In Ottawa, a tale of two protests … and a dangerous ending

Jordan Depending on your social media feed, Ottawa is either under siege or it’s the site of a pretty great party. Protesters who have blockaded parts of the downtown for almost two weeks now are either the worst antivaxx racists in the country trying to topple a democratically elected government, or they are ordinary, frustrated Canadians who are demanding a way out of this pandemic. The reality, as usual, is somewhere in the middle. And in this case, there actually might be two realities, two protests intertwined but separate on the streets of our nation’s capital. And the only thing everyone can agree on is that until the injunctions stopped them, the trucks were ******* loud. No matter who you believe in this instance, and it’s worth noting that there are all sorts of reports of harassment, threats, assault, racism, and worse that would prove critics of the protests right. We wanted to give you a sense of what it’s like to be in the midst of both these protests to find out what you see and who you meet and what you hear when you blend into the background, because you can. And what it’s like to be in the middle of something that will be debated for years and is shaping up to be a rather important part of our country’s recent history.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Matt Gurney is a writer and commentator. He is also the co founder of digital magazine The Line, for whom he reported over the past few days on the streets of Ottawa. Hi, Matt.

Matt Gurney Hey.

Jordan First thing I have to ask you before we get into this discussion, because I know that this is going to come up and this is an audio medium. Describe yourself to our listeners because this context is important, right?

Matt Gurney Well, I mean, the first word I think comes to mind is obviously handsome. That’s how I want to lead, with that. No, look, I am a generic issue white dude. I’m tall. I’ve got dark hair. Or to the extent that I have hair, it’s dark. I’ve buzzed most of it. I’ve got a beard. And when I’m walking around a convoy full of truckers, I don’t blend in perfectly, but I don’t exactly stick out either. So this is something that I made a point of noting in every piece I’ve written about this so far because I think it matters. I can’t change how I present to the world. I can’t change the context of that. But I can be honest with listeners who have never met me before that if you see me walking down the street in the middle of this trucker protest, you might just assume I’m part of it.

Jordan Right. So why did you then go to Ottawa and go into these protests? I know this is the first time The Line has sent someone out in the field, which is awesome. So Congratulations. But this stuff has been covered eight ways from Sunday. I can’t scroll through my Twitter feed for 2 seconds without seeing video clips that are taken on the ground. Why did you go?

Matt Gurney It’s funny, almost because of that. I was being bombarded with so many variations of coverage, and as I joked on Twitter, depending on which live stream you jumped into or whose blog you were reading, either the protest in Ottawa is this incredibly patriotic outpouring of love and camaraderie by proud Canadians who stand up for freedom, or it’s what happened in Paris when the Panzers were rolling by the Arc de Triomphe and everybody was standing on the sidewalk crying.

I couldn’t figure out who was telling me the truth, and I guess I’m media savvy enough to know that a picture is worth 1000 words and you can tell the truth of a situation without telling the whole truth. So I’m looking at reporters and commentators saying, here I am at this intersection experiencing this, and then there’s someone doing a live stream a block away, portraying it entirely differently. My main desire to go to Ottawa, which is not normally a city I think a lot of people choose to flock to in early February, was to wander around and eyeball it myself and just try to understand what the hell was happening.

Jordan What were you expecting to find or feel when you wandered into the protest? If I’d have asked you on Sunday before you left, what would you have told me?

Matt Gurney This may seem like a cop out answer, but I actually found it basically what I expected. So when I was heading over on Sunday, I had been reading the news coverage. I’d been listening to radio reports or podcasts or watching TV news. I’d even seen some of the live streams. And I know Ottawa geography enough to have been able to situate a lot of what I was seeing. And it was my impression when I was heading out on Sunday that what I was going to find was an event that was big and complicated enough that you would see in it what you wanted to see. And if you were coming into it with a bias or a perspective, or if you had an agenda to advance, you would have no problem finding what you were looking for. And that’s generally what it ended up being.

