Canada Covid ProtestEnding Protest Requires More Police, Ottawa Chief Says

‘There are no days off.’ Ottawa’s police chief says the force needs 1,800 more officers to end protest.

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The mayor of Ottawa declared the state of emergency after more than a week of unrest that began with protests by truckers over vaccine mandates. Demonstrations have spread beyond Canada’s capital.CreditCredit...Patrick Doyle/Reuters

Ottawa’s police chief told the City Council on Monday afternoon that it will take 1,800 more police officers to end a protest by truckers that has paralyzed the city’s downtown for 11 days, leading to the mayor’s declaring a state of emergency.

“We continue to employ all available officers, there are no days off,” Chief Peter Sloly told the special meeting. “This is not sustainable.”

The demonstrations, during which some protesters have desecrated national memorials and threatened local residents, have shaken a country known globally as a model for humanism and serenity.

They began on Jan. 29 with protests by truckers over vaccine mandates imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. They have since mushroomed into an occupation of Canada’s capital and to broader demonstrations over pandemic rules like vaccination mandates, shutdowns and mask requirements, as well as Mr. Trudeau’s stewardship of the country. They have also spread well beyond the capital.

Thousands turned out to protest in Toronto and Quebec City over the weekend. Truck convoys congregated near provincial legislatures in Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia. Downtown Ottawa, site of the country’s Parliament, remained paralyzed on Monday as truckers parked their vehicles across busy thoroughfares.

“Someone is going to get killed or seriously injured because of the irresponsible behavior of some of these people,” Jim Watson, Ottawa’s mayor, warned on Sunday. City officials and the chief of police said they were under “siege.”

The entire Ottawa police force numbers only 1,200 but has been supplemented with several hundred officers from the Ontario Provincial Police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and local police forces elsewhere in Ontario over the past week. It is unclear where the large additional numbers of police officers that Chief Sloly said the city needed would come from.

Separately on Monday, several federal cabinet ministers told a news conference that the federal government will set up a special body to coordinate efforts between the federal, local and provincial governments in managing the protests. While also promising to provide extra resources, all of them emphasized that they do not have the power to direct police operations.

Marco Mendicino, the public safety minister, flatly ruled out holding talks with protesters on their demand to end all pandemic measures.

“It would be a terrible precedent to say that if you show up to the nation’s capital with heavy equipment and blockade the capital city, that you can force reckless change in our public policy,” he told reporters. “It’s been surprising that some who say they believe in law and order seem not to get this point.”

Since the protests in Ottawa began, people who live near the densely populated neighborhoods near Parliament have complained about harassment by protesters and seemingly endless air horn honking, as well as the fact that the downtown streets are clogged with trucks. On Monday at the City Council meeting, Mr. Watson said the police arson squad was investigating two people, possibly protesters, who left fire starters in the lobby of an apartment building.

On Monday, Justice Hugh McLean of the Ontario Superior Court granted a temporary injunction against the horn honking that was sought by a 21-year-old public servant who lives in the area, but it was unclear how that injunction would be enforced.

Many of the trucks in the capital traveled as a convoy from the western province of British Columbia that as it rolled along, was joined and ultimately outnumbered by supporters traveling in pickup trucks and cars. The group — loosely organized and without a single, clear leader — also expanded its demands, pressing Mr. Trudeau to end all Covid rules and restrictions in Canada, including those set by provinces and local governments.

Long before the first trucks began trickling into Ottawa on Jan. 28, Mr. Trudeau said he would not reverse the vaccine mandate. He has refused to meet with members of the groups, which he described as a “fringe minority.”

“What we are doing is within the law,” said Eric, a demonstrator from the Niagara region of Ontario who declined to give his full name. He was in a large delivery truck with a poppy painted on the side. Eric said he could not say specifically what he wanted from Mr. Trudeau, but that he needed to be “a man of the people.”

Canada convoy draws online support from far-right activists around the world.

