Canada seeks to free bridge blocked by opponents of sanitary measures

Canadian police on Sunday resumed their operation to evict anti-sanitary restriction protesters blocking the Ambassador Bridge, a key border crossing between Canada Y U.Sbut protests continue in Ottawa.

A large police contingent gathered near the bridge early in the morning, making arrests and towing vehicles.

“There will be no tolerance for illegal activity,” Windsor Police said in a tweet, asking people to avoid the area.

According to the CBC channel, the road leading to the bridge has been cleared. However, traffic on the bridge had not been restored by mid-morning Sunday.

The operation began very early on Saturday, when the police pushed back some of the occupants. That day there were no arrests and at the end of the day the bridge was still partially blocked.

The eviction maneuver was launched by virtue of a decision by the Ontario Superior Court, which ordered to ensure free movement through this crossing between the two North American neighbors and end a blockade that pushed Washington to intervene with the Canadian government.

The shutdown has already caused upheaval in the auto industry on both sides of the border. More than 25% of the goods traded between the United States and Canada pass through this bridge.

Rejection of sanitary measures

The mobilizations in Canada inspired similar initiatives in other countries.

In France, part of the convoys against the health pass left on Sunday from the outskirts of Paris to reach Brussels and demonstrate there on Monday, despite the ban by the Belgian authorities.

Thousands of opponents of the health pass or President Emmanuel Macron had converged on Paris to demonstrate there on Saturday, baptizing their movement as “freedom convoys”. The Parisian demonstration had been banned by the police headquarters.

The Canadian movement, which is entering its third week, began with a mobilization of truck drivers protesting against the obligation to be vaccinated to cross the border between Canada and the United States, but the demands extended to the rejection of all health measures and even the rejection of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

The demonstrations continued on Saturday in several Canadian cities, including Toronto and Montreal, and other border axes remain blocked, in the provinces of Manitoba and Alberta.

The situation in Ottawa was calmer on Sunday morning, but the capital has been paralyzed since the end of January.

According to Ottawa police, some 4,000 protesters were present in the city center on Saturday.

Police said in a statement that some of them had been aggressive.

He also reiterated that he had limited means to deal with this situation, prompting authorities in the city and province of Ontario to declare a state of emergency.

On Sunday morning the first protesters converged, Canadian flags in hand, in a sunny but very cold Ottawa, with temperatures close to 20 degrees below zero.

“The love here is incredible. It’s peaceful,” Vanessa Turgeon, 38, from British Columbia, who works in agriculture, told AFP. “It’s good not to feel rejected and discriminated against anymore,” she said.

For Rosie Albert, a 34-year-old Quebecois who arrived in the capital on January 28, “it is as if she had just met a big family.” “She had never seen such an environment vibrate and so much love, friendship, mutual help: it’s just incredible,” she says, although she admits that “it can’t go on like this.”