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Comment by talentedcoin | Hacker News Reader

Well, if I'm being charitable, that's exactly the question mark here.

There are reports of intimidation and other bad behaviour, but there are also a whole bunch of other people just enjoying the party atmosphere. I think both narratives can be true. To be clear, some of the honking has been going on 18+ hours a day, which is bad, but there are suggestions of worse things under the surface. This happened a couple weeks ago, for instance:

https://globalnews.ca/news/8581568/ottawa-shepherds-of-good-...

My probably subjective impression is that wandering around this protest is a bit of a choose-your-own-adventure. There's friendly folks, but there are troublemakers around too, and unfortunately the troublemakers seem to be more senior in the planning process ...

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I think your standard for “peaceful protest” seems unreasonable. How many large scale protests have there been which had zero reports of “bad behavior”? Can you name any protest in the last 5 years whose scale was comparable to these protests which had no reports of bad behavior?

That’s a fair point. The way I see it is:

1) This is pretty severe by Canadian standards (we don’t have the same kind of protest culture the US does), but more importantly,

2) If nobody was driving their trucks up to Parliament Hill (and if the demands the protestors were initially making weren’t as wild — although obviously there’s room to disagree, as we have here, regarding how serious they are), then I would agree. The mandates and COVID itself have definitely caused a lot of disruption and it’s our right to peacefully protest what the govt does. But the moment you bring commercial vehicles into the mix you are not, imo, a protestor anymore. Especially when you have prominent voices in the US egging it on, sending them money, etc. For what it’s worth I think the blockades on the border are at least as bad if not worse than what’s going on in Ottawa.

I confess to being not overly sympathetic to protest culture generally, but I believe a free society must tolerate protests. However, I think what’s happening now has moved somewhat beyond what we should tolerate.

> This is pretty severe by Canadian standards (we don’t have the same kind of protest culture the US does), but more importantly,

Fair enough. Prior to BLM the US protest culture was much milder as well. :/

> However, I think what’s happening now has moved somewhat beyond what we should tolerate.

I can empathize with the frustration of traffic and noise disruption, but I don’t think it’s a good idea to set the precedent of giving the PM the power to suppress his own critics peacefully protesting.

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