Mark, I respect you and I enjoy reading your thoughtful messages on HN. I think you're missing a bit of context.

I doubt many truckers were violent, but the truckers weren't the only one there. Their presence created a center of gravity that attracted many hangers-on, and from what I have seen, they've been the source of most of the problems.

Also, it's not really about violence. It's about needlessly harming innocent citizens. Although this is happening right near Parliament, it's one of the poorest wards in the city. This isn't a neighbourhood full of the liberal elite sipping lattes while they work from home. It's students, and shift works, and retail workers just trying to live their lives.

Consider things like this: https://twitter.com/glen_mcgregor/status/1488905393199890432

Turn your sound on/up to get a sense of what that was like. Do you want to live in a society where that is ever okay in the name or protest? I sure don't.

And that was filmed from a building a couple of hundred meters away from the trucks that were parked up Kent St. How do you think it felt for people living in these apartments right on Kent:

https://www.google.ca/maps/@45.4168826,-75.7005369,3a,75y,10...

For what it's worth (and I realize it's a small sample of a small portion of the population, so maybe it's not worth much), my friends in neighbours in my small Ontario town were initially generally supportive of what they saw as the truckers' core message, because "it's time to end vaccine mandates for truckers re-entering Canada" is a completely reasonable topic of protests. It's a good time to have that conversation.

But the protest quickly evolved into something larger and messier than that core message, and sentiment in my small town quickly soured against the protest. What I've heard is recent conversations is that people feel the protest had lost the plot, the actions of some of the attendees in harming local citizens were beyond the pale, and it was time for the protest to end.

There have been some objections to the way police ended the protest, but it looked relatively tame in comparison to other protest breakups here in recent memory like the Toronto homeless camps last summer, or the Montreal student protests, or the G20 protests. That's not to say it was done perfectly.

I used to live a few blocks from Parliament Hill, and everybody living there is used to protests. We think protests are good and healthy and even necessary, even if we disagree with the protestors. This one quickly evolved into something beyond mere protest and turned residents against the protest who might otherwise have been sympathetic to its message.

For some of the grievances local residents have, see lists like this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/onguardforthee/comments/sh7qok/a_su...

Lists like that are, of course, one-sided. It's up to you how much of that information you choose to see as credible. Just realize that as someone from outside Canada, you're probably seeing a filtered version of events. That list above is also a filtered version of events, but it's a very different filter. Look at it through enough filters and you'll probably end up with a more complete understanding.

Personally, I watched some of the live streams to learn more about the protests and hear from some of the actual truckers. Danny and Czaba and the couple from Saskatchewan with the puppies seemed like good people with legitimate grievances to protest about. At the same time, no amount of goodness makes the harm caused to local residents okay. I know it's easy to come down strongly on one side or the other of this, but I see the whole thing as a crappy tragedy for everyone involved.

As for the government's response to all of this - we'll have plenty of opportunities to voice our opinion at the ballot box. Municipal and Provincial governments should have been able to manage this protest from the start without needing the feds to step in, and we have municipal and provincial elections this year. And with a minority government federally, we could have an election there at any time as well. Realistically it's unlikely we'll see one before next year - but we'll still get to express ourselves soon enough.