Basically there’s a Jim Watson faction and anti-Watson faction.
The Watson faction has been trying to CYA and offload all blame to Sloly (who was chosen by the anti-Watson faction as a progressive measure due to the numerous Black men who died at the hands of Ottawa police due to mental health episodes). One of these measures is to increase control over the Ottawa Police Services Board.
The Anti-Watson faction has been trying to CYA and offload all blame to Mayor Watson and are either resigning, trying to protest the secret hiring/screening of a new Police Chief without review, or protesting the increase of Watson favourable council members to fill in Ottawa Police Services Board vacancies.
No doubt CYA is happening and blame to being dished out freely.
There’s, no doubt, a lot of nuance I’m missing as no one should be forced to follow municipal politics close enough to understand all the layers of political movements.
There’s no subtlety to this cohort (in Canada or the US) – no subtlety, no sense of context, no nuance. Just … none:
“If it means that I need to go to prison, if I need to be fined in order to allow freedom to be restored in this country — millions of people have given far more for their freedom,” said David Paisley, who traveled to Ottawa with a friend who is a truck driver.
As I said about the mask mandates (and lockdowns) and the insane pushback they engendered from the same type …
“If I can’t drive while intoxicated, that’s TYRANNY !!” “If I can’t smoke on an airplane, then the terrorists have won !!” You see how absolutely idiotic that sounds ? I think about the number of laws under which we ALL live, and how we still enjoy more freedoms than almost any other nation in the world. But this is the line ? This is the line between freedom and tyranny ? Is that laid out in some book somewhere ? I’d like to understand it better.
I would agree that small private groups blocking the border in several places probably does clear that high bar. I do not see this as completely automatic or obvious, even though I would like to see all the truckers go home now that any reasonable points, if any, were made long ago. The weapons stuff complicates things too. But rather than comparing ends and means, I simply mentioned the legal requirements.
ISTM that the police service has been rendered ineffectual by internal politics and apparently the actions of the chief. Now we have city council melting down (I saw that discussed on CBC earlier today with one panelist referring to it as a “monkey knife fight”).
Yesterday, I believe it was, another talking head (a security expert whose name I don’t recall) on CBC stated his conviction that the Coventry and Wellington sites have weapons.
With the former two issues ongoing, plus the possibility of weapons, I wonder if a military aid to the civil power may suddenly become necessary.
After the fireworks of the City Council last night, today everyone is on the edge, vacillating between “this is the day!” and “the cops aren’t going to do anything”.
So far it looks like today is Day Two of the cops handing out written warnings that they really mean you might be in trouble if you don’t leave eventually.
If they don’t have a plan for keeping the weekend party crowd out of downtown Ottawa, I think a lot of residents are just going to lose it.
I haven’t been watching the news (sadly I, unlike the freedumb protesters, have to work) but my wife is following it and, apparently, the citizens of Ottawa have been informed that they may see things they’ve never seen before.
My gut feel, and hope, is that something’s going to happen sometime very late in the next night or so and that it will aggressively deal with the situation and demonstrate to the world that no, we aren’t the incompetent, weak, indecisive idiots that they’ve been seeing the last three weeks.
Well, there’s a lot of snow in the forecast for tomorrow, so if they don’t move soon that may make things far more difficult.
I’m expecting a 4AM raid, personally. Late enough the party crowd has finally gone to bed, early enough the rest of them are still in bed.
In terms of tactics, I’m torn between slow and stealthy, or shock and awe. Shock and Awe would be more viscerally satisfying, but slow and stealthy is probably more prudent.
Good points. According to one article I read the truckers on Wellington have been told by the Coventry gang to stay in their truck cabs and lock the doors. If they do that I’m not sure how this will be best approached.
And regarding slow and stealthy vs shock and awe I agree with what you’re saying there though, depending on intelligence data regarding resistance and arms there may have to be a combination of both. I also think that it will be important to make examples of them (not in terms of violence but in terms of how big a book is thrown at them); I believe that a lot of the Jan 6 sentences do not do an adequate job in those terms, notwithstanding the limits of the various criminal codes.
If I had to bet, I think they’ll start slow in the dark, take down as many isolated individuals as possible as quietly as possible, but with the expectation that at some point, an alarm will be raised, so they’ll move in in force when that happens.
But the Emergencies Act also requires it be a problem t hat cannot be handed with normal means and existing laws. It is painfully obvious it COULD be. They have cleared other blockades with existing laws and haven’t even made an effort in Ottawa.
I would say that it could have been but I think far too much was permitted to happen in terms of letting them dig in for the long haul. For whatever reason it was allowed to get this far when so much could have been prevented early in this thing.
At the Council meeting the point was made several times by some of the council members that the only people who seemed to have any actual impact on the free movement of the convoyers were the citizens who self-organized to blockade them at riverside and Bank last Sunday. I’ve seen some discussion of what to do as a repeat if there’s no apparent police action before Friday afternoon. Friday Evening will probably be too late.
Also, apparently residents and businesses in downtown Ottawa have filed a $306 million lawsuit against many of the protesters. They have info from 400 license plates.
Oh it’s doubtless way harder now, but I strongly believe regular law enforcement MUST be tried before engaging the Act. You cannot just have the government saying “Well, this seems like it might be hard, let’s go around the usual law.”
