Unrest Over Covid Rules in Canada ‘Has to Stop,’ Trudeau Says

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had a defiant message for the protesters in the national capital, whom he accused of undermining Canadian democracy: “It has to stop.”

Speaking to the House of Commons in Ottawa on Monday night, Mr. Trudeau said the protests, which began in opposition to Covid-19 restrictions, were harassing Ottawa residents “in their own neighborhoods.”

They are “trying to blockade our economy, our democracy and our fellow citizens’ daily lives,” he said. He had previously denounced the protesters for desecrating national memorials, wielding Nazi symbols and stealing food from homeless people.

Mr. Trudeau said on Twitter that hundreds of Royal Canadian Mounted Police had been mobilized to support Ottawa police officers, and promised that the Canadian government and city would employ “whatever resources are needed to get the situation under control.”

Almost two weeks after convoys of angry truckers in Canada first set off from British Columbia to protest pandemic restrictions in the capital, they have become a rallying cry for powerful far-right and anti-vaccine groups around the world that have made the cause their own. Some, including in the United States, want to replicate it.

In Ottawa on Tuesday morning, several hundred trucks continued to paralyze the city center but the nonstop honking of previous days appeared to have subsided. Reports on local radio in Ottawa said residents had had a good night’s sleep for the first time in over a week.

But a road blockade in Windsor, Ontario, formed on Monday afternoon by a group of anti-vaccine protesters shut down traffic crossing the Ambassador Bridge from Detroit. The bridge is the busiest crossing point on the Canada-United States border and critical to the automotive industry for the movement of parts, leading to concerns that a prolonged restriction could lead to factory closings.

The demonstrations in Ottawa started in January as a loosely organized convoy of truck drivers and protesters rumbled across the country en route to the capital to oppose the mandatory vaccination of truckers crossing the U.S.-Canadian border. It soon attracted the support of other Canadians exhausted by nearly two years of pandemic restrictions.

Some protesters were clearly on the fringe, wearing Nazi symbols and desecrating public monuments. But some say they had never attended a protest before. And many described themselves as ordinary Canadians driven to take to the streets by desperation.

“They keep doing the same thing, and it’s not working,” said Nicole Vandelaar, a 31-year-old hairdresser protesting in the capital. “They have to do something else. No more lockdowns. Let us live our lives.”

On Sunday, after a weekend of boisterous demonstrations, the authorities in Ottawa declared a state of emergency and said the police were overwhelmed. “We continue to employ all available officers, there are no days off,” the Ottawa police chief, Peter Sloly, said Monday. “This is not sustainable.”

The message at the heart of the protests — that in combating the pandemic, government has been overreaching for too long — has resonated far across Canada’s borders.

Photos of the Canadian truckers appeared on anti-vaccine groups on Facebook and other social networks about two weeks ago. Since then, prominent far-right figures in numerous countries, including the United States, Australia and Germany, have praised the protests, spreading the images and arguments even more widely.

Donors have contributed millions of dollars meant for the Canadian protesters in online campaigns with hashtags, images and messages of support spreading across social media platforms.

The occupation has paralyzed Ottawa, Canada’s political center, pushing residents to sleepless fury and anxiety, and causing many businesses to shutter, losing tens of millions of dollars.

But even as a growing number of politicians denounced them, the protesters across from the country’s graceful Parliament buildings made on thing clear: They were not leaving.

Thousands of people in cars, trucks, caravans and other vehicles have crossed New Zealand and Australia this week to protest pandemic restrictions.

The protests — including a “Convoy to Canberra,” the Australian capital — are an echo of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has swarmed Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

Australia and New Zealand, which have some of the world’s highest vaccination rates, prohibit unvaccinated people from going to cafes, bars and restaurants, and from visiting museums or other attractions. Those who are not vaccinated make up a small but vocal minority, with protests taking place in both countries throughout much of the year.

A convoy in New Zealand departed for Wellington, the nation’s capital, on Sunday morning. It arrived on Tuesday with thousands of vehicles, many flying New Zealand flags or bearing signs against mandates and in favor of “freedom.” A handful of protesters carried American flags or banners in support of former President Donald J. Trump.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand said she would not meet with the protesters. “We have a full day in Parliament today,” she told Radio New Zealand on Tuesday, adding, “That’s what we’ll be focused on today.”

