were going until they left,” Sandy says. “And people don’t do that, not in the heart of winter when it’s 30 below and you’ve got business going on.” That was another convergent detail that made them all think they were supposed to be there.

Lee joined to expose “the coercion and corruption and collusion of the federal government.” But he especially wanted “to shed light on the Wold Economic Forum,” the Geneva-based Davos darling that touts stakeholder capitalism so corporations can partner with governments to make more efficient global decisions. Mark Carney (Bank of Canada, Bank of England) and Chrystia Freeland (Deputy Prime Minister, Finance Minister) and Yo-Yo Ma (cellist) and Larry Fink (CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment fund) are some of its trustees. Lee believes the forum is a front for global elites to reverse overpopulation by decimating fertility rates, hence the vaccines. He figures 70 per cent of Justin Trudeau’s cabinet are compromised by the forum and that Conservative Party leadership front-runner Pierre Poilievre is too. “They’re promoting a new world order,” he tells me moments after we meet. Lee has a lot of dark, semi-exhausting theories, but he’s a generous, energetic, often funny guy.

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Luke’s the youngest, 33, and the least intellectually adamant of the three, a tall rail of a man with a dark beard, who lives on his family’s 1,800-acre farm near Didsbury, Alta., 90 kilometres north of Calgary, where he runs a busy agricultural and heavy duty mechanical repair shop. When Sandy’s truck broke down on the way to Ottawa, Luke fixed it. Luke likes to lean his elbows across the table to talk. His bugbear is that “Justin Trudeau wants to shut down independent media.” He means Bill C-11, the Online Streaming Act. The federal government wants streaming companies such as Netflix and Facebook to pay more to Canadian media producers. The right-wing media outlets Luke ingests, among others, claim the bill is a form of online censorship.

Meanwhile, they all lament the carbon tax, the rising price of homes and gas and everything else, the disappearance of the middle class and the federal government’s unacknowledged surveillance of Canadians’ phones to track the spread of COVID-19 (albeit without identifying details). They are especially peeved that Mr. Trudeau – ”he’s supposed to work for us” – wouldn’t talk to the protesters in Ottawa, wouldn’t acknowledge their claim to importance. “We drove across the country for something,” Sandy says. “And they refused to meet with us.”

Oh, and they despise the mainstream media. “The mainstream media are lying about everything,” someone says. “There’s people all across the country that have another point of view, but it’s quashed.” By “mainstream media” they seem to mean CBC and CTV, because the two national newscasts homed in on a swastika flag in Ottawa – coverage that, they insist, branded all convoyistas as fascists. Unfair! But they are only too happy to repeat the falsehood, retweeted by mainstream Fox News to 1.3 million viewers, that “women were being trampled by horses” – something that never happened.

Where do they get their news instead? Like a surging number of convoy supporters, the trio are drawn to TikTok (roughly a billion users, compared with Twitter’s 300-odd-million), which they believe to be free of government funding and influence. Luke consults the Western Standard and Rebel News (Ezra Levant’s Canadian equivalent of right-wing Breitbart News), but thinks “the truth lies in between them all.”

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Lee’s go-tos include The Epoch Times and Rumble. The latter – started by Canadian Chris Pavlovski – is a right-wing twin of YouTube, headquartered in Florida.

Rumble attracts 44 million visitors a month and is already an important artery in the right-wing circulatory system. It also traffics in bald-faced lies, which is nothing new in politics. A recent story “confirmed” that Justin Trudeau owns shares in Acuitas Therapeutics, a British Columbia company that creates part of the biological delivery system for Pfizer’s COVID vaccine. There is no evidence – and the story doesn’t provide any – that Mr. Trudeau has or ever had a stake in Acuitas.

That hasn’t weakened Lee Bates’s conviction that the Prime Minister owns a stake, because, you know, it could be true. And for Lee and Sandy and Monique and Luke, what could be true seems to be more persuasive than what is provable. (Speculation is non-deniable.) “Tell me this,” Lee says of Mr. Trudeau: “Why did he buy 10 times more vax than there is population?” Because the federal government wanted to secure an adequate supply of vaccine when the global panic for it resembled The Hunger Games? No: because “he’s stealing our money.” This refusal to acknowledge another possible explanation becomes frustrating, then sad: In the vast spectrum of human motive, Lee and his cohort see only conspiracy. Eventually this exhausts you. Maybe that is their intention. They like to state their countervailing positions, but seem less interested in a dialogue (for all they claim to have wanted one with Mr. Trudeau in Ottawa). What they want is to be acknowledged as having acceptable public opinions. They want to be taken seriously. They want to be inside the fence.

