State of emergency, court decision, police intervention… Nothing helps, the anti-sanitary measures demonstrators continue their protest in Canada. They were still thousands, this Saturday, in the streets of Ottawa and continued to block the Ambassador Bridge, a strategic place since it connects the city of Windsor in Ontario to the American city of Detroit.
For the first time since the start of the movement, which is entering its third week, the police have taken up position in large numbers around this hot spot of protest. The day before, the Superior Court of Ontario had ordered the departure of the demonstrators installed for five days, in vain.
Protesters still on the bridge
The blocking of this essential axis prompted Washington to intervene with the government of Justin Trudeau. And the latter had promised, on Friday, increased police repression because the “borders cannot remain closed” and the state of emergency was declared in Ontario. But at the beginning of the evening this Saturday, the police had still not managed to completely free the bridge following hours of face-to-face with the demonstrators. Most of the trucks and vehicles that were blocking the road have been moved, noted an AFP journalist. But there were still several hundred demonstrators on the spot.
The goal is to defuse the situation “peacefully” and through mediation, Jason Bellaire of Windsor Police told reporters, unable to confirm whether the bridge would be permanently evacuated at the end of the day. No arrests were made immediately. The Canadian government announced on Saturday evening that the Task Force would meet once more this Sunday to discuss new measures to be taken, according to the daily. The Globe and Mail.
The closure of this bridge is causing serious concern on both sides of the border and has already caused disruption to the automotive industry. More than 25% of goods exported between the United States and Canada pass through it. Two other border axes are also blocked: the first, at Emerson, connects the province of Manitoba to North Dakota, while the second is located in Alberta.
Beyond these blockages, for the third consecutive weekend, the crowd was at the rendezvous in the streets of the federal capital Ottawa, epicenter of the movement, this Saturday. Music, horns, dance floors and stands for coffee… There were thousands marching and celebrating in the streets of the city center where very few police officers were deployed, noted an AFP journalist.
The abandoned pass in three provinces
John Pacheco, who comes three times a week to demonstrate, took his 15-year-old daughter on Saturday. This “Catholic activist” is convinced that the movement will last: “They are not going to crack down, they are not going to bring in the army, they don’t have the equipment to move all these trucks. So we might be here for months,” he thinks.
Starting from the departure of truckers opposed to the vaccination obligation to cross the border with the United States, the protest has extended to broader claims once morest all health measures but also once morest the government of Justin Trudeau. The latter has been strongly criticized by the opposition for his inaction since the start of the movement.
For his part, Justin Trudeau has judged, since the beginning of the dispute, that it is a “marginal and noisy minority”. But in a country where health measures are in most provinces more restrictive than elsewhere in the world, the movement has received wider popular support than anticipated by the authorities. According to a poll, a third of Canadians support the movement and 44% of those vaccinated understand “the cause and the frustrations conveyed by the protesters”.
Since the start of the movement, three central Canadian provinces have announced the abandonment of the vaccine passport and the mask in the coming weeks. But this is not the case for the two most populous provinces in the country: Ontario, the epicenter of the protest, and Quebec.
