These days, like every year in February, the ottawa municipal operatives They carry out work on the Rideau River preparing and cutting the ice, with controlled explosions, to prevent flooding when spring arrives. It is a studied, planned, repeated operation; a moment in which the city warns that ice is unstable and dangerous and, in this winter paradise, as given to skiing as to skating, calls to avoid it.
For two weeks, however, something different has been flowing and it has also been frozen in the Canadian capital and the authorities have not found a way to undo it nor to calculate well its effects, present and future.
The protest of hundreds of truckers who arrived with their heavy vehicles on January 28 in a organized convoy against the restrictions of movements between the country and the United States of those not vaccinated against coronavirus is not like other demonstrations that have historically chosen Wellington Street, in front of the Canadian Parliament, as the scene of their demands. This time the demonstrators and their mechanical giants have remained parked there, and in other surrounding streets, and in other parts of the city.
They are accompanied by dozens more vans and smaller vehicles and also a human tide. A torrent of flags with the maple leaf dyes people red and white, the cars, the streets. On the gates in front of parliament, in graffiti on trucks, on banners and on T-shirts, a panoply of messages is displayed that show that the demands have gone far beyond the pure original rejection of vaccination mandates. Now there are calls for send to prime minister Justin Trudeau to jail or to even less desirable places, to dismantle the government. Also ideas that are known to anyone who is aware of conspiracy currents, from the supposed microchips in vaccines to the supposed control of a “new world order”.
“Liberty!”
Everything is also full, in writing, in songs, in conversations and shouts, of a word: “freedom”, “freedom”, “freedom”, freedom!”
Nathalie, for example, wears it woven into a pink ribbon in her hair. And this 40-year-old woman, 20 as a driver of large vehicles, also mentions it out loud when she talks about why she has decided to leave her two children, ages eight and nine, at home, an hour from Ottawa, and settle in the protest in the cabin of his truck. “We fight for our freedom, we want to be able to work, just pay the bills,” he says. “I’m not vaccinated but why won’t they let me work if I’m alone in my truck?”
Also talking about freedom is Sonia, a 37-year-old woman with roots in India who arrived in Ottawa with her brother in the convoy that left Toronto and spends her nights in an Airbnb and her days in one of the many positions where distributes free food, and also toys for the children, many children, who are seen in the protest. “I have come for freedom, we do not live in communism,” she says behind the barbecue where he makes hot dogs. “We have lived two years of fear and that is the new divide and rule of politicians, the new colonization.”
For others, like Lee, a neighbor from the outskirts of Ottawa who for the fifth day has come to walk with a sign that reads “thank you, truckers”, “this protest is about control, about the government telling us how we have to live life. If we don’t resist now our children will live in a country we never imagined,” he adds. And he returns to the most repeated concept. “The most important thing is that we can live a free life”.
The bubble
Going through the “red zone”, as the authorities baptized the paralyzed center, is to enter a bubble. There is not a single mask in sight. As much as a court order forced to avoid honks, they sound. The engines roar, even though access to fuel has also been limited.
There is camaraderie among those present and loudspeakers and music and dances and hockey games and gifts, like the small golden cross that a woman gives Sonia “for doing God’s work”. Y Rob Closea 48-year-old trucker who arrived 14 days ago from another point in Ontario seven hours from the capital, says that he has accumulated a pile of notes and letters that are given to him by people who are grateful for his protest and explains that “a small community has been created And everyone takes care of themselves.”
Close is one of many who, in an environment where they are also numerous critical messages with the press, the accusations that most of the media spread ‘fake news’ or are at the service of governments, ensures that the image of the protest has been “distorted”. “The media has filled the neighbors with fear that we are violent. A lot of people don’t come downtown because the government has told them to stay home,” he says.
The outside
It is enough to get out of the bubble, or look at it without the perspective of the protesters themselves, or listen to neighbors who do not agree with many of the ideas or with the method of the protests, to come across a different vision. As much as there is an effort to maintain a festive and pacifist aura, especially after the first days of the protests were marked by the presence of Nazis and white supremacists, Due to incidents such as the attack on a building and the infernal noise, it is also unavoidable to listen to less friendly speeches and witness less kumbayá moments.
This Friday there were at least a couple of moments of tension with the police when the agents forced the dismantling of a couple of structures set up on Wellington Street. In general, however, the work of the uniformed men does not have too much criticism among the truckers themselves. “They have behaved well with us”, “they have been fantastic”, I don’t think they want to do this they say.
It may be a matter of sympathy between many agents with the origin of the protests, the rejection of vaccination mandates. Or it may be that they are overwhelmed and numerically unable to deal with a protest that authorities clearly did not prepare for, even knowing it was coming.
They are two of the options that arise in a conversation with Michael Harkins, a resident of Ottawa, who used to work in finance, and who this Friday was with his friend Paul in the center, near some protests for which, if asked for a word as a definition, they choose “chaos” and “madness”.
“The protesters have exchanged their confinement for our confinement,” says Harkins, underlining the fear, real and not provoked by the press, of many to go out into the ‘downtown’, or the one that has led to numerous businesses, including the largest shopping center of the city, with 175 stores, temporarily close its doors (and leave their workers unpaid).
“80 or 85% of the city is tired of what is happening and frustrated with the municipal government and the police,” says Harkins, who does not hesitate to see behind this “freedom convoy” something bigger and less transparent. than a protest by a specific group against a specific measure. He is convinced that “those who have organized it are not the truckers, they are laborers, the pandemic is used as an excuse”. And beneath that surface of frozen trucks on the streets of Ottawa, he’s not the only one to see a stream of ultraconservative populism and extremist movements waiting for your spring.