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A truck driver looks out from his truck covered in support messages in Ottawa, on Monday.Credit...Dave Chan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The truck convoy protests in Canada that have roiled the nation’s capital are attracting support online among far-right activists across the world.

The protests initially focused on vaccine mandates imposed by the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau but have since grown to encompass broader demonstrations over general pandemic rules like vaccination mandates, shutdowns and mask requirements.

About two weeks ago, photos of the truckers appeared on anti-vaccine groups on Facebook and other social networks. The hashtag used by the truckers, #FreedomConvoy, spread quickly across Facebook and Twitter, as well as the messaging app Telegram.

Since then, prominent far-right figures in numerous countries, including the United States, Australia and Germany, have praised the protests online, spreading the images and arguments even more widely. Some are also calling for similar demonstrations in their countries.

“I love the smell of freedom in the morning,” George Christensen, a member of Australia’s Parliament, wrote above a photo of the truckers on his Facebook page Sunday. The post was shared over 500 times, and liked nearly 7,000 times.

Christine Margarete Anderson, a German member of the European Parliament, shared images of the truckers on her Facebook page with the caption, “Hooray Canada, go for it!”

On Facebook, the #FreedomConvoy, hashtag has been shared over 1.2 million times since Jan. 24, according to Crowdtangle, a Facebook-owned data analytics tool.

Other hashtags, including #ConvoytoOttawa2022, had garnered hundreds of thousands of shares across the platform. Another Facebook group dedicated to following and supporting the truckers has attracted nearly 700,000 followers in the last two weeks.

Meta, the parent company of Facebook, said it removed several groups associated with the convoy for violating its rules. One of the groups had engaged in the types of practices commonly used by spammers, like sending people who followed the group to external sites to buy merchandise. Another group had violated Facebook’s rules by sharing content tied to the banned QAnon conspiracy movement.

The company said it was still reviewing other groups being formed in connection to the truckers’ protests.

“We continue to see scammers latch on to any hot-button issue that draws people’s attention, including the ongoing protests,” said Margarita Franklin, a Meta spokeswoman. “Over the past week, we’ve removed Groups and Pages run by spammers, including in Vietnam, who used abusive tactics to mislead people.”

“We continue to monitor the situation and will enforce against violations when we find them,” she added.

American anti-vaccine groups, which were among the first to notice and support the protests, have also begun forming local wings of the movement and urged truckers in the United States to mimic the tactics being used in Canada.

On Telegram, several far-right figures have promoted the protests. Among them are Dan Bongino and Ben Shapiro. Both have shared links to fund-raising sites that have collected millions of dollars to support the truckers.

Telegram did not respond to a request for comment.

In one Ohio-based Telegram channel started last week, hundreds of people were crowdsourcing how to send aid to the Canadian truckers, and discussing how they could form a convoy in their state.

“Does anyone know a trucker? Hell, does anyone want to become a trucker?” asked one person in the group. “We can’t let Canada have all the fun.”

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Protesters say they’re protesting for liberty. Some Ottawa residents ask: What about ours?

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A rally in Ottawa on Monday.Credit...Andre Pichette/EPA, via Shutterstock

Standing in front of several trucks near Ottawa’s Parliament Hill on Monday, Emily Martin was wearing a black winter hat adorned with the words “fringe minority” in white. It was a reference to a statement Prime Minister Justin Trudeau used to play down the scope and scale of the protests.

Ms. Martin, who arrived in Ottawa from her farm near Niagara Falls, about seven hours away, said she was hardly on the fringes of Canadian society. Rather, she is a mother, who was channeling the anger of many Canadians across the country, fed up and exhausted by pandemic restrictions that have wreaked havoc with their lives.

“It feels like we are in jail,” said Ms. Martin, 31, whose family produces honey.

Ms. Martin said she wanted her two young children, age 4 and 14 months, to be able to play soccer and visit their 99-year-old great-grandmother, who is living in a nursing home. She herself hasn’t seen the older woman since before Christmas, because of pandemic restrictions.

