Last week was truly a horrible week. Robin Sears writes:
It feels like something broke in Canada this week. The nation that has always been a little too smug about its values of civility and respect seemed to have disappeared, replaced by what looked far more American than Canadian.
If you had told me protesters in the national capital would leave their feces at residents’ front doors; that drunken protesters would urinate on sidewalks from atop their trucks; that in Alberta a protester would deliberately try to run down an RCMP officer, my response would simply have been, “No, not in Canada.” I now live in a city under siege, with the police apparently paralyzed to remove this infestation that has invaded Ottawa’s neighbourhoods.
I was astonished by two sidebar stories in our very unpleasant week. The first was the number of young students from the University of Ottawa and Carleton I saw out in their schools’ regalia, joining the demonstrations with singing, flag-waving and drinking as if they were attending a homecoming event. The second surprising groups were the number of older Ottawans who would tell anyone who asked that they were triple vaxxed, but still supported the demonstration because it was “Time for the government to give back our lives!” That each group was blinkered to the threatening insults hurled at the masked, along with the obscene slogans and swastikas, was jaw-dropping.
In both Ottawa and Alberta, operations to end the illegal blockades and occupations would have begun by now if the demonstrators were predominantly Indigenous or Black people. The blatant double standard of hundreds of white men not even receiving parking tickets is something that will need to be explained when this is over.
Sears suggests that it may take a military intervention to end this. That will be tricky and dangerous. One thing is certain: The more deadly virus is ignorance. It mutates every day -- with new variants threatening the civic health of the nation.
Image: The Toronto Star
