While I agree with patio11's assessment here, if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them.
Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.
Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?
It's not "a residential area" in any sense.
The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.
Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.
Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.
South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.
Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.
You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.
Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.
When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.
I'll play: we can find 1m² of road in the residential area that is obviously not residential. Now we have two counterexamples that conflict. Logically the premise is meaningless.
i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.
Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.
It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.
Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.
No they're not, at least not in Ottawa at 2AM. They might do a quick blip at an intersection but generally they run silent. There was a massive difference between the train horns and the sirens. The horns were continuous, sirens are very occasional and short.
If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.
For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.
The loud noise is a rare and short event, not a nightly recurring occurrence of a long loud continuous blare. If it was as you say, then the protestors wouldn’t be doing it to gain attention.
Yes, a group of people decided that the only way to get their message across was to be assholes for a while.
I would label this as an inconvenience.
A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.
Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.
I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.
I don’t think it’s terrorism but that’s not why the back accounts were frozen.
The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.
The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.
Who has called the truck horns terrorism? I see people calling sleep deprivation torture, and I see people calling an armed border occupation terrorism.
At a minimum they were actually taking proactive action to be nuisances in solidarity with terrorists. Whether that makes you a terrorist I don’t know, but historically governments frown on those providing any kind of support to terrorists and tend to use the transitive property when dealing with such actions.
Are you trying to compare an emergency vehicle -- which is there to save someone's life -- with someone blasting a train horn outside your house to harass your neighbourhood as a deliberate political tactic? Are you looking to imply that all noises, for all reasons, at all hours, are equal, and therefore what they did is beyond reproach?
As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?
> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.
I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.
The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.
There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.
> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them
The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.
Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)
1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.
And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.
Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.
I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.
And yet if you go there at commuter times and spend 5 minutes just observing, I'm sure you'll feel the same way.
The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.
I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.
I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.
It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.
Canadian politics (not uniquely here) is plagued with petty squabbles. The really meaningful political and social issues don't get any airtime.