With the protests in their second week, the feeling on the streets outside Parliament on Monday was festive, as frigid temperatures eased a bit to somewhere just below freezing. A group of people danced to music blaring from the flatbed of a huge truck. Handmade signs decorated the iron fences encircling the Parliament grounds.

“We are not bad people for having questions,” said one. “For cowards, freedom is always extremist,” said another.

Rodica Stricescu, 64, a caregiver in a nursing home, came to Ottawa with her daughter from Windsor, Ontario, about an eight-hour drive away. Ms. Stricescu, who moved to Canada from Romania in 1995 in the aftermath of Communism’s fall, said her protest was about affirming freedom, not the intricacies of vaccine mandates.

“I ran from Communism to be here — I don’t want the same situation to happen here,” she said. She said she had felt forced to get vaccinated because of her workplace, and she was not happy about it.

Many of the protesters also framed their quest as a matter of personal freedom.

“It’s been a long few years here. I’ve seen a lot of government overreach,” said William Swinimer, 29, a trucker from Halifax, Nova Scotia, who said he was attending a protest for the first time. “I don’t think we should give up our Canadian way of life.”

Nicole Vandelaar, 31, a hairdresser who said she was not vaccinated, came to the protest with her father, a dairy farmer. She said lockdowns and other restrictions were creating a mental health crisis — and high rates of depression — in Canada.

“That’s the real pandemic,” Ms. Vandelaar said.

On the other side of the debate are infuriated Ottawa residents, who are irate at the occupation of their city by demonstrators, some of whom have honked horns, snarled traffic, desecrated national war memorials and threatened residents.

Zully Alvarado, a hair stylist who volunteers at a homeless shelter, walked through protest grounds with a mask under her chin — a symbol of defiance against the protesters, she said, since she does not normally wear a mask outside.

“This is unbelievably selfish,” she said, referring to the disruption of daily life in the capital. “I find it so disrespectful.”

Leah McInnes-Eustace, 54, a communications consultant in the nonprofit sector who lives about two miles from the Parliament building, said the unruly protests had exacerbated her existing mental health issues. “I’ve just found myself with kind of a constant, high level of anxiety,” she said. “I can feel it in my body.”

Dwayne Winseck, a professor of communication and media studies at Carleton University in Ottawa, said his wife had been harassed by protesters while walking their poodle in the neighborhood. He has also faced abusive comments online for expressing his thoughts about the protest.

Canada’s far-right, struggling to make political inroads, relies on spectacle.

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Protesters in Toronto on Saturday.Credit...Cole Burston/Getty Images

The truck convoy protests in Ottawa and several provincial capitals are highlighting the unusual role of Canada’s far right and populist right in political and cultural life.

Those movements have not made nearly as many inroads to the mainstream in Canada as their American and European counterparts have.

“The biggest misconception about this, even within Canada, is that extremists have infiltrated the movement,” said Stephanie Carvin, a former national security official in Canada who now teaches at Carleton University.

In reality, she added, “this was an extremist movement that got mainstream attention.”

The organizers are mostly fringe activists. One, Tamara Lich, was a senior member of a splinter party that has advocated secession for Western provinces, until resigning her position last week.

Pat King, who is listed as an official contact for a regional group involved in the protest and has been a prominent champion of the protests online, has called Covid a “man-made bioweapon” and claimed that international financiers want to “depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race.”

This influence is hardly hidden at the protests, where Trump and QAnon flags are frequently visible, as are figures like Romana Didulo, who has called for military executions of doctors who vaccinate children.

The activists have sought for several years to organize protest convoys. They first found success in 2019, when 100-some trucks swarmed Ottawa over energy policies, though the protesters’ message drifted into opposition to immigration.

But the 2019 protest, like other such efforts, mostly failed to gain traction.

