Dispatch from the Ottawa Front: Sloly is telling you all he's in trouble. Who's listening?
Last edited Thu Feb 10, 2022, 08:52 PM - Edit history (1)
Dispatch from the Ottawa Front:
(Chief) Sloly is telling you all he's in trouble. Who's listening?The scale of Ottawa's defeat is a jarring and continuing indictment of the capacity of the Canadian state, and the state must reverse this situation, decisively.
https://theline.substack.com/p/dispatch-from-the-ottawa-front-sloly
By: Matt Gurney
OTTAWA
"SNIP.......
Before I came to Ottawa, I spoke with a few people who were sympathetic to the protest: I was advised to stay away from this secondary encampment site, or at least to approach it with caution. I wasn’t feeling particularly heroic on Tuesday, but I figured it wouldn’t make sense to travel all the way from Toronto and then ignore one of the main sites. I drove over, parked my car nearby and walked the rest of the way to the parking lot.
It was clear well before I even arrived that this was something different. There was absolutely no visible police presence. Not a single uniformed officer or marked cruiser. (Note my careful phrasing there: I have no doubt this place is under watch. Just not overtly.) This site, for lack of a better term, has been fortified. There are many trucks parked in the parking lot, but some of them have been arranged to form outer walls. These walls have been augmented with wooden sawhorses and what looked to me to be stacked pallets of some kind. There was an entrance with a tent marked Reception (see photo, below). I wish I could give you a better description of the site, or tell you what was inside, but as soon as I began to approach it on foot, someone very quickly fell into step behind me. A series of others, four or five, met me before I made it to the reception tent. We chatted briefly, and I got the distinct impression that it would be way, way better for me to be somewhere else. I left.
They did not threaten me. Everybody was very polite and all smiles. But it was extremely clear to me that my presence was unwelcome. It was also clear to me that these people were organized. This is wildly different from the sites closer to Parliament. As I have written in the earlier dispatches, during the daytime, it’s something of a festival atmosphere along Wellington. At night, it is more grim and much more tense, but I still had no concerns or issues walking through the entire area. This encampment near the stadium?
That was something else.
.........
My encounter at the site intrigued me. I made some calls. My sources on the ground are pretty good in the sense of federal politics, but not great in terms of the local governance. Still, each call I made went similarly: the police are very much aware of the site, and they are very worried about the presence of a hard-right-wing, organized faction that isn't there to protest mandates and vaccine passports, but to directly create conflict with the government. This hard-right element probably includes some non-Canadians, here for the party. The broader complaints of the protesters are a cover for the group seeking open conflict. Most of the convoy protesters aren’t part of this smaller, nastier group, nor linked to it in any overt way. Many of them will think any concern about it at all is just some MSM lamestream media conspiracy.
.......SNIP"
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