A few things that did surprise me about it is how geographically compact it is. It is big, and don’t misunderstand me, but it is generally confined to a few areas. And as I noted in one of my recent reports, I’m a Toronto guy born and raised. Toronto is a big city. It’s a big city by any standard. And if there’s a big protest in downtown Toronto, where I live in Midtown Toronto might as well be a million miles away. Ottawa doesn’t have that scale. So if there’s a loud rowdy protest right outside Parliament, you’ve got residential neighbourhoods a few hundred meters to the south of that. It doesn’t have the sheer scale Toronto has or larger cities to sort of absorb the chaos of protests. So that surprised me.

One other thing that surprised me, and I mentioned this in my second report, was how connected the event was. And what I mean by that is that I’ve seen this before, it wasn’t the first time I’ve seen this, but I’ve never seen it at that scale. People wandering around doing YouTube lives or podcasts or live streaming on TikTok or doing Twitter spaces. And I think that really did bring kind of something new to it. And I don’t know if it’s good or bad. I don’t even know if we need a value judgment on it. But that was something that genuinely surprised me about it. How many people were wandering around with selfie sticks and cameras or microphones and headphones. You had the traditional media there, I saw quite a few of them around doing stand ups and TV reports or radio reports and whatnot, but I would say they were outnumbered by the amateur social media broadcasters who were everywhere at the site.

Jordan I’m glad you mentioned that, because I actually have that on my list to ask you about, is the way the protest has evolved sort of over I guess more than one and a half weeks now, being more about the optics of it that go out on social channels, whether on the right or left, than it has actually been about… because this is something I actually haven’t seen a lot of recently, standing in front of Parliament with signs chanting and singing and what we traditionally might refer to as a protest.

Matt Gurney You know what? That’s a great question. The situation in Ottawa is complicated, and it is partially organic. It is partially grassroots. It is partially kind of a natural and I would even maybe say inevitable combustion of accumulated stress, emotion, anger, and political alienation that has been building in this country for years. And I think anyone who is writing this off as entirely manufactured, entirely orchestrated, and to be blunt with you, entirely unwarranted, is wrong. There are a lot of people in this country who are alienated and angry and feel dispossessed, and we can roll our eyes and demean them all we want, but that’s not going to make them go away. It’s only going to make it worse.

So I think you do have to understand that there is this spontaneous nature to some of it, and it is real and it is genuine and it is sincere. But to your question, is it being used? Oh, yeah, it’s being used. And I think there are thousands of people, particularly immediately around Parliament, who are there because they are angry. They are there because they are threatened. They are there because they want to be heard. But there are other people there who are using these people to advance political agendas. And I don’t know the extent to which many of the participants realize that they are being used as part of someone else’s political agenda here. When you look at some of the declarations and the press conferences that I’ve had, I don’t know how politically savvy a lot of these people are. I think they’re hard working grassroots people who’ve shown up because they heard about something on Facebook and they maybe never even thought to look at who had started the Facebook group.

Jordan Well, why don’t you kind of do what we invited you on to do, which is take us into the protest. Let’s start with during the day when you arrived. And I will just say this to our listeners. I know from your writing and previous conversations we have that you have Liberal views on some things, very conservative views on other things. So for what it’s worth, I believe you when you tell me you went to see both sides of this thing, what did it look like?

Matt Gurney In the daylight? It’s weird. It’s kind of hard to explain. Imagine a festival, but it’s packed in the middle of an urban street, and it’s lined with dozens and hundreds of vehicles that are idling and pumping fuels into the air. And particularly on Monday, this changed later in the week, but particularly on Monday, a lot of those trucks are consistently roaring with their horns, and it is loud, oppressive, ear splitting noise. But it’s also surrounded by a lot of people in a good mood. I noted in my first dispatch, again, I grew up in a big city. When you grow up in a big city, you kind of learn polite detachment from your surroundings. If you get on a bus, you don’t make eye contact, like you find a seat, you sit down and you mind your own business. People there were very friendly, very chatty, lots of eye contact. A lot of people wanted to talk to you, find out where you’re from, where you’re staying.

It is overwhelmingly white. It is not exclusively white. And I made this point as well. Like I said before, people are being manipulated for the agendas of others there. If you want to take pictures to show how multicultural and diverse that crowd is, you can find examples of that and you can take those pictures and you can tweet them out. But it is an overwhelmingly white crowd, a real mixture of French Canadians, kind of lopsidedly, so I thought. English is the dominant language, but there is a large Quebec contingent there. The trucks are parked up and down the streets, and particularly along Parliament, they’ve sort of colonized the sidewalks. So you’ve got folding tables where people are making sandwiches or handing out toilet paper rolls or deodorant sticks, toothpaste tubes, things like that. It’s become kind of a self contained community in that sense. A lot of kids around.