“You did have far-right populism — historically, it was there — but it was isolated,” said Jeffrey Kopstein, a Canadian political scientist at the University of California, Irvine.

“One of the reasons they’re descending on Ottawa is they’re having trouble taking over parties and winning elections. And so they go to this other method,” Dr. Kopstein said.

Still, a slight majority of Canadians want to end some pandemic restrictions, polls find, which may be why one in three express support for the protest.

And there is another change: The Conservative Party, whose leaders have long isolated populist figures, has had a difficult year.

In a sign that the Conservatives might now be more willing to embrace the populist right, they ejected Erin O’Toole, their center-right leader last week. Several Conservative lawmakers have since visited the protests in endorsement. One was photographed alongside Mr. King.

Still, it is impossible to say whether support for the protests will translate into a longer-term embrace of the movement behind them, or will fizzle as happened during prior surges of populist sentiment in Canada.

“We haven’t normally seen this in modern Canadian politics,” Dr. Carvin said. “We are really in uncharted territory.”

A correction was made on 
Feb. 7, 2022

An earlier version of a picture caption incorrectly referred to the city shown in a photo. It is Toronto, not Ottawa.

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Who are the protesters and what do they want?

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Protesters in Toronto on Saturday.Credit...Cole Burston/Getty Images

The loosely organized “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations shaking Canada’s capital began as a protest against the mandatory vaccination of truck drivers crossing the U.S.-Canada border. They have morphed into a battle cry against pandemic restrictions as a whole, and the leadership of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

Mr. Trudeau initially sought to downplay the scope and influence of the protesters, calling them a “small fringe minority,” and lashing out at them for desecrating war memorials, wielding Nazi symbols, spreading disinformation and stealing food from the homeless during protests in Ottawa.

But they have grown in scope as the protests have gathered force. While many of the protesters have far-right links, they have also been joined by everyday Canadians exhausted by pandemic restrictions that have been among the toughest in the developed world.

Nevertheless, the protesters have not galvanized widespread national sympathy. A poll released Feb. 14 by the Angus Reid Institute, a leading polling organization, showed a backlash against the protesters, who have paralyzed the downtown of the national capital for weeks and undermined the Canadian economy.

Nearly three in four respondents said it was time for protesters to “go home, they have made their point,” and 44 percent said the protests had made them more inclined to support indoor masking requirements as well as vaccination requirements to cross the Canada-U.S. border, Angus Reid said.

“If the goal of the Freedom Convoy was to capture the attention of millions of people in Canada and around the globe — mission accomplished,” said a report by Angus Reid. “If, however, the goal was to build support for their demands to end pandemic-related restrictions — it has backfired utterly.”

Still, some provinces have relaxed restrictions amid declining coronavirus cases.

Police and analysts say the protests, which have mobilized thousands of demonstrators in Ottawa, Quebec City, Toronto, Edmonton and Vancouver, among other places, have no single leader, but encompass an assortment of people, many of them on the political right.

A key organizer of the “Freedom Convoy” is Tamara Lich, who was previously secretary of the relatively new Maverick Party, a right-of-center group that was started to promote the separation of Canada’s three western Prairie Provinces from the rest of the country.

Ms. Lich, a former fitness instructor who has sung and played guitar in an Alberta band called Blind Monday, played a leading role in organizing a GoFundMe campaign for the protests.

Ms. Lich has called for the federal government to strike down pandemic restrictions in Canada, such as provincial vaccine mandates and rules requiring masks. But Canada has a federal system in which provincial governments have considerable constitutional power, including over health care regulations.

Another main organizer of the truck convoy is a group calling itself Canada Unity, which initially published a “memorandum of understanding” calling on Canada’s appointed senators and Canada’s Governor General (the representative of Queen Elizabeth II in Canada’s constitutional monarchy) to abolish all Covid-19 related restrictions and to allow all unvaccinated workers whose employment was terminated because of vaccine mandates to get their jobs back. But the group later withdrew the memo of understanding amid criticism that some parts of it appeared to suggest it wanted to topple the government.

