Andrew Lawton’s The Freedom Convoy—released June 24, 2022—already topped Amazon Canada’s politics charts by June 13–14, debunking media lies like arson at the Terry Fox statue and violent conspiracy claims. He details how police blockades forced trucks onto residential streets, honking was settled via lawsuit, and community efforts (e.g., feeding homeless with pig roasts) contrasted with chaotic left-wing protests like CHAZ/CHOP. Tamara Leach’s restrictive bail and Marco Mendicino’s disputed Emergencies Act invocation reveal a clash between state narratives and protesters’ accounts, raising civil liberties concerns. Sheila Gunn-Reid highlights legal shifts, including Pastor Art Poloski’s Christmas event ruling, while praising Rebel News intern Celine Gallus’s growth amid protest coverage, signaling hope for younger generations’ engagement. [Automatically generated summary]
Andrew Lawton's new book on the convoy is already a number one bestseller on amazon.ca and it's not even released yet.
I'm Sheila Gunn-Reed, and you're watching The Gunn Show.
The book by True North's senior journalist called The Freedom Convoy, the inside story of three weeks that shook the world, is set to be released on June 24, 2022.
And as of June 13th, 2022, it had already hit the top spot on Amazon Canada's international politics category.
And by the morning of June 14th, it was also the number one in the politics and government category.
The book is described this way.
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.
The book is based on Andrew's firsthand experience and his interviews with those involved in the convoy.
And he joins me tonight to discuss the book, why he wrote it, and if he thinks the Liberals will pay any price for what they did to Canadians.
So joining me now from his studio is Andrew Lawton.
He's a senior journalist at True North.
And this is our second run through because the first time I didn't hit record, but I wanted to have Andrew on the show today because he's got a great new book out.
And I don't even know if it's great because I haven't been able to read it yet.
Nobody else has either because it's a number one bestseller and it's not even been released yet.
We're recording this on June 13th and the book doesn't even come out till the 24th.
So 11 days.
And yet, Andrew's new book, The Freedom Convoy, The Inside Story of Three Weeks That Shook the World is already at number one in international politics on Amazon.ca.
First of all, Andrew, congratulations, but what inspired you to write this book?
Thank you, Sheila.
Well, I was in Ottawa when the convoy got to Ottawa and I was there covering it for True North.
And it was, again, there was just this momentous episode of Canadian politics and Canadian history that I knew was not just going to be a flash in the pan.
And as we know, it ended up lasting three weeks.
And I was there the last weekend as well or the last few days.
And I saw just how wrong the mainstream media coverage of the convoy had been and continued to be for the entirety of it.
And I was seeing how much complexity there was to this operation.
It wasn't just the trucks and the horns and the bouncy castles, but there was such a sophistication almost to the operation with these command centers and these organizers and the fundraising campaigns and the cryptocurrency and all of this.
And I kept saying to a friend of mine, you know, I can't wait to read the book on this.
I can't wait to read the book on this.
And then I realized, well, who better to write it than me?
I was there.
I had talked to a lot of the organizers and I just decided, you know, I'm going to buckle down and make this my spring project.
And because it is time sensitive, I made sure to work night and day to finish it very quickly.
But I wanted to get it out to really start correcting the record as we knew there was going to be this review into the Emergencies Act.
The media was going to continue to report on the trials of the organizers.
And I thought it was important to really put on the record what this thing actually was.
Yeah.
And there's a real thirst, obviously, based on the fact that you're a number one bestseller on a book that hasn't even been released yet, which is kind of unheard of in Canada.
And I'll say that as someone who has had three bestsellers, a pre-release hitting number one in politics in Canada, I think that's pretty indicative of the thirst from the Canadian public to get the full story from somebody they trust and they know you and they trust you.
They saw your journalism from on the ground.
But you've talked about the things that the mainstream media has gotten wrong.
True North has been incredible at just documenting where the media gets things wrong, you know, with regard to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and the lady that was dancing on there.
And then she wasn't even associated with the convoy.
Tell us some of the things that the mainstream media really got wrong, but so many of them are still part of the accepted public narrative of this stuff.
Yeah, you mentioned a few.
And that first weekend, there was just a bombardment of them: the Terry Fox statue, the apartment arson, the stealing food from the homeless, all of these things that were just patently untrue.
