After Weeks of Demonstrations, Ottawa Police Clamp Down on Protesters

Twenty-two days after a trucker convoy rumbled into Canada’s capital to protest pandemic restrictions, hundreds of police officers in downtown Ottawa moved in to arrest protesters Friday, hoping to end weeks of gridlock that have roiled the city, infuriated local residents and shaken the country.

After a night of unusually heavy snowfall, rows of police officers in fluorescent jackets edged steadily toward protesters on Parliament Hill, backed by at least two armored vehicles and tactical officers armed with rifles and wearing helmets.

By late afternoon, protesters were clashing with police officers in front of Canada’s Senate building. The Ottawa police said that some demonstrators had assaulted officers and had tried to remove their weapons. The police deployed crowd-dispersal spray against demonstrators, and officers on horseback were forcing the crowd back, leading to a rush of people trying to flee in a flood of panic.

Images on Canadian television showed police officers dragging one recalcitrant protester on the snowy ground near a truck draped with a Canadian flag.

At 4:45 p.m., after several hours of making arrests, the police cleared hundreds of protesters from a major intersection outside the Canadian Senate, where a truck blockade has been disrupting daily life.

Earlier, B.J. Dichter, a spokesman for the truckers’ convoy, wrote on Twitter that it was time for protesters to leave, saying that the police had smashed the windows of one driver’s truck.

Several heavy tow trucks whose license plates had been removed and whose company names were covered with Ottawa police stickers were towing protesters’ trucks away. The police said 21 vehicles had been towed.

The Ottawa Police Service said that as of Friday evening, more than 100 people had been arrested on various charges, including “mischief,” a serious offense under Canada’s criminal law, which can carry a prison term of up to 10 years.

Among those arrested on Thursday night was Tamara Lich, a leading activist, fund-raiser and singer who in the past has advocated the secession of Canada’s western provinces. She has become one of the main voices of the protest movement.

The police mobilization comes after mounting criticism that law enforcement personnel have moved too slowly to end the protests, permitting protesters to taunt local residents for wearing masks, honk their horns in quiet residential neighborhoods and undermine local businesses.

Law enforcement officers have created a perimeter with about 100 checkpoints in Ottawa’s downtown core to keep anyone but residents from entering.

There was a sense of anticipation across the trucker encampment as reports trickled in from their organizers via a text message chain that police cruisers had been seen massing outside the demonstration area.

“They’re coming in,” said one man wearing a Canadian flag as a cape. “They’re going to corral us.”

While it was proceeding cautiously, the police operation appeared to be the culmination of a tenacious protest that has reverberated around the world and has been a seminal moment in the history of Canadian civil disobedience and law enforcement. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the rare step this week of declaring a national public order emergency — the first such declaration in half a century — to end the protests.

The logjam in the nation’s capital, the weekslong blockade of an Ontario bridge that is vital to automakers’ supply chains and the news media’s projection of all that onto the global stage have given the protests an outsize megaphone and impact.

As the police move to clamp down on the protests, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” is likely to live on long after the last trucks depart — if only as a vivid template for how civil disobedience can be effective, in particular in a liberal democracy where the threshold for intervention by law enforcement personnel to stop demonstrations can be high.

Much like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Canada convoys show that what seem like fringe political movements can gather force at a time of anxiety — and when the world’s cameras are pointed at them. Back then, the driving force was anger over endemic social inequality. These days it is a lethal global pandemic.

In addition to Ms. Lich, Chris Barber, another main organizer, was also arrested on Thursday.

Ms. Lich, of Medicine Hat, Alberta, has emerged as the public face and the most visible leader of the trucker convoy. She is a former fitness instructor who has worked in the energy sector and has sung and played guitar in a band called Blind Monday.

The protests began weeks ago with a loosely organized group of truckers who objected to a requirement that they be vaccinated if they cross the U.S.-Canada border. They expanded into a broader movement opposed to an array of pandemic measures and to Mr. Trudeau generally.

Ian Willms contributed reporting.

The image of Canadian police moving in and arresting protesters on Friday in the nation’s capital, backed by tactical officers wielding rifles, is a seminal moment in the history of Canadian law enforcement and civil disobedience.

It is happening just days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took the rare step of declaring a national public order emergency, the first time the Canadian government has taken such action in half a century.

Many of the powers enabled by Mr. Trudeau’s move on Monday had already been given to the police and authorities under a state of emergency enforced earlier by the province of Ontario. But the federal declaration extended them nationwide, and also enabled banks to freeze accounts of protesters and organizers — a step the government says is now underway.

