Through you, Chair, thank you for that question.
It was the compounded result of the hundreds of daily threats of aggression that people felt in the downtown. If you went out and did your groceries and you happened to have a mask on, what happened was.... I'll be clear here. I've never suggested that it was the trucker from Saskatchewan or Canmore, or anywhere, who came and parked for two days and then left the next day. It was what was left behind, and it was the space that opened up for others to come into our downtown residential neighbourhoods because it was lawless. We had no protection, and there was an openness to the racism that we were seeing, the anti-Semitism and the homophobia.
What happened was that—especially on the weekends, I might say—hundreds and hundreds of people who were sympathetic poured in, but wouldn't allow people into grocery stores or would go into grocery stores and harass people. We had seniors who were terrified of leaving their apartments. People with rainbow flags had their windows broken, defecation on their front lawns. It was a constant.
There was probably no one act you could point at that resulted in severe harm, but it was the result of many, many aggressions over three and a half weeks, including horns that were being blown by dozens and dozens of trucks, not allowing people to sleep at night or to work during the day or to have any peace.