And a ton of signs attached to the fencing around Parliament, attached to the vehicles on site as well. Most of the signs are sort of generic slogans like End the mandates or Resign Trudeau. There’s also a smattering of sort of the mishmash of political slogans you’d see at any protest if you went there. I saw signs about Free Northern Ireland, Free Tibet, a ton of religious material, some of it politicized, a lot of it just scripture like Jesus Saves, Accept the Lord as Your Savior, things like that. Scriptural verses. A ton of profanity. Trudeau being invited to perform improbable acts upon himself or members of his family. There’s a nasty edge there. Not a lot of political slogans advancing other parties in a partisan sense. I saw a few signs for the People’s Party, but not many.

The vibe is mostly friendly, like I said. There are two other elements in that crowd during the daylight. One of them is that there are a series of men, and they’re almost all men. I described them in my first report as the hard men, unsmiling, suspicious, standing in small groups, looking out at all newcomers. I blend into that crowd pretty well, but I have no doubt that on a couple of occasions these guys spotted me as an outsider and they were watching me and I was aware of that. No one threatened me and I just kept moving on, but I was aware of it. And something that reminded me very much of my time down at Occupy Toronto, back when that was a thing many years ago, was however this thing started, it has drawn in other elements. And Occupy Toronto and I’d imagine the camps in other cities, the protest during the day is beset with what I would imagine is a significant portion, if not almost all of downtown Ottawa’s homeless and mentally ill population.

So the crowd is a real mix of mostly people who are there talking about how we got to get our freedom back. We’re going to oppose mandates. Trudeau needs to resign. We need new government that better represents the people. Fairly typical political protest, unusually loud in that sense, with a mentally ill and homeless element mixed in as well as I described, the hard men. I described them in my first report as the kind of guys you would be very careful of if you stepped off a bus and they got off behind you or if you’re at a bar and you’re having a drink and one of those guys is there, you’d pay attention to them.

And the last thing I’ll mention because I’ve been talking too long, there is a major police presence all around the protest and moving through it in large groups, but it’s a mobile presence. They’re not there to do anything. They are there to be seen. So you’ll have a group of eight or ten officers march through kind of on the north side of the street and they will pass a group of eight or ten officers going the other way on the south side. The cops are everywhere, but they’re not interfering. They’re not doing anything. You know, they’ll stop and chat. If they’re engaged, they’ll wave or they’ll pose for a picture, but they’re not there to do anything other than to be a very visible presence.

Jordan I do want to ask you about some of the conversations you had, not necessarily with the more dangerous looking folks, but I’m curious about the average typical protester who I think, as you said, you know, has some concerns about various political directions or just kind of saw something on Facebook and feels like this speaks to them so they joined it. What I’m curious about is these people are being portrayed, depending on who you read, as either insane people that want to depose the democratically elected government of Canada and get rid of Trudeau and turn it all over to themselves and the governor general, or as people who are tired of Covid mandates and restrictions and would like them to please end and would like a plan for coming out of this. Which side did you see more predominantly in your conversations?

Matt Gurney I think it’s a spectrum. I don’t know if there’s a clear, bright dividing line between the two. I would say sincerely frustrated people would be the largest group. I’m not sure they would be lopsidedly the largest group. And like I said, without a clear dividing line, I’d get into a conversation with someone and I’d be like, what brings you here? And they’re like, look like my sister lost her business during this pandemic, and I don’t believe in the vaccines. I’m fine if you chose to, but I’m just not comfortable taking them. And now I’m being told I can’t do my job and I got a family to support, and that’s why I’m here. And you’re thinking, yeah, you know what? This is a misguided person who probably got some bad information on social media and we need to work on the vaccine hesitancy. And then the conversation ends, but then 2 seconds later you’re having another identical version of that, and then the person follows up with And Justin Trudeau is an enemy of the people, and we need to bring true freedom back to the government by installing a people led government. And you go, “oh, okay.”

