OTTAWA — When I asked Matthew Wall, a 36-year-old electrician from Manitoba, what brought him to this city, which has been overwhelmed by a giant protest encampment, he answered with one word: “Mushrooms.” Searching for his purpose in life, he said, he went on a psychedelic spiritual journey and had an image of the Freedom Convoy, a demonstration against Covid rules that has converged on the Canadian capital with trucks and other large vehicles.
“I’m here for the rights of our kids, for parents’ rights, for everyone’s rights,” said Wall. “So kids can live in a future where they don’t have to have something covering their face, lose emotion. You don’t have the human connection, don’t see them smile anymore. It’s dehumanizing.” His daughters, he told me, were seeing a school therapist weekly because of the emotional fallout of the pandemic. “You’re taking away the love!” he said.
Wall was sitting in the passenger seat of a black truck owned by a friend he’d made in Ottawa. It was covered in painted slogans, some with imperfect punctuation: “Dad’s On a Mission,” “Bless You in Advance Boys in Blue,” “Superhero’s Never Die.” Notes of thanks were taped to the truck, as were tickets that had been issued to protesters, including one to Wall for “bass noise (or unusual noise or noise that disturbs inhabitant(s) of the city),” which came with a fine of 1,000 Canadian dollars.
In the back seat was Jenna Wozney, a 24-year-old actress from Vancouver who’d flown to Ottawa on her own a few days earlier. She said some of her family and friends considered the protests “hateful,” but she’d been determined to see them for herself. Wozney deeply distrusted the vaccines, though she’d given in and gotten the shots in order to be able to work: “I’m so poor, I didn’t have any money, I had to get it,” she said, adding an expletive.
The demonstrations felt, to her, transformative. She saw them, somehow, as the next step after Black Lives Matter and Canada’s Every Child Matters movement, which is devoted to Indigenous survivors of abusive residential schools. “I feel like this is the final thing,” she said.
“This is an awakening,” added Wall.
The day before, Wozney had broken up with her live-in boyfriend, who didn’t support her traveling to Ottawa, and canceled her ticket home. She wasn’t sure where she was sleeping that night but said several people had offered her a place to stay. At one point, speaking about the harms that she believes, falsely, are coming to children as a result of the coronavirus vaccine, she exclaimed, “I’ll die here!”
“I will, too,” said Wall.
As I left, they insisted I take some of the fudge a stranger had given them.
The takeover of downtown Ottawa, whose streets are clogged by trucks, trailers and cars, is now approaching its fourth week. Populists and reactionaries worldwide, including Donald Trump and Tucker Carlson, have been thrilled by what’s happening here. A relatively small number of people — around 8,000 at the height of the protests, and on most days fewer — have snarled the capital of a major Western country and thrown its left-leaning government into chaos, demanding freedom from Covid-related public health measures. Related encampments on some of the bridges linking Canada to the United States affected hundreds of millions of dollars in trade a day before they were dispersed.
There is a debate in Canada about whether Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was justified on Monday in invoking the Emergencies Act, a 1988 law which gives the government the power to override certain civil liberties. But the fact that he resorted to the law — which has never before been used — shows the extent to which the protests are making the capital ungovernable. The tactic of using large vehicles to occupy a big city has inspired similar protests in countries including France, Israel and New Zealand. Trump supporters are planning American versions of the convoys next month. If they succeed in entrenching themselves somewhere, it could be terrifying, not least because unlike the Canadians, they’ll probably be heavily armed.
The thrust of the Ottawa protests is clearly reactionary, but there were plenty of people on the streets who seemed genuinely baffled by the media’s description of them as part of a far-right movement. They’d been infuriated and in some cases unmoored by Canada’s pandemic restrictions, which have been stricter than America’s. (As The National Post reported, during the Omicron wave, the provinces of Quebec and Ontario “closed schools and imposed blanket bans on indoor dining, gyms and bars,” and Quebec enacted a 10 p.m. curfew.)
Most people I met said they’d never been to a protest before. Their willingness to not just go to Ottawa, but in many cases to stay there in the freezing cold for weeks on end, is a sign of how profoundly the pandemic has eroded trust in the authorities. Two years of Covid has created a climate of suspicion, confusion and grief that the far right has been able to exploit.
By the time I arrived at the beginning of the week, the occupation had shrunk, but the main encampment still spread out several blocks on either side of Ottawa’s Parliament Hill as well down a number of other downtown streets, including some residential blocks. There were more food tents and barbecues than I could count. On Kent Street, people were roasting a whole pig, one of two they said had been donated. Others played hockey on the block between the Supreme Court and the Department of Justice. Someone had brought a hot tub. At times there were bouncy castles for the kids who were visiting, as well as those camped out with their parents. Imagine Occupy Wall Street, but set up by construction workers and military veterans with logistics training.
I didn’t see any Confederate or Nazi flags, though there had been some early on. I saw one Gadsden flag, and a guy in a MAGA hat who’d taped over the word “America” and written “Canada” on it. I saw lots of anti-vax paranoia, but few efforts to own the libs. The one word that was repeated over and over again — on signs, in chants and in conversation — was “freedom.” Many who’d found the pandemic intolerably alienating were reveling in human connection. Several people hugged me after I interviewed them, even though I told them I was from the hated mainstream media.
