Canada Declares National Emergency to End Trucker Protests

The day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the rare step of declaring a national public order emergency aimed at stopping protests that have roiled Canada for weeks, many in the country were asking: Will it actually work?

Mr. Trudeau’s move to invoke the Emergencies Act on Monday was the first time a Canadian government has taken such action in half a century, and his most aggressive response since the crisis began.

The protests in the nation’s capital have snarled traffic, disrupted daily life and undermined the local economy. They have also multiplied across the country, including an almost weeklong blockade of a bridge connecting Windsor, Ontario, and Detroit that is vital to the supply chains of the global automobile industry.

The response by the police and all levels of government to the crisis has been widely criticized as inadequate, while Mr. Trudeau has come under fire for failing to be sufficiently decisive to end the turmoil. Some critics contend that he should have intervened earlier and perhaps even sent in the army.

The Emergencies Act confers enormous temporary powers to the federal government, allowing it to do what is necessary to restore public order, including banning public assemblies or restricting travel to and from specific areas. But Mr. Trudeau stressed repeatedly that the act would not be used to suspend fundamental rights.

Under the extraordinary measures invoked by Mr. Trudeau, the police will now be able to seize trucks and other vehicles being used in blockades. The measure will formally ban demonstrations that “go beyond lawful protest,” and the government will formally ban blockades in designated areas like border crossings, airports and the city of Ottawa.

Tow-truck operators, who have been reluctant to cooperate with the police, will now be compelled to work with law enforcement agencies to clear Ottawa’s streets and the border crossings at Coutts, Alberta, and Emerson, Manitoba. If they don’t cooperate, they could face arrest.

Image

While the prime minister and the cabinet can invoke the act whenever they think the security of Canada is under threat, the decision must then be approved by Parliament within a week.

Mr. Trudeau said that the protests have been illegally obstructing neighborhoods and disturbing residents, while the blockades have harmed the economy. “This is not a peaceful protest,” he said. “We will not allow illegal and dangerous activities to continue.” He said invoking the act was a “last resort” and stressed that he was not limiting the rights of peaceful assembly or freedom of expression.

“The time to go home is now,” he added.

The decision to invoke the law came as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in Alberta said on Monday it had arrested 11 people and seized items including guns, body armor and ammunition. Police officials said in a statement that the people arrested were connected to a small group near a border crossing in Coutts, Alberta — which has been blockaded for days — and that the group was willing to use force against the police if any attempts were made to disrupt its blockade.

Mr. Trudeau’s extraordinary response brings back memories of October 1970 and a tumultuous period known as the October Crisis when Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau — Justin Trudeau’s father — quashed a wave of terrorism by a violent Quebec separatist group by invoking the War Measures Act, and then sending in troops to Montreal. It was the only time in Canadian history that the war act was applied in peacetime. The Emergencies Act was introduced in July 1988 to replace the war act.

Mr. Trudeau reiterated on Monday that he would not be using his authority under the declaration to deploy the military against the protesters.

While Mr. Trudeau has expanded his means to defuse the crisis, the most economically damaging part of the demonstrations appeared to have subsided on Monday. After protesters blockaded a critical economic link between the United States and Canada for nearly a week, traffic began making its way over the bridge again early Monday, providing some relief to the Canadian authorities struggling to tame the protests and to industries disrupted by the unrest.

But any sense of accomplishment by law enforcement at the Ambassador Bridge, which links Detroit and Windsor, Ontario, was offset by the tenaciousness of protests in Ottawa, which are now in their third week.

The loosely organized “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations shaking Canada began as a protest against the mandatory vaccination of truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. But they have transformed into a battle cry against pandemic restrictions as a whole, and the leadership of Mr. Trudeau.

New details about the source of millions of dollars supporting the Canadian trucker convoy suggest many of the larger donors are wealthy Canadians, though one of the biggest contributions was made in the name of an American tech entrepreneur.

