Western Standard - IN FOCUS： Ottawa resident speaks out - Freedom Convoy & Emergencies Act inquiry

00:00:00.000 good evening and thanks for joining me for another edition of in focus tonight we're

00:00:13.040 speaking with david maybury an ottawa resident and data scientist now david lives in downtown

00:00:19.680 ottawa and had a bird's eye view of the freedom convoy when it landed in our nation's capital in

00:00:25.360 in late January of this year.

00:00:27.600 They literally camped out below my bedroom window,

00:00:30.860 he said in a published piece he released back in February

00:00:34.120 called A Night with the Untouchables.

00:00:36.380 Now his article has gone viral

00:00:38.200 and has just circulated around the world.

00:00:40.900 David, thanks for joining me this evening.

00:00:43.660 Well, thank you for having me, Melanie.

00:00:45.600 And let's start by talking a little bit

00:00:47.320 about the article that you published in February

00:00:49.480 and why you decided to do it.

00:00:52.360 Well, at first I didn't think I was going to write anything.

00:00:54.080 I went down just to talk to people who were on my street.

00:00:56.780 This was on the Wednesday night, I think,

00:00:58.600 when they first arrived.

00:01:00.080 And after talking with everybody,

00:01:02.220 I got a sense that it was very different

00:01:03.880 than what was being portrayed in the media.

00:01:06.640 First of all, there was no honking at night.

00:01:09.660 I sleep above it,

00:01:10.520 so I know precisely how loud it was at night,

00:01:13.440 and it wasn't that quiet at night

00:01:15.100 than it normally was in downtown Ottawa.

00:01:17.540 So I-

00:01:18.380 What's your window view?

00:01:18.960 Where is your window view looking down on?

00:01:21.680 It's right on Kent Street.

00:01:22.880 So Kent Street, where I am, is a few steps.

00:01:26.580 I can see the Peace Tower very clearly from my condo, and I'm right above Kent Street, which is just south of the Supreme Court.

00:01:34.960 So I can see the Supreme Court from my bedroom window.

00:01:38.460 And going up Kent Street goes right up to Wellington.

00:01:40.320 So this is where the convoys on Wellington Street in front of the Parliament buildings, but it also wrapped around coming down Kent Street all the way past where I live, going further south all the way down to Somerset.

00:01:50.560 so I had a really good a good view of where everybody was so you just you kind of looked

00:01:57.220 around and thought well yeah like yeah I didn't really follow it that closely before people arrived

00:02:04.240 and once they arrived I I was of course loud during the day but at night it was very different

00:02:13.160 than what was what I was seeing in different news sources so I thought I'd go down and talk to them

00:02:18.040 And then after talking to them, I came home,

00:02:20.600 it was about midnight and I decided I couldn't sleep.

00:02:23.120 So I thought I should write about the stories

00:02:25.500 on my little blog that I have about the people I talked to

00:02:30.600 and what their experiences were like

00:02:33.260 coming from all over the country.

00:02:34.500 I talked that night from somebody

00:02:37.120 from every province except PEI.

00:02:40.040 And you said in the article that you published,

00:02:42.880 you said you found that most of what you knew

00:02:47.280 begin with was from reporters and columnists who wrote from disadvantage or sorry distant vantage

00:02:52.880 points somewhere in the media heartland of canada and and they were sort of depicting all of these

00:03:00.160 protesters uh descending on ottawa as white supremists racists hate mongers pseudo trumpian

00:03:08.320 grifters and q anon style nutters so when you went down there to walk amongst these people

00:03:15.040 did you feel unsafe to begin with like did you feel there was uh was any kind of threat around

00:03:19.840 you no it was it was really quiet because in the evening everybody was in their cabs or in their

00:03:25.440 trucks uh but there were people that were out maybe some of them having a cigarette some of

00:03:30.160 them talking to other people and i just went and introduced myself and everybody was super friendly

00:03:34.080 in fact it was very canadian they're quite apologetic they go well you must the noise

00:03:38.640 during the day i'm sorry it's so loud that's what they said to me um so it was a very canadian

00:03:45.040 Very Canadian group of people. It was that it was a very mixed group, too

00:03:48.900 So for instance, there were lots of indigenous people. I talked to an indigenous man. He was a hundred meters outside

