“More than ever, now is the time to work together. It’s also the time to reflect on the kind of future we want for our country,” Trudeau told a news conference.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Monday, February 21, said it was now time for Canada had to start healing itself after police cleared downtown Ottawa of a truckers’ blockade that had paralysed the city for three weeks in a protest against COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, a Reuters report in The Peninsula, Qatar, says .
“More than ever, now is the time to work together. It’s also the time to reflect on the kind of future we want for our country,” Trudeau told a news conference.
He defended his last Monday’s decision to invoke emergency powers, citing what he called the threat to the economy. “The situation is still fragile, the state of emergency is still there” he said
“There’s a lesson for all of us in what happened this month. We don’t know when this pandemic is going to end, but that doesn’t mean we cannot start healing as a nation,” he added.
Police spent two days clearing protesters from the downtown area, making 191 arrests and towing away 79 vehicles by the time the operation ended on Sunday.
The protesters initially wanted an end to cross-border COVID-19 vaccine mandates for truck drivers, but as time went by the blockade soon turned into a demonstration against Trudeau and the minority Liberal government.
The truckers’ protest burgeoned out of control, causing closure of a handful of Canada-US border posts and the shut down of key parts of the capital for more than three weeks.
But all border blockades have now ended in what was one of the biggest police operations in the nation’s history.
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