I am not a fan of Trudeau, but I do live in Ottawa.
These are not peaceful protests. It's an occupation backed by our extreme right wing and significantly funded by people in other countries (cough). It's been terrorizing local residents night and day. Too loud to sleep, get harassed if you leave your house, and in one case the occupiers attempted to light an apartment building on fire and trap the residents inside.
Our local municipal police and council could not have done a worse job in the early days of this situation, and now the occupiers are well entrenched.
The occupation is also easy to mimic. A small group closed down a $300mil/day border crossing into the US. Another blockade in Alberta has now had 12 arrests and two caches of weapons siezed.
Before anyone brings up BLM, I will say I don't agree with violent protests on either side and that BLM protests were peaceful here in Ottawa.
Do earplugs work? I ask because the truckers arrived in Toronto and I worried about 24 hour noise, but then the TPS did their job, and I never needed to find out.
As an aside, I actually had a lot of respect for Sloly when he was in TO, so I am completely baffled why he didn’t keep this under control. Any ideas why this went so badly in Ottawa?
I live far enough away to not be directly impacted by the horns, but from what I understand the best is active noise cancelling headphones, but when three 120db train horns are blaring from trucks parked in front of your apartment (as someone had to deal with the first week of the occupation) it was still unbearable.
I really don't understand either how fast and how far this got away from the control of the police. At the start, OPS leadership saw this as a valid protest and gave away a ton of ground from the get go. Ottawa downtown does not help in that there are 5 different authorities and their areas overlap: OPS, OPP, RCMP, NCC, PPS, plus the police in Gatineau. But the response from the police has been very disheartening. I think they have a chance of ending this during the week, but on the weekend when the autonomous zone grows to 5000+ people who are there to party and bring their kids it's a whole other nightmare.
These are not peaceful protests. It's an occupation backed by our extreme right wing and significantly funded by people in other countries (cough). It's been terrorizing local residents night and day. Too loud to sleep, get harassed if you leave your house, and in one case the occupiers attempted to light an apartment building on fire and trap the residents inside.
Our local municipal police and council could not have done a worse job in the early days of this situation, and now the occupiers are well entrenched.
The occupation is also easy to mimic. A small group closed down a $300mil/day border crossing into the US. Another blockade in Alberta has now had 12 arrests and two caches of weapons siezed.
Before anyone brings up BLM, I will say I don't agree with violent protests on either side and that BLM protests were peaceful here in Ottawa.