Tamara Lich’s raw memoir reveals the moment millions of Canadians lost trust in government

Title: Hold the Line: My Story from the Heart of the Freedom Convoy
Author: Tamara Lich
Publisher: Rebel News Network Ltd.
Publication Year: 2023
(Available from Amazon)

Most political memoirs are exercises in score-settling. Tamara Lich’s Hold the Line: My Story from the Heart of the Freedom Convoy is something rarer: a deeply personal account of political resistance rooted as much in faith and human dignity as in anger at government power.

That difference matters because the Freedom Convoy became one of the most divisive political events in modern Canadian history. Whether viewed as a defence of civil liberties or a destabilizing protest movement, it exposed deep fractures in how Canadians viewed government authority, public health restrictions and political dissent.

What has been largely missing from the debate, however, is an honest attempt to explain why so many Canadians identified with the convoy in the first place.

Lich’s memoir attempts to answer that question from a deeply personal perspective.

Others, including Andrew Lawton and Donna Laframboise, have already documented the convoy itself and the federal government’s response. Lich approaches the story from a different angle. Her account is less concerned with political strategy than with the emotional and moral atmosphere that developed during the COVID-19 years and culminated in the protests in Ottawa.

Before becoming a national political figure, Lich worked in Alberta’s oilpatch managing logistics for companies including SLB, formerly Schlumberger, and STEP Energy Services. Those organizational skills later proved useful in helping coordinate aspects of the convoy. But her deeper political frustrations had begun years earlier through western alienation, opposition to Ottawa’s treatment of Alberta and growing hostility toward federal climate and energy policies.

Like many western Canadians, she came to believe the federal government viewed Alberta less as a partner than as a problem to be managed.

Then came COVID-19 and the restrictions that transformed Canadian political life almost overnight.

The protests began after the federal government required cross-border truck drivers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 if they wanted to avoid quarantine requirements when re-entering Canada. At its height, the convoy drew thousands of protesters to Ottawa and inspired demonstrations and blockades across the country.

The result is not polished literature. At times, the book is repetitive, emotionally raw and overly detailed. But oddly enough, those imperfections strengthen it. Lich writes like someone trying to record events she still finds difficult to fully process rather than someone carefully crafting a political brand.

That authenticity gives the memoir much of its force.

One of the memoir’s strengths is its ability to capture how rapidly many Canadians adjusted to extraordinary restrictions that would have seemed politically impossible only months earlier. Lich followed the rules initially. She wore masks, complied with regulations and accepted lockdowns as temporary emergency measures. What disturbed her was how quickly temporary measures became open-ended demands for obedience.

As mandates expanded, so did the anger and alienation of Canadians who felt dismissed, mocked or coerced by political leaders, public health officials and media commentators.

Lich is especially effective when she remains grounded in personal encounters rather than political abstraction. Some of the memoir’s most revealing passages involve people she met across the country who felt isolated, frightened or ignored. In one memorable example, Neoline Villebrun, a former chief and clan mother from the Copper Dene First Nation in Yellowknife, organized drummers and prayers along the convoy route.

Calling the convoy “about humanity” may sound overwrought to critics, but it helps explain why the protests resonated so deeply with many Canadians. For Lich, the convoy gradually became something larger than a protest against vaccine mandates. It became, in her words, “about humanity.”

To supporters, the convoy was no longer merely about truckers or vaccines, but about resisting what they viewed as increasingly coercive government authority.

The memoir is particularly effective in documenting the emotional whiplash surrounding public attitudes toward truckers themselves. In early 2020, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau publicly praised truckers as essential workers keeping the country alive during lockdowns. By early 2022, many of those same truckers were being portrayed as dangerous extremists for objecting to vaccine mandates and border restrictions.

Lich does not hide her bitterness over that transformation, nor her contempt for much of the mainstream media, particularly the CBC, which she believes caricatured convoy participants rather than seriously attempting to understand them. Some readers will find portions of the book one-sided, and they are not entirely wrong. Lich rarely grants much legitimacy to the fears or frustrations of those who opposed the convoy or supported restrictions.

Still, too often participants were reduced to stereotypes rather than treated as citizens with genuine grievances, however imperfectly expressed.

The Ottawa chapters are among the memoir’s strongest. Lich captures the strange mixture of celebration, exhaustion, confusion and mounting tension that developed as the protests dragged on. She also effectively conveys the convoy organizers’ growing realization that no meaningful dialogue with the federal government was ever going to occur.

According to Lich, protesters were already beginning negotiations to leave Ottawa before the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act. It was the first time the Emergencies Act had ever been invoked since the law replaced the War Measures Act in 1988. Lich argues the government chose escalation over de-escalation because confrontation served its political interests better than compromise.

Readers will make up their own minds about that claim. But the lasting value of the memoir lies less in proving every political argument than in preserving the perspective of someone who lived through events that profoundly altered public trust in Canadian institutions.

The memoir’s final sections dealing with Lich’s arrest, imprisonment and prosecution are often disturbing. Whatever one thinks of the convoy itself, her account raises uncomfortable questions about political vindictiveness, proportionality and the use of state power against dissenters.

What ultimately separates Hold the Line from most contemporary political memoirs, however, is its spiritual dimension.

Lich repeatedly frames the convoy as a moral and even religious struggle. She writes openly about prayer, providence and forgiveness. At several points she describes drawing strength not from ideology but from faith and emotional encounters with supporters who approached her in tears.

The book ends not with calls for revenge or triumph but with an appeal to pray even for Trudeau, whom Lich regards as deeply responsible for the country’s divisions. That conclusion gives the memoir unexpected emotional weight. Many political books are fuelled almost entirely by resentment. Lich’s is driven more by grief, conviction and the belief that fear overtook much of the country during the pandemic years.

Agree or disagree with Lich’s conclusions, Hold the Line captures a moment when many Canadians stopped trusting the institutions governing them and decided, rightly or wrongly, that somebody finally had to say no.

Our Verdict
More than a protest memoir, Hold the Line is a revealing account of how many Canadians came to distrust their institutions during the COVID-19 years. An important and deeply personal contribution to one of the most polarizing episodes in modern Canadian history.

Barry Cooper is a professor of political science at the University of Calgary. Author of 35 books and 200 studies, his book on terrorism was recovered by Seal Team Six during their visit to the Osama bin Laden compound in Abbottabad in May 2011. This commentary was submitted by the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.