It was an odd juxtaposition this weekend, as I stood by the Rideau River, frozen and blanketed with snow on a crisp winter’s day, while a cacophony drifted in with the wind. A short distance away from this peaceful winter scene, the
anti-mandate convoy was making itself heard downtown.
This dissonant scene mirrored what we we’ve heard and seen since the convoy arrived last week. Underneath a promise of peace, the steady din of rage.
It’s been three days now the convoy has taken over the downtown core of this city, and there is no end or resolution in sight.
SKIP ADVERTISEMENT
ARTICLE CONTINUES BELOW
To some extent you can sympathize with the people that have made the trip. The pandemic is exhausting. The constant separation from friends and family; the ways in which life has become so small, so circumscribed, is difficult on the best of days. It is so much worse when it interferes with your livelihood. Frustration, even anger are understandable.
What separates the convoy’s grievance from understandable and reasonable outrage at the pandemic is the way that anger is directed outward, in all directions. It is not a focused beam of outrage at the powers that be; instead it is an unattended firehose, left to spray its rage in all directions.
If the people Ottawa have been unable to understand their peaceful motives, it’s because the demonstrators won’t let us. Malls, vaccine clinics, schools and entire blocks have been shut down by the convoy. We are told to avoid the centre of town.
Our sympathy comes up short thanks to the way they’ve treated the people of this city. How can you sympathize with the cause of people who will throw
rocks at paramedics; who will impose their vision of maskless freedom on a mall full of people who just want to do their jobs? Where do you find common ground when there are those within the crowd misappropriating Holocaust imagery and waving swastikas? Where do you find unity with people
assaulting a homeless man, and harassing shelter staff?
This city, a place where real people live, has been taken over by those who have made it less safe for several days now. There has been no widespread violence, but there is a low and threatening hum from the gathered convoy. Large groups walking through public buildings unmasked may not be a riot, but it is still a danger.
It is, for example, difficult to understand how a protest can be considered fully peaceful, when the city is afraid to tow vehicles or give out parking tickets, as Mayor Jim Watson has put it, for fear of inciting those who remain.
Police have made a point of saying, in statements and interviews, how positively peaceful things are. (The willingness of the police to take a hands-off approach, prioritizing de-escalation, can likely be thanked for that.) And yet the people who live in the city’s core feel unsafe leaving their homes among the throngs of trucks and angry, sometimes intoxicated, protesters.
There are those that have said there is nothing to fear, that it is just skittishness of a privileged class suddenly surrounded by the “working class.” But what of the workers in the hotels and malls, exposed to unmasked and unruly convoy members?
There was good reason for senior politicians like Conservative Leader Erin O’Toole to meet with members of the convoy before they reached Ottawa. Outside of town, the demonstrators were individuals looking for a helping hand; once they reached town, they would become just faces in an angry crowd. Best not to sully the leader’s image in a crowd so volatile, with so many chances to end up in the same frame as a swastika.
This gets to the dual nature of this protest the people of Ottawa have been subject to first hand. We’re told to listen to the convoy and consider what they have to say, but they’ve come together under a banner of rejecting health measures altogether.
“We are not leaving until you can open up your businesses, we are not leaving until you can hug your best friend, we are not leaving until you can go see your parents in a long-term care facility, and for your children to have a birthday party. This ends now, and we’re going to do it peacefully,” organizer Tamara Lich told the crowd on Sunday, according to CTV.
That’s the goal, to end the public health measures keeping our most vulnerable from drowning in their own lungs. Lich controls millions of dollars in GoFundMe donations to fuel their movement. It imagines an alternate universe, where a city like Ottawa doesn’t have 95 per cent of its acute care hospital beds occupied and a health-care system stretched to its limit.
It’s typical in these situations to blame this on a few bad apples, but that ignores the second half of the idiom: they spoil the bunch.
Ottawa has seen how the convoy has wanted to be portrayed, and how it has actually behaved. We have looked the unmasked in the face, and felt their outraged spittle upon our brow. They have told us who they are, and we believe them. Now, we would like them to go.
#unity #progress