But their disdain for the mainstream media is also personal. They’re being persecuted, they claim, for having unconventional views.

“You’re allowed to have different views,” Luke insists.

At first I think he means you’re allowed to hold an opinion that dissents from the mainstream, which is true. But, over time, I realize they mean something very different: that no one who holds a dissenting opinion, even one more or less devoid of facts or evidence, should be chastised publicly for stating it publicly. “Not being judged,” is how Sandy puts it.

“We can agree to disagree,” Sandy adds, “but mutual respect is necessary. Freedom to have your own opinion.”

This is a new kind of thinking, conceived in social media, gestated via pandemic, given life by the convoy. Speaking out is suddenly equal in weight to having something legitimate to say. Social media has helped eliminate the distinction between a lie and a fact: They both appear in the same venues, on equal footing.

There’s no widely convincing theory as to why Lee and his like resist facts and proven science, why they’re susceptible to seeing conspiracies everywhere. Are they brilliant or have they been brainwashed? Has a life of unrelenting hard work made them resentful of the status quo? Winston Churchill is said to have thought, ”the best argument against democracy is a five minute conversation with the average voter.” There are theologians who believe there is a resistant nook in every one of us that seeks to be free and somehow transcendent, to be forgiven for what we are, despite what we are.

Lee and Luke and Sandy and Monique aren’t disruptive trolls inventing misinformation. They’re simply consumers and repeaters of it. But even just repeating the anti-Narrative narrative has a cost. By joining the convoy, they automatically (unfairly, maybe, but automatically nonetheless) became associated with its professed central premise: that loss of life due to the spread of COVID-19 (15 million dead) is no more important than a temporary loss of personal autonomy (I don’t want to wear a mask or get a jab). That was the calculus that offended a majority of Canadians. Lee and Luke and Sandy and Monique underestimated the reputational cost of their so-called freedom of choice. Is it any wonder, then, that to avoid the ethical darkness of their stance, they have convinced themselves that the government and the medical system are lying about the severity of the disease? Psychologists sometimes call that projection. The greater the denial, the more intransigent the defence.

Whatever else you say about the convoy, it was an expression of widespread social and political discontent. That impression set in the moment Sandy started driving in northern Alberta and saw people waving flags from overpasses. He saw them on his way home, too. “When you hit the road and you see all these people, the heart really filled up with pride and emotion,” Sandy said. “We started as a convoy, and it turned into the world’s biggest parade.”

But the convoy in retrospect is like an object in a distorting mirror: It looks bigger than it actually was. The lads all believe 1.5 million people showed up in Ottawa on a given Saturday while they were there. The official police estimate pegged the crowd at 20,000. Still, Sandy says, “the movement’s all over the world –and started by a bunch of hillbillies in Alberta.”

The convoy wasn’t just organized, it was ordained. An Almighty presence was there all along. They all felt it. “We should have had a fatality along the way,” Sandy says of the long drive across the country. “But it was just unbelievable, a divine movement, by design, not by accident.”

Luke hadn’t even planned on joining: He had engine jobs stacked up at home in Alberta. Then one night he went to bed at 10 p.m. and woke up at 1 a.m. and said to his wife, Tania, “I have to go to Ottawa.”

“I know you do,” she said.

As soon as he arrived on the outskirts of the capital, he was put to work sourcing supplies the protesters needed downtown. Right away, strange and wondrous things started happening. One of the organizers downtown would call Luke on his cell and declare a desperate need for some commodity useful to protesters: Shovels, say. Or salt, for the icy roads during the minus-30 days. And like that, somehow, the shovels or the salt would show up, donated by the gross and by the hundredweight. “We had no idea where it was coming from,” Luke said. “And this happened over and over again.” Bug wash? Abracadabra! Bug wash, donated anonymously. Outdoor toilets? Here, suddenly and inexplicably, are your porta-potties. Boxes of oranges? Fresh underwear? Socks? Check, check, check. “It was huge at the end of it. The Creator had his hands all over it. We had more talks about the divine than I’ve ever had in my life. You just felt at peace while you were doing it.” To Luke, it was the Biblical parable of the loaves and the fishes, the feeding of the five thousand, all over again.