The declaration also gave the government the power to restrict mobility, allowing Ottawa’s police to effectively seal off the city’s downtown core to residents and people who work in the area.

Under the act, police services across the country have the power to seize trucks and other vehicles used in the protests. Demonstrations that “go beyond lawful protest” can be banned, the prime minister said this week. But Mr. Trudeau and members of his cabinet offered repeated assurance that the act would not be used to suspend “fundamental rights.”

Mr. Trudeau’s extraordinary response brought 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 has said that he would not use his authority under the declaration to deploy the military against the protesters.

As pop music played from a truck parked in front of the Canada’s Senate building, police officers surrounded the small offshoot encampment on both sides. At one point, “Let’s Get it On” by Marvin Gaye echoed through the streets.

In olive green riot gear, the police cleared a line through the trucks, having already removed demonstrators from a number of the vehicles. On the other side of the knot of trucks, roughly 40 police officers in red-knit caps began to march down Rideau Street, in Ottawa’s city center, joining others on another side and filling out their ranks with more officers as trucks revved their engines.

In front of Parliament, many members of the main protest group dashed over to watch the slow-moving advance of police officers toward an intersection blocked by other demonstrators and trucks to the east. Protesters swiftly retreated as officers, half a block away, stepped forward.

“They’re coming in,” said one man wearing a Canadian flag as a cape. “They’re going to corral us.”

The truckers who remained, many of whom have been holding out for weeks, began to grow weary on Friday as the police closed in on them.

Mike Marsh, 48, doesn’t want to leave, but he knows what’s coming. “We can’t stop them,” he said, nodding toward the direction of the police formation heading toward the stronghold of protesters still camped out near Parliament. “All we can do is slow them down.”

Mr. Marsh hasn’t been a commercial truck driver since getting in an accident two years ago, he said. Now he’s looking for a truck to sleep in tonight to avoid areas now occupied by law enforcement.

Wearing an umbrella hat emblazoned with the Canadian flag, Mr. Marsh said he couldn’t see a future for himself if the truckers have to back down.

“If we lose this fight I’m driving straight to Florida,” he said, “because there is no home here for me any more.”

For residents of Ottawa, the clampdown comes as a welcome reprieve after weeks of what many have called an inadequate response from law enforcement to the occupation.

Kathryn Moore, who works in administration at the University of Ottawa, lives west of downtown, close enough that when the wind blew the right way, she could smell diesel fumes and hear horns blaring.

Since the protests began, Ms. Moore said she hasn’t felt comfortable going to her office. “I headed in a couple times and just turned around,” she said, adding, “I feel relief that this is finally happening.”

Children scampered gleefully outside in the cold on Thursday, playing street hockey among the growling trucks occupying Parliament Hill and jumping on bouncy castles inflated for their entertainment.

Some were the sons and daughters of the truckers who have been camped here for nearly three weeks. Others were brought by their parents in a show of support for the convoy.

On Wednesday, Ottawa police officers went truck to truck handing out a notice telling demonstrators they were breaking the law and faced arrest. It warned that anyone taking a minor to an unlawful protest could be fined up to 5,000 Canadian dollars “and/or potentially spend up to five years in prison.”

Outside Parliament with his son and two daughters on Thursday, wearing “Make America Great Again” baseball caps, Baret McAuley, a retired oil field company manager, said the notice did not change his plans to protest with his children, Emily, 17, and Ryan and Sarah, both 12. They had driven more than 1,700 miles from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, a 30-hour trip.

“I don’t believe that any person with a soul will take away my children,” said Mr. McAuley, 47.

A woman, who requested anonymity because she feared the consequences of violating the police order, said she arrived at the protest that morning with her young child, only to learn en route about the possible risk. They stood waiting on the street for a ride back home, she said, unwilling to take any chances.

Irwin Elman, who formerly served as Ontario’s child and youth advocate, sharply criticized protesting parents who planned to remain there with children. “To stay there and not exercise a parent’s duty of care to their children, and put their own rights ahead of the rights of their children, it’s unforgivable and selfish,” he said.

Last week, police said children were present in about 25 percent of the heavy trucks at the protest. As the police appeared to be bracing on Thursday to remove the protesters, there were fewer minors among the trucks.

Interim Ottawa police chief Steve Bell said in a statement Wednesday that police will be working with the Children’s Aid Society and have “a plan” to keep young people safe in the event of their caregivers’ arrest. He did not elaborate.

