> if you were to poll the average Ottawan about the trucker protest, you'll largely get back a response of "#&$! those people", soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them

This just illustrates why pure/Athenian democracy doesn’t work. Madness of the crowds and all that. Decide most issues by plebescite and you get an emotional outcome.

Switzerland has direct democracy and seems to go fine with it.

I can't imagine looking at Republican Rome or any of the tyrants in the ancient world and thinking they're better.

The Republic fell because a bunch of senators were too greedy and refused to do basic land reform or anything else to make life better for anyone other than themselves.

There's no shortage of absolutely insane tyrants that made people's lives miserable.

its a much less severe response than there would gave been, compared to say, ottawabs torching the trucks along with anyone in them

Is this where the meme about Canadians being very polite comes from - a tendency towards pettiness rather than really nasty political rifts? (I don't know anything about Canadian culture)

Spend 5 minutes in Toronto Union Station during commuter hours and you'll never describe Canadians as polite again.

That's the very worst point of view you'll ever get of Canadians. Of course people in a busy train station during rush hour aren't in the best mood.

Travel the country up and down, big cities and small towns, and I guarantee you will conclude that Canadians are the best people around.

Yes and no.

1/3 of the country's entire population is in the GTA. That brief moment is the most contact that Canadians will have with each other on any given day.

And they treat everyone worse than garbage. I've been in busier commuter zones that have been far more civil than that.

Even the drunks going home on the LIRR are better than that.

I won't disagree with you that Canadians are great people -- I spent a lot of time living there for a reason -- but you have to judge people by when their hair is down, not their Sunday best.

Daily traffic at Union is 300k according to a quick google.

So the most annoyed 1% of Canadians go through there every day.

Not the world’s most rigorous basis for a sweeping statement about an entire culture.

And yet if you go there at commuter times and spend 5 minutes just observing, I'm sure you'll feel the same way.

The funniest thing about the responses here to me is that not a single person has disputed the characterization I presented -- what I'm describing seems to be clear enough to everyone.

I spent years commuting via that very station, and others like it in cities elsewhere in the world.

It’s just a whole bunch of stressed people in a hurry.

They are also not all Canadian in the station

French Canadians are not a welcoming people.

As a French Canadian this is unfortunately true the further north you go.

Fwiw, I’m not trying to knock you, it was just my experience.

I had some of my best times in Quebec (City). I felt super welcome despite only speaking English.

I do understand where you're getting at though, and trust me, if you go to Berlin and you only speak English, you'll get far worse than you would from the Québécois for doing the same.

It's almost like those Americans who give people shit for not speaking English, except we have even less entitlement to that.

There are still Canadians in Canada?

ethnic canadians are still about 5% of the population, if you can believe it.

> soley because they were minorly-inconvenienced by them

The trucker protests were right in the middle of the Covid supply chain issues. Not defending the actions taken in particular, but it had the potential to be a much worse issue than a minor inconvenience.

> minorly-inconvenienced

120dB train horns at 2AM in the morning in a residential area is not a minor inconvenience.

That stopped after the judge gave an injunction. That judge also said the protest could otherwise continue as was a Charter right.

it actually is lmao

No they're not, at least not in Ottawa at 2AM. They might do a quick blip at an intersection but generally they run silent. There was a massive difference between the train horns and the sirens. The horns were continuous, sirens are very occasional and short.

You're completely missing the point.

If you live around a million other people, you're going to have to deal with loud noise in the middle of the night at some point. Scale this up or down depending on how many people you're living near.

For the entire time that I lived in Manhattan, loud noise at 2am was unavoidable. You get thick windows, leave them closed, buy curtains and run your AC.

I'm so sorry that you were inconvenienced.

The loud noise is a rare and short event, not a nightly recurring occurrence of a long loud continuous blare. If it was as you say, then the protestors wouldn’t be doing it to gain attention.

Yes, a group of people decided that the only way to get their message across was to be assholes for a while.

I would label this as an inconvenience. A bunch of Canadians, including commenters in this thread, believe it to be terrorism.

Terrorism to justify removing these peoples rights and not addressing their concerns.

I'm so glad for you Canadians that this Trucker Protest was the closest thing that your nation can approximate to Terrorism. I don't consider this a serious perspective though.