So who was organizing it?

Luke pointed to the sky. “Right there.”

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Lee and I left the truck stop in Calgary, climbed into his vehicle and headed for his spread outside Stettler, east of Red Deer. It was a three-hour drive, what with the snow. There was a tin of chew in the console next to the driver’s seat, some toothpicks, a blue and a green scented pine-tree freshener hanging from the mirror. It was the cab of someone who drives a lot, which is to say no different from any rural truck in Alberta.

On the way out of Calgary, we stopped at Hockey Life so Lee could have a smoke and pick up a pair of skates for Mackenzie, his 13-year-old daughter. She and her 11-year-old sister, Sierra, are good hockey players. Lee’s one of their coaches. He was a first-rate hockey player himself and at 17, was offered an open-ended tryout with the Hartford Whalers. He turned it down. “I was sick of hockey by then.” He had an anguished youth. His father lost the farm for a while when Lee was 13. Lee was shot in the shoulder by a cousin, dropped out of high school, had a daughter at 22, fought for custody and won. He then put himself through university, earned a science degree, became a geologist. He’s been working ever since. “That’s all we know how to do around here,” he once told me. He may be 45, but he has a grandchild.

We stopped again at Outlaw Meats, deep in Hutterite country, to pick up 306 pounds of freshly butchered ($1 a pound) wild elk Lee and his father had shot. The staff were full of news of the appeal of Tamara Lich, one of the convoy organizers. They were also completely convinced Fidel Castro is Justin Trudeau’s father.

As the hours rolled by in the truck, Lee talked. He talked a lot. He said he’d been going down the “rabbit hole” of the internet for a decade. He meant he’d been reading alternative, non-mainstream sources. He had some wild opinions, even by convoy standards. He was convinced the vaccines will affect our major organs; that Bill Gates supports eugenics, the selective breeding of human beings. (There is no evidence of this, but it’s a popular line of elided logic on right-wing conspiracy websites: Bill Gates’s father was on the board of Planned Parenthood, which was founded by feminist Margaret Sanger, who was tangentially endorsed in the 1920s by eugenicists, ergo Bill Gates is into eugenics.) “You wonder,” Lee said in the truck, “are they actually conducting mass genocide on the world population? Is that what we’re witnessing?” Then we moved on to the Clintons and funnelling kids out of Haiti for sex trafficking. “It sounds so outlandish,” Lee said. “But it’s actually happening.”

Sometimes Lee’s theories got scary wild. Maybe it was the snowstorm, the way the headlights made a tunnel through the blizzard and the night. These theories were “off the record” because they were about “the stuff I don’t know 100 per cent fact.” He is semi-convinced, for instance, that Google calls its search engine Chrome and its navigational software Adrena – I think I have this right – to dogwhistle the word adrenachrome. Adrenachrome is oxidized human adrenaline. According to Lee (off the record) and QAnon (very much on the record), adrenachrome is being harvested from the pineal glands of kidnapped children to confer everlasting life to Satanists, whose numbers include the Silicon Valley tech kings and, of course, Justin Trudeau. Lee is by no means the only person rolling this confection around in his mind. According to Wired, the theory enjoys “robust hidden virality” in less visited corners of the internet. Then again, anti-Semitic blood-drinking tropes have been with us since at least the Middle Ages. Fear lives forever.

