Select Page

Ottawa Declares a State of Emergency Amid Trucker Protests

Ottawa Declares a State of Emergency Amid Trucker Protests

Video

Video player loading

The mayor of Ottawa declared the state of emergency after more than a week of unrest that began with protests by truckers over vaccine mandates. Demonstrations have spread beyond Canada’s capital.CreditCredit…Patrick Doyle/Reuters

Canadians awoke on Monday with their capital, Ottawa, under a state of emergency, as protesting truckers continued to occupy the country’s center of political power and calls were growing in some quarters for the government to take more drastic action to end the crisis.

With demonstrations snarling traffic and disrupting business and residential neighborhoods, Ottawa’s City Council was to meet Monday to try and find a way out of the upheaval.

The demonstrations, during which some protesters have desecrated national memorials and threatened local residents, have shaken a country known globally as a model for humanism, peace and serenity.

On Sunday afternoon, the mayor of Ottawa declared the emergency after 11 days of unrest that began with protests by truckers over vaccine mandates imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The protests have since mushroomed into an occupation of Canada’s capital and broader demonstrations over pandemic restrictions that have spread well beyond the capital.

“Someone is going to get killed or seriously injured because of the irresponsible behavior of some of these people,” Jim Watson, Ottawa’s mayor, warned on Sunday. City officials and the chief of police said they were under “siege.”

One city councilor, Catherine McKenney, last week wrote to Mr. Trudeau and the commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Brenda Lucki, asking that Canada’s national police force and the federal government take over operational control of Parliament Hill and the Parliamentary Precinct to allow Ottawa’s local police to refocus on keeping the peace in local neighborhoods.

Thousands turned out to protest in Toronto and Quebec City over the weekend. Truck convoys congregated near provincial legislatures in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia. Downtown Ottawa, site of the country’s Parliament, was paralyzed as truckers parked their vehicles in intersections and across busy thoroughfares.

Early Monday morning in Ottawa, it was 14 degrees Fahrenheit and sunny, and the thousands of weekend protesters were gone. The streets near Parliament were quiet without the honking horns of the weekend. But trucks still clogged the roads heading to Parliament Hill, and with a snowfall overnight, had become part of the snow scape. Most had license plates from Ontario or Quebec, with a few from Alberta, in the west of the country. Many were decorated with Canadian flags. Several bore anti-Covid restriction posters and signs.

Late Sunday night, heavily armed police seized a tanker truck with more than 3,000 liters of diesel fuel from a staging area used by the truckers, and arrested people in downtown Ottawa for transporting fuel.

Near Parliament, one of the protesters said the group was prepared in the event the police seized more diesel fuel or if their trucks were towed.

“What we are doing is within the law,” said Eric, a demonstrator from the Niagara region of Ontario who declined to give his full name. He was in a large delivery truck with a poppy painted on the side. Eric said he could not say specifically what he wanted from Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but that he needed to be “a man of the people.”

Throughout the pandemic, Canadians have been living under varying restrictions to combat the coronavirus. Although polls show that most Canadians support the measures, the protests are an expression of frustrations as the pandemic enters its third year.

The demonstrations were initially set off by Mr. Trudeau’s decision to require Covid vaccinations for truckers returning from the United States But they have evolved into a more general protest against pandemic rules like vaccination mandates, shutdowns and rules requiring mask-wearing, as well as Mr. Trudeau’s stewardship of the country.

As the convoy rolled along, it was joined and ultimately outnumbered by supporters traveling in pickup trucks and cars. The group — loosely organized and without a single, clear leader — also expanded its demands, pressing Mr. Trudeau to end all Covid rules and restrictions in Canada, including those set by provinces and local governments.

Long before the first trucks began trickling into Ottawa on Jan. 28, Mr. Trudeau said he would not reverse the vaccine mandate. He has refused to meet with members of the groups, which he described as a “fringe minority.”

