Ottawa Protests Swell as Ontario Police Struggle to End Bridge Blockade

As protesters swarmed Canada’s capital, Ottawa, for the third weekend in a row to vent their anger about pandemic restrictions, the police in Windsor, Ontario, struggled to tame a blockade at the Ambassador Bridge, a crossing at the U.S. border that is vital to the supply chains of the global automotive industry.

By Saturday night, the bridge was still closed. The police had driven some protesters away in the morning, forming a line to push them back, but others stayed, and the crowd swelled as the day went on, despite frigid temperatures.

“We don’t have a time frame actually, that’s something that we’re not imposing,” Deputy Chief Jason Bellaire of the Windsor police said on Saturday afternoon. “They are professionals, they know what they’re doing, and they are pacing themselves.”

The unrest in Canada began in late January, when a loosely organized convoy of truck drivers and others descended on Ottawa to protest a Covid vaccine mandate for truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. Most Canadian truckers are vaccinated, and trucking organizations have spoken out against the protests.

But the demonstrations have transformed into a broader cry of frustration against Canada’s pandemic restrictions — which are among the most stringent in the developed world — and against the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Over the past two weeks, protesters have blocked roads leading to the U.S. border at a number of points, including Windsor; Sarnia, Ontario; Emerson, Manitoba; and Coutts, Alberta. Automakers have been particularly affected by the blockade at the Ambassador Bridge, which normally carries $300 million worth of goods a day, about a third of which are related to the auto industry. Carmakers have been left short of crucial parts, forcing companies to shut down some plants from Ontario to Alabama on Friday.

In a meeting with senior officials on Saturday, Mr. Trudeau “stressed that border crossings cannot, and will not, remain closed, and that all options remain on the table,” according to a government statement.

On Saturday in Ottawa, steps from Canada’s Parliament buildings, the streets morphed into a huge festival even as temperatures plunged.

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Thousands of people flooded downtown streets, sometimes making them difficult to navigate. Some draped themselves in Canadian flags; others blared pop music. Some were young. Others were in their 90s. They danced and chanted “freedom.” They railed against vaccine and mask mandates and Mr. Trudeau. Vendors made quick sales of small Canada flags and T-shirts that rudely told the prime minister where to go.

Though Ontario had declared a state of emergency the day before — and stiff penalties for protesters, including jail time — the few police visible in Ottawa were not seen handing out fines or enforcing the law. They were terribly outnumbered.

“They don’t have an easy job,” said Scott Spenser, 36, looking up from a drum concert on Sparks Street, as a phalanx of six officers marched by. “Hopefully this all ends peacefully and they lift the mandates and we all get back to living.”

The Ottawa police said more than 4,000 demonstrators had been in the city on Saturday. “Safety concerns — arising from aggressive, illegal behavior by many demonstrators — limited police enforcement capabilities,” they said in a statement.

They said they had set up an “integrated command center” that would “result in a significantly enhanced ability of our police service to respond to the current situation.”

Protests were also held in Montreal, Toronto and other cities, drawing crowds of varying size.

The Canadian demonstrations have attracted the attention of far-right and anti-vaccine groups globally, raising millions of dollars and inspiring copycat protests in France, New Zealand and Australia. Organizers of a U.S. convoy said a protest would be held in Washington, D.C., on March 5.

In Paris on Saturday, the police fired tear gas after dozens of cars emulating the Canadian protests evaded police checks. Thousands of cars, camper vans and trucks bearing protesters from around France made their way to Paris over the past few days to protest France’s vaccine pass and other government policies.

But Paris police deployed over 7,000 officers over the capital for the weekend to prevent any blockades, and many protesters’ vehicles were prevented from entering the city. At midday, police had handed out over 280 fines, the authorities said.

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In Windsor, after the police drove many protesters away on Saturday, more arrived on foot to add to their numbers, honking and yelling in what resembled a party atmosphere.

Joanne Moody, a personal support worker from Chatham, Ontario, yelled at police officers as they formed a line to push the crowd down the street. She stayed into the afternoon, as the earlier tense mood grew festive, with people dancing and waving Canadian flags. Ms. Moody, who had spent the last two weeks at the movement’s original demonstration in Ottawa, said she wanted to see an end to mandated health restrictions.

Aurelien Breedon contributed reporting from Paris, and Allison Hannaford from North Bay, Ontario.

Under persistent snowfall on Saturday morning, protesters convened on Ottawa’s Parliament Hill — part of the weekend tide of out-of-towners, sympathizers and gawkers who have come to support the truckers camping downtown now for more than 15 days.