And still, even months later, would get cited by politicians when they're debating this.
So a lot of stuff like that is, I think, very much what the book is seeking to correct.
But some of the bigger picture things as well.
One notable example of this is the money.
And this was an issue, not just that the media got wrong, but also the government and the police.
They tended to think that money was the lifeblood of the convoy, and that if they could just freeze the money and go after the money, that the convoy itself would dissipate.
And that wasn't the case at all.
In fact, anytime police or government tried to go after something that the convoy had, whether it was fuel or cash, they would get more the next day because people would just bring more.
They'd show up with more fuel.
They'd show up with more money.
And I think that the one overarching theme that really emerged from the book is that it was the people and the passion that fueled the convoy, not anything that the government could take away.
Now, that was one of the things that I, one of my big takeaways from the convoy, was this was so indicative of the difference between people on the left and people on the right.
In that, and I think it goes to why we believe in smaller government, us people over on the right, is because so often we see these far left-wing radical protests.
They just do an occupation and then it descends into drug abuse, violence, and madness and squalor.
But with the convoy, when left alone, without government intervention, a community grew.
The streets were being cleaned.
They had community events.
The homeless were being fed.
And for me, I saw this and I thought, yeah, that's why people like me believe in smaller government is because the convoy demonstrated what happens when there's no overarching government and people are just left alone.
They do form their own community.
Is that what you saw?
That was my viewpoint on the outside looking in: they created a community in three weeks on the streets of Ottawa.
Yeah, it was interesting.
I mean, we all saw, I think it was last summer when they founded Chaz or CHOP or whatever it was, that the left-wing autonomous zone in Portland or something like that.
Or Seattle.
They're all in the background or Seattle.
But yeah, I mean, when conservatives do that, it ends up being a more desirable place than the city around it.
Whereas when the liberals do it, it ends up becoming this godforsaken hellhole that no one in a million years would want to go into.
And that was the thing here.
Like they had arranged their own garbage disposal routine where, you know, they would bring the, they would collect all the garbage from inside their little perimeter and then they'd drive it to the outskirts and then the Ottawa city police or the Ottawa City trash collection people could pick it up from there.
They were doing their own snow removal in this little section.
So it is interesting that they did take care.
And even those stories we talked about earlier, like the War Memorial and the Terry Fox statue, when these stories emerged, the convoy then all of a sudden started protecting these places.
They had a team cleaning up and dusting off the Terry Fox statue.
They had a bunch of veterans that were shoveling the snow and making sure that the area around the war memorial was always tidy.
And I remember the first thing I saw when I got there was how all of the garbage cans were full and there was no garbage anywhere else, which is not even like Canada Day in Ottawa, where there's just trash everywhere at the end of it.
Yeah, it was, I just remember those images of Chaz and they couldn't keep the plants alive in their community garbage.
And when you look at the convoy, they're feeding everybody, including the homeless.
And I thought, you know, that's exactly exactly the reason.
They had a pig roast.
They were frying chicken wings.
They had hot dog, all of it, anything you wanted.
They had.
Now, I want to ask you, because we hear so much about how the people of Ottawa hated having the convoy there.
I know there are some of those people out there, but I don't think they were really the overwhelming.
I don't think they were the mainstream or were they?
It's tough to say.
I mean, there were undeniably people whose lives were disrupted by this that lived in Ottawa, whether it was employees that worked at the Rideau Center, which closed down, or people who lived in some of the residential streets where the trucks had parks.
But one of the things that was interesting that I learned in writing this, because I did just hours and hours and hours of interviews with organizers and other people involved in this, was how the city and the convoy organizers were working very significantly to get the trucks off of the residential streets to downtown Ottawa or even outside the city.
And it was never the convoy's intention to go to these streets.
They ended up there because police had shut down access to downtown and there was no room to go.
So trucks just kind of said, well, you know, I can't go anywhere.
So let's just stop here.
And it was really an accidental protest in some of these areas.
So people on these streets were definitely disrupted, but the convoys and the truckers were trying to work with them and trying to mitigate that.
And people were affected by the honking, but that was a problem that was really dealt with very quickly by that class action.
And the one little bit from the book I'll give you that I found interesting, pretty much every organizer I spoke to was so grateful when the judge issued that injunction because they were fed up with the honking too.
