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Jordan Furlong's avatar

Excellent column. The National Framework’s goal that a protest should be allowed to “happen and end” is a sound objective that will hopefully become the standard police response to protests. What’s interesting to me is that the protest basically “happened” on the first weekend. Then it didn’t end. I think the police assumed, as many of us in the city hoped, that the protestors would have to leave town on Monday to go back to their jobs and homes. When it became clear that that wasn’t happening, the police didn’t seem to know what to do next.

Suppose the protestors had stayed, blocking Wellington Street and some surrounding roads, but had otherwise been relatively well-behaved — demonstrating loudly during the day, but also letting people get on with their lives in relative peace. Residents would have found the street blockade a huge nuisance for getting around downtown, but I think most would have accepted that as the price of life in the national capital. Certainly we’re accustomed to detours and blocked roads the rest of the year.

What turned most local people against the protestors was all the things they were doing that weren’t “protesting.” They abused passersby, invaded stores and a homeless shelter, ran their massive diesel engines, and blasted their horns as long and loudly as they could. There is a difference between protesting government actions and being an asshole for the sake of being an asshole — and continuing to do it after you’ve been asked to stop. They’re both perfectly legal. But only one is intended to achieve a political goal. The other is intended to harass people for your own amusement.

That was around the time we stopped calling them “protestors” and began calling them “occupiers.” But I’m not even sure that that was the right word. An occupation is also a political act. At about the ten-day mark, I feel like for most of those gathered in the red zone, the point of the gathering became to hang out, party, blast their horns, use the hot tub, see themselves on TV, and enjoy — really enjoy — the upset they were causing. It wasn’t a protest or an occupation at that point so much as collective untrammeled self-indulgence. They were having the time of their lives. The fact they were making people angry was the cherry on top.

None of this is what Rouleau’s commission is meant to deal with, and I doubt that his findings will touch on these issues more than slightly. It’s important to determine whether invocation of the Emergencies Act was justified. I think Rouleau will find that it wasn’t, because sustained group assholery in a city with a broken police force does not rise to the level of a liberties-suspending national crisis. But the fact that so many of us cheered the Act’s passage as necessary and overdue should probably make its way into his report, even as a footnote, because I think it’s pretty important.

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Mark Ch's avatar

The biggest problem for the police was that they didn't realize they were supposed to be the bad guys.

In Canada, indigenous people are allowed to protest all they like, except that shutting down key linear infrastructure, like the Windsor bridge and the railways in 2020, needs to be ended in a short period of time. Occupying random streets in centres of government (or small towns) is currently allowed indefinitely.

The rules for the convoy were different. Many people in government believed that, because their message was not approved, they should not have been allowed to stay. The OPS mistakenly thought that the rules for protests should be viewpoint independent. Much of the confusion stemmed from the fact that nobody would admit that enforcement is viewpoint-based.

If leadership had said what they were really thinking, eg "all that stuff about liaison and letting people protest applies to indigenous people and environmentalists, but not vax free blue collars - them we bash" there would have been much less confusion. All the drivel about the protest being illegal because it broke parking bylaws is the same - all major protests break those kinds of minor laws. The people talking about parking bylaws are doing it because they are afraid to say what they really think: this protest was different because of who was protesting and what they were saying.

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