In a statement, the Children’s Aid Society of Ottawa on Wednesday urged parents to make child care arrangements should they be arrested. If children and parents are separated due to law enforcement action, the organization said, it will “work to reunite families as soon as possible.”

Surrounded by five of his eight children, Daryl Sheppard, a teacher from North Bay, Ontario, 220 miles northwest of Ottawa, walked through the protest on Thursday holding an anti-vaccination sign. Mr. Sheppard, 41, said he and his children would remain in Ottawa, in defiance of the emergency orders.

“I’m not really concerned with laws that infringe on my rights as a citizen, my right to bear witness,” he said.

There are plenty of coronavirus deniers and conspiracy theorists among the trucks in downtown Ottawa, but Mike Johnson doesn’t count himself among them.

Mr. Johnson, 53, said Thursday he wasn’t even particularly concerned about government mandates or vaccine passports until his son urged him to drive to the nation’s capital to protest against them a few weeks ago.

But now his fire engine red truck, the only thing of significant value he owns, is parked right outside Canada’s Parliament — and Mr. Johnson says he’s prepared for the police to seize it and to forsake his livelihood to defend the cause.

“When we turned our headlights toward Ottawa, I don’t think any of us knew what we were driving into,” said Mr. Johnson, a trucker from Niagara, Ontario. “I didn’t realize how bad it was until I got here.”

Some among the protesters have links to far-right parties whose support is so low that they hold no seats in the federal Parliament. Mr. Johnson said that he supports one such party, the People’s Party of Canada, whose leader has railed against multiculturalism, immigration and climate change “hysteria.”

The logjam in the nation’s capital, the weekslong blockade of an Ontario bridge that is vital to automakers’ supply chains and the media projection of all that onto the global stage have given the protests an outsized megaphone and impact.

As the police clamp down on the protests, the so-called “Freedom Convoy” will likely live on long after the last trucks depart — if only as a vivid template of how civil disobedience can be effective, in particular in a liberal democracy where the threshold for law enforcement intervening to stop demonstrations can be high.

Much like Occupy Wall Street in 2011, the Canada convoys show that what seem like fringe political movements can gather force at a time of anxiety — and when the world’s cameras are pointed at them. Back then, the driving force was anger over endemic social inequality. These days it is a lethal global pandemic.

Mr. Johnson never got vaccinated and didn’t have to — hauling scrap metal around northern Ontario doesn’t require border crossing. He said he believes the coronavirus is real and when people have knocked on the door of his cab to talk about conspiracy theories he refuses to engage.

“That’s not why I’m here,” he said. “It’s a distraction.”

During the occupation, his centrally located truck became a kind of command station for anyone who needed a break from the bitter cold or a place to charge a phone. The throngs of people who stopped by have moved Mr. Johnson with stories of losing their work because they don’t want to get vaccinated.

Mr. Johnson believes that even once the police arrive in force, the truckers will have made a lasting mark on the country by drawing attention to their demands.

“This has already been a positive accomplishment,” he said, eyeing the police car parked on the lawn of the Parliament building. “Regardless of what happens.”

Canada has employed strict restrictions in its efforts to fight the coronavirus pandemic. But unlike in the United States, such measures have received very little pushback or politicization.

However, a month ago, a law was passed requiring truckers who cross the border into the United States to be vaccinated, threatening the livelihoods of unvaccinated truckers.

So a group of them, along with other organizations, assembled a convoy and drove across Canada toward the capital, Ottawa, in protest.

The demonstration, which many thought would last only a few days, has turned into a noisy, three-week occupation and has led Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to declare a state of national emergency.

“The Daily” explores how Canada got to this point, and what the protest is like on the ground.

She is a former fitness instructor who has sung and played guitar in a band called “Blind Monday” in Medicine Hat, Alberta. She was a senior member of a splinter party that advocated for Canada’s Western provinces to secede from the country.

And now Tamara Lich, 47, has emerged as the public face and the most visible leader of the trucker convoy against pandemic restrictions that has roiled the nation’s capital, shaken the country and prompted Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to take the drastic step of declaring a national public order emergency.

That visibility rose on Thursday night when Ms. Lich was arrested in Ottawa. She faced one charge for “counselling to commit the offence of mischief,” the Ottawa police said in a statement on Friday, and was due in court on Friday.