So you can’t necessarily spot them when the conversation starts. The conversations were fairly simple. We need freedom back. Okay, great, everybody supports freedom. And then you’d be listening in on it, and every once in a while, someone would be like, yeah, we should hang that bastard Trudeau. And someone would go, yeah, we should. Or the other person will go, Whoa, Whoa, no. This is a nonviolent process. There was a degree, I think, of sorting going on at the event as well. Justin Trudeau is not a popular guy at this thing. And there’s a lot of talk of kind of, why doesn’t that coward come out from his cottage and talk to us? If I were the Prime Minister’s security detail and he tried to go down to that event, I would drag him from it by whatever body part I needed to grab hold of. Like the Prime Minister of this country should not go anywhere near that protest. One of the things that worries me is that I believe these protesters have set themselves up with an unrealistic sense of what they are capable of accomplishing. And as this thing goes on, they’re going to start getting more and more frustrated.

Jordan We’re going to end with what happens next and if there even is an end game. But first, just to get some more balance to it, how does that scene change at night?

Matt Gurney Well, at night the festival goers go home. The live music stops, the speeches are over, the kids are gone. I don’t know where they go. They go back to hotels or they go to sleep inside some of the trucks, which is what’s being reported on. The streets are almost deserted, but these big, big trucks are still there. They’re idling and their engines are going and the fumes are still belching. And you’ve got much smaller groups of men, almost exclusively men, standing around propane heaters or bonfires, people staying warm, quiet conversations. During the day, in the larger crowd, I had no problem whatsoever blending in. At nighttime I was an immediate outsider. No one was unfriendly to me, no one was threatening to me, but anytime I attempted to join a conversation, it fell completely silent and I was just politely looked at until I got the message and left.

The police presence at night is gone. They pull back to the perimeter and they basically surround the protest area. And you have cruisers with flashing lights parked across major streets with officers either in them staying warm or standing in small groups behind them. So, yeah, I walked around. I spent a lot of time there, and again, I did not feel in danger at any time. But when the crowds are gone, it’s a very different, dark, tense vibe of these guys standing around talking in whispers to each other. I’m not getting anywhere near those conversations. And it made me wonder what they were talking about and what I worried about before. Like I said, there’s no path to a victory for these guys. As the frustration starts setting in and they’re out all at night and the music is gone and there’s no more DJ and the hot dogs aren’t being grilled anymore and the kids are out of sight. Is that when they’re talking about their frustrations? Is that when they’re wondering why Justin Trudeau hasn’t come out yet to talk with them?

And I should mention as well, because when you and I are doing this interview, I have a third article that is pending, but it is not out yet. There are one or two encampment sites that are completely removed from the main protest. Those are not protest sites. Those are occupation sites. I presume armed camps. In any case, they’re fortified camps. I went to one of them on Tuesday. It is in a large parking lot near a baseball Stadium. The trucks have been parked in such a way as to form a solid perimeter. There are shipping containers that make up part of it, as well as long wooden saw horses or stacked crates. There is one entrance in and out. It is guarded, and I was intercepted by six men and politely redirected away before I got within 30ft of it.

So if you want to understand what’s happening in Ottawa, like I said before, you’ve got to understand that there’s two things happening at once there. The larger protest by some frustrated, in some cases sincerely so, in some cases by misinformed people or badly informed people. It is obscuring with a big, loud honking story. The fact that there is another element that has moved into Ottawa and has taken over at least one parking lot a couple of miles from Parliament Hill. I don’t know what they’re doing there, but what that is is not protest. It is a camp that is now fortified and guarded, and I suspect if there’s going to be problems, it could happen there.

Jordan well, this is why I wanted to end with this, not that I expect you to know what happens next. I don’t think anybody does at this point, but Ottawa’s police chief who has been criticized throughout this for not having his officers do more, has kind of said a few times now that one of the reasons they haven’t is they just don’t have the means to move these people in these massive trucks without it possibly turning into a really violent incident. What kind of sense do you get about if he’s right about that or not, from what you saw firsthand?