I don’t think it’s terrorism but that’s not why the back accounts were frozen.

The people involved with noise pollution should definitely have been handed significant fines and escalating punishments similar to anyone violating noise ordinances. It gets trickier since these actions are in support of a larger organized effort but that should be the minimum punishment.

The terrorism aspect comes from shutting down trade on a hugely important trade route with our largest trading partner, holding the economy hostage to make demands of the government. That by itself isn’t terrorism per se but the legitimate threats to use violence to keep the embargo going fits the textbook definition of terrorism, using violence or threats of violence to achieve political goals.

Who has called the truck horns terrorism? I see people calling sleep deprivation torture, and I see people calling an armed border occupation terrorism.

Several other posts all over this thread.

At a minimum they were actually taking proactive action to be nuisances in solidarity with terrorists. Whether that makes you a terrorist I don’t know, but historically governments frown on those providing any kind of support to terrorists and tend to use the transitive property when dealing with such actions.

> I would label this as an inconvenience.

Yeah, that kind of comment pops up after "non-violent" protest that privates innocent people of fundamental rights.

Get someone to put you in sleep-deprivation torture for a few days, and tell us back how minor of an inconvenience it is.

Are you trying to compare an emergency vehicle -- which is there to save someone's life -- with someone blasting a train horn outside your house to harass your neighbourhood as a deliberate political tactic? Are you looking to imply that all noises, for all reasons, at all hours, are equal, and therefore what they did is beyond reproach?

As a follow-up question -- were you impacted by this event? Were you there, even momentarily?

> a residential area

Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

The moderately-wide Ottawa River forms the north-west edge of the downtown area.

Along it are the Alexandra Bridge, Major's Hill Park, the Rideau Canal, Parliament Hill, the Supreme Court, Library and Archives Canada, and other government-related buildings and infrastructure. Those aren't residential.

Immediately south-east of those is Wellington Street, where those protests were held, literally right in front of Parliament Hill. It's about as close as they could physically get to the Parliament Buildings.

South-west of that, there are numerous government office buildings, commercial office buildings, small shops, restaurants, a few hotels, and so on for a number of blocks. Again, those aren't residential.

Also keep in mind that the government-imposed lockdowns and other restrictions being protested were preventing or severely limiting the use of the offices, hotels, restaurants, and other businesses in the area.

You have to go out about 1 km from Parliament Hill before you even begin to start encountering any significant number of apartment buildings and residences.

Downtown Ottawa is not "a residential area", and those protesters were in the most relevant, appropriate, and reasonable place they could have been to protest policies imposed by the Government of Canada.

I know several people who live in those "non-residential" areas you describe.

For example, https://www.google.com/maps/place/9+Rideau+St,+Ottawa,+ON+K1... is a condo building.

Singular counter-examples are meaningless in reference to the category "residential".

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

When you say it is not a residential area in “any sense” and he finds a counterexample showing it is clearly a residential area in some sense then what you said is just untrue.

I'll play: we can find 1m² of road in the residential area that is obviously not residential. Now we have two counterexamples that conflict. Logically the premise is meaningless.

why make a new definition of residential? ottawa already has agreed upon zoning; you can find it here: https://ottawa.ca/en/living-ottawa/laws-licences-and-permits...

i dont see why a bit of road would justify honking the horn all night at an apartment building though. can you elborate on what changes when there's a road? the apartment building has people sleeping in it.

"several people" is not singular

> Have you ever actually been to downtown Ottawa, where those protests were held?

> It's not "a residential area" in any sense.

World-renowned pianist Angela Hewitt would disagree:

* https://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/angela-hewitt-play...

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Hewitt

Her living room, with her piano, is in the area.

Both of these links state pretty clearly that she lives in London. In the UK.

It isn't uncommon for posh famous people to have their posh second, third, etc., residences in places that where normal regular people don't actually live...like Downtown Ottawa.

Were you in the location at that time? Because you are speculating based on a perfunctory knowledge of the map. I live in this "non-residential" area along with tens of thousands of others. The truckers were not just occupying Wellington, they were on all streets till Somerset between Elgin and Bronson. And hundreds of vehicles blaring horns together reaches very far.