About 30 of the protesters were arrested. Production and dismiss workers because of supply issues. That week-long blockade cost about C$350 million a day in cross-border trade and forced some industrial plant operations to scale back The operation involving Ottawa cops, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, Ontario and Quebec provincial police-along with other forces-came days after a similar protest blocking the Ambassador Bridge linking Windsor, Ont., and Detroit was broken up. Some 389 charges were initially laid against 103 participants. Police brought the loud, three-week occupation to an end on Feb. 20 after a three-day operation in which they dispersed crowds with pepper spray, horses and stun grenades, towed more than 70 vehicles, and arrested 191 people-including four key organizers whose connections to the trucking industry were tenuous at best. It cost the City of Ottawa some $800,000 a day in policing. Nevertheless, the movement gained worldwide attention and inspired similar protests in several countries, including the United States. The mandate the “freedom convoy” was originally protesting was invoked by the administrations in both Ottawa and Washington. The Canadian Trucking Alliance distanced itself from the January-February protest, saying that, while protesters clogged downtown Ottawa streets, shut down businesses and harassed local residents, 85 per cent of the alliance’s member truckers were fully vaccinated. What began as a protest by truckers over pandemic-related border restrictions turned into a full-blown occupation financed and driven by right-wing extremists whose agenda went well beyond the issue of vaccine mandates. “There’s no doubt they came to overthrow the government.” “The occupation of Ottawa was dug in, they had supply chains, they had organization, they had funding coming in from across Canada, but also other countries,” Jody Thomas told the 2022 Ottawa Conference on Security and Defence. This past winter’s COVID-19 protest-turned-occupation of the nation’s capital amounted to an extremist attempt to take over the government, the prime minister’s top security adviser told a conference in March.
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