Members of the far-right People’s Party of Canada are also well represented among the protesters in Ottawa. The party has no seats in the federal Parliament. Its leader, Maxime Bernier, has denounced vaccine mandates and has previously railed against immigration and multiculturalism.

Andrew McDougall, an assistant professor of political science at the University of Toronto, described the protests not as a mass national movement but, rather as “the most extreme manifestation we have seen of frustration about pandemic restrictions.”

“To the extent that the convoy is anti-vax and anti-science,” he added, “it is on the margins of Canadian society.”

Might Canada send in the army? Not if its history is any guide.

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Police officers in Ottawa on Monday.Credit...Dave Chan/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Many Canadians are looking with consternation at the sight of their usually serene national capital reduced to a state of emergency, as protesters objecting to vaccine mandates swarm the city of Ottawa.

There have been numerous reports of people being harangued by protesters for wearing masks, demonstrators trying to rip down pro-vaccination signs on houses and others defecating and urinating on lawns.

The Ottawa police have been widely criticized for allowing the trucks to enter downtown and then being reluctant to arrest protesters.

But Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, when asked about it, has said he has no plans to call in the army to defuse the demonstrations.

“One has to be very, very cautious before deploying military forces in situations engaging Canadians,” he said last week. Sending in the army, he said, is “not in the cards.”

On Saturday, Peter Sloly, chief of the Ottawa Police, said his force, which has been supplemented by members of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ontario Provincial Police and several other municipal police departments, was outnumbered and lacked the resources to evict the demonstrators.

There are very few precedents for the military intervening to tame civilian unrest in Canada, which does not have provincial equivalents of a national guard. That lack is a hangover from around the time of the confederation’s founding in 1867, when the new country’s leaders did not want to create provincial militias that might challenge the federal government.

The Canadian Army does respond, when called upon, to national emergencies. It helped communities devastated by recent flooding in British Columbia, and sent reinforcements to nursing homes in Quebec and Ontario to help alleviate staffing shortages during the pandemic.

The most dramatic case of army intervention in Canada was during the so-called October Crisis in 1970, when the F.L.Q., a violent extremist group agitating for Quebec’s independence from Anglophone-dominated Canada, kidnapped and murdered a Quebec cabinet minister, Pierre Laporte. It was the first political assassination in Canada in more than a century.

From 1963 to 1970, the F.L.Q. unleashed more than 200 bombs and robberies, most of them in Montreal.

In response to the escalating violence, Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau — Justin Trudeau’s father — invoked the War Measures Act, the only time in Canadian history it was applied in peacetime. Armed soldiers patrolled the streets of Montreal and Ottawa, and hundreds of people were arrested without charges.

The military also intervened in September 1990, during a crisis in the resort town of Oka Quebec. A disagreement over the town’s plan to expand a golf course onto land that the Mohawks claimed as their own grew into armed and violent confrontation with the Quebec provincial police. Eventually the military was called in.

After 11 weeks of confrontation — and the death of a policeman — the standoff between soldiers and a group of Mohawks ended when the Mohawk laid down their arms. As the Mohawks tried to walk toward the town of Oka, scuffling broke out, and the soldiers tried to herd them into military tents and buses that were waiting nearby.

Then there was the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919, the largest strike in Canadian history. More than 30,000 workers left their jobs to protest poor working conditions in the city, bringing the province of Manitoba to a standstill.

In June of that year, the protests intensified when the government arrested 10 of the strike’s leaders, culminating in a demonstration during which a streetcar was vandalized. After the police stormed in, beating and firing at the protesters, federal troops were called in. About 30 people were injured and two were killed.

Ian Austen in Ottawa contributed reporting.

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The protesters want an end to vaccine mandates. Many Canadians are also frustrated with the pandemic.

