theline | I don't honestly know the backstory of the how and why the Ottawa protest was allowed to settle into the downtown core the way it did. It was obviously a massive intelligence and planning failure, but what kind of failure? And whose? Did they not have enough information? Bad information? Did they have good information that, for whatever reason, they didn’t accept or trust? That's not the sort of thing you can discover wandering the site. But I can tell you that some of the protesters themselves are surprised by how easy it was for them to set up shop.
I have the terrible feeling, and I've spoken with five separate sources in government roles or in adjacent security positions who all confirmed this, that Sloly is one of the damn few people in Ottawa who understands the situation he's in, and he's trying to get everyone else to notice, or at least to catch up to his understanding. My sources, alas, seem to think that most others involved in decision-making are only just now starting to realize the enormity of the challenge in the capital. Sloly figured it out last week.
The chief is very political. I say that with no disrespect. Becoming the chief of a major police force isn't something that happens because you catch the most bad guys. It happens because you're good at working your way up through the power structures of a very particular institution. Sloly talks like a politician. But if you listen closely, and if you follow along across his briefings, you start to see a theme. From the moment he first mentioned that there might not be a policing solution to this protest, and hinted that we need the armed forces, he's been signalling to the public that Ottawa, as a city, has lost control of itself. That's a blunt description, but as I noted in a Twitter thread after a pretty remarkably stark Ottawa Police Services Board meeting on the weekend, Sloly was clear: the city needs to be rescued. It has lost control, it is outnumbered, and it cannot fix this problem with the resources on hand.
Rescued from what? The crowd around Parliament Hill is mostly — not entirely, but mostly — peaceful. I grant that; I've seen it with my own eyes. And a few minutes' walk from those sites, now that the horns have been largely silenced by a court order, the city feels quite normal. The idea that Ottawa needs rescuing may seem absurd, but it's not. The longer this goes on, the harder it will become to convince the protesters to leave, and the harder it will be to stop others from joining in. The Ambassador Bridge, which links Windsor to Detroit, is now blocked. Would that have happened if Ottawa had been cleared quickly and decisively?
The inaction that has so infuriated Ottawans, and the very visible displays of police ineffectiveness as protesters fuel trucks from jerrycans despite the city’s stated plan to stop such activity, cannot be easily explained, and no doubt has multiple contributing causes. Some is probably simply political expediency, with all the various leaders wanting someone else to take the blame in case it goes badly (which it likely will). Some is probably just necessary delay while plans are made and logistics arranged. And then there’s just the good, old-fashioned problem of our expectations being a problem, as I’ve written about here. Canadian officials are struggling to realize just how deep in the muck they are, despite what seems like increasingly exasperated efforts by Sloly (and I believe a few others) to get them caught up to the present. I don't think most of our leaders are there yet.
Also, there’s this: there's another element of the protest that's nothing at all like a festival.
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