As soon as we pulled up in front of his spread half an hour outside Stettler, Lee transformed into the most normal father and husband in the world. He introduced me to his wife, Melanie, and his younger daughter, Sierra, who were headed off to hockey. Both girls look just like their mother. He showed me the stuffed and mounted wildebeests and African buffalo and eland and kudu he and his father shot on safari in Africa, massive heads that gaze down from Lee’s living room with what I thought was an unapproving stare. (We’re all suggestible about something.) He wouldn’t show me his guns; he has “about 30.” Then we stepped outside and he gave me a shy but quietly proud tour of his new cold-storage shed where he parks his gigantic 620-horsepower tractor and his combine and his semi-trailer and his sixty-foot-long air drill ($245,000 used). He spoke of hefty bank debts and explained how he hopes to pay them off by trading equities, brokering grain and flipping reconditioned farmland. (He managed two flips last year and has plans for five more this year.) He’s watching crypto stocks as well. He and his father stopped raising cattle years ago, but they’re planting canola, wheat, barley, yellow peas and flax this spring. He hopes to be worth $20-million in 10 years. In two weeks, he’s going on a bear hunt.

These were the details of his real life, far from the frothy dystopia of convoy camping conspiracies in Ottawa. He showed me the corner of the shed where he has installed a climbing wall for the girls and where he keeps his mementoes from the convoy, including two Canadian flags he flew in Ottawa. He plans to donate one to the rec centre and the other to the school in Stettler.

We walked back to the house and down into the basement rec room, where a long bank of green leather recliners had been set up in a big curve in front of a TV so huge it looked like a deep-space radar dish – a great spot to watch a hockey game together.

Mackenzie was sitting in one of the recliners, texting on her phone. Lee looked at Mackenzie and nodded. “She’ll probably go try out for the Red Deer team,” he said. “She was offered a spot this year.” Both daughters play league hockey, but the Red Deer squad is the equivalent of Double A. The game’s faster and more competitive and less friendly.

“Maybe,” Mackenzie said, not looking up from her phone. She’s slim for a defender, but her skating and puck skills are super-strong, and she likes the rough action in front of the net.

“You will,” Lee said.

“No, maybe.” It was the first and only time all day I’d heard anyone openly defy something Lee had said.

The next morning, I took a cab to Didsbury, three hours away, for $375. (There wasn’t a car to rent in all of Alberta.) The sun had come out again and the wide foothill sky seemed to be filled with nothing but time. In the course of the three-hour drive – shorter than the one Lee makes to take his girls to their hockey games in Lethbridge or Medicine Hat, and then redrives to get them home – I met four people: the waitress at the Ramada Hotel, who brought me fresh milk in the Breakfast Room; the cab driver; a clerk in a gas station who sold me a honey bun; and Luke, when I got to Didsbury. In downtown Toronto, where I live, I meet four people in five minutes walking two blocks to the dry cleaner – and at least two of them, the jackass in the bike lane and the tool in the dry cleaner who thinks he’s the only customer in the universe, will somehow challenge the size and shape of my existence. That happens all day long. I think it’s harder in the city, where you come face to face with other human beings all the time, to believe whatever your compulsions want to believe.

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Luke was up to his arms in the hood of a truck in his shop at Kendze Mechanical Services, the agricultural and heavy-duty mechanical repair shop he operates in Didsbury. The shop’s in the big shed next to his house, which is across the road and down a field from his parents’ home, which is next to both his brother’s home and the original farmstead where his grandmother lives. He does not consider this arrangement claustrophobic, the way some people might. Luke had been in the shop non-stop since he got back from Ottawa. Tania, his wife, had just returned with Ava, their six-year-old, from a birthday mani-pedi in town when Beau and Dax, their boys, arrived with Tania’s parents, who’d driven over from their own house 75 kilometres to the east. Tania thought Luke seemed different when he got back from Ottawa – clearer, or calmer, or something. “I’ve learned about God all my life,” he said to her the day he got home. “But in Ottawa I got to know Him.”

Luke met Tania 12 years ago at the Calgary Stampede. But then Tania went away to Bible College in London, and he didn’t see her for two years. Luke wove his own stint at Capernwray Harbour Bible College on Thetis Island, B.C., into his mechanic’s apprenticeship at John Deere. They married 10 years ago, when Luke came back to farm with his father and brother and started his engine business. He’s been working hard, “sleeping four hours a night,” ever since. He pays himself a salary of $80,000 a year.