There were few examples of public vandalism, though a convoy of demonstrators held up traffic at Canberra Airport to delay travelers. Protests also disrupted traffic, prompting buses to be rerouted.

In Australia, the convoy was made up not only of those against vaccination mandates, but also of people who claim to be “sovereign citizens” and not subject to any laws, and members of some religious groups. Some accused lawmakers of being “pedophiles,” or said they would soon be arrested for treason. Others held flags in support of the conspiracy theory QAnon.

Some demonstrators in both countries claimed to be demanding greater rights for Indigenous groups. In Australia, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra disavowed the convoy. In New Zealand, many Maori tribes have encouraged their members to get vaccinated or organized vaccination drives for them.

Standing in front of several trucks near Ottawa’s Parliament Hill on Monday, Emily Martin was wearing a black winter hat adorned with the words “fringe minority” in white. It was a reference to a statement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used to play down the scope and scale of the protests.

Ms. Martin, who arrived in Ottawa from her farm near Niagara Falls, about seven hours away, said she was hardly on the fringes of Canadian society. Rather, she is a mother, who was channeling the anger of many Canadians across the country, fed up and exhausted by pandemic restrictions that have wreaked havoc with their lives.

“It feels like we are in jail,” said Ms. Martin, 31, whose family produces honey.

Ms. Martin said she wanted her two young children, age 4 and 14 months, to be able to play soccer and visit their 99-year-old great-grandmother, who is living in a nursing home. She herself hasn’t seen the older woman since before Christmas, because of pandemic restrictions.

With the protests in their second week, the feeling on the streets outside Parliament on Monday was festive, as frigid temperatures eased a bit to somewhere just below freezing. A group of people danced to music blaring from the flatbed of a huge truck. Handmade signs decorated the iron fences encircling the Parliament grounds.

“We are not bad people for having questions,” said one. “For cowards, freedom is always extremist,” said another.

Rodica Stricescu, 64, a caregiver in a nursing home, came to Ottawa with her daughter from Windsor, Ontario, about an eight-hour drive away. Ms. Stricescu, who moved to Canada from Romania in 1995 in the aftermath of Communism’s fall, said her protest was about affirming freedom, not the intricacies of vaccine mandates.

“I ran from Communism to be here — I don’t want the same situation to happen here,” she said. She said she had felt forced to get vaccinated because of her workplace, and she was not happy about it.

Many of the protesters also framed their quest as a matter of personal freedom.

“It’s been a long few years here. I’ve seen a lot of government overreach,” said William Swinimer, 29, a trucker from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who said he was attending a protest for the first time. “I don’t think we should give up our Canadian way of life.”

Nicole Vandelaar, 31, a hairdresser who said she was not vaccinated, came to the protest with her father, a dairy farmer. She said lockdowns and other restrictions were creating a mental health crisis — and high rates of depression — in Canada.

“That’s the real pandemic,” Ms. Vandelaar said.

On the other side of the debate are infuriated Ottawa residents, who are irate at the occupation of their city by demonstrators, some of whom have honked horns, snarled traffic, desecrated national war memorials and threatened residents.

Zully Alvarado, a hair stylist who volunteers at a homeless shelter, walked through protest grounds with a mask under her chin — a symbol of defiance against the protesters, she said, since she does not normally wear a mask outside.

“This is unbelievably selfish,” she said, referring to the disruption of daily life in the capital. “I find it so disrespectful.”

Leah McInnes-Eustace, 54, a communications consultant in the nonprofit sector who lives about two miles from the Parliament building, said the unruly protests had exacerbated her existing mental health issues. “I’ve just found myself with kind of a constant, high level of anxiety,” she said. “I can feel it in my body.”

Dwayne Winseck, a professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, said his wife had been yelled at by protesters while walking their poodle in the neighborhood. He has also faced abusive comments online for expressing his thoughts about the protest.

Eleven days into an unruly occupation against coronavirus restrictions that has paralyzed Canada’s capital, the protests have become a rallying cry for powerful far-right and anti-vaccine groups around the world that have made the cause their own.

The demonstration in Ottawa started in January as a loosely organized convoy of truck drivers and protesters rumbling across the country to oppose the mandatory vaccination of truckers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. It soon attracted the support of other Canadians exhausted by nearly two years of pandemic restrictions.

Some were clearly on the fringe, wearing Nazi symbols and desecrating public monuments. But many described themselves as ordinary Canadians driven to take to the streets by desperation.

