CANADIAN police issued an ultimatum yesterday to protesters who have been choking Ottawa streets for 20 days to leave the capital, as provincial and US state leaders called for an end to the cross-border vaccine requirement that sparked the trucker-led movement.

Officials, meanwhile, announced a negotiated peaceful end to the last of several recent blockades by protesters of border crossings between Canada and the United States.

“You must leave the area now,” Ottawa police said in a notice distributed to truckers outside parliament. 

Anyone blocking streets or assisting others in doing so will be arrested and face charges as well as fines and seizures of their trucks, the statement said.

Police also warned that anyone charged or convicted for taking part in the illegal demonstration may, in addition to criminal penalties, be barred from travelling to the United States.

As the notices were handed out, AFP journalists saw hundreds of trucks continuing to occupy streets in the parliamentary precinct, blaring horns – despite an extension yesterday of a court order against the deafening noises, obtained by an area resident fed up with the disruptions.

“We’re still a lot of trucks holding the line,” trucker David Shaw, 65, told AFP. If arrested, he added: “I’ll keep coming back.”

Fellow protester Jan Grouin, 42, decried Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision earlier this week to impose a state of emergency, calling it “a little overreacting maybe to think that we are terrorists”.

In a statement, Ottawa interim police chief Steve Bell said “a methodical and well-resourced plan” would be carried out over the coming days “to take back the entirety of the downtown core and every occupied space”.

“Some of the techniques we are lawfully able and prepared to use are not what we are used to seeing in Ottawa,” he said.

“But we are prepared to use them… to restore order.”

Montana Governor Greg Gianforte, meanwhile, asked Canadian and US leaders in a letter signed by 16 US governors – all members of the Republican party – to exempt truckers from vaccine and quarantine requirements when crossing the Canada-US border.

They were joined by Alberta Premier Jason Kenney and Saskatchewan Premier Scott Moe, who has endorsed the truckers’ convoy.

“The timing of your decision to terminate the vaccine and quarantine exemptions could not have been worse, as North America already faces grave supply chain constraints,” said the letter addressed to US President Joe Biden and Trudeau.

“These constraints, combined with increasing inflation, place significant burdens on the residents of Canada and the United States.”

Unable to dislodge the protesters, Trudeau this week invoked the Emergencies Act, which gives the government wide new powers to end the demonstrations over Covid restrictions. The move marked only the second time in Canadian history such emergency powers have been invoked in peacetime.

Trudeau told reporters yesterday that with police now getting help from various other law enforcement units, they should “be able to begin their actions”.

“It’s time for this to end,” he said, adding that it was up to “police to decide when and how.” – AFP, February 17, 2022.