00:03:54.860 My front door. I talked to him for 40 minutes

00:03:58.120 Why he told me why he was there

00:04:01.120 There were people of all different races that I talked to you

00:04:04.680 I think probably the similar composition of what you would have found if you just grab a

00:04:09.040 Whole bag of Canadians at random. So it was I felt it was very different than what

00:04:15.040 what was being portrayed and that's why i wrote what i wrote well and certainly considering uh you

00:04:19.920 know white supremacists don't typically uh consist of multi-national yeah that's right uh so you talk

00:04:28.320 about many of the people in the article and we will have a link through to the article uh for

00:04:32.960 people to read for themselves and this is really just a bird's eye view this is your vantage point

00:04:37.840 this is your discussions the people that you met um and and you walks you walked amongst them for

00:04:44.320 hours one evening talking to them uh people from all over you said uh cochrane ontario someone from

00:04:51.120 sudbury ontario you talked to other people from alberta and and what were you hearing generally

00:04:57.920 from the people you were talking to i think i think the biggest message is that uh we

00:05:04.240 we had a government that felt that they felt that was out of touch with them that they

00:05:08.720 feel like they that they don't get heard and uh that the people need to know that they matter

00:05:18.640 um and and this is something that i think that we need to really get to grips with in canada is that

00:05:24.480 there are all kinds of different people different views and i think that this country can accommodate

00:05:29.280 all kinds of different people it does has a great history of that and talking to these people they

00:05:34.160 they were there to remind us that there aren't second-class citizens in this

00:05:38.400 country and they felt like it was time for the government to hear that they

00:05:43.520 had had enough. So day in and day out you were able to watch things unfold, you

00:05:50.120 were able to watch the interactions with the the convoy protesters and I'm

00:05:55.700 assuming that your vantage point also allowed you to witness some of the force

00:06:01.920 that was used against the protesters in the last days of the freedom convoy did

00:06:08.520 do you have any do you recall anything with the where the force was used was up

00:06:14.460 on Wellington Street and there wasn't any force used on Kent Breiland what was

00:06:19.480 surprising is that again I don't know how much of it was portrayed in the

00:06:23.880 media is that most of the convoy had cleared out by the very last hours and

00:06:29.340 And the people on my street had mostly moved.

00:06:34.240 That morning, I talked to people who were in front of my condo building.

00:06:39.320 What they had done, there's a very old church that's right next to where I live,

00:06:42.860 and they'd collected all the supplies that they didn't use,

00:06:45.880 and they put it in front of the church before they left.

00:06:49.300 And so what had happened is that they had largely cleared out from that area.

00:06:53.020 The street was almost entirely clear by the time that Wellington Street was being cleared out.

00:06:58.140 gotcha and so all of these all of these donations to the church and things left to the church again

00:07:05.160 you know it's strange to kind of cool yeah to look at that and say well these were hate mongers

00:07:11.580 there's no I talked to people down there they would not they organized in terms of block

00:07:18.780 captains they made sure that there was no garbage I have video from my condo of them sweeping the

00:07:23.980 sidewalks every morning it snowed uh they made sure that the uh that the entrances were passable

00:07:30.560 for condos that were facing on kent street uh so yes it was you know there was civil disobedience

00:07:36.540 in the sense that they were parked downtown but they it wasn't this sort of free-for-all chaos

00:07:41.760 either right the block captains made sure that like i said garbage was picked up the streets

00:07:47.720 are clean it was a there's all very grassroots but the same time they did

00:07:54.260 what they could to make sure that that they can be at their message heard but

00:07:58.340 the same time not recognize and and so you're saying that through this entire

00:08:03.620 time that they were sort of parked and and actively protesting there was no

00:08:08.600 time that you felt in danger you didn't know no no no in fact what I felt

00:08:15.860 downtown is that on kent street when the lights go green it becomes a bit of a thoroughfare for

00:08:20.500 some people who like to to gun the sports cars going down at sometimes at night and uh and that

00:08:27.220 didn't happen so it's actually i think a little bit safer uh interesting yeah and and so i'm kind

00:08:33.060 of looking over some of the um comments because now we're going to talk a little bit about your

00:08:38.900 thoughts around the Emergencies Act inquiry. Again, you know, bird's eye view, you were amongst

