Canada’s protests settle down, but could echo in politics

Rob Gillies and Tim Sullivan, Associated Press

The streets around the Canadian Parliament are quiet now. The Ottawa protesters who vowed never to give up are largely gone, chased away by police in riot gear. The relentless blare of truckers’ horns has gone silent.

But the trucker protest, which grew until it closed a handful of Canada-US border posts and shut down key parts of the capital city for weeks, could echo for years in Canadian politics and perhaps south of the border.

The protest, which was first aimed at a COVID-19 vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers but also encompassed fury over the range of COVID-19 restrictions and hatred of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, reflected the spread of disinformation in Canada and simmering populist and right-wing anger.

“I think we’ve started something here,” said Mark Suitor, a 33-year-old protester from Hamilton, Ontario, speaking as police retook control of the streets around Parliament. Protesters had essentially occupied those streets for more than three weeks, embarrassing Trudeau and energizing Canada’s far right. Suitor believes the protests will divide the country, something he welcomes.

“This is going to be a very big division in our country,” he said. “I don’t believe this is the end.”

While most analysts doubt the protests will mark a historic watershed in Canadian politics, it has shaken both of Canada’s two major parties.

“The protest has given both the Liberals and the Conservatives a black eye,” said Nelson Wiseman, a political science professor at the University of Toronto. Trudeau’s Liberals look bad for allowing protesters to foment weeks of chaos in the capital city, he said, while the Conservatives look bad for championing protesters, many of them from the farthest fringes of the right.

The conservatives “have to be careful not to alienate more moderate voters, who are generally not sympathetic to the protesters or right-wing populism more generally,” said Daniel Béland, a political science professor at McGill University in Montreal.

The self-styled Freedom Convoy shook Canada’s reputation for civility, inspired convoys in France, New Zealand and the Netherlands and interrupted trade, causing economic damage on both sides of the border. Hundreds of trucks eventually occupied the streets around Parliament, a display that was part protest and part carnival.

Authorities moved quickly to reopen the border posts, but police in Ottawa did little but issue warnings until the past couple days, even as hundreds and sometimes thousands of protesters clogged the streets of the city and besieged Parliament Hill.

Truckers ignored warnings that they were risking arrest and could have their rigs seized and bank accounts frozen under the new emergency powers invoked by Trudeau. The truckers, parked on the streets in and around Parliament, blared their horns in defiance of a court injunction against honking, issued after residents said the constant noise was making the neighbourhood unlivable.

“It’s high time that these illegal and dangerous activities stop,” Trudeau declared in Parliament a few days ago, speaking just a few hundred metres from the protests.

On Friday, authorities launched the largest police operation in Canadian history, arresting a string of Ottawa protesters and increasing that pressure on Saturday until the streets in front of Parliament were clear. Eventually, police arrested at least 191 people and towed away 79 vehicles. Many protesters retreated as the pressure increased.

The Ottawa protests — the movement’s last major stronghold — appeared to be largely over by Sunday. Fencing and police checkpoints remained.

“The number of unlawful protesters has dramatically declined in the last 24 hours,” Ottawa interim Police Chief Steve Bell said.

Authorities also said 206 bank accounts had been frozen under the power granted by federal emergencies act.

Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said progress has been made but the end of the blockades might not be over. He said that targeted measures in the emergencies act allowed police to designate a wide swath of Ottawa’s downtown core to become a no-go zone and that tool alone has been extremely effective.

“For the first time in three weeks the streets are calm, they are quiet and they are clear. That all followed the invocation of the emergencies act,” Mendicino said in an interview with The Associated Press. “We will not use it for a single minute longer than we have to.”

Mendicino said the financial accounts of those who refused to leave will remain frozen while the act is in force but added that it is up to police to decide whose accounts get frozen. The powers are already in effect but Parliament is expected to ratify the action Monday.

As it did in the United States, COVID-19 quickly became a political issue in Canada.

Coronavirus health restrictions became a political cudgel for Canada’s far right, which accused Trudeau of authoritarianism. But while the restrictions clearly benefited the far-right People’s Party of Canada, things are more complicated in the Conservative Party.

Only recently have some Conservative leaders fully embraced the pushback against vaccine mandates and coronavirus restrictions.

Even so, the protests may open the door to the sort of populism that former President Donald Trump used to vault himself into the White House.

Pierre Poilievre, who is running to become the next leader of the Conservative party, has cheered on the protesters, gambling that voters will back him. But it remains unclear whether that will get him to the top of the party, or whether it would help or hurt him if there is a showdown between him and Trudeau or the next Liberal party leader.

“Poilievre is clearly playing by the populist playbook right now,” said Béland. “If he becomes Conservative leader, the party might effectively shift towards Trump-style populism. However, it’s unclear whether enough Canadians support this vision to make it appealing beyond the party’s base.”

The protests have been cheered on in the US by Fox News personalities and conservatives like Trump. Millions of dollars in donations have flowed across the border to the protesters.

About 44 per cent of the nearly $10 million in contributions to support the protesters originated from US donors, according to an Associated Press analysis of leaked donor files. Prominent Republican politicians have praised the protesters.

But experts say the US support of the Canadian protesters is really aimed at energizing conservative politics in the US, where midterm elections are looming.

Meanwhile, though the situation in Ottawa appeared to be ending, there were new signs the protests had not died out entirely.

The Canadian border agency warned late Saturday afternoon that operations at a key truck crossing from western Canada into the United States had been slowed by protesters, advising travellers to find a different route.