Oh, no, I've attended some of these protests and you go home and you can still hear the honking.
Yeah, you bolt up at like three in the morning with because you heard like a phantom honk.
Yeah, that happened even that night.
The first night in Ottawa in the hotel, I like bolted up in the middle of the night and I was like, did I dream that or did I truck horn honk?
I still don't know.
Yeah, it's just a low, you know, like if you've been in the wave pool all day and you can sort of still feel the waves splashing on your face.
It's like that was the honking.
Now, I wanted to ask you, you talked to some of the protesters.
I'm assuming you probably talked to Tamara Lich.
I don't know because I haven't been able to read your book yet because it's 11 days till it's released.
Did you talk to Tamara Lich?
And if so, what was her experience?
Did she tell you about her experience on the inside of the prison system?
So I talked to a lot of organizers and volunteers, and some of them I spoke to before I even started writing the book.
And I had access to those interviews, and others I spoke to over the course of it.
And one thing I'll remind you is that there are a lot of people that I would love to speak to that I just couldn't legally speak to because of their bail conditions.
So I have had conversations with Tamara Leach.
She is in the book, but because of those bail conditions, I haven't actually been able to do like a formal sit-down with her since she was released from jail.
You know, and that's that's really been terrible.
Her bail conditions were recently just adjusted so that she can go to Ontario to deal with some family issues, but they are still treating her like she is a monster.
She cannot go anywhere near the downtown core in Ottawa because the judge said it might be too traumatic for people to see her little blonde face wandering around.
It would somehow bring back the phantom honks of yore.
Yeah, it's a bizarre thing.
And again, it speaks to one of the chapters is called dueling narratives because there really were throughout the course of the convoy these two vastly different stories that were emerging from the same set of facts.
You had Justin Trudeau in the mainstream media, this violent insurrection, the fringe minority.
And then you had the people that saw the bouncy castles and the pig roast and saw this, you know, tiny Metis grandmother that just united a nation behind her.
And it is interesting that this is apparently this fear-inducing, trauma-inducing figure in Canada now.
You know, I wanted to ask you about the title of your book because it's called The Inside Story of the Three Weeks That Shook the World.
I think it inspired people around the world.
Do you think the liberals fully understand how much they were harmed by their reaction to the convoy, internationally speaking?
You know, we saw members of the European Parliament speak out against Justin Trudeau, and he's used to being the darling of the international media.
Do you think they get how bad it looks on them?
I don't know because they have always been unrelenting in their vilification of the unvaccinated and of the protesters.
There was zero humility whatsoever from the liberals before, during, or I would say after.
But it was international and that's very deliberate, that idea of saying it shook the world.
And one of the points that I raised in the book is that I had never in a million years seen the term Canada-style protest appear in media coverage, but it was.
It was in the Associated Press, the New York Times, the UK Independent, because Canada had exported this, the truckers had exported this idea of using a convoy to protest.
There was a big convoy in the U.S. There was one in Europe to Brussels where the EU capitalist and all of this happened.
And I do think that, again, even if we didn't see immediate policy changes that you can attribute to the convoy, it very much inspired millions of people, not just in Canada, but around the world, most definitely.
Yeah, I think we're underselling it when you say we're not sure if we can attribute immediate policy changes.
Need For Swift Civil Liberties Protection00:07:01
I know once that convoy rolled into Ottawa city limits, Scott Moe in Saskatchewan was like, you know what?
We're done with the vaccine passport.
There were a lot of politicians.
Well, in Quebec, Quebec dropped the tax on the unvaccinated.
Yeah, a lot of politicians did not want to get convoyed themselves, I think.
Now, I also wanted to ask you about some of the things that have come out, I guess, likely since you wrote the book.
And that is just how much Marco Mendicino has been caught lying about the circumstances around the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
Said repeatedly that law enforcement asked him for this tool to, I guess, at the end of the day, charge Metis Grandmothers with mischief, as though that wasn't a tool under the law already.
Um, what do you think is going to come of that?
Is he going to face any sort of career ramifications?
Is he going to have to resign?
I mean, whether he faces any consequences for it, I don't know, but I I can tell you this is not a new phenomenon.
One of the most notable examples of Marco being Marco was when he got up and did a press conference to justify the emergencies act and said that there had been this violent conspiracy that had been uncovered of people in Ottawa, connected to the Gonvoy, that were going to do violent things.