By afternoon the snow had let up, but all morning thick flakes covered the Canadian flags that protesters wore as capes, and bled the ink on handmade signs that were pinned to the iron railings of the Gothic-style parliamentary buildings. Undaunted by the weather, the posters rallied against vaccines, mask mandates and the prime minister, Justin Trudeau.

In discussions, many demonstrators have emphasized that their cause is not tied to the nationalistic beliefs associated with similar protests elsewhere, particularly in the United States. But the American Confederate flag, the Gadsden flag (yellow with a snake and the words “Don’t Tread on Me”) and the Canadian Red Ensign, which experts say are symbols of white nationalism, have been spotted in Ottawa in recent weeks.

On Saturday, one of the few Black protesters in the crowd, a woman who gave only her first name, Sharon, because she said she mistrusted journalists, wore a sandwich board that read: “Do I look like a white supremacist?”

Sharon, a clinical social worker, has made the three-hour drive from her hometown to Ottawa to join the protesters over the past three weeks. “Do you know how hurtful it is to have your prime minister say we are a fringe minority with unacceptable beliefs?” she said, referring to Mr. Trudeau’s characterization of the protesters this month.

“That is saying there are acceptable views to have, and unacceptable ones,” she said, adding that she believed such thoughts were the purview of communist systems, not democracies. “It is implying that what should be considered as Canadian is what he is thinking.”

As she stood on an esplanade in front of Parliament, people led the protesters in Christian prayers — “with a maple leaf in one hand and a cross in the other,” one prayer leader said — and called on Canadian saints to support their cause. Beside her two people animatedly discussed how the government might track people with social media, and a woman wore a T-shirt with a QR code (a symbol for the Canadian government’s vaccine pass) crossed out in red.

On Wellington Street, as pop music played, a man knocked on the door of a truck and asked the driver to autograph his Canadian flag, which was covered in signatures.

Karl Braeker, 93, sat on an orange wool blanket at the Centennial Fountain under a dusting of snow. Originally from Germany, Mr. Braeker said he had served in the German military as a teenager under the Nazis, and emigrated to Canada in 1951.

“It is very deep what brings me here: I grew up under Hitler in Germany,” he said. He had come in person concerned over reports that the protesters shared white nationalistic or Nazi sentiments. From his vantage point on the fountain, he said, he felt they did not.

Watching the protests, he said, had “brought back all of my P.T.S.D.” from serving in Hitler’s army. He said that he had not slept for days when the protest first began — particularly after hearing that swastikas had been seen on flags. He asked his son to drive him here to see for himself. “I’ve always loved Canada for the freedom,” Mr. Braeker said. “I had to come here to see.”

Mr. Braeker is not vaccinated but is not against others getting vaccinated. He said he opposed mandating that people receive the shot. He found he sympathized with the protesters’ demands. In fact, he said, he felt like the mandates had echoes of the totalitarian regime under which he had grown up.

“My member of Parliament told me that these are just a bunch neo-Nazis and malcontents that are trying to disturb things — but it’s the other way around,” he said. “These are Canadians that I have known since the day I landed in Halifax in 1951, and I love this country.”

The premier of Ontario, home to Canada’s capital, Ottawa, declared a state of emergency on Friday and said that anyone involved in the protest there would face “severe” consequences, including major fines or jail time.

On Saturday the Canadian police began an operation to clear trucks from the Ambassador Bridge, a vital crossing in Windsor, Ontario, connecting the United States and Canada. But the Ottawa police still were not issuing tickets or making arrests.

“They’ve taken an oath to protect our country,” said Terry Grein, a protester in the crowd, after bumping fists with one of the officers. “A civil servant will not go against watching people being unified.”

Two weeks after Ottawa’s downtown was transformed into a raging tailgate party, many in Canada wonder how this happened — why the police seemingly abandoned the country’s seat of power, with no perceivable backup, and how a motley group of truckers, anti-government activists and anti-vaccine agitators have managed to outfox them.

The answers will surface in a post-mortem, but initially, analysts link the police officers’ hands-off approach to two opposing factors: the weaknesses of the local police force in size and preparation, and the relative strength of the occupiers — in numbers and logistics.

While the trucks themselves are the purported cause, symbol and tool of the protest, only a few of the self-proclaimed leaders are actually truckers. Some are, in fact, former police officers and army veterans who many believe have used their expertise to help organize the occupation.

“This is an entirely sophisticated level of demonstrators,” Ottawa’s police chief, Peter Sloly, said in a news conference on Thursday. “They have the capability to run a strong organization here, provincially and nationally, and we’re seeing that play out in real time.”