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People waiting for Covid-19 vaccines in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, in May.Credit...Cole Burston/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Although the protesters who have been clogging the streets of Ottawa have a variety of grievances, they are unified by one: frustration over the restrictions imposed by the Canadian provinces to combat the coronavirus, and weariness of the toll the pandemic has taken on the economy and their lives.

Public opinion polls in Canada have shown consistent and strong support for vaccine mandates and the public health restrictions the protesters want to see lifted; one recent survey found that 68 percent of Canadians say they have “very little in common” with the protesters. Still, a lot of Canadians can likely relate to some extent to the protesters’ complaints. Like much of the world, Canada has been living under a shifting set of restrictions for nearly two years.

While the protesters in Ottawa are demanding that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau strike down all vaccine measures, the vast majority of the rules have been put in place by provincial and local governments, which generally control public heath measures in Canada. Those rules have varied widely over time and between provinces.

The provinces of Atlantic Canada closed their borders to the rest of the country at some points, as did Quebec and the western province of Manitoba. Stores, cinemas, galleries and restaurants have been shut or faced customer limits in much of the country. Most provinces moved to online learning, but more recently, children have returned to classrooms in much of the country.

While some provinces are gradually and slowly easing restrictions, Scott Moe, the right of center premier of Saskatchewan, announced last week that he intends to end all measures shortly, although he did not give a date.

Early in the pandemic, many were frustrated with delays in the arrival of vaccines. Now, though, 78 percent of Canadians are fully vaccinated, and 84 percent have received at least one dose. More than 90 percent of the adult population in several major cities are fully innoculated.

As as last week, 34,721 deaths have been attributed to the virus.

The current wave of the virus brought on by the Omicron variant has overtaxed hospitals in several major cities, including Toronto.

Dr. Theresa Tam, the chief public health officer of Canada, said last week that while new cases had fallen by 24 percent, there are several indications of “ongoing widespread activity across the country.”

She added: “As such, maintaining layers of protection remains important to reduce spread.”

Protests turn Ottawa’s downtown into a scene of disruption and desecration.

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Heavy trucks and other vehicles parked outside of Parliament in Ottawa on Monday morning.Credit...Ian Austen/The New York Times

Over the past two weekends, the protests in Ottawa, Canada’s capital, have paralyzed the city’s core and greatly disrupted the lives of residents in the densely populated neighborhoods close to Parliament.

Heavy trucks have been rumbling through the narrow streets blasting air horns, some usually fitted to train locomotives, day and night. Residents have been harassed for wearing masks and generally intimidated.

Last weekend, protesters urinated on the national war memorial, which has since been fenced off, and danced on Canada’s tomb of the unknown soldier. Anti-vaccine signs and an upside-down flag were placed on a statue of Terry Fox, a Canadian folk hero who died from cancer while on a cross-country run to raise money for medical research.

Protesters pressured staff members at a homeless shelter to give them meals, assaulted one of its residents and hurled racial slurs at a security guard. Residents, including people seeking refuge in a women’s shelter, were abused for displaying rainbow flags, and some protesters have tried to remove signs outside people’s houses that support vaccinations.

“Our police, our city, the province and the federal government are allowing this to continue,” said Catherine McKenney, the City Council member for the area closest to Parliament. “Once you dissolve into this lawlessness, it is very hard to get the law back. And once people lose faith in their government to protect them at any level, it’s very, very difficult to get that back.”

On Sunday, with the help of more than 250 members of the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Ottawa police successfully persuaded protesters to remove from a park a building they had constructed as a canteen. They also began arresting people delivering diesel fuel or similar supplies to the trucks now blocking the city’s streets.

After more than 8,000 people swarmed downtown in the first weekend, the action dwindled to a few hundred people through the week, only to rise to more than 5,000 on Friday. One group tried to solicit signatures for a document calling on the appointed Senate and the governor general, Queen Elizabeth II’s representative, to strip the House of Commons and Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of power.

