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Contrasts of Control

February 24, 2022   ·   0 Comments

By Constance Scrafield

Friday, February 18, 2022, listening to the situation in Ottawa live on the CBC:

“Protesters, you must leave, cease unlawful activity – move yourselves and your vehicles from the unlawful area.” Police finally empowered to say so where the Emergency Measures Act has defined where is and is not a legal gathering place in Ottawa.

CBC commentator: “They have already moved quite a distance. This is something I’ve not seen: Quebec police are here. They have the equipment (tear gas) if necessary to move people. The RCMP are coming into the area but no arrests at this point.”

From another place, “All sorts of things, telling people they must leave, a lot of people who are still on the street but no arrests as yet; trying to stop organizers mis-informing people by saying they can’t be arrested if they’re sitting down on the ground.”

“Those are trucks have been down at the parliament buildings for 22 days now.”

“The protestors are saying they are on the right side of history and telling the police that don’t have to obey their orders…”

“Truckers are finally understanding that the fun is over – they understand if they get arrested, they will not be able to drive across the American border with their loads [in future].”

As of Sunday, the streets of Ottawa are cleared. People have been arrested. Vehicles have been towed. Citizens have their city back.

In December, 2021, authorities in Hong Kong removed the statue commemorating the brutal evacuation of protesters in Tiananmen Square in June 1989. They were calling for greater political freedoms. Hundreds of deaths are admitted by the Chinese government but the truth is likely that thousands were killed during this truly peaceful protest.

Last June, Donald Trump ordered police to use tear gas on peaceful protesters against the killing of George Floyd’s death under the knee of a policeman and racial violence by police.

Late last year, a determinedly peaceful protest of Indigenous people (here in Canada) standing to stop the incursion of an oil pipeline crossing under a river on their land at Wet’suwet’en were brutally removed (testimony witnessed by myself and others) by RCMP officers. 

In these incidents, where the police responded in a very heavy-handed manner, there were no heavy trucks blocking the roads, blaring their horns day and night, shutting down businesses, intimating residents, leaving filth in the streets. Yet Ottawa was shut down for three weeks because truckers objected to the safety protocols taken by a government that has been battling the scourge of a pandemic, which has gripped the whole world for nearly two years. They were protesting wearing masks and getting vaccinated for the sake of their trips back and forth across the U.S./ Canadian border.

There was no military trying to remove this blockade. There were police giving fair warning that the occupation of the city was now illegal, that it was time to go, that people remaining would be arrested and their vehicles would be towed.

Let us be clear, the original motive for the protest was never innocent and never based on an ideal that made sense. Wearing a mask to protect others from oneself during a period of an infection that for a long time has proved very difficult to control; getting vaccinated – however limited it seems still works overall – is not tyranny. In the long run, the truckers were the tyrants.

The problem, of course, was numbers; the problem, of course, was who else came. It was not just families, babies in car seats, people of good intent trying to exercise their rights – and rights they are: to protest: they are our fundamental rights. It was also the funds pouring into the GoFundMe coming from the Republican party in the U.S. (source CBC), the truckers coming from the U.S., coming to encourage something more dangerous than peaceful.

It was the inability of the march organizers to control who else came; it was their heartlessness to close businesses which had already struggled so hard to stay open for all those months – the mean spirit to create so much distress for so many residents, for such a petty protest.

As a nation, we are wise and foolish; we are selective about whose rights matter; we are measured and brutal. It must surely be time to assess these diverse reactions to protests.

Furthermore, we must be wary of who influences what we protest and how.

During dinner one evening, several years ago, the news was about women stopping traffic as they protested violence against women which had been in the news more than usual. Violence was ever moderately condoned within society; violence in general was escalating and they stopped the traffic to make the statement, to bring attention to serious matters. One of us objected that protest can take place without disruption but it was an action that lasted mere hours and I condoned it.

Balance and wisdom: we must struggle to achieve them.

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