Konvoi -Verurteilung eines Teils einer behartten Justizgeschichte im Umgang mit Protest

Some of the key issues from this article:

>Champ was initially reluctant to get involved. “I believe really deeply in protest, and it doesn’t matter what issue you’re protesting. You should have the right to be out there. There’s lots of reasonable reasons to disagree with certain COVID measures and given how significant the impact was on people’s life, people should protest,” he said. He also felt protest leaders shouldn’t be held responsible for the actions of a few bad actors, like those who defecated on residents’ lawns or sent fireworks bouncing off apartment walls. But the damage done by the horns, along with the serial harassment of businesses and residents alike for wearing masks (at a time when mask-wearing was mandated for public indoor spaces to prevent COVID’s spread), changed his mind.
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>“It’s important to distinguish between the issues that the people were protesting and the manner in which they were protesting,” Champ said. “They were honking those horns because they were trying to make living downtown extremely difficult. And they were doing that to put pressure on the government … they were kind of holding the people of downtown Ottawa hostage.”
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>For the Conservative Party to become the movement’s champion without acknowledging any of those harms spoke volumes, Champ added. Poilievre famously brought donuts to members of the Convoy during the blockades, and described them as “bright, joyful, and peaceful Canadians championing freedom over fear.”
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>“Poilievre never spoke out about how miserable it was for the people who have young kids, for the elderly, people with disabilities, the shelters that are downtown, all the business people — he just didn’t give a crap because he’s exploiting it for political gain.”
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>That strategy created an enormous new base for Poilievre in 2022, almost overnight. “Pierre took a principled stance which hurt him politically when it mattered the most. This is how he earned my loyalty,” the Pleb Reporter posted on Monday. Courting the Convoy vote brought Poilievre within a hair of becoming prime minister, but ultimately backfired spectacularly. It cost him not only the election but also the parliamentary seat (Carleton, which abuts downtown Ottawa) he had held for 21 years.
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>It’s common for protesters from all ideological backgrounds to feel unjustly persecuted by police. But for all the complaints from Conservatives and Freedom Convoy members over their rough treatment at the end of their blockade, the Convoy’s start was marked by an unusual level of police cooperation.
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>“The big question was why the police did not enforce any laws for that particular group,” said Joao Velloso, a professor of criminology at the University of Ottawa. When truckers started pulling into downtown Ottawa, he noted, police didn’t even hand out tickets for illegal parking. “It’s quite scary that police can decide to not enforce any laws. That’s quite dangerous for democracy.”
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>Images of police officers shaking hands and taking selfies with protesters emerged not just from Ottawa, but also from other convoy blockades throughout the country, like the one in Coutts, Alberta, where some of the protesters were later found to have been stockpiling assault weapons. Each of these groups was blocking critical infrastructure, collectively inflicting billions of dollars of damage on the national economy.
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>This paints a stark contrast to the treatment given to environmental and Indigenous protesters who target infrastructure. During the Fairy Creek protests against old growth logging on Vancouver Island in 2021, RCMP officers were filmed tearing the masks off protesters before spraying them point blank in the face with pepper spray — tactics a judge later declared illegal — for blocking a logging road. Two years before that, during the Wet’suwet’en protests against BC’s Coastal GasLink pipeline, RCMP dispatched snipers ahead of a militarized arrest of Indigenous protesters and journalists, generating international headlines.
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>It is hard to compare how various protest groups are treated because with all the different factions and protest methods it’s rarely an apples to apples comparison. For example, the “Freedom Convoy” protests were exceptional because the protesters utilized huge hard-to-remove trucks, which he says may have thrown a spanner in the police response in Ottawa.
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>Powerful lobby groups influence the political agenda and seek to shape views on national threats, whether it pertains to war or climate change — and right now, it appears fossil fuel interests are shaping the narrative, Turk said.
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>“When we talk about who we’re afraid of, we’re afraid of the left,” said Meaghan Daniel, a Montreal lawyer who has defended activists and Indigenous protest movements across the country. Daniel has roots in activism herself, and was deeply involved in the left-wing G20 protests in Toronto in 2010, where 1,100 people were arrested in the largest mass arrest in Canadian history. The police chief in charge of that operation, Bill Blair, was later put in charge of CSIS and the RCMP as public safety minister.
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>“For a long time we’ve seen extensive surveillance and infiltration of far-left groups, but we didn’t see that [with the Freedom Convoy],” Daniel said. “”We didn’t even see the acknowledgement of far-right groups until about a decade after the G20.” That helps explain why authorities were caught “flat-footed” by Convoy groups in 2022, when they seized critical infrastructure all across the nation with almost no effort to prevent them until it was too late. “I think they were really surprised at the existence of far-right extremist organizing.”
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>Even after all levels of government awoke to the scale of the threat, the way police finally ended the Convoy protests was far more peaceful than similar actions against major left-wing acts of civil disobedience. Almost no arrests were made, and in the end only three people were criminally charged. During the Wet’suwet’en protests, RCMP arrested 74 people in four separate raids. At Fairy Creek, the number of arrests once again surpassed 1,100 and many were prosecuted.

Looking at these comparisons, it looks pretty clear that there is a political angle to which groups get what kinds of treatment during and after protests and other public actions. And as mentioned in the article, lobby groups and media owners have been influencing both the narrative as well as the public responses to various groups. This runs counter to our notions of justice where there should be one set of laws that are evenly and fairly applied to all.

Very good read. I am not a fan of the national observer as I find them with a bias but not so in this case. I think they balanced the need for protest with what actually happened in Ottawa fairly.