Leaked data said to be from the GiveSendGo crowdfunding platform, posted last night to a now-defunct web page by anonymous hackers, lists records of more than 92,000 donations totaling more than $8 million. A review of the data shows that some $4.3 million came from Canada, while an additional $3.6 million originated in the United States, though the United States accounted for the most individual donations. Small donations from dozens of other countries made up a fraction of the total amount raised.

One of the largest donations, for $90,000, is attributed to Thomas M. Siebel, a billionaire Silicon Valley entrepreneur and investor. He did not respond to a request for comment sent to the email address listed in the records and to his company.

Others who made donations ranging from $10,000 to $75,000 appear to be mostly Canadian business owners, with a few Americans in the mix.

Brad Howland, president of a New Brunswick-based company that makes pressure washers, appears in the leaked data as having donated $75,000, leaving the comment: “Hold the line!” In an email, Mr. Howland confirmed he was a donor, saying the protests “will go down in the history books.”

“Our company and my family are proud to stand with these men and women as they uphold the Charter of Rights and Freedoms of our great nation,” he said.

A donation for $17,760, attributed in the data to Travis Moore of Idaho, was accompanied by the comment: “Let freedom ring, brothers of the north. Cryptocurrency is the future.” A request for comment sent to Mr. Moore, using the email address listed in donation records, was answered with a reply containing a meme objecting to Covid restrictions.

Most of the comments left by donors expressed peaceful solidarity with the cause of opposing vaccine mandates and other pandemic restrictions. Mixed in with the positive messages, however, were some with a more menacing tone, like one left by an American who donated $50: “I’d rather pay to support this movement now than pay for bullets later.”

The presence of cryptocurrency evangelists among supporters of the convoy is apparent in a separate set of data reviewed by The New York Times. It shows donations were made in Bitcoin through a web page that went up after the initial fund-raising vehicle, GoFundMe, pulled the plug on the campaign. The new site, called “Bitcoin for Truckers,” is hosted by a cryptocurrency crowdfunding service, and had raised $946,000 as of Monday morning.

The Bitcoin campaign, which has received more than 5,000 mostly small-dollar donations, has been supported by a handful of large infusions from cryptocurrency boosters. The two biggest, with a combined value of more than $300,000 at the time they were made, were donated anonymously.

A series of others valued at about $42,000 each appear to be associated with an online challenge by a former software engineer who goes by the pseudonym LaserHodl and asked other Bitcoin fans to join him in supporting the trucker convoy. Jesse Powell, founder of the crypto exchange Kraken, tweeted his agreement, and a donation attributed to him appears in the data.

Benjamin Dichter, one of the convoy organizers, said at a news conference last week that after the cryptocurrency crowdfunding campaign began, he received offers of help from “major players” in the crypto markets.

“I was shocked how quickly I started getting messages from some of the most prominent Bitcoiners in the world,” he said.

The GiveSendGo data leak was announced Sunday evening on a webpage titled “GiveSendGo IS NOW FROZEN,” with a five-minute video in which a manifesto by the anonymous hackers scrolled across the screen. In it, the hackers complained that the trucker protest had “held a city hostage” and warned it “could be cover for a type of Trojan horse attack where extremists and militia groups may arrive in large numbers with weapons.”

The data contains a record for each donation that includes the donor’s name, ZIP code and the email address they used. It is not possible to independently verify every donation, but some of them line up with donations that had publicly appeared on the GiveSendGo website before it went offline.

For example, Mr. Siebel was cited last week by a Canadian news network, which noted that his name appeared with the $90,000 donation, at the time it was made, on the web page for the convoy campaign. About half the donations were not accompanied by a person’s name when they publicly appeared on the page.

GiveSendGo, which had earlier been the target of another data hacking that revealed personal information, such as driver’s licenses and passports, for some site users, was offline Monday morning. The company did not respond to a request for comment.

Organizers started a GiveSendGo campaign earlier this month after GoFundMe shut down an online fund-raiser that had raised nearly $7.8 million. The funds were to be used to “provide humanitarian aid and legal support for the peaceful truckers and their families,” Alex Shipley, a spokeswoman for GiveSendGo, told The Times in an email last week.