The trucks began roaring into the city on Jan. 28. But the police did not put down concrete barriers to keep the trucks a safe distance from the legislature, nor did they ensure that the downtown core would not be converted into a parking lot.

It was only at that point that everyone understood how a 30,000-pound tractor-trailer that a trucker may live in for days at a time while on the job could be converted into a strategic tool of protest — huge and immovable, equipped with a heater and a bed, and with a built-in, ear-shattering noise maker.

In some cases, the truckers removed their tires and bled their brake lines to make their trucks immovable, the police said. And some heavy-duty towing companies have refused to work with the police to remove the trucks.

The police were also greatly outnumbered and outflanked.

Ottawa is a small city, with about one million residents, and has a police force to match, with fewer than 1,500 officers. That comes to one officer for every 667 residents, a far cry from New York City, with one officer for every 233 people.

A week into the occupation the police reported that they had moved their shifts around, managing to put 150 officers on the streets in three of the most affected neighborhoods over the course of a day, and swearing in new federal officers sent to help.

At that time, Chief Sloly said, there were about 5,000 protesters settled into the city’s core.

The mayor declared an emergency and Chief Sloly requested an additional 1,800 police officers. But still, there were too few officers to handle the crowds.

The numbers of truck drivers protesting vaccine mandates in Canada has swelled since the drivers first gathered last month. Blockades in some places, like the Ambassador Bridge — a vital link for the automobile industry that connects Windsor, Ontario, to Detroit — have disrupted the flow of goods between the United States and Canada. An Ontario court ruled late Friday that protesters must clear the bridge.

After first disrupting traffic in Ottawa, the nation’s capital, almost three weeks ago, truck drivers subsequently staged protests in other cities, including Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary, Alberta. As of Friday afternoon, four border crossings were blocked: Windsor; Sarnia, Ontario; Emerson, Manitoba; and Coutts, Alberta.

PARIS — The police fired tear gas at demonstrators blocking traffic on the Champs-Élysées in central Paris on Saturday, after hundreds of vehicles emulating the “Freedom Convoy” protests in Canada evaded police checkpoints around the French capital.

Thousands of cars, camper vans and trucks had made their way to Paris from across France over the past few days to protest the government’s vaccine pass and other policies.

But the French authorities vowed a firm response to any blocked traffic. The Paris police force, which had banned the protests, deployed more than 7,000 officers, who pushed marchers off roadways and towed vehicles on the Champs-Élysées. The police said they had handed out more than 330 fines and arrested 44 people. By midday, there were no widespread blockages and traffic flowed normally through most of the city.

Officers had set up checkpoints at several of the main entrances to Paris on the road that surrounds the city, known as the Boulevard Périphérique. That prevented many demonstrators from entering.

But small clusters of protesters who managed to get past the checkpoints gathered at several places in the city, honking their cars and waving French flags. Some joined up with the anti-vaccine-pass marches that had been held on most weekends in Paris but had waned in recent months.

The different convoys, which had started out in cities like Nice, Brest, Lille and elsewhere, appear to be only loosely coordinated on social media and on instant messaging platforms.

In central Paris, thousands of peaceful demonstrators walked on the Pont du Carrousel on the Seine River, waving French and Canadian flags and chanting: “QR code, never again!” “Freedom!” “No to the vaccine pass!”

France’s vaccine pass bars most people who do not show proof of full vaccination or recent recovery from Covid from entering public establishments like bars, restaurants and museums.

But the protests have grown to encompass other sources of anger, like rising gas or energy prices, and the French government is watching the convoy protests closely. President Emmanuel Macron is keen to avoid a repeat of the Yellow Vest protests that roiled France in 2018 and 2019, sometimes violently.

That movement was sparked by an increase in gasoline taxes but was fueled by a much broader sense of alienation felt by those living outside Paris, echoing the motley mix of grievances expressed by the convoy protesters — some of whom wore yellow vests.

OTTAWA — Each stretch of street has a “road captain,” and chunks are divided and overseen by “block captains” who operate below them.

Gas is supplied from the central organizing group and carried through the streets to the trucks in canisters by volunteers pulling trolleys.

The money raised from online donations was invested by leadership into hotel rooms, gas, food and supplies. That food is regularly disseminated to the truckers by the road captains and block captains, who stop by their trucks at intervals and ask if they’re hungry.

Truckers who arrived in Ottawa about two weeks ago for the protests came into a nascent infrastructure that was built by a handful of organizers and later expanded by scores of volunteers. That infrastructure has kept the protesters supplied with the goods necessary to endure for the past three weeks mostly in their truck cabs, even as temperatures plummeted, public resentment grew and officials intensified pressure on them to leave.