And, to their credit, the reporters in that press conference asked him for details and it took them like six seven, eight tries and eventually he walked back this idea of a violent conspiracy to the idea that well, he saw some mean tweets and that was basically and you can watch that.
It was like five and a half minutes.
You can watch the claim just get walked back further and further and further before it's not even uh, you know recognizable to what he initially said so.
He has a tendency to do this and I don't know if it's that he's making stuff up or he's just the least prepared minister in the Trudeau cabinet, but either way, I don't have much confidence in his ability to oversee Canada's public safety and national security.
So I I think we're seeing a trend here where anything he says is just not something that can be trusted.
Well, and I don't want to tip my hand too much to what i've been working on lately, but I have a lot of the police communications with Mendicino's office where they were advising him that things were completely peaceful.
So when he was in the media saying that violent conspiracies were being uncovered, that was him reading his twitter account.
He wasn't getting that information from the police, but I do think it's interesting that the police didn't say anything at the time.
That I think might be the most annoying part of all of this to me is Mendocino was out there in the media at the time saying the police asked for this, and the only time we're hearing the police say no, we didn't is later on yeah, when they're under oath, right when they're under oath at the committee hearings, when Mendicino could have been proven to be a liar and we could have saved a lot of damage to civil liberties in this country if the police had just spoken up sooner.
Yeah, it's unfortunate.
I mean my book very much focuses on the convoy organizer side of the story, because that was the side of the story that was not being told through the media coverage.
But I did try to get Uh, the Ottawa police chief to comment.
I tried to get Peter Slowly, the deposed Ottawa police chief, to do an interview and I didn't have any luck with it, because I did feel that their side of this would be very fascinating, because I I think that even if we don't like how police ultimately took those powers at the end of this, I do think that police were oftentimes stuck in the middle of what the liberal government were trying to make a political fight rather than a policing fight.
And I mean Peter Slowly himself said this early on.
He said there's not a police solution we need here.
This is something in need of a political solution, and I think the liberals didn't want that.
The liberals wanted the police to be the ones that had to go in and get their hands dirty.
Now, I want to ask you, is this going to impact civil liberties for Canadians going forward?
Is this a one-of event?
Did we normalize having the banks seize your bank accounts and making protests illegal?
Or is the pendulum going to swing back the other way going forward?
I fear yes.
I think a lot will depend on the lawsuits that have been filed by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, by the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and the Alberta government has joined those challenges as well.
Because if there is just a significant and sweeping rebuke of the government through the courts, then there's no way they can justify using as thin as evidence as they did to justify this in the future.
I also think, though, that once you've popped that cork, you can't put it back in the bottle entirely.
And I fear that as we're seeing now, the fact that they could do this.
And one thing I would point out especially is without Parliament endorsing it, because you remember they revoked the emergency before the Senate had time to authorize it.
So technically, there has been no endorsement of this by anyone other than the Liberals.
And that in and of itself, I think, reveals a bit of an oversight in the legislation.
I know Leslie Lewis, the conservative leadership candidate, has said perhaps we need to look at having a vote within 24 hours rather than seven days.
I think that's the sort of discussion we need to be having about this act.
Yeah, I mean, I guess that goes to my next question is what is the solution to make sure that this never happens again?
Because the Emergencies Act was very clear that it's really only supposed to be invoked for 9-11 scale events, Pearl Harbor scale events, and not bouncy castles from people with whom you disagree politically.
And even that was written into the legislation, but that never, that didn't really seem to matter to the liberals at the end of the day.
So I guess is it Leslie Lewis's solution where there has to be a quicker examination of how this thing gets invoked so that it's not a week's worth of civil liberties carnage next time?
Yeah, I think that's one piece of it.
I mean, but at the same time, there might also be a bit of a Pyrrhic victory in that because the Liberals had a majority in the House of Commons and quite easily passed it through the House.
We don't know what would have happened in the Senate, but the ability for a majority government to rubber stamp it doesn't solve the problems just because they're doing it more quickly.
I do think that an expedited timeframe is one piece of it.
I would also suggest that another thing that could be done is reevaluating this idea of a public order emergency because the Emergencies Act has a bunch of different criteria.
Whereas before, under the War Measures Act, it was very clear.