00:08:46.580 this for the entire time. And so I think that your perspective matters. And clearly it was important

00:08:54.340 because your publication that you put out, A Night with the Untouchables, did go viral. It did

00:09:01.940 spread around the world. You were being contacted from all around the world to discuss what you were

00:09:06.260 seeing correct yeah that's right I mean it has voted millions of views it's yeah

00:09:11.380 I was I couldn't keep up in moderation of the comments so I shut the comments

00:09:16.440 down not long after I publish it so I could I it is impossible to keep up

00:09:22.540 there's just so much I didn't think to be this much interest in it to be honest

00:09:25.500 when I wrote it I just felt like that evening I had to talk about what I saw

00:09:31.380 but I didn't think you would catch on with that.

00:09:34.380 Well, some of the notes from the Emergencies Act inquiry include comments from, let's see,

00:09:45.380 let's see, David Villeneuve said at no point, so he was the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency,

00:09:55.380 And he said that he believed that the Emergencies Act was indeed required.

00:10:03.060 There were other comments that there were several safety concerns.

00:10:08.740 There were, you know, in an effort to keep the public safe from the protesters.

00:10:14.880 Based on what you saw, what are your thoughts on some of those comments?

00:10:20.120 I think that's inaccurate.

00:10:21.880 I don't think that there was this, it was in danger or any such thing.

00:10:26.740 I think it was peaceful.

00:10:28.620 Of course, it was civil disobedience.

00:10:30.180 They were parked on the streets in downtown city, downtown in Ottawa.

00:10:36.420 Civil disobedience, there's a history of that in this country to let the government at time to time know.

00:10:42.080 Fortunately, we don't have to use civil disobedience in our democracy very often.

00:10:45.140 But sometimes it's an important reminder that there are minorities in this country who matter and we can't always ignore what the minority has, what's infecting the minorities in our country.

00:10:59.020 So in this particular case, there's people who felt very strongly about the vaccine mandates, which were probably a minority of the country, felt that they had been pushed too far.

00:11:10.200 And I understand why they would be down here to protest that.

00:11:13.380 What was remarkable is how peaceful it was and how, what I thought, a sense of camaraderie that, like I said, they organized themselves in these block captains situations to prevent anything from getting out of control in terms of garbage.

00:11:33.200 and they were yeah the whole thing did not turn into this sort of chaotic mess

00:11:37.820 that sometimes you you see it reported at least where I was I mean there were

00:11:43.580 parties that were happening down on toward Wellington Street in front of

00:11:46.460 the Parliament building but where I live in the residential area here on Kent

00:11:51.920 Street that's not and it is interesting to me too because when I look at some of

00:11:56.960 coverage uh even when all of the um the the takedown was happening and um the the law enforcement

00:12:05.120 was coming and uh and sort of pushing the protesters to to bring an end to everything

00:12:10.480 um when you look at uh some of the way the mainstream media reported on that

00:12:16.080 and then we hear you know testimony from people like you and i um at the time was was speaking

00:12:21.600 with other Ottawa residents that were saying that the only violence that they actually witnessed

00:12:27.980 through the entire presence of the protesters in Ottawa was when the authorities moved in on

00:12:35.760 the protesters. And so it's kind of interesting because for the average Canadian who really just

00:12:43.260 relies on the mainstream media as their main information source, they're going to know no

00:12:49.020 different yeah I felt I mean there was a couple of times where I was watching media report on

00:12:56.300 different stances and often they would interview other people in different parts of the country so

00:13:02.580 they would interview somebody in Manitoba they're interviewed the views of somebody in Vancouver

00:13:06.140 that's fine having people's ideas or other Canadians about what they might think of the

00:13:10.720 of the situation is fine but what they also need to do is leave their condos in Toronto or wherever

00:13:15.700 that they were doing their podcasts,

00:13:18.860 wherever it was, their media takes,

00:13:21.560 they should just come down here and talk to people.

00:13:23.420 And if they had done that early on,

00:13:25.720 I think it would have helped understand,

00:13:29.300 or helped the Canadian public understand

00:13:31.200 the full totality of what was going on.

00:13:34.180 This country's had, like I said in the past,

00:13:35.960 we've had civil disobedience before.

