Tuesday, April 22, 2025

Guest Contributions

Road Warrior News wants to publish your writing, your poetry, your photographs, artwork, or videos. Our “Reader Contribution” page exists to showcase the work, thoughts and opinions of everyone working working where the rubber meets the road. and those who support them. 

Guest ContributionsOpinion/ColumnTrucking

“You can interview that front tire”

During the three weeks Mark and his truck spent in Ottawa, the parking tickets and small acts of vandalism were minor matters. Wife Joanne describes him as a laidback guy who doesn’t talk much about feelings. But as they texted back and forth during those weeks, she says, he told her about the tears and the gratitude. People kept thanking him for taking a stand. “He said the love that was there, it was just unbelievable.”

Regular people would come by his truck offering submarine sandwiches and fried chicken. An Asian woman, Mark says, “was bringing us down Chinese food all the time. And Tim Horton’s. I don’t drink coffee myself, but they’d be bringing wagons full.” At random times of day, strangers would ask if he needed fuel. “Yeah, I’ll take it.”
After the police started cracking down on fuel deliveries, folks got more creative:

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Guest ContributionsNewsOpinion/ColumnTrucking

The Highway to Hydrogen: Recent Hydrogen Developments in Alberta’s Transportation Industry

Virtually every industry is looking to reduce carbon emissions in its development and operational life cycles. This has proven to be a particular challenge in the transportation industry, specifically heavy-duty transport where the industry has traditionally relied heavily on energy-dense diesel fuel to provide the torque necessary for heavy load transportation. However, Hydrogen may become an attractive zero-emission alternative for heavy-duty commercial vehicles. Unlike diesel which produces carbon dioxide and other harmful bi-products, hydrogen produces only water at the tailpipe.

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Guest ContributionsOpinion/ColumnTrucking

Every Beautiful Thing You’d Ever Seen

‘A thousand people standing on an overpass and you driving under it’ by Donna Laframboise Read Part One, here By the time Mark, a Nova Scotia commercial fisherman, joined the Freedom Convoy the pandemic had dragged on for nearly two years.

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Feature/ProfileGuest ContributionsTrucking

A Fisherman, a Truck & a Train Horn

Mark rescues old trucks. These days he owns 30 of them, the oldest being a green 1936 Maple Leaf, one of the earliest heavy duty pickups sold in Canada. “I get most of them outta California,” he says. “You start with no rust, so they’re a lot easier to restore.”

A commercial fisherman in Nova Scotia for 40 years, in the summer of 2023 he tells me scallops are doing well. Lobsters are another story. Market prices are “always up and down, they’re yo-yos. You never know.”

Back in January 2022, an Ontario friend told Mark he was heading to Ottawa to take part in the trucker protest scheduled for that weekend. Did Mark want to come?

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Guest ContributionsOpinion/Column

How big was the Truckers’ Freedom Convoy?

Agricultural journalist says it was wildly larger than reported by Donna Laframboise “I come from a long line of farmers,” says Ian Cumming, who covered the Freedom Convoy for the Ontario Farmer newspaper. Which means, he says, he grew up with truckers. On

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Guest ContributionsOpinion/ColumnTrucking

Not a Trucker Anymore

“The convoy and life after the convoy has really changed my way of thinking and what I want out of life. I no longer enjoy living in a truck and living out of truck stops for days on end away from family and friends. After losing my job due to the vaccine bullshit and having some time off to sit around and think…I realized that I actually want a home life and a family of my own…

…I also realized that I enjoy fixing trucks more than I enjoy driving them. So I have decided to sell the truck…and chase after another dream. Tomorrow I start a new job where I will be fixing heavy equipment and trucks as an apprentice! I’ll be home every night with weekends off which is something I’ve never had as an owner operator! I’m very excited to start this new life.”

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