Truckers on the grounds of the Ottawa protest on Friday afternoon painted a picture of the intricate inner workings of their demonstration.

So many supporters donate food that the truckers no longer need to rely solely on block and road captains to keep them fed, said Lloyd Brubacher, a truck driver from Owen Sound. Well-wishers bring care packages of home-cooked food, first aid kits, drinks and candy. Camped out in his truck, he has “never been hungry,” he said. “I want for nothing here.”

As he spoke with a reporter, a woman walked by with hot Tim Hortons coffee, rapped on the door of his Kenworth truck and offered him a cup, which he accepted, with cream and sugar. “Two of each,” he said. He made room in his cup holder, placing it between his three other cups, as well as the stuffed animals, roses and ornaments that others had given him.

Keeping the trucks purring and the drivers inside warm requires an enormous amount of diesel. Every few hours, a team of volunteers towing garden trolleys loaded with five to six 20-liter gas cans goes from truck to truck offering the drivers gas. Some volunteers pour the gas themselves into the fuel tanks, or into reserve plastic gas cans that the drivers have.

After the police said on Sunday that they would remove fuel supplies and arrest people bringing fuel to the trucks, organizers briefly cut that service back and only distributed gas under cover of night, Mr. Brubacher, 31, said. In the last few days, however, it has returned.

Other supplemental services are provided by volunteers, like a man who would only give his first name, Brian, for publication, who was on Wellington Street on Friday afternoon. Brian was on his knees in coveralls in front of a Transport Martin Thibault truck as its eponymous owner watched anxiously from the cab. All the idling had ruined a portion of the truck’s exhaust filtration system, Mr. Thibault said, and Brian, a car mechanic, was buzzing away with his tools replacing it — a $1,500 job, by his estimation — for free.

Brian has come to the protest site every day after work for the past several weeks, he said, “for my children.”

He was galvanized to action by an exchange he had about a month ago with his young son. After his son was told in school that people who are against vaccines — like his father — are hurting people, he said, his son asked him, “Are you a bad person?”

Misinformation has been a key weapon wielded by Canada’s protest movement, and critics of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau have returned to one simmering falsehood: that Mr. Trudeau is the love child of the former Cuban leader Fidel Castro.

The conspiracy theory that Mr. Trudeau is Mr. Castro’s son has gained momentum on social media in recent days. It previously spread after Mr. Castro’s death in 2016, when Mr. Trudeau hailed him as “a remarkable leader.” He described Mr. Castro, who ruled as a Communist autocrat for almost 50 years, as “Cuba’s longest-serving president.”

“I know my father was very proud to call him a friend, and I had the opportunity to meet Fidel when my father passed away,” Mr. Trudeau said at the time. His father, Pierre Trudeau, served as prime minister for over 15 years. Pierre Trudeau was the first leader of a NATO member state to visit communist Cuba, and Mr. Castro served as an honorary pallbearer at his funeral, according to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.

The claim that the Canadian prime minister is Mr. Castro’s “illegitimate son” was also amplified by Tucker Carlson in an opinion piece posted on Fox News’s website on Friday.

Some proponents of the falsehood have pointed to a striking resemblance between Mr. Castro and Mr. Trudeau. But the facts don’t add up, and the Canadian government has also previously denied the contention.

Mr. Trudeau’s mother, Margaret, famously traveled to Cuba and met Mr. Castro at the beginning of 1976. But the visit was more than four years after Mr. Trudeau was born, on Dec. 25, 1971. Given her high profile, it would have been highly unlikely for Mrs. Trudeau to have slipped into Cuba undetected.

Misinformation is just one tactic used by some protesters. While the demonstrations outside Canadian Parliament began as loosely organized truck convoys and supporters, the Ottawa police say the protesters are showing signs of increasingly sophisticated methods to target law enforcement operations. On Wednesday night, the Ottawa police emergency line was “almost jammed” by 911 calls, a significant number of them traced to United States addresses, said Peter Sloly, Ottawa’s police chief.

Protesters have also mocked Mr. Trudeau in recent days by showing real images of him in blackface. In 2019, on the eve of federal elections, photos and a video emerged of him dressing up in blackface and brownface in the early 1990s and in 2001.

Mr. Trudeau has long cast himself as a global spokesman for liberal causes, supporting women’s and Indigenous rights, welcoming immigrants and fighting climate change and racism. But that carefully calibrated image suffered a blow at the time.