00:13:37.420 You know, Winnipeg General Strike of 1919,

00:13:39.700 or on the Ottawa track 1935.

00:13:43.080 These are situations of working class people

00:13:45.200 who felt the government was not taking

00:13:47.540 their concerns seriously.

00:13:49.560 And that's sometimes a reminder is important.

00:13:53.520 Yeah, you did include that as well when you were saying

00:13:56.520 you noticed that there were no reporters

00:14:00.280 from any of Canada's news agencies walking among the trucks

00:14:03.800 to find out who these people are.

00:14:05.520 So you decided to do that.

00:14:07.760 And of course that's where a night

00:14:09.580 with the untouchables kind of came from.

00:14:13.320 Another comment here, Minister of Emergency Preparedness Bill Blair complimented law enforcement on the entirely professional, proportional and measured way they removed Freedom Convoy protesters from the streets of Ottawa.

00:14:28.180 What are your thoughts on that statement?

00:14:30.100 Yeah, I didn't see the actual final days where they removed the final protesters up on Wellington Street.

00:14:36.540 first of all they the police were making sure to keep that area clear of other

00:14:40.660 people coming down into the area if you wanted to go there was going to be a bit

00:14:44.040 difficult but in in terms of the overall police situation I when you have civil

00:14:52.500 disobedience like this and you try to figure out how to handle it I think the

00:14:56.020 police overall I mean it seems kind of a crazy situation for them they didn't

00:15:00.320 know how to handle the what to do at all so as far as I can tell and resorting

00:15:05.040 to when you let thing when they let it get to the to the state that it did to have to pull what they

00:15:10.320 feel they had to do is pull these much more sharp measures i think just i don't know it looks to be

00:15:17.760 to my honest eye looking at it it looks like the police were being a whole security apparatus is

00:15:23.200 being rather amateurish in the whole situation professionally we've had situations that have

00:15:28.480 been very difficult in this country and it's really really important to not have to go to

00:15:34.240 these kinds of measures right that includes dialogue includes discussion it includes making

00:15:39.520 sure people have heard even if they don't get their way sometimes that's enough and um i i felt

00:15:45.520 that you know this was beyond really a security situation it was a political one too and there

00:15:50.880 needed to be that kind of opportunity to make sure that people knew they were being heard

00:15:56.560 and it wasn't really just a security problem in my opinion agreed and i think um i've heard from

00:16:03.280 many that um that really it was it was dialogue that they were looking to have with their leaders

00:16:08.400 uh and the leadership and the and the government uh in this country it doesn't mean you get your

00:16:12.240 way it just means that you you you know you've been heard and sometimes that's enough to take

00:16:17.120 the temperature down right absolutely uh and so did you watch and follow along with

00:16:23.520 some of the emergencies act inquiry i didn't watch it on television i just saw some of the

00:16:28.480 clips or the the takes on it or some of the the news reports on it but I didn't

00:16:36.040 watch it as it was happening was there any testimony or anything that you heard

00:16:40.540 of coming from the inquiry that you thought that was very different from what

00:16:45.580 I witnessed well the initial hardship situation I thought where they taught

00:16:51.760 where residents and former mayoral candidate here in Ottawa

00:16:56.200 was talking about how awful it was.

00:17:00.020 I mean, I'm sure some people felt really put out by it,

00:17:04.180 having these large trucks and people protesting downtown Ottawa

00:17:08.100 for the length of time that it was.

00:17:10.260 But in terms of saying that it was violent

00:17:19.840 or that it was some kind of mob that was looking to create all kinds of chaos.

00:17:26.800 That's just not what it was.

00:17:28.660 I do not believe that for a moment, not having lived among it, not having watched it.

00:17:33.820 Well, and at some level, there was talk about using even stronger force,

00:17:42.860 such as bringing tanks in, or at least tanks were mentioned in some of the conversation.

00:17:48.600 I mean, I think for the most part, many have agreed that that would have been an overreach.

00:17:56.780 Yeah, I think this is, and I don't like how people position this as an unprecedented situation in Canada.

00:18:02.300 It is not anything of the sort.

00:18:04.440 There's lots present for this in Canada.

00:18:06.280 We have this, like I mentioned, the Winnipeg General Strike of 1919.

00:18:10.040 And I really think people should read up on that because there's a lot of similarities in terms of the language the government was using.

