The Ottawa mayor’s office on Sunday sealed a deal with protest organizers to relocate trucks parked in residential neighborhoods that have kept Canada’s capital city at a standstill for the past three weekends.
Mayor Jim Watson said Freedom Convoy organizers agreed to the city’s demands to confine their protests to a concentrated area around Parliament Hill.
In exchange, Watson said he would be willing to meet with demonstrators and hear out their complaints if trucks and other vehicles linked to the protests are out of residential neighborhoods by noon Monday.
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A written response from Convoy board president Tamara Lich seemed to indicate the truckers would comply and begin moving to new locations tomorrow.
Lich said organizers will spend the next 24 hours “working hard … to get buy-in from the truckers” who flooded the streets of Ottawa with their trucks.
The organizer of the Freedom Convoy agreed to concentrate the 400 trucks around Centretown, which runs along the Parliament buildings and not residential areas in the city.
But the deal leaves a lot of unanswered logistical questions. For example, some of the streets the city wants the truckers to move to are already jammed for several blocks.
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Watson said some of the trucks might need to move to other locations as well, but he didn’t say where.
In his letter to Lich, Watson said residents were “exhausted” and jittery due to the demonstrations and claimed some businesses were teetering on financial ruin because of it.
The protests began late last month after a group of truckers and their supporters drove from Western Canada to Ottawa to challenge a regulation that requires truckers returning from the United States to show proof of vaccination. If the truckers are not fully vaccinated, they will be subjected to COVID-19 testing and quarantine requirements.
