Yeah, I’m kind of feeling this myself. I was out doing some errands at lunch today, and I drive a red F-150. I made a point of wearing my mask whenever I stopped anywhere, even doing curbside pick-up.
I saw one person with flags on their car, and had to think, “Convoyers, or celebrating Canada’s hockey gold medal from last night?”
When I stopped at the gas station to pick up some rock salt for my driveway, there was guy with a big rig cab fueling up. No visible flags, but I was wondering - I’ve never seen a big truck like that at a local gas station, and this location had pretty good highway access for getting downtown.
So, personally, I’m definitely more paranoid than normal. At least I recognize it, though.
The problem is, we had regular law enforcement just standing around doing nothing, for weeks.
And sometimes less than nothing. There are documented instances of the Ottawa police and OPP actively helping convoyers, and openly sympathizing with their cause. A lot of people in Ottawa have seen this as a tacit declaration that the cops are complicit in this, and are only too happy to let the wolves run wild.
The utter failure of the police in Ottawa, and the complete loss of trust that failure has led to, demands some kind of response from higher authority. You might not think it’s so bad as that, but here in Ottawa, we’re on the verge of a collapse of civil society. Our police are useless, our city government is entirely dysfunctional, and the citizenry are actively starting to plan vigilante actions to protect themselves. And none of that is hyperbole.
This is the worst crisis in Canada that I’ve ever seen, and I’ve just lived through two years of a global pandemic.
You mean they might suffer consequences for their actions? Why, how can this be?
When young people go and lie down in front of logging trucks or when indigenous people block a remote road protesting a pipeline going through their unceded territory, they fully expect that there will be consequences, including possible jail time.
It’s my feeling that these Ottawa blockade yahoos, coming as they do from a position of privilege, are just blissfully unaware that they will suffer any consequences whatsoever.
Yeah, this. You see it in the few times the police have pushed back against any of them. Screaming about “I didn’t do anything! If you touch me that’s assault! I’m going to sue you! That diesel fuel is my property! You’re stealing from me!”
They’re the whole country’s worth of those maskholes we’ve seen throwing tantrums in grocery stores, all in one place.
Then the problem is with the municipal and provincial government, not a systemic inability to do something. Do you really want to encourage cities not solving law enforcement problems because they figure the feds will do it for them?
If the Ottawa police have failed, and they have, the next step is for the province to impose its will upon them. The legal remedies for that exist and should be attempted. I don’t at all mind Ottawa’s city government having powers stripped of it by Queens Park. Cities are not a sovereign authority, and it’s clear Ottawa’s city government is in a state of complete organizational shock.
For one, it’s the people in the trucks that are the real problem. They’re the ones honking horns all night to keep everyone else awake, they’re the ones harassing local people in their own homes and while they’re out going to work or shopping. Pretty much everyone in Ottawa agrees - get rid of the people, and we don’t mind if it takes weeks to get rid of the trucks. Without the people, the trucks are a large, but also largely trivial, problem that we know how to fix. The streets they’re blocking are nice, but not actually critical. Locals can walk to most of what they need, and those from the suburbs can figure out how to avoid the blocked streets. We do that all the time for other protests, events, snowstorms, and traffic jams.
Secondly, they’re only “hard to tow” if you’re trying to avoid damage to the trucks. If, for some reason, we need to move the trucks quickly, I don’t think anyone but the truckers is going to care a whit about damaging them.
Except “the Province” is “Doug Ford”, who has also ignored the city of Ottawa this entire time. He’d apparently rather try to score political points on Trudeau than help the citizens of his province.
I agree that the Feds should be the last resort, but I think we’re at the last resort stage - every earlier stage has failed, for one reason or another. I’ll be quite happy to see them all burn one this mess is fixed, but we’ve got to fix the mess first.
As was said earlier (or in another thread), wrap some chains around them and use snowmoving equipment to drag them off to a parking lot with rubber burning and sparks flying. Does not matter what damage is done to the trucks by this method. They are not trucks anymore - they are illegal barricades that need to be removed.
The unladen weight of a semi-tractor can vary between 10,000 and 25,000 pounds, depending on how powerful the engine is, how much it’s designed to tow, and whether or not it’s a sleeper cab. An unladen 53-foot trailer weighs about 10,000 pounds, accounting for a total unladen weight of about 35,000 pounds.
I mean … you don’t have to drag these trucks to the Maritime Provinces – just to a private airport somewhere just outside of town. A couple of stealthy riggers on the ground, and …
Only somewhat tongue-in-cheek. “Hey ! I can see Russia from the cab of my truck !”
If we’re using snowmoving equipment, I want the front-end loader we use to dump snowbanks into the dump trucks. Because I’m pretty sure they could tip one of these big rigs on their side.
And I think it would be a grand treat for the people of Ottawa to see these guys freaking out as, one by one, every truck in the convoy is tipped on its side.
Hell, the citizens would probably be willing to just leave them there for a few months afterwards, “pour encourager les autres.”
They should just bring in a heavy excavator with hydraulic shears. But realistically, if they were to go scorched-earth on the convoy, there would be people chaining themselves and their kids to the trucks, rendering such a scenario unworkable.