In some parts of the city, there was a party atmosphere. A D.J. turned a major intersection into a dance floor. Trucks ringing it attempted to honk their horns in time with the music in an earsplitting, chest-pounding performance. Bounce houses were blown up in front of Parliament.

On Sunday night, Jim Watson, the city’s mayor, urged everyone to go home and noted that most pandemic measures were imposed by provincial governments anyway.

“The behavior has been completely reprehensible, and the organizers — and I call them that loosely — should be ashamed,” Mr. Watson told the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. “Let us take back our city.”

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Among the protesters, a shared frustration over lives truncated by pandemic restrictions.

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A protester against mandates related to Covid-19 vaccines and restrictions in Toronto on Saturday.Credit...Geoff Robins/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

They have come from across Canada: right-leaning truckers, libertarians, far-right activists, concerned parents and vaccine-mandate opponents angry that their personal freedoms are being trampled by what they view as governments wrongly interfering in their lives.

In Ottawa, Toronto and Quebec City, thousands of protesters took to the streets this past weekend, snarling traffic, disrupting businesses and, in some cases, bringing loud disturbances to residential neighborhoods. Truck convoys also congregated near provincial legislatures in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and British Columbia.

In Toronto, Canada’s largest city and financial capital, some of the protesters honked their horns and shouts of “freedom” rung out. Others held up signs of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the document enshrining constitutional rights like freedom of expression. They used hockey sticks as flagpoles for Canadian flags and Gadsden flags, a yellow banner dating to the American Revolution that has the image of a rattlesnake and the phrase “Don’t Tread on Me.”

Among the protesters in Toronto was Corey Ley, owner of a landscape construction company and volunteer firefighter, who drove from his home in Ontario’s Kawartha Lakes region about 85 miles northeast of Toronto to attend Saturday’s demonstration. He was accompanied by his wife, two children and two friends.

Determined and vowing not to leave, Mr. Ley was standing outside of his truck on Bloor Street, in Toronto’s high-end shopping district, joining dozens of cars, pickup trucks and heavy trucks on Saturday that were parked along the city’s high-end shopping district downtown.

Mr. Ley said the pandemic restrictions were undermining his personal freedoms, and those of his family. He said he was fed up with his son not being able to play ice hockey and his daughter not being able to go to dance lessons.

Over the past two years, schools across Canada have been periodically shuttered and parents have been forced to grapple with remote learning and after-school activities being halted.

“I’m here until whenever, as long as it takes,” said Mr. Ley, who said he wanted proof-of-vaccination and mask policies to be optional rather than mandated.

He had packed plenty of provisions to remain at the site, including food, fuel and water.

In protests in Quebec City, dozens of tractor-trailer cabs were parked two deep for three blocks along one of the major arteries through the downtown area, adjacent to the provincial legislature. Thousands of people lined the sidewalks, cheering on truckers as they arrived or drove past.

David LeBlanc, a biologist from Matapédia, said it was time for the government to lift pandemic restrictions. He, too, cited the heavy toll the pandemic was taking on his children.

“Our children are impacted,” he said. “My son is 18 years old. He could not have a trip with his friends at high school. He could not get in the bar to have fun with his friends.”

While the protests continued in Ottawa on Monday, most of the truckers in Toronto and Quebec City had cleared out as the week began, according to police.

Vjosa Isai in Toronto and Peter Black in Quebec City contributed reporting.

A timeline of the protests.

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Protesters in Ottawa on Jan. 29.Credit...Nasuna Stuart-Ulin for The New York Times

The protests engulfing Canada’s capital were set off by the federal government’s requirement that truckers crossing the border from the United States show proof of vaccination against the coronavirus. Here is how the demonstrations have unfolded over the past two weeks.

Jan. 15: Vaccination mandates in Canada have been in effect since Oct. 30 for ship crews, railways and airline workers. But effective Jan. 15, the federal government expanded the requirement to truck drivers returning from the United States. One week later, a reciprocal policy went into effect in the United States for Canadian truckers crossing its border.