00:18:15.240 They called them seditionists.

00:18:16.340 They had seditionist trials.

00:18:18.600 the language that the justice minister at the time was very similar to the language that's being used today.

00:18:24.660 And a lot of those people are celebrated in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights.

00:18:30.000 So I think that when time passes and we look at what happened here in February of this year,

00:18:39.520 I think we will see this in a much different light that is far more nuanced.

00:18:43.680 And it's very important to understand that sometimes civil disobedience in a democracy, in a great country like ours, is important to remind everyone that you can only go so far when we have minorities to accommodate.

00:18:58.040 Well, and having said that, being that Canada is a great country, do you feel that democracy has been compromised?

00:19:06.100 I don't.

00:19:07.480 I think this country is phenomenal.

00:19:09.380 I think it has, it makes mistakes, but it learns from them.

00:19:14.740 We've done, if we read our history, these kinds of events have happened before, and

00:19:18.740 we've become better every time it happens.

00:19:21.040 I think that will happen in this case, too.

00:19:23.660 It'll take time.

00:19:24.760 It doesn't happen fast.

00:19:25.920 Democracies are slow, they're incremental.

00:19:28.700 But I think that we will be a better country for it in the future.

00:19:33.260 Yes, hindsight is definitely always 20-20 and very valuable.

00:19:37.960 Now, based on your bird's eye view of the events that unfolded in Ottawa during the Freedom Convoy protests,

00:19:43.500 what do you hope to see coming out of this inquiry?

00:19:48.360 Oh, what I think, my personal opinion is I think the Emergencies Act was an overreach.

00:19:52.920 I think I would like it if we recognized that.

00:19:57.040 I don't know if that will happen.

00:19:59.240 Again, I think the history will judge it very differently.

00:20:03.300 That would be my hope for it.

00:20:04.800 think we should be very cautious using those kinds of powers I think we should

00:20:08.900 recognize as I said before that civil disobedience is reminder sometimes right

00:20:14.060 if it becomes violent it's a different but nonviolent civil disobedience to let

00:20:18.860 people know that they've had enough is sometimes very important reminder of

00:20:21.920 where we need what kinds of actions we need to take how we need to listen to

00:20:25.440 people so yeah I was just gonna say you you answered my my final question for

00:20:34.680 for you your opinion whether the invocation of the emergencies act was necessary so so clearly

00:20:39.560 your opinion is it was over oh yeah i think it was overreach for sure yeah and i've had

00:20:44.680 conversations with um quite a few people who have said uh things along the lines of you know what

00:20:50.680 what recourse should people have right like when when locally you're not being heard and then

00:20:56.200 provincially you're not being heard and then federally you're not being heard i mean you know

00:21:01.160 there's there's this argument that these protesters shouldn't have done what they did

00:21:06.200 but in a situation where you are backed against the wall which many of these people were uh with

00:21:12.200 these with the mandates and losing their livelihood and not being able to work and things like that

00:21:18.600 you know really yeah it's tough it really is i had a conversation with one lady who was uh

00:21:24.520 i said in the long run this is talking she's very upset about the reason why she was there she's

00:21:29.800 She was very upset about the situation.

00:21:31.460 She had been fired from her job, and she was in a situation where she had custody difficulties with her husband, and she wasn't vaccinated.

00:21:38.880 I told her, this country, it works in the long run.

00:21:41.520 And she said something that's quite heartbreaking.

00:21:42.980 She said to me that night, but it doesn't work for me.

00:21:47.500 And that's the thing where we sometimes have to understand is that when you bring that kind of hardship to people, that kind of suffering, whether you think they're kooky or weird or different, it doesn't matter.

00:21:57.680 the canadian and we need to find a way to not have people suffer under such circumstances

00:22:04.640 certainly uh david mabry uh an ottawa resident who published a night with the untouchables uh

00:22:12.400 back in february bird's eye view of the protests in ottawa thank you very much for sharing your

00:22:19.840 thoughts uh and and speaking a little bit about why you put that publication out and and your

00:22:25.360 opinion on the Emergencies Act. Thanks so much. Thank you very much.

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Western Standard - December 07, 2022

IN FOCUS： Ottawa resident speaks out - Freedom Convoy & Emergencies Act inquiry

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