Image

Credit…Ian Austen/The New York Times

Over the past two weekends, the protests in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, have paralyzed the city’s core and greatly disrupted the lives of residents in the densely populated neighborhoods close to Parliament.

Heavy trucks have been rumbling through the narrow streets blasting air horns, some usually fitted to train locomotives, day and night. Residents have been harassed for wearing masks and generally intimidated.

Last weekend, protesters urinated on the national war memorial, which has since been fenced off, and danced on Canada’s tomb of the unknown soldier. Anti-vaccine signs and an upside-down flag were placed on a statue of Terry Fox, a Canadian folk hero who died from cancer while on a cross-country run to raise money for medical research.

Protesters pressured staff members at a homeless shelter to give them meals, assaulted one of its residents and hurled racial slurs at a security guard. Residents, including people seeking refuge in a women’s shelter, were abused for displaying rainbow flags, and some protesters have tried to remove signs outside people’s houses that support vaccinations.

“Our police, our city, the province and the federal government are allowing this to continue,” said Catherine McKenney, the City Council member for the area closest to Parliament. “Once you dissolve into this lawlessness, it is very hard to get the law back. And once people lose faith in their government to protect them at any level, it’s very, very difficult to get that back.”

On Sunday, with the help of more than 250 members of the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ottawa police successfully persuaded protesters to remove from a park a building they had constructed as a canteen. They also began arresting people delivering diesel fuel or similar supplies to the trucks now blocking the city’s streets.

After more than 8,000 people swarmed downtown in the first weekend, the action dwindled to a few hundred people through the week, only to rise to more than 5,000 on Friday. One group tried to solicit signatures for a document calling on the appointed Senate and the governor general, Queen Elizabeth II’s representative, to strip the House of Commons and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of power.

In some parts of the city, there was a party atmosphere. A D.J. turned a major intersection into a dance floor. Trucks ringing it attempted to honk their horns in time with the music in an earsplitting, chest-pounding performance. Bounce houses were blown up in front of Parliament.

On Sunday night, Jim Watson, the city’s mayor, urged everyone to go home and noted that most pandemic measures were imposed by provincial governments anyway.

“The behavior has been completely reprehensible, and the organizers — and I call them that loosely — should be ashamed,” Mr. Watson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Let us take back our city.”

Image

Credit…Blair Gable/Reuters

The demonstrations shaking the nation’s capital began as a protest against the mandatory vaccination of truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. They have morphed into a battle cry against pandemic restrictions as a whole, and the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Mr. Trudeau, who is isolating after testing positive for Covid-19 last week, has sought to downplay the scope and influence of the protesters, calling them a “small fringe minority,” and lashing out at them for desecrating war memorials, wielding Nazi symbols, spreading disinformation and stealing food from the homeless during protests in Ottawa.

During the pandemic, repeated polls have shown that a majority of Canadians support public health measures to contain the pandemic, but the number of Canadians who would like to see restrictions end has risen in recent weeks, and the demonstrations have tapped into pandemic fatigue across the country after months of lockdowns.

More than two-thirds of Canadians said they had “very little in common” with how the Ottawa protesters see things, while 32 percent said they had “a lot in common,” according to a survey conducted last week by Abacus Data, a research firm.

Police and analysts say the protests, which have galvanized thousands of demonstrators in Ottawa, Quebec City, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, among other places, have no single leader, but encompass an assortment of people, many of them on the political right.

A key organizer of the “Freedom Convoy” that arrived in Ottawa last week is Tamara Lich, who was previously secretary of the relatively new Maverick Party, a right-of-center group that was started to promote the separation of Canada’s three western Prairie Provinces from the rest of the country.

Ms. Lich, a former fitness instructor who has sung and played guitar in an Alberta band called Blind Monday, played a leading role in organizing a GoFundMe campaign that raised about 10 million Canadian dollars, about $7.8 million, for the cause. But the online service has turned over only about 1 million dollars of that. After consulting the police, the company closed the campaign and is refunding the rest of the money to donors, citing “violence and other unlawful activity” during the demonstrations.