Matt Gurney It is my impression based on personal experience, but also conversations I’ve been having with a variety of people that chief Sloly in Ottawa knows exactly what the problem is, that there is a very large, somewhat organic, mostly friendly protest that is basically offering cover politically and maybe literally to a much harder edged, better organized movement there that is seeking confrontation. I think when you look at what the chief has been saying, he’s going as hard as he can into telling us collectively and probably also trying to get his bosses to accept that we face a very difficult situation in Ottawa.

He has been repeatedly thanking the intelligence cooperation we’ve been getting from the United States. He has repeatedly raised the prospect of the armed forces. He has repeatedly said that he does not have the manpower to resolve this. He has said there may not be a policing solution to this problem. Whatever criticisms you want to make of chief Sloly, and believe me, I could make some. He’s not stupid. He is very well spoken. He is savvy. He is a good communicator. He is telling people what is going on there in the most blunt way he probably feels like he can get away with. And I don’t think he’s being listened to. My impression is that officials in Ottawa, the Ontario government, and particularly at the federal level, are still not really understanding what they’re up against in Ottawa, that they think this is an unusually raucous or persistent protest. That’s partially what’s going on. But there is that other element that’s taken root there as well.

And I think that is what has the chief worried. Because if they try to do any enforcement action on the Wellington Street protest or the Kent Street protest near Parliament, what are those guys down at that encampment going to do? Meanwhile, if they make a move on the encampment to enforce some search warrants or something like that, what are the guys at Parliament going to do? I believe that the chief is worried that he has no nonviolent options, and I’m worried that he is right.

Jordan So it sounds like you’re saying that there are two separate protests, as you’ve kind of described in both your pieces and in this interview. Does that mean that kind of everything that everybody on both sides are saying about what’s going on in Ottawa is right? Because it kind of sounds like that to me right now.

Matt Gurney Yeah, but they’re also wrong. This is an excellent example I’ll offer you here. There are a lot of people who are convinced that the reason this protest was treated with kid gloves is because the police are an instrument of white supremacy and they saw a bunch of white people show up and they didn’t feel threatened. You know what? There are massive proven racial disparities in policing outcomes and enforcement, and I’m not for 1 second denying that. But if you only look at the police and you only see an instrument of white supremacy, you are missing the fact that there is another element in this protest. First of all, the use of the heavy vehicles as blockade instruments and possibly as weapons. These other groups that have moved into the protest and have now set up shop with it. You’re missing the big picture if all you’re seeing is what you would have seen in any police action.

And that cuts the other way. If you’re convinced the police are always the good guys and they can do no wrong and you’re a good reflexive law and order type, you’re probably convinced that the police are on the side of the angels here and you’re not considering the fact that I think the Ottawa police have realized that they don’t want to be responsible for this and they are waiting for someone to come in from above and bail them out and to take the political responsibility away from this here.

So, like I said, if you drive to Ottawa today and you are convinced already that it is a good group of patriotic, freedom loving Canadians having themselves a grand old time at a street party, you’re going to take pictures and video that are 100% going to confirm that narrative. If you go to Ottawa and you’re convinced that this is a far right movement that is determined to find a confrontation with the government and would like that to be violent, you’ll find evidence of that, too. And I think rather than viewing these things as in opposition to each other, we have to understand that reality is very rarely as simple as it exists in our own minds here. The officials in Ottawa from the Ottawa police officers themselves to the reinforcements from all over Ontario, right up to the federal cabinet, are dealing with a situation that they have probably never, not only experienced before, but I doubt that they even thought about. I don’t think the federal government has caught up to the reality of where they are yet. I think the provincial government might be a little bit closer. And I think Chief Sloly knows exactly what’s going on. He just hasn’t figured out a way to fix it yet.

Jordan This marks the third or fourth very pleasant conversation I’ve had about the future of this country in the last couple of weeks. Thank you, Matt.

Matt Gurney Yeah, the fifth one, we should just do like puppies. Aren’t they great?

Jordan Yeah, sometime we’ll get to puppies, sometime after the borders get unblocked.

Matt Gurney I’ll be here.

Jordan Matt Gurney is a co founder of The Line and you can find it at theline.substack.com.

This was The Big Story which you can find at thebigstorypodcast.ca . You can find us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. And of course, you can email us with questions, comments or concerns or rants or whatever you like at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!].

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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