Imad Arraj, who installs HVAC systems and helps his wife run an Ottawa hunting and fishing shop, was at the protest on Tuesday night with a cousin. “It did a lot of damage,” he said of pandemic restrictions. “Me myself, I’m sitting home, I’m just feeling so down because all these friendships that you used to have, get together for a card game or whatever, it’s no longer there. We disconnected from each other.” He spoke bitterly of the 10-person limit on indoor gatherings in Ontario over the winter holidays. “We used to have a lot of people at our house — my brothers, my sisters, my mom come to visit,” he said sadly.
Before the Freedom Convoy came to Ottawa, Arraj said, he’d never taken part in a demonstration. “I was in depression, sitting at home. I thought I was alone. I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was the only person thinking that way,” he said. “And when this happened, I came down to see.” What he saw uplifted him. “The love that you’ll receive here, you are never, ever going to see it anywhere else,” he said.
For many other Ottawans, though, the protests have been a siege, not a love fest. Locals described the incessant blaring of horns — which have ebbed, but not stopped, after an injunction — as a form of psychological torture. An Asian-inspired ice-cream shop closed for several days after a member of its staff who was walking to work was confronted by two men and shoved to the ground for wearing a mask. “Based on the accounts we’ve heard from our neighbors, this behavior is not an isolated incident,” said a statement on the shop’s Instagram feed.
Not everyone at the protests comes from the far right, but the organizers do. Among them are Tamara Lich, formerly a leading figure in the fringe Maverick Party, which promotes the secession of three of Canada’s Western provinces, and Patrick King, a “great replacement” conspiracy theorist who has railed against a plot to use refugees “to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race because they are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.”
The crowds themselves contain a number of extremists. At an encampment an the border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, four people were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers. Two of them reportedly had ties to a white-nationalist network called Diagolon, whose founder, Jeremy MacKenzie, has been part of the Ottawa demonstrations.
“One of the dynamics here is there are multiple faces to this occupation,” said Jeff Leiper, a member of the Ottawa City Council. “On weekends, there’s a party happening in occupied downtown — you’ve seen the stage, you’ve seen the bouncy castles, you’ve seen the hot tubs, you’ve seen the D.J.s. And that is one face of it.” But the other face has been more sinister.
Throughout the protests, men in black pickup trucks flying Canadian flags have menaced people in residential neighborhoods. “Frequently, over and over again, we get the reports from residents that the trucks are slowing down, they’re accosting residents on the street for wearing masks, and frequently they’re accompanying that with some sort of misogynist, homophobic or racist slur,” said Leiper.
Near the encampments, the restaurants and stores on some shopping streets, as well as the Rideau mall, have been shut for weeks, after being flooded with defiantly unmasked visitors when the convoys first arrived. Those who were horrified by the invasion of their city kept wondering: Where were the police? On Wednesday, cops handed out fliers warning protesters that they were subject to arrest. Under the Emergencies Act, the flier said, “anyone coming to Ottawa for the purpose of joining the ongoing demonstration is breaking the law.” But until Thursday, when the police started making arrests, their presence was minimal, and people continued to bring wagons full of fuel containers into the encampment to keep their engines running.
Once the protesters had lodged their vehicles in the city, there was no straightforward way to get them out. Some towing companies refused to cooperate with the police, but even if they were willing to help clear the roads, it was hard to see how they could remove the vehicles — some with their wheels taken off — without being swarmed. Arresting the demonstrators first, however, would be a struggle, because they could hide in their cars, trucks and trailers. The presence of children complicated matters further.
“I don’t think any of us have accepted at this point it’s inevitable that this will end in a firefight,” Leiper said on Wednesday. But, he added, “we’re all worried about it.” The day before, Ottawa’s police chief had resigned over his handling of the crisis.
Back at the occupation, I met Dana Wilson, who told me was raised in Mississippi and had served in the U.S. military in Central America before moving to Canada in 1987. He gestured to a cluster of men nearby and said they were veterans as well, and that he was part of a group led by a retired colonel. “From a military man’s perspective, you want to talk jargon, this is the last hill,” he said, describing Trudeau as “a narcissistic globalist sociopath” who has used “medical tyranny” to control the population, all for profit.
I asked him what he thought would happen when the police moved in. “We’ve got some things that we’re not prepared to talk about,” he said slyly. “We’ve got an arsenal too. People power, darling.” When I pressed, he said that the arsenal was metaphorical. He called the encampment “the Canadian Alamo,” but then said that was a metaphor, too. At one point he said he didn’t believe there would be a police confrontation because Canadians wouldn’t stand for it; like others at the Freedom Convoy, he was convinced that the population is on his side, which polls show is very much not the case. (In one survey, 65 percent of respondents called the convey “a small minority of Canadians” who were behaving “selfishly.”)
But he also seemed prepared for violence. Of the police, he said, “I hope they don’t start shooting people like they did at Kent State, but you know what, the world’s got to see.”
However the protests resolve, Elizabeth Simons, deputy director of the Canadian Anti-Hate Network, an organization akin to the Southern Poverty Law Center, expects the far-right forces behind them to be emboldened. “It’s a populist movement,” she said. “We have people who feel that they are the pure public fighting for the rights of the people versus the corrupt elite, which is government, media. That’s going to resonate with a lot of people when we’re two years into a pandemic where there is legitimate grievance and criticism” of how the authorities have handled things.
Nobody, she said, “has come out of the last two years unscathed. Everyone’s affected in some way. It’s just which direction do they choose to go.” And how far.
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook, Twitter (@NYTopinion) and Instagram.
