On July 4, 2025, Diesel and Discord will roar onto bookshelves everywhere—an unflinching narrative of Canada’s great mid-winter upheaval, arriving in time for summer reflection on a nation once frozen in dissent. The cover image is coming soon; prepare to glimpse eighteen-wheelers etched against Ottawa’s frost-rimmed skyline. Available at all primary book retailers.
In the hush before dawn on February 6, 2022, the first convoy rigs rumbled over Highway 417 like restless ghosts. What began as a dispute over vaccine mandates for cross-border truckers quickly metastasized into a weeks-long blockade of Parliament Hill and key border crossings, a defiant symphony of air-horn blasts and digital fundraisers. Author Robert George Cruise, writing from his own battle with illness and cognitive fog, maps this seismic rupture with lyrical precision—each rumble of diesel engines echoing a nation’s unspoken fractures.
At its heart are the characters who carried the story: Jack “Dogbone” Ducharme, whose CB-radio banter and prairie-hardened humour grounded us in the convoy’s pulse; Tamara Lich, whose GoFundMe campaign became both lifeline and lightning rod; and the political and law-enforcement figures—Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, provincial premiers, and Ottawa Police Superintendent Ray Sutherland—whose decisions draped the capital in states of emergency. Cruise weaves courtroom transcripts and leaked spreadsheets into poetic vignettes, revealing how digital dollars flowed like hidden rivers beneath the ice, and how misinformation and meme-warriors amplified every crack in the national conscience.
When the Emergencies Act awoke from its thirty-four-year slumber, freezing bank accounts and conscripting tow trucks, Canada found itself at an extraordinary crossroads. In prose at once spare and searing, Cruise asks: when does the pursuit of freedom become its own cage? Diesel and Discord is more than a chronicle of a protest; it is a meditation on liberty’s true cost, on unity tested by discord, and on the fragile map we redraw whenever we claim the roads for ourselves. Mark your calendars for July 4, 2025—this is a country’s story you will not soon forget.
“The twentieth century belongs to Canada.” Wilfrid Laurier’s bold prediction captured the hope of a young Dominion. But beneath the progress and prosperity lay unresolved fractures.
Dominion explores Canada’s journey through rapid industrial expansion, waves of immigration, and profound social change. It examines the seismic impact of transcontinental railways, the rise of urban labour movements, and the economic boom–and–bust cycles in agriculture and resource extraction. The book also delves into geopolitical tensions: Canada’s negotiation of autonomy within the British Empire, burgeoning ties with the United States, and fraught immigration policies affecting Asian and Black communities.
Drawing on extensive archival research, government records, and personal diaries, this volume offers a panoramic study of pre-war Canada's ambitions and contradictions.
Fall 2025
This definitive six-volume series explores Canada’s contested identity and tumultuous history throughout the 20th century.
The Unquiet North: A History of Canada in the 20th Century traces Canada’s emergence from colony to conflicted nation-state through seismic political, social, and cultural transformations.
Far from a peaceful ascent into stability and global respectability, the series presents a more truthful portrait of a country forged in friction. Across wars and recessions, insurrections and referendums, migration waves and constitutional crises, Canada has repeatedly redrawn the boundaries of who belongs—and who decides.
Each volume weaves archival research, political analysis, and narrative storytelling into an expansive portrait of a nation too often defined by silence. From prairies to Parliament, conscription riots to peacekeeping missions, residential schools to global trade deals, the series uncovers the hidden architecture of a country built on contradiction and contested memory.
Spanning 1896 to 2001, The Unquiet North asks: What does it mean to be Canadian in a land never fully at peace with itself?
