The freedom of some ends where that of others begins. With their freedom convoy, the truckers crossed the line that separates the right to protest – essential in a healthy democracy – from the right of Ottawa residents to live in peace.
Posted yesterday at 9:00 a.m.
For the past week, they have been seen attacking the volunteers of a soup kitchen to obtain food, throwing stones at the paramedics or even desecrating the tomb of the Unknown Soldier.
Beyond these sad feats of arms, they paralyze the city center with their trucks parked in the middle of the streets and they break the ears of residents with their horns that ring day and night.
It is no longer a demonstration, it is a siege.
Without anyone flinching, the besiegers set fires in the middle of town, explaining that they were on Algonquin territory and that the chief had given them permission. It’s laughable.
Unstoppable by the police, they built a makeshift home in Confederation Park across from City Hall. Firewood, gas cylinders… everything is there to stay warm. With the risks that entails.
And to think that in Pointe-Claire, zealous officials ordered a kind-hearted resident to dismantle the little tree house he had built for local children on an unoccupied lot1 !
But let’s stay in Ottawa, where the besiegers threaten to camp around parliament until all sanitary measures are abolished, even if Public Health repeated on Friday that it was still too early. They want to stay in as long as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau hasn’t resigned, nothing less.
But wait: how many are there? About 250.
And how many voters went to vote in the last elections? 17 million. They re-elected only four months ago the Liberal Party, which had campaigned on the promise of imposing vaccinations on civil servants and the transport sector.
It is true that discontent escalated with the fifth wave. A third of the population even say they “have a lot in common” with the protesters in Ottawa, according to a poll conducted earlier this week by Abacus.
But sympathy for truckers is waning. Those who complain of being deprived of their liberty ironically deprive citizens of a normal life.
Think of the 4-year-old boy with cancer who missed his chemotherapy treatment after being stuck in a traffic jam for four hours on his way to the hospital. Or to all those Ottawa merchants already battered by the pandemic who cannot reopen their establishments.
The Ottawa police chief seems overwhelmed by the situation, but sending in the army is not the right way out.
No one wants a psychodrama like that of the Oka crisis in 1990. The army had been called in to help dismantle the barricades erected by the Mohawks who were protesting against the expansion of a golf course on ancestral lands that they claimed. The images of the confrontation, in particular that of a young soldier face to face with a Mohawk warrior, had gone around the world.
A peaceful solution is clearly preferable.
The new interim leader of the Conservative Party of Canada criticizes Justin Trudeau for not having a plan to convince truckers to pack up.
She who had proudly encouraged the truckers. She who, behind the scenes, had suggested to former chief Erin O’Toole not to “ask them to go home”, preferring instead to try to turn the seat “into a problem for the Prime Minister”, as evidenced by an email obtained by the Globe and Mail2.
Doing politics like this on the backs of the population is deplorable.
At least, in Quebec, all elected officials – including Conservative MP Claire Samson – spoke with one voice to prevent the city from being “jammed” in the middle of the carnival.
On social networks, this is what we promise. A seat “. “Trucks” everywhere, “stalled” around the National Assembly. To the trade unionist Bernard “Rambo” Gauthier could be added demonstrators with varied and radical recriminations. For example, La Meute, a far-right anti-Islam group that had lost its breath, wants to take the opportunity to make a comeback.
Nevertheless, the leader of the Conservative Party of Quebec, Éric Duhaime, advocates listening.
“Before crying wolf, it would be good to listen to what the truckers have to say and let them show us that they can very well demonstrate peacefully, as was the case last week in Ottawa”, a- he wrote on social media.
Far from having been peaceful, the last week in Ottawa has rather demonstrated that the demonstrators must not be allowed to take root, which does not seem to be the case in Quebec for the moment. We can only rejoice.