On Sunday, after a weekend of boisterous demonstrations, the authorities in Ottawa declared a state of emergency and said the police were overwhelmed. “We continue to employ all available officers, there are no days off,” the Ottawa police chief, Peter Sloly, said Monday. “This is not sustainable.”

The message at the heart of the protests — that government has been overreaching for too long — has resonated far away across Canada’s borders.

Donors have contributed millions of dollars in online campaigns with hashtags, images and messages of support spreading widely across social media platforms.

Photos of the Canadian truckers appeared on anti-vaccine groups on Facebook and other social networks about two weeks ago. Since then, prominent far-right figures in numerous countries, including the United States, Australia and Germany, have praised the protests, spreading the images and arguments even more widely.

The truck convoy protests in Ottawa and several provincial capitals are highlighting the unusual role of Canada’s far right and populist right in political and cultural life.

Those movements have not made nearly as many inroads to the mainstream in Canada as their American and European counterparts have.

“The biggest misconception about this, even within Canada, is that extremists have infiltrated the movement,” said Stephanie Carvin, a former national security official in Canada who now teaches at Carleton University.

In reality, she added, “this was an extremist movement that got mainstream attention.”

The organizers are mostly fringe activists. One, Tamara Lich, was a senior member of a splinter party that has advocated secession for Western provinces, until resigning her position last week.

Pat King, who is listed as an official contact for a regional group involved in the protest and has been a prominent champion of the protests online, has called Covid a “man-made bioweapon” and claimed that international financiers want to “depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race.”

This influence is hardly hidden at the protests, where Trump and QAnon flags are frequently visible, as are figures like Romana Didulo, who has called for military executions of doctors who vaccinate children.

The activists have sought for several years to organize protest convoys. They first found success in 2019, when 100-some trucks swarmed Ottawa over energy policies, though the protesters’ message drifted into opposition to immigration.

But the 2019 protest, like other such efforts, mostly failed to gain traction.

“You did have far-right populism — historically, it was there — but it was isolated,” said Jeffrey Kopstein, a Canadian political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

“One of the reasons they’re descending on Ottawa is they’re having trouble taking over parties and winning elections. And so they go to this other method,” Dr. Kopstein said.

Still, a slight majority of Canadians want to end some pandemic restrictions, polls find, which may be why one in three express support for the protest.

And there is another change: The Conservative Party, whose leaders have long isolated populist figures, has had a difficult year.

In a sign that the Conservatives might now be more willing to embrace the populist right, they ejected Erin O’Toole, their center-right leader last week. Several Conservative lawmakers have since visited the protests in endorsement. One was photographed alongside Mr. King.

Still, it is impossible to say whether support for the protests will translate into a longer-term embrace of the movement behind them, or will fizzle as happened during prior surges of populist sentiment in Canada.

“We haven’t normally seen this in modern Canadian politics,” Dr. Carvin said. “We are really in uncharted territory.”

The protests engulfing Canada’s capital were set off by the federal government’s requirement that truckers crossing the border from the United States show proof of vaccination against the coronavirus. Here is how the demonstrations have unfolded over the past two weeks.

Jan. 15: Vaccination mandates in Canada have been in effect since Oct. 30 for ship crews, railways and airline workers. But effective Jan. 15, the federal government expanded the requirement to truck drivers returning from the United States. One week later, a reciprocal policy went into effect in the United States for Canadian truckers crossing its border.

Jan. 22: Truck convoy groups departed from British Columbia along the Trans-Canada Highway, a highway system connecting the coasts, en route to Ottawa. Other groups drove from the Prairie and Atlantic provinces.

Jan. 28: The Ottawa police estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 people arrived in the capital and took part in protests over that weekend, on Jan. 29 and 30.

Jan. 29: As protesters converged on the capital, a standoff emerged in Western Canada between truckers and the police at the U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta. In a statement last week, the local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment said the peaceful protest devolved into an “unlawful blockade.”

Feb. 5-6: This past weekend, the police estimated that 5,000 people protested in Ottawa and that 1,000 vehicles clogged the streets. While the core group has been parked outside the Parliament building in Ottawa, protesters also organized rallies in other Canadian cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary last weekend.

Feb. 6: Jim Watson, the mayor of Ottawa, declared a state of emergency on Sunday.

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 the coronavirus 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 previously 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.”