Any protest of any respectable size will block the roads it chooses to march in, every climate change protest and every gay pride blocks the roads, never see people complaining about those.
>destroying property
What is the property that was destroyed by the protest in question?
Ottawa gets protests for left- and right- wing causes on a weekly basis. One of the biggest protests we see is a yearly "bus all the catholic school children to parliament hill to protest abortion", and it goes by without a hitch every year.
Anyways, protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most and involve people standing on parliament hill or marching around the downtown core, not blockading the city core and constantly harassing the people who live there for multiple weeks.
I see this word used multiple times in people arguing against the protest, never with any details about the concrete instances of the supposed harassment. Noise is not harassment, any activity with a large group of people is going to annoy and disturb the place they happen to choose to congregate, this is not even specific to protests.
Actually, just to be clear, what exactly did the protestors do besides blocking the road and making a lot of noise?
>protests last for maybe an afternoon or day or two at most
So
(1) The duration of a protest and
(2) How much inconvenience it causes to the locals
are the two factors that determine whether it's a legitimate protest or not ?
The level of noise, the duration of the noise, and the tools they were using to create that noise (including multiple actual train horns) were all illegal under existing laws, as well.
https://www.smh.com.au/national/sleep-deprivation-is-torture...
Because it's not, harassment is usually implied to be personal, involving hostile contact between the harasser(s) and the harassed. Did the protestors shout insults or threats at you or other neighborhood residents ?
>all illegal under existing laws
Do we really need to constantly circle back to the point that protests have to be lawful ? they do not, protesting is about breaking the ordinary and disrupting the status quo, that's the point, especially when the people protesting feel cornered and without a lawful retort to perceived injustices.
Every action against the government will hurt the population to some degree or another, 100db noise seems pretty mild compared to the private property damage valued in the millions that large-scale protests usually cause. Prioritising comfort over protest is implicitely siding with the government, which is your right off course, as long as you're explicit about it.
Edit : 100db noise turns out to be a deadly serious matter, I apologize to the person I'm replying to for making light of it.
I still believe it's wrong to use this as justification for quashing a protest, there is a whole spectrum of solutions from reasoning with the protestors to wearing ear covers, but I can better understand and empathize with the antagonism most of the affected city's residents hold toward the protests.
Truth be told I've rarely encountered a protest I liked - they are always annoying (even the ones I agree with are annoying - they block traffic to friends and foes equally).
It comes with the territory, and it's something you must tolerate to have a democracy.
