Coutts Villagers Still Divided on Protest Blockade Months After, Says Mayor

The community in the small border village of Coutts, Alberta, is still divided over the protest blockade that occurred last winter, its mayor told the Public Order Emergency Commission on Wednesday.

“We still have neighbours that won’t talk to each other,” Mayor Jim Willett testified.

He assessed the community was split 70-30 regarding the blockade, with the majority being supportive.

“We had a lot of … sympathetic people in the village who figured it was our duty to feed everybody,” Willett said.

Protesters started impeding traffic at the Canada-U.S. border crossing in Coutts on Jan. 29.

Their grievances against COVID-19 restrictions were similar to the trucker-led Freedom Convoy protesters who started arriving in Ottawa around the same time.

Willett said he understood the original cause of the protesters at Coutts was the vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the border enacted by Canada and the U.S. in mid-January.

“Then it mutated into my body my right [and] all of the different conspiracy things that have gone on,” Willett said.

“People haven’t let that go, and so it still exists to this day.”

Willet said residents were still able to move around, in and out of the village, but it depended on how comfortable they were with driving past “monster pieces of equipment.”

As an example of the split in the community, Willett said one resident asked him to relay to the inquiry that residents were never prevented from moving around.

Willett also spoke of a resident who is a military veteran from Afghanistan who had to leave town during the events due to having post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“They had to leave town because it triggered her PTSD and she just couldn’t take it,” Willett said.

No Enforcement

Willett told the commission he stopped supporting the protests after it became a border blockade.

“I was never against the protest, you have that freedom, that right to protest anytime you want as long as you don’t break the law and interfere with my right to travel and so on,” he said.

“In a way I participated in their protest because along with the other border mayors, we communicated with the federal government saying this is not right to treat these guys after the two years as if they suddenly become pariahs or something,” he added, referring to truckers who suddenly needed to be vaccinated to cross the border after previously crossing freely during the pandemic.

The blockade dispersed voluntarily on Feb. 15, a day after the RCMP made a number of arrests and seized firearms said to be linked to a group of blockade supporters.

“The group was said to have a willingness to use force against the police if any attempts were made to disrupt the blockade,” the RCMP said at the time.

“I got that feeling … that because of what had happened, that the mood in the crowd had changed, and they were going to depart,” Willett said.

One blockade organizer, Marco Von Huigenbos, said at the time the protest dispersed to “wrap this up in a peaceful way.” Von Huigenbos testified before the inquiry on Nov. 8.

Mayor Willett said no enforcement was required by the RCMP to make the protesters leave, and that no power from the Emergencies Act invoked by the Liberal government on Feb. 14 was used.