NORTH PORTAL - A peaceful demonstration near the North Portal border crossing on the weekend drew more than 70 vehicles and about 160 participants.
One of the local protest organizers, Jay Riedel, said that they gathered to once again voice their opposition to the COVID-related federal policies.
"We're fighting for freedom, for not having to go through checkpoints to go from point A to point B in our own country and to have the right to choose," Riedel said.
Many speeches were made, voicing continued opposition to the COVID-19 pandemic restrictions. While the provincial government has been moving to lift restrictions, there are other areas of the country where pandemic-related health orders are still in effect.
"They've dropped mandates here and in Alberta, but they haven't dropped it federally. And this is what we're fighting for is to drop federal mandates because, yeah, a lot of people say, 'Okay, well, Saskatchewan, Alberta are fine. We don't have to do anything anymore.' But that's wrong because we need to fight for the rest of the country that's still having to do this, plus for the truckers that are bringing our food and everything we needed to the grocery stores, the hardware stores and lumber stores, for the cross-border trucking is not allowed to come now. And we're going to start paying more money and more money, and we can’t afford it," Riedel said.
The demonstration was also a chance to express their support for the Freedom Convoy in Ottawa, which police have been dismantling in recent days after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergency Measures Act.
Those involved with the South Bound and Down Convoy started to arrive on private land on Friday afternoon, and they were gone by Sunday evening. Some of the participants came from the Regina and Weyburn areas. The crowd was confined to a rural property north of North Portal.
Many of the vehicles at the site sported Canadian and Saskatchewan flags. Riedel said there were a lot of young people and also new faces, which was good to see. Many participants brought food for everyone and meals were served to those in attendance.
There was a heightened police presence, with representatives of the Saskatchewan RCMP and the Saskatchewan Highway Patrol in the area. They diverted participants away from highway 39 down a rural road to the protest site, located a few kilometres east of the highway.
Information from the RCMP said the police respect the rights of Canadians to protest, to assemble and use private property for the protests, as long as no breach of the peace occurs.
They reminded the protesters that they could not disrupt traffic or access to border facilities in any way. They also could not park their vehicle on the side of any public roads or on private properties that they do not have approval to use by the legal owner.
"The Emergency Act prohibits public assemblies, leading to a breach of peace such as the serious disruption of the movement of persons, goods or serious interference with trade; the interference with the functioning or critical infrastructure; or the support of the threat or use of serious violence against persons or property," RCMP reminded the protesters in the hand-outs.
Another protest was held on private land near the Canada-U.S. border at Northgate. Riedel said those people weren't affiliated or known to the local protesters, who've been involved with peaceful demonstrations in the Estevan area and beyond since 2018, and that overlap caused some disruption to the original plans.
"We had permission to be fairly close to the border. But there was other parties coming from other areas, and nobody knew who they were. Most of our groups, like Regina and Weyburn, we know the usuals. But nobody knew these people," Riedel said.
This group came earlier than those who Riedel described as the "usuals" and, according to Riedel, didn't co-ordinate their actions with other protesters. They reached out to landowners asking for permission to rally on their land, which resulted in changes in plans.
"They started calling around looking for a place to go, for private land. And then the landowners that we already had, basically got scared because everybody's phoning and they backed out. And then we had to go three miles from the border to (other private land) where we had the permission to be on his property because we weren't allowed to park on the roads," Riedel said.
He added that there was a heavy police presence, which to him seemed "way overdone for power," but the police was good to protesters allowing for a peaceful demonstration to take its course.
"We've been peaceful since 2018, there's never been any incidents or anything else," Riedel added.
"We were skeptical of other people coming in and what their intentions are. That's why we wanted to have control and get ahead of everybody. I talk to the police quite often, to RCMP, and I dealt with them all through this, and I told them … in the end, this is our area, and we have to deal with the aftermath," Riedel said.
"But it turned out that they (the other group) were fine. They were okay, they did everything legally. So I guess we covered two borders instead of one, which was good."
He heard some protesters were turned around, but most of those who came to voice their position were able to do so either with Riedel's group or at Northgate.
Riedel said the local protesters plan to have more action in the near future, depending on the situation with the federal Emergency Act and COVID mandates. And he invited people to step forward and start voicing their opinions as well.
"We just need more people out. Every time we've had these rallies now, this time, especially, we've seen a lot of new faces. And they all seem to say the same thing, 'We had our head in the sand and we weren't paying attention. And now we realized that there is some evil going on,'" Riedel noted. "They felt they got to start coming out. And that's all we keep asking. All we've done is try to create awareness. We don't tell anybody how to think, we basically say, 'Do your own research; come to your own conclusions.' But in the end, we need you on the street, and we need you to stand up for Canadians and our freedoms."
