Regina tow companies hit with harassment after Sunday protest

They almost don’t want to answer the phones anymore at TJ’s Towing in Regina because of the harassment flooding in since the weekend.

On Sunday, protesters brought a convoy up Albert Street and stopped near the Legislative Building. Eventually, the Regina Police Service called tow trucks to come and move the vehicles — and TJ’s Towing Recycling & Auto Wrecking answered the call.

“We didn’t go down there starting anything, we went down there to do a job,” explained a spokesperson with the company; she didn’t want her real name used due to the harassment so 980 CJME is calling her Lynn.

At the time, Lynn said the protesters were mostly just shouting as the vehicle was taken away, as police were keeping things pretty safe. By the time the tow truck returned, Lynn said most of the rest of the vehicles had left.

Then the calls began.

“Threatening phone calls uttering ‘to shoot you right between the eyes,’ ‘shoot you in the head and cause damage,’ ” said Lynn. “One guy told me if I would have towed his truck, he would have shot me between the eyes.”

Lynn said there were people accusing them of towing trucks in Ottawa and telling the company they’re going to put it out of business.

“This is uncalled for. They talk about control; they’re trying to control us by controlling us not to work,” said Lynn.

The police have been kept aware of the threats, according to Lynn, and are keeping track of them and phone numbers.

Lynn said having to answer the phone when those kinds of calls are coming in is frustrating and annoying and has them feeling like they need to watch their backs. She said they’ve had calls coming in all night, and some even calling and asking for a tow then admitting they’re trying to waste the company’s time when they’re told they have to wait.

“If we’re called to do an impound, we’re going to go do it regardless of who it is,” said Lynn.

There have been people calling in and posting their support for the company, and Lynn said that helps them through it all. She hopes it all blows over and things can settle down again.

Mistaken facts

Other companies were also called to the protest by police, like Alpine Towing, and they declined the work but still got dragged into the backlash.

“When it gets to the point where my staff is communicating to me that they’re scared to have a vehicle with our company logo on it parked outside of their home, that’s when it gets to be a little bit too much. That’s when it’s been taken too far,” said an employee of Alpine Towing & Recovery.

He said staff declined the job when they got to the protest because they didn’t want to get involved.

“It’s not very often that we turn anything down from our contractors, but that one time we just felt like we had to,” the employee said.

That night, the company started getting hundreds of calls, messages and threats.

“These are death threats, bomb threats, threats to burn our houses down and our business down, threats to shoot at us — like it’s literally every threat that you can think of imaginable we were getting that night and it was really overwhelming,” he said.

There were threats he didn’t even want to repeat. And they weren’t just coming from Regina, the employee said there were calls coming from every province, as well as California, New York and even one from Australia.

“It hurt to see that so many people got down to that level. It was really, really hard to stomach some of the things that people were saying. And to have no involvement with the actual protest kind of made that feeling amplify a little bit,” he said.

He said they tried to figure out where the calls and threats were coming from. It turned out one or more persons at the protest thought Alpine Towing accepted the work and posted that online, and it snowballed from there with other people then reposting to various pages and groups.

In addition to the calls and threats, people spammed the company’s Google Reviews page with one-star reviews, tanking the company’s ranking. That has since been rectified.

The employee posted on Alpine Towing’s Facebook page to clear up the misinformation and he said since then some people had been either deleting or changing their Google Review and some had even been calling to apologize.

He said on Thursday the backlash had started to calm down — around midday he said they’d only got a handful of negative calls and by then they’d been getting calls from people showing their support.