Ms. Lich has called for the federal government to strike down pandemic restrictions in Canada, such as provincial vaccine mandates and rules requiring masks. But Canada has a federal system in which provincial governments have considerable constitutional power, including over health care regulations.

“Our departure will be based on the prime minister doing what is right, ending all mandates and restrictions on our freedoms,” Ms. Lich said at a news conference in Ottawa last week, during which she did not take questions. “We will continue our protest until we see a clear plan for their elimination.”

Another main organizer of the truck convoy is a group calling itself Canada Unity, which has published a “memorandum of understanding” calling on Canada’s appointed senators and Canada’s Governor General (the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) to abolish all Covid-19 related restrictions and to allow all unvaccinated workers whose employment was terminated because of vaccine mandates to get their jobs back.

Members of the far-right People’s Party of Canada are also well represented among the protesters in Ottawa. The party has no seats in the federal Parliament. Its leader, Maxime Bernier, has denounced vaccine mandates and has preciously railed against immigration and multiculturalism.

Andrew McDougall, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, described the protests not as a mass national movement but, rather as “the most extreme manifestation we have seen of frustration about pandemic restrictions.”

“To the extend that the convoy is anti-vax and anti-science,” he added, “it is on the margins of Canadian society.”

Image

Credit…Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

They have come from across Canada: right-leaning truckers, libertarians, far-right activists, concerned parents and anti-vaxxers angry that their personal freedoms are being trampled by what they view as governments wrongly interfering in their lives.

In Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City, thousands of protesters took to the streets this past weekend, snarling traffic, disrupting businesses and, in some cases, bringing loud disturbances to residential neighborhoods. Truck convoys also congregated near provincial legislatures in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia.

In Toronto, Canada’s largest city and financial capital, some of the protesters honked their horns and shouts of “freedom” rung out. Others held up signs of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the document enshrining constitutional rights like freedom of expression. They used hockey sticks as flagpoles for Canadian flags and Gadsden flags, a yellow banner dating to the American Revolution that has the image of a rattlesnake and the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Among the protesters in Toronto was Corey Ley, owner of a landscape construction company and volunteer firefighter, who drove from his home in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region about 85 miles northeast of Toronto to attend Saturday’s demonstration. He was accompanied by his wife, two children and two friends.

Determined and vowing not to leave, Mr. Ley was standing outside of his truck on Bloor Street, in Toronto’s high-end shopping district, joining dozens of cars, pickup trucks and heavy trucks on Saturday that were parked along the city’s high-end shopping district downtown.

Mr. Ley said the pandemic restrictions were undermining his personal freedoms, and those of his family. He said he was fed up with his son not being able to play ice hockey and his daughter not being able to go to dance lessons.

Over the past two years, schools across Canada have been periodically shuttered and parents have been forced to grapple with remote learning and after-school activities being halted.

“I’m here until whenever, as long as it takes,” said Mr. Ley, who said he wanted proof-of-vaccination and mask policies to be optional rather than mandated.

He had packed plenty of provisions to remain at the site, including food, fuel and water.

In protests in Quebec City, dozens of tractor-trailer cabs were parked two deep for three blocks along one of the major arteries through the downtown area, adjacent to the provincial legislature. Thousands of people lined the sidewalks, cheering on truckers as they arrived or drove past.

David LeBlanc, a biologist from Matapédia, said it was time for the government to lift pandemic restrictions. He, too, cited the heavy toll the pandemic was taking on his children.

“Our children are impacted,” he said. “My son is 18 years old. He could not have a trip with his friends at high school. He could not get in the bar to have fun with his friends.”

While the protests continued in Ottawa on Monday, most of the truckers in Toronto and Quebec City had cleared out as the week began, according to police.

Vjosa Isai in Toronto and Peter Black in Quebec City contributed reporting.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2022/02/07/world/canada-trucker-protest