It’s hard to see a scenario where the government would find it necessary to declare a national emergency
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Comparing the Freedom Convoy protests across Canada two years ago — particularly the largest one in Ottawa — to the recent pro-Palestinian encampments at Canadian universities is useful.
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Why am I comparing these two protests, as opposed to looking at the pro-Palestinian encampments on universities in the U.S. compared to Canada? For several reasons.
1. Canadians protest differently from Americans. We are generally less destructive and more civil and law-abiding.
2. American laws and how their enforcement agencies operate are not the same as their Canadian counterparts.
3. The federal and Ontario governments that were primarily involved in the Freedom Convoy protests in 2022 are also in charge with regard to the pro-Palestinian encampments today.
The first point, that Canadian protests are generally less violent than those is the U.S., is particularly significant.
Vietnam war protests in the U.S., for example, reached a level of violence on both sides that simply did not happen in Canada.
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More recently, there is really nothing in Canada that compares to the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol building, or the 2020 Seattle Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone riots in the wake of the police murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Things have reached the point where in some U.S. cities, fast-food restaurants experience violence so frequently that they’ve installed bulletproof glass between the customers and cashiers — more physical security than we have in the branches of many Canadian banks.
In terms of the Freedom Convoy protest in Canada two years ago and the pro-Palestinian encampments at some Canadian universities today, neither involved major episodes of violence,
The convoy protest did result in some bylaw infractions and arrests were made after the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act to break up the demonstrations, but there was nothing like the violence that occurred in Washington on Jan. 6.
Today’s pro-Palestinian encampments have been largely non-violent, albeit without the hot tubs and bouncy castle.
Both the convoy and pro-Palestinian protests have had episodes of what could be described as hate speech and hateful acts, but these were confined to relatively small groups within the protests.
Both movements were not particularly good at removing their radical elements — police clearing an encampment at the University of Calgary said demonstrators hurled projectiles at them — but given the overall lack of physical violence, they were not dominated by these elements.
Generally speaking, Canadian authorities are less prone than those in the U.S. to break up protests and demonstrations by authorizing the police use of force. Canadian police are more likely to collect evidence after the fact and then lay charges where they consider there was a significant threat to public safety.
True, the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act to break up the Freedom Convoy protests after botching the job initially, which led to a demonstrator in Ottawa sustaining a minor injury by a police horse, but — unlike the Jan. 6 riots in the U.S. — no one died.
The pro-Palestinian encampments occupying some university campuses are on private property, but so far the police have not been called in to break them up in most cases.
While these demonstrations are inconvenient and embarrassing to the universities — and may disrupt the academic year and graduation ceremonies — it’s hard to see a scenario where the government would find it necessary to declare a national emergency and start freezing the bank accounts of the protesters or their supporters.
More likely the authorities will wait for now to see if the demonstrations will escalate or subside on their own, depending on developments in the Mideast stemming from the ongoing Israel-Hamas war.
— Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp, teaches Disaster and Emergency Management at York University and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.
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