The Toronto Star had an article yesterday on what it terms the "lacklustre" response of the Ottawa police force to the trucker convoy. The article compares the response of the Ottawa police to the Vancouver police in 2011 to the riot that followed the Canucks' Game 7 loss in the Stanley Cup finals.
At that 'siege', 155,000 people congregated in the streets of downtown Vancouver and it was titled "The Night the City Became a Stadium". It took only 928 officers to quell the riot in just three hours. It seems like a miracle in comparison.
The article asserts that both police forces knew of the impending problem - the trucks drove across Canada to converge on Ottawa. There's more going on now, according to author Christopher J. Schneider in his comparison in the Star HERE He is a professor of sociology at Brandon University and author of "Policing and Social Media: Social Control in an Era of New Media." He says:
"The Vancouver rioters were not motivated by politics, which made it less politically problematic for police to quickly bring an end to the melee. The rioters had no political agenda, whereas the “freedom convoy” is obviously politically charged, which, in part, helps explain why there are images on social media of officers in Ottawa posing for photos with occupiers. One would be hard pressed to find any photos of Vancouver Police standing with rioters!"
He has brought insight to the situation. Can he point the way to the solution? Not in that article so far.
A new term to describe this siege comes from the Guardian. An article named this "an astroturfed movement" with this definition: one that creates the impression of widespread grassroots support where little exists, funded by a global network of highly organized far-right groups and amplified by Facebook's misinformation machine.
We can expect to see more written about this before and after the clearing of the streets in Ottawa. How will the Ottawa citizens pay the $8 or so million for the lacklustre policing and clean-up activities? Maybe via gofundme.
Here's our post-Valentine's Day image - I call this one Silly Clown. Chicoree is a "coffee substitute." Don't suggest any chocolate substitutes on Valentine's Day.
