The protesting truckers have made their point in Ottawa with their rigs and blockades and should now leave in an orderly fashion.
There are other ways to pursue their grievances, which do not involve disrupting the whole capital and with it the lives, livelihoods, and, yes, freedoms and rights of others.
The chair of Ottawa’s police board calls it a ‘Canada-wide insurrection’, the protesters and also some in the media, view it as nothing but a “peaceful demonstration.”
Mark Carney, Liberal leader in waiting, who now appears to speak for the Liberal Party in lieu of our dumbstruck prime minister, labels the truckers as being “seditious.”
They all got it wrong. An insurrection it is not, but neither is it a peaceful demonstration.
An occupation, as Ontario Premier Doug Ford calls it, it most certainly is, and it would also fit the definition of “bullying” with the juvenile display of incessant blasting of air horns to disturb the peace. They did not disrupt the peace of the political elite, of course, — but that of ordinary Ottawans living and working nearby.
A “peaceful demonstration” it would be, if truckers had left their rigs parked on space outside the city, had bused in, then marched with placards, banners, etc, up to Parliament Hill and presented their protest there, as often and for as long as it takes to be heard. On foot, the burly guys could also better control and give the boot to freeloading extremist fringe elements.
The way it stands, it is way beyond the definition of peaceful and right of free assembly or right of free speech. It is, however, a dangerous warning of what may yet come, and chiefly because of a total vacuum in leadership at the highest level of government.
History is once again a useful guide here: Whether it was the French Revolution, the one in Russia or the state of affairs in Germany before the Nazis grab of power, or if you prefer the countless insurrections, revolutions and major upheavals in other countries around the world since then. It always starts the same: first petitions, then peaceful protests, then up-the-ante, the surfacing of all sorts of rabble-rousers and protests suddenly morphing into violent confrontations, with the best organized and most ruthless faction finally taking control. The usual result? Dictatorship — guillotines, the gulag, extermination camps, war, and after much suffering of the populace, eventual return to sanity — until the cycle begins anew.
What next? There can likely be only two outcomes: either the truckers quietly pull up and leave, but the longer they wait before doing so, the more it looks like without having accomplished anything in particular, and public opinion possibly having swung against them in the meantime on top of that. The other possibility is that the occupation begins to degenerate into violence, stirred up both by fringe groups and agents provocateurs alike, and as a result, morphs into something much more like an insurrection in our capital.
We must hope that dialogue, the tried and true Canadian way which served us so well in the past, will eventually prevail here too and get the trucks moving again.
Wolfgang Wittenburg
Squamish
