A Sad Day
'Acting in a way I've never seen police act. They would not look at you. They would not talk to you.'
Jodi Bruhn is an Ottawa resident (see my previous post). She was present on the final day of Freedom Convoy protest - Saturday, February 19th.
“I remember being proud of Canadians,” she says. “They were still coming. They were told not to go into that area, but they went anyway,” walking in on foot, past police checkpoints. Despite being advised facial recognition software would later be used to prosecute them, members of the public converged near Parliament even as the big rigs were being towed away.
She says the cops
were acting in a way I've never seen police act. And I'm somebody who grew up on military bases. I'm not afraid of uniforms, I grew up with them. I tried to approach a few of the police. They would not look at you. They would not talk to you. They acted in a very different way than I'd ever seen in Canada.
…They were advancing, they were actually moving from Parliament back, pushing the protest away from that precinct, and out of the streets of the downtown, out of this area….they're pushing us back and back. Without speaking. They don't explain anything, they're just pushing.
There were barricades nearby, also manned by the police. Jodi approached, trying to get clarification from a female officer. She said to me ‘Of course, yes, you can legally protest.’
And I said, “OK, where?
And she said, “I suggest you go to the City of Ottawa website and it'll say where.”
As that brief exchange ended, Jodi realized the police had discharged teargas into the crowd she’d been part of only a few minutes earlier. She continues,
And then suddenly they're in your face. Like, they're right in front of you. Because they're advancing and your only choice is to back up. And they had this bizarre tank type thing with them on Sparks Street…a big armoured vehicle of some kind…and they had those fellows in green outfits who looked like they were quasi military police or something. And you didn't know where they're from.
It was a very different atmosphere, then. It was almost, it sounds strange, but I felt like I was a player in a play that was the oldest play in the world.
She was witnessing, she felt, the perennial struggle between the powerful and the disenfranchised. It was, she says, “a sad day.”
Listen to Jodi’s hour-long discussion of the Convoy on Marco Navarro-Génie’s podcast here.
Oh it was a sad day. My son still remembers live footage that we were watching from our living room in NB, in which the protesters were being surrounded by faceless military while someone was playing the Cranberries song Zombies in the background. Surreal and depressing. And we had no friends or family that were seeing what we were seeing. That's why this substack, and others, are lifelines.
That dictatorial JT&company spent more than a week assembling the goon squad, is a sign there is still hope the Canada as we knew it, may still be reclaimed. The fearful part remains the total capitulation of our parliamentarians and the official media, both unwilling to speak up as civilization was being destroyed.
And that there is still again, today, silence in the face of bill C- 63, the ultimate perversion of justice, truly shows how thin a tread separates us from gulags.