Police and municipal officials are keeping an eye on rural encampments where apparent “Freedom Convoy” protesters have gathered after leaving downtown Ottawa.
On Monday, both Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson said they were concerned about groups gathering outside city borders.
The big question is whether the protesters are resting up for the next leg of their journeys home, or if they are hunkered down and preparing for another blockade.
“Are they wanting to come back and occupy Wellington Street again?” Watson told Power & Politics. “There are still people, the diehards, who seem to enjoy disrupting our city and our nation for four weeks. My advice to them is ‘please go home.'”
The fact that the protesters are camping in rural municipalities throws a new twist into the scenario.
Acting Sgt. Tyler Copeland said the OPP is currently monitoring encampments outside Arnprior and Vankleek Hill, both on private property.
“We continue to monitor the situation and keep an open dialogue with some of the individuals at these locations,” said Copeland. “It’s a fluid situation.”
In Embrun, east of Ottawa, almost all the vehicles were gone from a farmer’s field where they had been parked for the past few weeks and were visited several times a day by police and a municipal bylaw officer.
“What helped was when the temperatures dropped (on Monday),” said Russell Township Mayor Pierre Leroux. “As soon as the field got muddy, the farmer didn’t want to damage his field.”
It will be up to the police to decide whether or not to use the measures in the Emergencies Act said Joao Velloso, a criminologist and associate professor of law at the University of Ottawa who studies protests.
Velloso believes it is more likely that police will use standard policing techniques already available to them if, for example, police have information that someone is in an encampment who had been arrested and charged at the protest, but was released on conditions and is in breach of those conditions.
One option under the Emergencies Act would be declaring a piece of private property to be a “designated security area” — but that can only be done if the area is designated by the Minister of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness, he said.
On Friday, Pat King, one of the protest organizers who was later charged by police, directed protesters leaving Ottawa to an “overflow field” at the Arnprior Airport.
“That was news to us,” said Ted Strike, chairman of the Arnprior Airport Commission, on Tuesday.
The airport commission had allowed trucks in the convoy to park near the airport when it was headed into Ottawa to prevent parking on the highway, at the request of the OPP, said Strike. On Friday, Arnprior said no parking was available on the airport lands. The vehicles headed south about 10 minutes to a farmer’s field.
As of Tuesday morning, there were about 15 vehicles, including a transport truck, in the field on White Lake Road. Snow had been plowed to make room for many more vehicles and there were at least 10 portable toilets on the scene.
Two men in a truck at the entrance to the encampment refused entry to media and declined to comment.
In a video, one member of the “security” crew said: “You’re not getting in unless I say so. Don’t come if you’re not supposed to be here. Don’t be media. Don’t be troublemakers. We don’t have time for you guys.”
If the protester encampments do not comply with municipal zoning bylaws, then it is a matter for bylaw enforcement, not police, said Copeland.
The camp on White Lake Road near Arnprior is in the township of McNab/Braeside. Mayor Tom Peckett said the property is zoned agricultural. Allowing people to camp there is the same “as having visitors from far away camping in your back yard,” he said.
“They are doing nothing illegal at this point. OPP are watching the area.”
Mayor Leroux said in Russell township there is a bylaw that forbids people from sleeping in a recreational vehicle in a village. But there is no by-law about camping in farming areas.
“I’d be surprised if any municipality had a bylaw about camping in a rural setting.”
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