In the winter of 2022, Ottawa’s downtown core was a noisy, angry scene. Now it is quiet – but the silence speaks volumes about the issues left unresolved
Wellington Street in Ottawa, as it looked on Jan. 28, 2022 – the first week of last year’s convoy protests – and this past Jan. 24.In Ottawa, Wellington Street has always been an odd duck.
Meanwhile, the convoy infuriated and antagonized residents of Ottawa and a majority of Canadians watching from further afield, who felt no sympathy for what appeared to be a mass, gleeful temper tantrum. At a cabinet retreat in Hamilton this week, for example, Mr. Trudeau and his ministers were greeted by a farm-team version of the protest, complete with profane flags and fireworks.
“I was never so disappointed in my life, to see the news reporting from the mainstream media that we were painted as such evil people,” he says. “I’m a 10th-generation farmer with over 20 grandchildren, you know, and it was pretty hurtful to hear the way we were talked about, and still are.” First, many people feel as if their way of life is being threatened by forces they can’t control and that they’re falling behind.
But even with those preconditions in place, the convoy needed one more crucial ingredient to catch on like it did. But Mr. Jonker says it wasn’t until he got to Ottawa that he understood the full scope of things as he sees them now. “I remember saying to a guy after being there for a week, ‘You know what? I think this is bigger than COVID. This is not necessarily just about COVID, it’s about who’s controlling who and who’s telling who what to do.’”
“Do you know what he said? ‘I’m 73. I know where I’m going. I’m seeing my grandkids,’” Mr. Jonker says. “And that’s when it really hit me that yeah, there’s something not right.” “There was people locked up afraid – they thought they were the only crazy people out there that were thinking there’s something not right here,” Mr. Jonker says. “And when they seen how many people were on those bridges or how many people came there, they were like, ‘Wow, I’m not alone.’”Carlos Osorio/The Globe and Mailand saw several kilometres of people lined up in the darkness, honking and waving.
He ran for re-election in October, finishing third of four candidates in his ward. Mr. Jonker is still thankful he was part of the protest, and he’d do it again.Carlos Osorio/Reuters It’s one thing to say elites need to change, but they operate based on incentives, he says, and in a democracy, it is citizens who control those carrots.know from their research that people don’t like conflict in politics; they like compromise and other nice “boring stuff.” Prof. Wesley argues that people need to act like that’s the case, in order to change the incentives.
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