You had to essentially be in a state of war.
And even with the FLQ crisis, it was controversial for Pierre Trudeau to invoke it.
So I think that we need to reevaluate these different categories in the Emergencies Act and see if maybe we need to go back to only having the extreme criterias with very strict basically preconditions.
Coming Soon: Pre-Order Link00:03:57
And those are the only way that you could invoke it.
Now, Andrew, I want to thank you so much for coming on the show today.
I always feel so much smarter after I'm done talking to you.
Is it because I'm like, I'm so dumb, you look smart by comparison?
No, no, I'm just soaking it all in.
It's like I'm drinking from a fire hose.
Now, I want to ask you, first of all, how can people get the book?
And let's keep it at the top of the bestseller list on Amazon for as long as possible.
I know that irks the people on the other side.
So let's do that for you, but also for spite, because I'm motivated for spite.
So how do people find the book?
Well, yeah, if you want to help with the Amazon rankings, you can go to Amazon and search for the Freedom Convoy, the inside story of three weeks that shook the world.
But also, I know not everyone likes Amazon.
You can also get it directly through my publisher at sutherlandhousebooks.com.
And hopefully, it will be in all of your local bookstores when it comes out on June 24th.
So if you want to give them a call and make sure they're carrying it, I know that would go a long way.
Oh, I can't wait.
I can't wait to see your book out in the wild.
I can't wait to see that.
Now, how else do people find this support or find and support the work that you do?
I know you have a sub stack.
You're also on True North.
So let us know.
Yeah, I'm like the Travelocity Gnome online sometimes.
I just pop up everywhere.
But if people want to follow my show and the work that my fantastic colleagues at True North do, you can head on over to tnc.news.
And I am at Andrew Lawton on Twitter.
Great.
Thanks, Andrew.
And thanks so much for coming on the show today.
Hey, anytime.
For those of you who want to purchase or rather pre-order Andrew Lawton's new book, I will include the Amazon link in the website words for the show today.
Now, this is the portion of the show where I welcome your viewer feedback and like the mainstream media.
We actually do want to hear from you.
We leave the comments open and I even give out my email address.
So if you want to send an email to me directly to read on the show, you can send it to me at sheila at rebelnews.com.
Just put gun show letters in the subject line so that I can easily search through and find them.
And I choose them in no particular order.
So today's letter is from Bruce Atchison.
And Bruce writes to me and says, hi, Sheila, greetings from Radway, where nothing happens.
That's not true.
Radway is a bustling berg north of Edmonton.
And you have a really great Army surplus store right downtown.
And I haven't been there in a while, but my kids are really into Airsoft lately.
And so they could use some Army surplus clothes.
Anyway, don't sell Radway short.
It's a great place.
Let's keep going.
Celine did a great job that Celine Gallus, whom I interviewed on the show last week when I was in Calgary with her, teaching her the ropes of court reporting as we were covering the trials and tribulations of Pastor Art Poloski, who was on trial in Calgary and continues to be on trial in Calgary for the crime of throwing a Christmas event wherein he fed the homeless some steak and gave them Christmas presents because at the time,
at least according to the Crown Prosecutor, gatherings were illegal.
Now, a recent ruling has determined that public gatherings, including protests, were not illegal at the time.
So now the Crown is arguing that this open-air soup kitchen Christmas party where everybody was invited to and nobody was turned away, that constituted a private Christian gathering.
It's quite a stretch, a real leap.
Don't hurt yourself stretching that hard crown prosecutor.
Anyway, Celine was learning the ropes of how to court report.
Young Rebels Learning the Ropes00:00:47
And we did a pretty extensive interview about, you know, what it's like to be a rebel, what it was like her first week here at Rebel News, wherein we stuck her in a rental car and sent her all the way to Ottawa from Calgary.
And then when she came back, she didn't even get to go home.
We sent her straight to Coots.
Anyway, we didn't break her.
And she's no longer an intern.
She's a valuable member of our team who's learning all different aspects of the business.
Bruce continues and says, thanks for interviewing her.
I admire her and the rest of the young rebels.
Yeah, the young rebels sure give me hope for the millennials and the Zoomers.
They're not all crazy, are they?
Well, everybody, that's the show for tonight.
Thank you so much for tuning in.
I'll see everybody back here in the same time, in the same place next week.