Canadian Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino said it is time for police to begin using their broad authority conferred under Canada’s Emergencies Act, which allows the government to ban the blockades and begin towing away trucks.
OTTAWA, Ontario — Ottawa’s police chief resigned Tuesday amid criticism of his department's inaction against the trucker protests that have paralyzed Canada's capital for over two weeks, a federal government official said.
On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked extraordinary emergency powers to try to end the occupation there and elsewhere around the country. Across Canada and beyond, the question in the coming days will be whether it will work. The government will be able to ban blockades at border crossings, airports and in Ottawa; freeze truckers’ personal and corporate bank accounts and suspend their licenses; and target crowd-funding sites that are being used to support the blockades.
“What the operation revealed is that you got a very small, hardened core driven by ideology," Mendicino said.“We have been fortunate thus far there has not been mass violence,” he said. The busiest and most important border crossing, the Ambassador Bridge, was reopened on Sunday after police arrested dozens of demonstrators. The nearly week-long siege that had disrupted auto production in both countries.
The protests have drawn support from right-wing extremists in Canada and have been cheered on in the U.S. by Fox News personalities and conservatives such as Donald Trump.
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