If the outside world is baffled by the scenes unfolding in the streets of Canada, so are many Canadians. They are dumbfounded, perhaps none more so than the government officials who have stood by largely slack-jawed as giant trucks stake out ground in the normally placid capital, shaking and honking at night as people cheer and dance, neighbors be damned.

As demonstrations kept flaring, the government on Monday invoked the Emergencies Act, which greatly increases the government’s power to crack down on protest, and in Alberta, the police arrested 11 people and seized a large cache of weapons. Earlier, traffic resumed over the Ambassador Bridge, a major international route blockaded for a week, and officials announced that they were lifting some contentious vaccine pass requirements.

The chaos of recent weeks has left many wondering if Canada is witnessing the birth of a political alt-right, or if it is a pandemic-induced tantrum that, once exhausted, will curl itself asleep, leaving behind a country bewildered but essentially unchanged. It could also be, some argue, that the so-called freedom convoy is not an aberration at all but a mirror to an integral part of the country that doesn’t fit the stereotype, and so is ignored.

The unrest seems a rebuff to the cherished mythology imposed on Canada’s citizens from abroad and held by many Canadians themselves as moderate, rule-following, levelheaded — and just plain nice.

“It feels like a national nervous breakdown,” said Susan Delacourt, a veteran Canadian political columnist from Ottawa who like many of her fellow citizens is wondering what exactly is happening to her country right now.

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, and it reopened late Sunday.

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 Tuesday, demonstrations continued to disrupt service at border crossings in Emerson, Manitoba and Coutts, Alberta.

The trucks lined nose-to-tail in the streets around Ottawa’s Parliament Hill for more than two weeks hum constantly. Their diesel engines grumble to keep the drivers inside their cabs warm. Many truckers have hardly left the cabs of their hulking vehicles, giant semis by brands like Mack, Kenworth and Peterbilt, for the duration of their occupation of part of Canada’s capital city.

Some vehicles have a bed where a back seat should be, typically used for cat naps on long-hauls, now a hotel-room-on-wheels for some of the drivers. Lloyd Brubacher, 31, from Owen Sound, curls up each night in the back of the Kenworth cab owned by his employer, Highland Custom Farming, who is paying him during his attendance at the demonstration.

Others have more comfortable places to crash: Peter Doull, 56, a partner in Hot Bottom Baits, a New Brunswick company that supplies and hauls lobster bait, said a fish supplier for the company called him up last week to pledge his support; now Mr. Doull and his son James, 24, are staying in a hotel, paid for by the fish supplier, he said.

Guy Meister, a trucker from Aylesford, Nova Scotia, sat in the cab of a truck parked outside the Canadian Senate building, frustrated that the protest had become a catchall for a number of other causes. Mr. Meister, who is unvaccinated and believes the vaccine is dangerous, said the only thing that drew him to the capital was his opposition to vaccine mandates, particularly if children are required to become inoculated. “I don’t think a person that doesn’t know what rough hands are should be telling Buddy how to raise his kid,” he said.

The trucks have morphed into shrines for sympathizers. Some are now covered in signatures and well-wishes, as passers-by sign them like a cast; others are festooned with placards and banners condemning Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, or things like giant images of children wearing protective masks, with grim slogans about the supposed harm of face coverings.

It has become something of a ritual for passers-by to bestow gifts on the truckers as they sit in their seats, or rap on the cab door and ask for a hug or a handshake. Early Sunday morning, Mr. Brubacher sat in his cab practically under a pile of handwritten letters, thanking him.

Stuffed animals and valentines were piled on the dash and eddied in the footwells, but mostly, he said, people give cash: In one of the several coffee cups he’s been gifted, was Saturday’s haul. He had not counted the money yet, but estimated that people had palmed him over $1,000 that day alone. “It’s unbelievable,” he said. “It just keeps coming.”

He said that those in their cabs are getting most of their information on the protest and its impacts from a text message thread sent out by organizers, who discourage use of the CB radios truckers typically communicate with, because they fear being listened-in on. But Mr. Brubacher was startled to learn that at least some of the information being disseminated to the occupiers — for example, that half of the Ottawa police had resigned over the weekend in solidarity with the protest — was false.