Police Violence vs Peaceful Demonstrators with Freedom Convoy in Ottawa | Jody Ledgerwood

Jody recounts her experiences during the 3 weeks of peaceful rallies and her experiences on the front lines at the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa on and after February 18, 2022.

On the perspective on the ground in Ottawa before Feb 18…

The Hamilton convoy and probably had about 200 to 500 trucks somewhere in that vicinity. Toronto was much larger. My understanding is it was several kilometers long. The numbers I heard was 140,000 trucks stayed. Before the emergency measures act and them cracking down with the police and kicking everybody out, there was somewhere between 150 and 300 trucks left. I would say last Saturday was our biggest and if I had to guess I'd say was in the millions, probably 2 million.

On when the jackboots arrived…

Tuesday, Wednesday things were normal. You could feel a little bit of heaviness in the air cause we weren't really sure. We know because our numbers always drop midweek that if anything was going to happen, it was probably going to happen Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. There was a little bit of tension in the air, but people were still smiling. They were still dancing. They were still fist pumping and hugging each other. They were still feeding each other. They still weren't scared - Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday when our numbers are low and Friday our numbers start to climb and we're like, wow, nothing happened. Then, at 7:48 in the morning, I got a message saying it started, they're here, we need all boots on the ground. At seven in the morning, that's when the police officers from Durham, from Toronto, from York, from Peel and Quebec, those were the ones that I personally witnessed.

On the violence towards Canadian citizens…

I went through and got badge numbers and their little badges on their arms of where they were from. They started at seven in the morning with breaking truckers’ windows, with pulling people out of their vehicles and finding them, arresting them for doing nothing but sleeping in their vehicles. They tormented these truckers while they were asleep, they broke their windows, yanked them out of their cars, threatened their pets, their animals. It got to the point where we were actually pulling kids off the street and getting them into hotel rooms to keep them safe. If they didn't vacate their bank accounts would be frozen. And that their vehicles would be impounded. And they'd be towed away and they'd be arrested.

From my aerial view I didn't see the [horses] trampling. I saw the horses come in and I saw the horses come up and down and up and down. I heard the screams and then I heard the crowd yelling, oh my God, what are you doing? What are you doing? They're trampling us. And then I turned to try and catch that video. But all I caught were the horses coming in. I got to see the live streams later on. And it's pretty graphic. I was up on the wall, the police after the horse trampling, that's when the police started pushing the crowd back and telling us to move, pushing us, we were a couple thousand in size.