At 22and day of the beginning of the siege of Ottawa organized by the movement of Canadian truckers, the police launched, Friday, February 18, the first operations intended to overcome the illegal blockages. That same morning, to ensure the safety of MPs, the House of Commons had chosen to suspend the ongoing parliamentary debate on the Emergency Measures Act, invoked by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on February 14 to extend the police powers.
From the start of the morning, about a thousand police officers from seven Canadian corps – agents from the city of Ottawa, the province of Ontario, the Sûreté du Québec, and even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police – supported by armored vehicles but also by snipers positioned on the roofs, deployed in the city center of the federal capital, placed in a state of emergency. They quickly secured access to it to prevent any possible arrival of reinforcements of demonstrators, closing the highway access ramps to the city and establishing a hundred checkpoints.
Tense face-to-face clashes opposed, for several hours, helmeted and armed police officers to truck drivers coming down from their cabs, to the cries of ” Freedom “ and carrying Canadian flags. The mounted police intervened to disperse some crowd movements. Ottawa Police Acting Chief Steve Bell says truckers placed their children ” in the first line “, as shields; these children would have been evacuated in the morning ” in safe place “.
No violent confrontation
Despite an impressive police deployment – and rarely seen in Canada – it was a “slow” operation that was carried out by the police, Steve Bell for his part defending a “methodical approach”. No violent confrontation, but a meter-by-meter reconquest of the city center. Before evacuating the approximately 370 trucks still present in the city, the police chose to first neutralize their drivers: “a hundred demonstrators” arrested, announced the police in the evening, among which were the main organizers of the movement.
After the arrest the day before of Christopher Barber, a truck driver from Saskatchewan, and Tamara Lich, self-proclaimed president of the so-called “freedom” convoy, which initiated the first fundraiser of more than 10 millions of dollars in support of the demonstrators, the far-right Canadian activist Patrick King was arrested in turn at midday. An arrest filmed and broadcast on social networks by him, just moments after sending new messages to incite “truckers to continue the fight”, and threaten the tugs, called upon to dislodge the vehicles, of reprisals. In a statement released Thursday evening, the organizers of the “Freedom Convoy” dissociated themselves from Pat King, saying they were not encouraging “no way the hateful rhetoric, divisive comments and calls for violence” of this one.
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