[s1artibartfast]

I still don't understand why the police didn't do their job and the emergency powers were used in the first place

The correct solution to illegal behavior in a healthy democracy is to arrest someone and try them in court. We shouldn't be denying that to to anybody no matter how wrong they are.

There should be proportionate responses to illegal behavior. Not even attempting to address to illegal behavior with the appropriate government response should not be a justification for more severe government response.

Simply not wanting to go through the process of arresting people shouldn't be sufficient cause for emergency powers.

[lovich]

The federal Canadian government could not direct the police without using the emergency powers and the original police chief seemed to favor the protestors. The police in Canada, just like America, have had no issue cracking down on other protests, and started doing so after Sloly was replaced

[s1artibartfast]

So why didn't the Ottowa and Ontario government tell the police to crack down? After all it's the Ottawa residents that were so inconvenienced.

Did the city or provincial government instruct them to? Did they refuse?

[rescripting]

From what I’ve gathered it’s mostly municipal incompetence.

Ottawa police let them get entrenched, going so far as to offer use of a city owned baseball stadium parking lot which rapidly became a logistics base. They assumed protestors would park their rigs and travel in to the city to protest in a traditional way.

Instead protestors set up camp on downtown streets in a weekend and the local police had no idea what to do. By then it was too late. There were over 8000 people present the first weekend.

Police stated that attempts at enforcement would not be safe, probably because police felt just as threatened as residents did and they simply didn’t have the numbers to break it up.

They then shifted their plan to “maybe they’ll get tired” for two weeks which took us right up to the emergency act being enacted and police being able to muster the numbers required to disperse the protest.

At the provincial level, well, it’s an election year and the premier has an awful lot of voters who agree with the protestors, so he did his tried and true crisis management technique of hiding in a dark room.

[lovich]

^this with the additional tidbit that from what I’ve read the police chief at the time was put in place in the wake of the blm protests to help fix relations between the police and the populace of Ottawa, so this may have been a pendulum swing of the police going too easy after they went too hard on the black community.

The timing of who got the kids gloves and who got the truncheon is probably increasing how angry everyone is

[s1artibartfast]

Sincere thanks for the comprehensive response free of vitriol. It certainly helps paint a more complete picture.

It sounds like the there was a major disagreement between the federal and provincial governments about how to handle the illegal protest, and perhaps more importantly, who will take the heat for breaking it up.

I'm not sure if that makes the outcome more or less of a travesty. It seems the capability do disband the protest was there all along, but prevented by political disfunction and lack of leadership.

[klyrs]

Welcome to highly polarized politics. The police have a hard lean to the right, and they can exercise discretion with regards to what laws they enforce and when. Folks on the right want to abolish the mainstream media because of a perception of bias. Folks on the left want to abolish the police because of a perception of bias. Will anything change, or will we get further entrenched until there's a civil war?