Jan. 22: Truck convoy groups departed from British Columbia along the Trans-Canada Highway, a highway system connecting the coasts, en route to Ottawa. Other groups drove from the Prairie and Atlantic provinces.

Jan. 28: The Ottawa police estimated that 1,000 to 2,000 people arrived in the capital and took part in protests over that weekend, on Jan. 29 and 30.

Jan. 29: A separate standoff emerged in Western Canada between truckers and the police at the U.S. border crossing in Coutts, Alberta. The local Royal Canadian Mounted Police detachment said the peaceful protest devolved into an “unlawful blockade.”

Feb. 5-6: The police estimated that 5,000 people protested in Ottawa and that 1,000 vehicles clogged the streets. While the core group has been parked outside the Parliament building in Ottawa, protesters also organized rallies in other Canadian cities over the weekend, including in Toronto, Quebec City and Calgary.

Feb. 6: Jim Watson, the mayor of Ottawa, declared a state of emergency.

Feb. 8: Ottawa police said they had made 23 arrests and issued 1,300 tickets in connection with the protests. At the U.S. border in Windsor, Ontario, truck convoys blocked most access along the Ambassador Bridge to Detroit, Mich., a vital link for the automobile industry.

Feb. 9: A third border crossing in Sarnia, Ontario, was targeted for protests. It’s the only expressway route to a bridge into the United States that connects Sarnia and Port Huron, Mich.

Feb. 10: Automakers run some plants at reduced capacity and cancel shifts as blockades create delays in the movement of parts and components across the border.

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Protests in Canada inspire copycat convoys in Australia and New Zealand.

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Protest Convoy Arrives in New Zealand Capital

Inspired by truckers demonstrating in Canada, a convoy of protesters calling for an end to pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates arrived in Wellington. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said their views didn’t represent the majority.

I think it would be wrong to, in any way, characterize what we’ve seen outside is a representation of the majority. The majority of New Zealanders have done everything they can to keep one another safe.

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Inspired by truckers demonstrating in Canada, a convoy of protesters calling for an end to pandemic restrictions and vaccine mandates arrived in Wellington. Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said their views didn’t represent the majority.CreditCredit...Mark Mitchell/New Zealand Hereald, via Associated Press

Thousands of people in cars, trucks, caravans and other vehicles have crossed New Zealand and Australia this week to protest pandemic restrictions.

The protests — including a “Convoy to Canberra,” the Australian capital — are an echo of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” that has swarmed Ottawa, the Canadian capital.

Australia and New Zealand, which have some of the world’s highest vaccination rates, prohibit unvaccinated people from going to cafes, bars and restaurants, and from visiting museums or other attractions. Those who are not vaccinated make up a small but vocal minority, with protests taking place in both countries throughout much of the year.

A convoy in New Zealand departed for Wellington, the nation’s capital, on Sunday morning. It arrived on Tuesday with thousands of vehicles, many flying New Zealand flags or bearing signs against mandates and in favor of “freedom.” A handful of protesters carried American flags or banners in support of former President Donald J. Trump.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand said she would not meet with the protesters. “We have a full day in Parliament today,” she told Radio New Zealand on Tuesday, adding, “That’s what we’ll be focused on today.”

There were few examples of public vandalism, though a convoy of demonstrators held up traffic at Canberra Airport to delay travelers. Protests also disrupted traffic, prompting buses to be rerouted.

In Australia, the convoy was made up not only of those against vaccination mandates, but also of people who claim to be “sovereign citizens” and not subject to any laws, and members of some religious groups. Some accused lawmakers of being “pedophiles,” or said they would soon be arrested for treason. Others held flags in support of the conspiracy theory QAnon.

Some demonstrators in both countries claimed to be demanding greater rights for Indigenous groups. In Australia, the Aboriginal Tent Embassy in Canberra disavowed the convoy. In New Zealand, many Maori tribes have encouraged their members to get vaccinated or organized vaccination drives for them.

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