Welcome to the Colette Podcast. My name is Claire Lehman and I am editor and chief of Colette.

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Welcome to the Colette Podcast. newsletter. normally because seven months ago Ottawa, Canada's capital, was the scene of a massive

three-week protest led by Big Rig truckers who opposed Canada's cross-border vaccine mandate

and a bunch of other things besides.

That protest paralyzed the city for weeks, attracted international media attention, divided the country

along largely, though not exclusively partisan lines, then provoked a heavy-handed overreaction from Justin Trudeau's

liberal government and copycat trucker protests in countries around the world.

But in the end, once the police had cleared the truckers out, did it accomplish anything?

With me to answer that question is True North journalist Andrew Lawton, who literally wrote the book on the trucker

protest.

It's called The Freedom Convoy, the inside story of three weeks that shook the world.

Here are excerpts from our conversation.

As we're going to discuss, a lot of the protesters were motivated by an opposition to vaccine mandates, but some were also opposed to the concept of vaccines more generally.

As you know, there were some conspiracy theories going around. You kind of were faced with an existential

decision when you wrote this book whether you were going to be agnostic to some of the

more radical elements. There are just a lot of people who want a book like this to reflect the most extreme

opposition to vaccines, right? Possibly, but I also don't think that those

...