“All those pictures you’re seeing of Trudeau in blackface are real (but he’s not Castro’s love child),” The National Post, a Canadian newspaper, told its readers on Friday.

Blockades at the U.S.-Canada border stymied flows of critical supplies for the fourth day on Friday, leaving companies scrambling for materials and shutting down major auto factories from Ontario to Alabama.

The partial closing of the Ambassador Bridge, the busiest land crossing between the countries and a vital conduit for the auto industry, sent ripples through North American supply chains. Business groups called on officials to forcibly remove protesters blocking the bridge.

Some companies tried to redistribute key parts among their factories and looked for other ways to move products.

But others appeared resigned to shutdowns, saying that bypassing the Ambassador Bridge, which connects Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, was too expensive or difficult.

Toyota said that the disruptions had led to “periodic downtime” at its engine plants in West Virginia and Alabama, as well as factories in Canada and Kentucky, and that interruptions were likely to continue through the weekend. Ford curtailed capacity at two plants in Windsor and Oakville, which is also in Ontario, and shut down its Ohio assembly plant.

The disruptions threatened to linger as truck drivers and members of far-right groups protested vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions in Canada and called for the resignation of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“Every hour this persists the costs rack up,” said Brian Kingston, president of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, whose members include Ford, G.M. and Stellantis, which owns Jeep, Ram and other brands. “They need to enforce the law and remove the protesters from the road leading to the bridge.”

Production shutdowns will worsen a shortage of new vehicles, which has already driven up prices, IHS Markit, a research firm, warned Friday.

Both the Canadian and American governments were trying to help get auto parts, fresh fruit and vegetables, and other products through the border.

Canadian officials were allowing some companies to send goods through other ports of entry without having to refile documents. U.S. customs officials were assisting that effort by adding personnel and screening lines at those alternate crossings.

Manufacturers and logistics companies were sometimes routing trucks hundreds of miles out of their way to bridges and border checkpoints that were still open, but alternatives to the Ambassador Bridge are limited, said Kelly Stefanich, a Toyota spokeswoman.

Sending shipments through Buffalo and Mackinaw, Mich., for example, requires more drivers and trucks, which were already in short supply.

Some businesses were paying extra to reroute the freight through Buffalo, where the crossing remained open, said Jennifer Frigger-Latham, the vice president of sales and marketing at EMO Trans, a logistics company.

But finding alternate routes was not always easy, said Linda Dynes, the executive vice president of Canadian operations for Farrow, a 100-year-old customs broker.

“It seems like every time you find an alternative path, it gets blocked, either by a farm vehicle or a truck,” she said.

Domestic spot prices for shipping had tripled in some cases, causing many companies to suspend shipments, she added.

Many trucks are trying to use a bridge that connects Port Huron, Mich., with the Canadian city of Sarnia, north of Detroit. But traffic is so heavy that trucks often have to wait hours to cross, Mr. Kingston said, adding that he had heard of waits of up to eight hours.

Some carmakers have moved parts by airfreight or even helicopter. But “air cargo is not as efficient for large and bulky components,” Mr. Kingston said.

He noted that the Ambassador Bridge was designed to accommodate large numbers of heavy trucks. Some hazardous materials or other specialized loads cannot cross any other way.

Carmakers and suppliers are also breaking up shipments and putting them in smaller trucks and vans, which can pass through a tunnel that remains open between Detroit and Windsor.

But such measures are expensive stopgaps, and many companies are simply slowing down production until the blockade ends. “The hope is that this will be over shortly,” said Dan Hearsch, a managing director at AlixPartners, a consulting firm that has been helping auto companies cope with the turmoil.

news analysis

With the turmoil in Canada only intensifying from a protest movement that has shut down the urban cores of several cities and blocked crucial highways into the United States, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has mostly sought a quiet path through the tumult.

Mr. Trudeau hinted at a harder line on Friday, announcing, “Everything is on the table because this unlawful activity has to end.” But he has refrained from exerting greater federal authority to end the truck blockade and the protests, frustrating some Canadians who are impatient with the disruptions, as well as political voices on the Canadian left and in Washington.

His initial restraint may make more sense in the context of Canada’s tenuous political balance, in which Mr. Trudeau leads an unpopular minority government and the right-wing establishment is publicly trying on an embrace of populist methods it long disdained.

By holding back, Mr. Trudeau has avoided turning the protests into a referendum on his leadership, which has the approval of only 42 percent of Canadians, or on his pandemic policies in general, which have also polarized voters.

Allowing the protests to enter their third weekend has increased the toll on the economy and on daily life. But it has also kept the public and the political focus trained on the protesters themselves.