> Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.
Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.
Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.
I see this word used multiple times in people arguing against the protest, never with any details about the concrete instances of the supposed harassment. Noise is not harassment, any activity with a large group of people is going to annoy and disturb the place they happen to choose to congregate, this is not even specific to protests.
Actually, just to be clear, what exactly did the protestors do besides blocking the road and making a lot of noise?
>protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most
So
(1) The duration of a protest and
(2) How much inconvenience it causes to the locals
are the two factors that determine whether it's a legitimate protest or not ?
Noise is 100% absolutely definitely harassment, especially when it is over 100dB within people's homes, and every hour of the day for weeks on end. Why do you say it's not? It was loud enough to cause permanent damage and was unending for a significant portion of the occupation, until a citizen managed to get a court injunction.
The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.
You mean they did this at night? Wow. And police let this go on for multiple nights? When sleep deprivation is done to alleged terrorists, Amnesty International calls it torture.
Because it's not, harassment is usually implied to be personal, involving hostile contact between the harasser(s) and the harassed. Did the protestors shout insults or threats at you or other neighborhood residents ?
>all illegal under existing laws
Do we really need to constantly circle back to the point that protests have to be lawful ? they do not, protesting is about breaking the ordinary and disrupting the status quo, that's the point, especially when the people protesting feel cornered and without a lawful retort to perceived injustices.
Every action against the government will hurt the population to some degree or another, 100db noise seems pretty mild compared to the private property damage valued in the millions that large-scale protests usually cause. Prioritising comfort over protest is implicitely siding with the government, which is your right off course, as long as you're explicit about it.
Edit : 100db noise turns out to be a deadly serious matter, I apologize to the person I'm replying to for making light of it.
I still believe it's wrong to use this as justification for quashing a protest, there is a whole spectrum of solutions from reasoning with the protestors to wearing ear covers, but I can better understand and empathize with the antagonism most of the affected city's residents hold toward the protests.
At 100dB, a safe dose is about 15 minutes. Blowing horns all day for weeks on end poses a significant risk of severe hearing loss. Per affected person, a hearing loss payout can be up to around $100k. Given the ~1M people in Ottawa, I would expect the physical damage to persons in the area to exceed the millions of dollars in your "[usual] large-scale protest."
Let's flip it - can your neighbour block the end your driveway and lay on their car horn 24/7 for weeks straight if they say they're protesting the government? Bonus points for harassing you if you walk by
I wouldn't like it, but I also wouldn't call it an illegal protest because I don't like it.
Truth be told I've rarely encountered a protest I liked - they are always annoying (even the ones I agree with are annoying - they block traffic to friends and foes equally).
It comes with the territory, and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.
If the government had stopped at halting the horns, very few people would object, and even then not seriously. A lack of a horn does not prevent a protest.
But that's not what Canada did, is it? They not just remove the protest they froze bank accounts of supporters. That's not democracy. That's a government very very threatened by the protest.
If Canada does not wipe the slate clean and vote away every single politician who was culpable in this, then Canada is not the place it's been advertised to be.
I mean, aside from the noise torture they shut down a city's downtown core for 3 weeks, continually threatened, harassed, and assaulted it's residents, released multiple statements and videos calling for overthrowing and arresting elected leaders (especially women / people of colour), and the municipal police force proved itself incapable of enforcing the law and keeping Canadians safe. Not to mention the other blockades that halted more than $300mil/day in trade.
Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.
Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.