OTTAWA (Washington Insider Magazine) – Hundreds of armed police rushed into Canada’s capital late Saturday, taking back command of the streets surrounding Parliament house and seeming to put an end to the three-week-long siege of Ottawa.
Protesters fled from the nation’s biggest police exercise in history, with police detaining or driving out protestors and carting away their trucks, enraged by the government’s COVID-19 regulations and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.
While some demonstrators pledged to remain on the streets of Ottawa, one organizer informed ABC NEWS that they had opted to depart quietly.
Ottawa Interim Police Chief Steve Bell said that officials from all over the country had been sent in to assist with the clearance effort, 170 individuals had been jailed on Friday and Saturday, and that various inquiries had been initiated as a result of the weapons discoveries.
Protesters had dispersed by early Saturday from the roadway next to Parliament Hill, the cluster of government facilities that comprise the Parliament houses, which had been the focal point of the demonstrations. Since last month, it has been filled by demonstrators and their vehicles, with weekends transforming into a carnival.
Demonstrators remained “assaultive and aggressive,” according to police and officials had been protected with pepper spray Children were also taken close up to the police lines, according to authorities, placing them at risk.
Authorities in Canada also revealed that they had invoked emergency powers to confiscate 76 bank accounts linked to demonstrators, totaling almost $3.2 million in Canadian currency.
They also shut down a bridge into the nation’s capital from Quebec on Saturday to avoid a new inflow of protestors.
Around lunchtime, protest organizers said that trucks had been asked to leave Parliament Hill, calling the police’s actions “abuses of power.”
According to police, one demonstrator fired a gas canister and was apprehended as officers approached.
Bell had previously stated that the majority of the arrests were made on mischief counts and that no protestors had been injured. According to him, one cop suffered a minor injury.
Hundreds of officers, some wearing riot gear and some armed with automatic weapons, converged on the protest zone early Friday morning and started handcuffing activists and dragging them through the cold streets while holdout trucks blare their horns.
After weeks of rallies and barricades that closed down border crossings into the United States and put Trudeau to one of his most significant tests yet, the capital and its paralyzed streets were the protest’s last major foothold. They also shattered Canada’s civilized reputation, with several blaming American influence.
The Freedom Convoy protests began as a protest against Canada’s vaccination mandate for truckers coming into the country but quickly evolved into a general attack on COVID-19 safeguards and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government.
