A Mayor, A Protester, An Agreement

Before the Emergencies Act was declared, the Freedom Convoy agreed to move hundreds of trucks - and had already begun doing so.

Screen capture, taken yesterday, of Jim Watson’s personal website (click image).

Fifteen days after Freedom Convoy trucks began arriving in Ottawa last year, the city’s Mayor finally commenced personal communication with the protesters. On Saturday, February 12th, Jim Watson signed a letter addressed to Tamara Lich, the person who’d started the convoy’s wildly successful GoFundMe campaign and who had since become one of the convoy’s most recognizable faces.

The mayor offered “to meet with you to discuss your protesters concerns.” But before such a meeting took place, he had an extensive wish list:

1. trucks south of Wellington Street needed to move

2. trucks north of Wellington Street needed to move

3. trucks at a secondary staging area near the city’s baseball stadium (called ‘Coventry’ by the protesters) needed to depart

He wanted Tamara to agree that no trucks, vehicles, or demonstrators currently in these locations would be replaced at a later date with new trucks, vehicles, or demonstrators.

He wanted her to agree that, going forward, no trucks, vehicles, or demonstrators would park in any other locations deemed ‘residential.’

How she could be expected to enforce much of this wasn’t explained. Did the mayor imagine she was personally in control of where thousands of strangers sympathetic to the truckers might gather whenever a fresh wave of them arrived in the nation’s capital?

“I want to see clear evidence that the truck convoy will be departing the residential areas before noon on Monday, February 14,” said the mayor’s letter. For good measure, he further requested “that protesters stop asking more demonstrators to come to Ottawa this weekend.”

In a letter of her own, Tamara replied that the convoy

had made a plan to consolidate our protest efforts around Parliament Hill. We will be working hard over the next 24 hours to get buy in from the truckers. We hope to start repositioning our trucks on Monday.

One side agrees to do everything in its power to relocate hundreds of trucks. The other side promises only that the mayor will grace trucker representatives with his presence.

I’m not saying the Freedom Convoy had a lot of options at this stage, but let us be honest: it didn’t come out on top here. As Tamara explained in her testimony before an Emergencies Act hearing:

you have to understand that we had been there now for - I think that was going into our third week. We were tired. We wanted to go home. So we were looking for ways where we could start forming an exit strategy. And while our concern was obviously never with the City of Ottawa, we felt it was, a) a step one, and number two, finally, someone is willing to sit down and just listen to us and have a dialogue with us. [bold added, page 339]

The negotiations that led to the exchange of these letters happened quietly. Shortly after the agreement was publicly announced, there was confusion amongst the protesters as to whether it was real or fake news.

The truckers kept their side of their bargain. On February 14th, forty big rigs “plus an undetermined number of smaller vehicles” did, indeed, move. The City of Ottawa’s closing submission tells us considerably more were ready to do so, but that the police abruptly put a stop to things. That same evening, Canada’s Prime Minister invoked the Emergencies Act.

Mayor Watson never did meet with the protesters.