Ms. Lich speaks publicly in measured tones, and has become adept at deploying social media — and her Twitter feed — to amplify the protesters’ grievances.

At a news conference in the Sheraton Ottawa Hotel on Monday, opened to media other than solely conservative-leaning news outlets for one of the first times, there was an air of gravitas in a room that echoed with the constant coughing of dozens of maskless supporters.

Wearing or not wearing a mask has become a potent political statement during the protests and some Ottawa residents have complained of being taunted by protesters.

“Some of you might oppose our grievances,” Ms. Lich said to the television cameras. Like other members of the movement, she does not wear a mask. “However, democratic society will always have non-trivial disagreements, and righteous dissidents,” she added.

What message discipline exists in the protest movement has come from Ms. Lich, said Jay Hill, the interim leader of the Maverick Party, a small right-of-center group based out of Calgary, Alberta, created to promote the separation of Canada’s three western Prairie Provinces from the rest of the country. Ms. Lich, who worked previously in the energy sector, has deep ties to the group.

Even before the convoy assembled, its messaging was Ms. Lich’s preoccupation, according to Mr. Hill, who said she called him several times even before arriving in Ottawa to strategize.

“We had a number of discussions about staying on message, about the need in this modern-day world of politics to have a very clearly defined message that is understandable and simple, a message that people can grasp hold of and run with,” he said. “Tamara clearly understands that.”

Ms. Lich played a leading role in organizing a GoFundMe campaign for the protests that raised $7.8 million before the crowdfunding site shut it down after receiving “police reports of violence and other unlawful activity,” GoFundMe said.

B.J. Dichter, an official spokesman for the convoy, said he joined the effort after Ms. Lich sought help managing the swell of donations flowing into a GoFundMe page. Mr. Dichter has a history of spouting anti-Islamist views and once said that “political Islam” is “rotting away at our society like syphilis.” He has rejected claims of racism.

Within the occupiers’ tightly managed ground operations, there are military hallmarks, outlined and executed by the several higher-ups who have backgrounds in the armed forces and law enforcement, according to leading members of the group.

Their organization includes oversight of each occupied street by a so-called road captain, with sections divided and overseen by block captains who operate below them.

Before becoming a prominent face of the protests, Ms. Lich was a personal trainer in Medicine Hat, a town once dubbed “Hell’s Basement” by Rudyard Kipling for its location on top of a huge natural gas field.

Zach Smithson, an employee at Body Building Depot Fitness Emporium, where Ms. Lich used to work, said she has become the talk of the town.

“I think we are all very proud of her,” he said.

Ms. Lich did not respond to a call and text message requesting an interview.

With police forces swelling in the area Friday morning, and tow trucks and other heavy equipment poised to move against them, the protesting truck drivers who have occupied downtown Ottawa for weeks were on alert on Friday for imminent police action.

Like truckers who had mounted blockades in other parts of Canada, they expressed defiance and the intent to hold firm against any effort to disperse them. But the defiance melted away at the other protest sites as law enforcement moved in, and the big question on Friday was whether the same would happen in Ottawa.

Around noon, a spokesman for the protesters, B.J. Dichter, tweeted that “It’s time to leave. @OttawaPolice please allow the remaining trucks to leave in #Peace.”

An hour later, it was unclear how quickly, or if at all, Mr. Dichter’s message would spread or how influential it would be.

Some protesters said they have been hearing from friends and family members, begging them to leave. Some of them have no way to leave. They are physically backed into one another, and some of them have let air out of their tires or bled their brake lines.

On Thursday, Samantha Dougherty, 32, a protest supporter, patrolled the area around a truck facing Parliament. Inside the truck was her new friend, Lenny Frey, she said, who had been parked there for 20 days and had no intention of leaving.

“Nobody is allowed within 6 feet of this truck,” said Ms. Dougherty, a blow horn in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “This truck is not moving, over my dead body.”

Any police response would be an overreaction, said another protester, Mark Fenson, 55, who said he was a drug and alcohol counselor from Petersburg, Ontario, and had spent the last 22 months attending anti-vaccine and anti-lockdown protests. Pointing toward the encampment on Thursday, which at times has included recreation activities for children, he said a clampdown would be “going a little far for a bunch of bouncy castles.”

Still, Mr. Fenson said he would allow himself to be arrested, although he felt Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and the police were unfairly targeting the protesters. He said he believed that the official forces were acting on behalf of global elites trying to enforce a new world order. “I’m not about to fight against them,” he said. “I’ll deal with them in court.”