Canada's Freedom Convoy is gone from the streets of Ottawa, but there are no plans to end the Emergencies Act it served as the pretext for.
Freedom Convoy Leaves Town and Quiet Returns to Ottawa | Wall Street Journal - Paul Vieira:
February 20, 2022 - "For the first time in over three weeks, downtown Ottawa on Sunday was largely deserted, with the heavy-duty trucks and thousands of protesters demanding an end to Covid-19 vaccine mandates replaced by police vehicles, officers, and crews trying to clean up after a 23-day demonstration. Officials in the capital and across Canada remained on high alert. While police in Ottawa cleared out Freedom Convoy protesters there, authorities in some of Canada’s biggest cities, such as Toronto and Vancouver, dealt Saturday with either the threat of a trucker-led demonstration or protesters that disrupted traffic.
"'It’s still clear that while police have made significant progress, the job is not yet done,' Bill Blair, a former Toronto police chief and Canada’s emergency-preparedness minister, told CTV News on Sunday. 'The threat, the risks, the reasons we had to invoke emergency powers, they still exist'.... In the West Coast province of British Columbia, a convoy of vehicles on Saturday blocked a U.S.-Canada border crossing connecting Washington state with suburban Vancouver. Demonstrators were calling for an end to Covid-19 measures. The border crossing reopened late Saturday. Mr. Blair, Canada’s emergency minister, said the Vancouver-area protest was evidence that the government’s emergency measures were necessary.
"Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked extraordinary powers nearly a week ago under the country’s Emergencies Act that deemed the Ottawa protest and copycat demonstrations that blocked U.S.-Canada traffic as a threat to public order.... The powers allowed police to create no-go zones, such as downtown Ottawa, and compel tow-truck drivers to remove trucks.... Police in Ottawa on Sunday cordoned off the immediate area surrounding the country’s parliamentary district, with the help of 10-foot fences and concrete barriers, and limited vehicular and pedestrian traffic into the area....
"'This is not the normal state of our city,' said Ottawa police interim chief Steve Bell, of the need for fencing downtown. 'Despite the successes of the past few days, we require these measures to prevent unlawful protesters from returning.' Interim chief Bell said he couldn't provide a timeline as to when traffic flow in the Ottawa core would return to normal.... Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said Sunday the capital would continue to see a beefed up police presence for the immediate future, to ensure protesters don’t return and citizens’ safety can be secured."
Read more: https://www.wsj.com/articles/freedom-convoy-leaves-town-and-quiet-returns-to-ottawa-11645385184
Don Martin: An emergency about nothing as tow trucks become the excuse to act | CTV News - Don Martin:
February 21, 2022 - "Pressed hard for an Emergencies Act justification with the protests gone, border blockades down and convoy leaders in custody, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau reached deep into his leadership vacuum for rationalizations. The emergency demanding the unprecedented use of the Act was . . . hesitant tow truck drivers, the prime minister declared. Without a broad range of new federal powers, he argued in defending this mostly obsolete crisis intervention, truckers would not be towed without the Act and thus the occupation would still fill the streets around Parliament Hill....
"Only in Canada could this most-powerful of Acts be aimed at forcing reluctant tow truck drivers, who usually hover like price-gouging vultures over high-accident locations and snow-clearing routes, to drop the hook for a big-ticket rig removal.... This is clearly an Emergencies Act in search of an emergency after being introduced two weeks too late and approved on Monday night by a vote of 185 to 151, two days after the inspiration for the Act had left the city.
"Of course, there are no winners in this stew of parliamentary toxicity, flailing leadership, police hesitancy, city council division and insurrection insanity. NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh, who sided with the government to approve the Act, has decided the nuclear option is needed for a protest which, while nasty, noisy and unsettling, was far from violent.... The Conservatives, too many of whom have canoodled with the convoy, ... [have] gone from legitimate government-in-waiting to fighting against People’s Party Leader Maxime Bernier at the bottom of the nut barrel.
"And, of course, there’s Trudeau, the convoy instigator who washed his hands of all responsibility for a problem he created that no longer exists but needs a law-enforcement sledgehammer now that the clean-up crews have arrived.... He imposed a vaccine restriction on truckers without a medical reason to justify it. He dismissed the many who are fed up with restrictions and vaccine mandates as a “fringe.” He acted to clear a key border crossing only when scolded by the U.S. president. He went invisible and silent as the protests escalated and he failed to cajole premiers into a coherent unified Canada-wide response. For all these flaws and faults framed by his moistly delivered repetitive geyser of rhetorical babble, his reputation has taken a hard hit....
"In the end, somehow, police will emerge as the best among the losers, finally doing their jobs without inciting widely predicted violence. After missing the rig-rolling-in threat and engaging in painfully slow and too-friendly enforcement, they got the cop numbers they needed and steadily pushed back. While I’ll bow to the view of police chiefs who say the Emergencies Act was at play during the breakups, it sure looked like basic police on parade using their everyday powers to corral and disperse a mostly-peaceful crowd....
"As the convoys retreated, they left behind smouldering wrecks in Canada’s political leadership. Removing them may be the most legitimate emergency use of tow trucks."
Read more: https://www.ctvnews.ca/politics/don-martin-an-emergency-about-nothing-as-tow-trucks-become-the-excuse-to-act-1.5790644
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