An anxious Ottawa preps for protesters

Ottawa doesn’t need to brace this weekend for a replay of the convoy protest, says the new police chief, because “lots has changed since last year.”

For one thing, the chief has changed. Eric Stubbs, who took over late in 2022, told CBC’s “Ottawa Morning” on Wednesday that while he hasn’t talked to the man he replaced — former chief Peter Sloly — he is confident the city can avoid the occupation that gripped the capital one year ago and cost Sloly his job.

The other thing that’s happened since then was a cathartic six weeks of public hearings into the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” conducted through the last few months of 2022 under Justice Paul Rouleau, head of the commission of inquiry.

Rouleau’s report is expected to focus on how to avoid the mess and anarchy of another convoy or convoy-like protest in the future. But that report isn’t due for another month, and this weekend, in fact, will be an early test of what everyone learned through those public hearings — not just the police, but politicians and Canadians overall.

Stubbs talked to the Ottawa police board and reporters earlier this week, offering assurances this weekend’s anniversary of the convoy protest would not trigger the kind of three-week spectacle that unfolded last year.

“We’re monitoring a number of intelligence lines. We were talking to a lot of people, a lot of organizers,” Stubbs told local media.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau doesn’t seem any more inclined to talk to these protesters than he was last year — a strong sign that he has no second thoughts about nonengagement with the demonstration in 2022. Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre has said many times that Trudeau could have cut short the convoy protest just by agreeing to meet some of them, as Poilievre and many of his MPs did.

Would Poilievre do it differently himself in 2023, if Ottawa was plunged into a convoy replay? If Chief Stubbs is right, we will never know.

In many ways, Ottawa is facing the same kind of test this weekend as the vaccine mandates that triggered the convoy outrage last year. We will only know what’s working by what doesn’t happen — if the convoy virus fails to infect the country as it did last year.

Officially, the Rouleau commission was only supposed to answer the question of whether Trudeau was right to invoke emergency legislation to end the protest. But of course, those hearings turned into much more, and many people hope all that testimony has become a vaccine of sorts against a future protest.

Then again, what Rouleau’s hearings demonstrated was that the convoy wasn’t just one protest. It was, in the words of former chief Sloly, a many headed “hydra” that was impossible to confront as one, singular beast. One would hope that police and security are mindful of that reality in 2023, not assuming that a repeat of the convoy can be avoided by negotiating with a few people.

Much of the motivation behind last year’s mass protest — those vaccine mandates — are gone, which some supporters of the convoy regard as a victory of the Ottawa occupation and border blockades. That’s obviously an overreach. COVID isn’t gone, but Canada seems to be learning to live with it without lockdowns.

One other big demand of the protesters — the ouster of Trudeau — obviously didn’t happen, and judging from the small demonstrations in Windsor and Hamilton the past couple of weeks, that’s still annoying an angry knot of Canadians. But is that sentiment rampant enough to paralyze a capital and a country again?

As my colleagues Raisa Patel and Grant Lafleche wrote in a one-year anniversary piece last weekend, the “freedom” movement is scattered and splintered now — likely unable to regroup. For the next few days, though, many in Ottawa will be hyperalert to the sound of trucks honking or the sight of flags flying from vehicles entering the capital. This weekend will show whether Ottawa has been convoy-proofed.