The engine business has six employees, down three thanks to the pandemic. The shop is packed fender to hood with massive semi cabs and lifted engines, drive trains and cylinder heads, all laid out like the brains of a robot. The shop’s crowded because jobs are backed up because he can’t get parts. The green tractor by the window has been here seven months; that’s a $65,000 rebuild. A semi in the yard has been waiting three weeks for cams and cylinder heads; that’s a $25,000 job. The delays have in turn created a labyrinth of interim financings and partial and extended payments. Prepandemic, Luke made two calls to get a good price on a part; these days it’s 15 to 20 calls, “and I don’t care about the price.” He roams wrecking yards to find engine control units, which is why the wrecking-yard owners – normally the most laid-back people in the auto supply chain-of-being – are taking stress leaves from being on the phone so much. Luke’s gross margin is down 35 per cent in the interim. A bottle of Freon to charge a truck’s air-conditioning system used to cost less than $300. It now runs $780. A box of mechanics’ gloves used to go for $6; now they’re $30. But at least now you can actually find mechanics’ gloves.

But for all the loneliness and isolation the lockdowns created, for all the outrage Lee experienced watching “the beatdown” and hearing the mainstream media portray the protesters as a solid mass of sameness, the pandemic had a silver lining: It forced him to slow down. “It was a bit of a lifestyle change,” he admits. “So I could be with my kids.”

Not that the pandemic made even that easy. Luke likes to swim with his kids, the way Lee likes to play hockey with his girls, but hasn’t been able to for two years, because he isn’t vaccinated. He couldn’t stage his company’s annual barbecue. “I know multiple people who lost their jobs because they wouldn’t get jabbed,” he said – which seemed unfair to him, because both vaxxed and unvaxxed were getting sick. His entire family contracted COVID.

He said all this sitting in the kitchen, which is also part of the dining room and the playroom, under one central atrium. It’s a popular design in rural Alberta. The walls were grey and a vase of pink tulips stood out prettily on the central kitchen island. Tania was offering around a bottle of caramel-flavoured creamer for our coffees.

Luke was scanning his phone, which he has been paying less attention to since the convoy. In Ottawa, he posted daily to Facebook and lots of people liked his entries. But Instagram and TikTok and Facebook make him wary, too. “I find it to be an alternate reality,” he said. “It’s not the same as talking face to face. The thing about social media is, how do you know what’s true? That’s why it’s important to know actual people.” Tania has sworn off social media entirely. “I ended up being a lot less overworked,” she said, and laughed. “There’s so much negativity. And so much influence.”

“When it’s at your fingertips,” Luke said, across the island in the kitchen, “it’s dangerous.”

Before the convoy, Luke had never been east of the border between Saskatchewan and Manitoba. He’d never been to the place the greedy, godless, liberal, Eastern bastards lived. The long drive east into terra incognita astounded him: It was spectacular. His favourite stretch was the spin through Algoma in northern Ontario. Now he wants to go back, to drive all the way to the Maritimes, and Tania wants to go with him. Her father’s from Cornerbrook, N.L., after all, but somehow this country is still of sufficiently vast scale that she has never visited. “I’ve heard Montreal and Quebec are beautiful,” she said. So much yearning, so easily satisfied, still to be satisfied. It seemed like a yearning that would be easy to harness.

“Do you remember that old idea someone in Ottawa had,” I said suddenly, “to put Parliament on a train for a summer, and have it hold its sessions in different places across the country?”

They did not. It was an idea from the late 1970s, maybe, before they were born.

“What a great idea,” Luke said.

Now they want to see France and Italy, too. Before the convoy, Luke had no desire to travel or do much of anything except hunker down and work. “Before I went to Ontario” – he enunciated the word delicately, as if it were some kind of exotic spiritual practice – ”if things got bad, the separatism thing in Alberta, I might have gone for that. But when you drive across Canada and there’s that moral kindness and that moral support, your viewpoint changes.” Whatever else the convoy did, it managed to expand Luke’s world. It put him among strangers, but they wanted him to be there.

After the convoys: More from The Globe and Mail

The Decibel

Commentary

John Boyko: Recapturing the flag: Canada is still recovering from a moment of darkness in Ottawa

Andrew Coyne: Vaccine refusal? Blockades? Bitcoin? What does any of this have to do with conservatism?

Zarqa Nawaz: The Ottawa convoy, and now Putin, are making Muslims look good

Editorial: The subject of the Rouleau inquiry? It’s the Trudeau government, not the truckers

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