A protester who took part in the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” which occupied downtown Ottawa, Canada, for much of February, now says he regrets participating because he’s lost $13,000 and his home protesting something he never “had a stance on” — vaccine mandates and restrictions.

“I regret going,” said Martin Joseph Anglehart, who spoke to CBC News via Zoom, from Hope, B.C.

Now he says he has “nothing left” because he spent his life savings on food and gas for the occupiers. Those occupiers disrupted Ottawa’s downtown for more than three weeks.

“I started delivering fuel and picking up laundry,” Anglehart said. “Everything for the truckers.”

It just goes to show you that there are stupid people in Canada as well as in the U.S.

He definitely blew a small fortune on the truckers. His bank statements from Jan. 28 to Feb. 14 which CBC News obtained show that Anglehart transferred thousands of dollars and spent thousands more at a local gas station where he posted himself most of the time while this nonsense was going on.

Anglehart is now living in his SUV because he and his landlord locked horns over his “point of view” about the protests and he was evicted as a result. He’s also unable to access his bank account because it remains frozen. More than 250 bank accounts linked to people and businesses were frozen when the Emergencies Act was invoked.

Millions of dollars flooded in through fundraisers, but Anglehart says he never saw any of it. Instead, he wound up relying on roughly $2,000 in cash donations from other protesters so he could go home.

Anglehart says he never had a “stance on mandates,” but was drawn to the movement when he was prevented from seeing a dying friend at a hospital in Montreal in June 2020 due to COVID restrictions. I can certainly empathize with him on this but those restrictions were to save lives. Which they did.

And he shut down his web development business in January and left his home to join these nudniks.

“[We] merged with a convoy around Medicine Hat,” Anglehart said. “I thought that it was a cause that was bigger than me. And I thought … it was worth the effort to go.”

Ontario Premier Doug Ford declared the protest “an illegal operation” on Feb. 11. Anglehart was arrested four days later for delivering fuel to truckers. He was soon released but only on conditions that he leave Ottawa immediately. His Dodge Caravan was also seized and is still impounded because Anglehart says he can’t afford to get it back.

So now, while he regrets his actions, he’s also contrite.

“I would like to apologize to [the] people in Ottawa,” he said. “I’m sorry … all I wanted was to help people.”

That’s all well and good but fighting restrictions that have been shown to save lives is NOT helping people.

It’s sad that Anglehart and others like him were so foolish. He lost his home and his life savings but according to Our World In Data, 37,601 Canadians lost their lives in this pandemic. Those statistics are far better than in the U.S. where over 974,000 deaths have been reported, Statista reports.

I’m glad that Canada has managed to fare better but that certainly wouldn’t be the case if the Freedumb Convoy had been successful. Anglehart has learned a sad and painful lesson but it’s the price he pays for being gullible.

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