By Wednesday, the sixth day of the convoy demonstration, some of the people who live in the neighbourhood around Parliament had had enough.

A handful of counter-protesters holding signs confronted the people encamped in their vehicles on Wellington Street. Someone threw eggs at one protester’s SUV. Women stood in the street, refusing to let trucks pass.

Ottawa knows it’s a capital city. It’s used to demonstrations—the Black Lives Matter protest where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took a knee; an annual anti-abortion March for Life; a climate march in 2019 that drew thousands. Longer ago, anti-globalization protesters took over downtown for days, hemmed in by riot police from multiple forces. Indigenous activists erected a teepee on Parliament Hill in 2017; Occupy Ottawa demonstrators set up camp in a downtown park in 2011.

If you don’t live in Ottawa, this is the thing Ottawans need you to understand: This demonstration that began with the arrival of heavy trucks two Fridays ago is different.

Real people are being harmed by protesters whose demands are crackers, who won’t leave until those demands are met, who appear to have the resources to back that commitment up for some time, and whom the police say they can’t dislodge.

Last Saturday and Sunday, the convoy demonstration was large and loud, but mostly within normal ranges. Since then, not only have parked rigs and cars filled the boulevard outside Parliament and several streets leading to it, but truckers have blasted air horns practically around the clock.

“It’s incessant,” said Martine Dore, the director of programs at Cornerstone Women’s Housing, which operates a shelter on the edge of the protest zone. “If it dies down for a little bit of time, it just picks up again.”

The 53 women staying at the shelter have almost all been through terrible things, she said, and the Omicron wave has been, in many ways, the worst two months of the COVID-19 pandemic for them.

“If you’ve experienced trauma, it creates fight-or-flight responses to events that may not even be traumatic. This has been a true trauma that has been layered on top of the trauma people already feel,” Dore said. Anxieties are through the roof. One resident checked herself into Ottawa’s mental hospital.

Ottawa’s transit service has rerouted buses out of downtown, so that’s meant more walking in the protest zone. Besides the noise, clients and staff have been harassed on the street, she said, especially if they’re wearing facemasks. They’ve been called sheep and been told to take them off.

“Our BIPOC residents and staff are feeling a lot of fear because they know that there’s some factions that are left that really do espouse racist, misogynistic views,” Dore said. “I mean, you only need to see one swastika or one Confederate flag or hear one racial slur and the fear is there.

“Our cleaner, who is a Black woman—she went to go get her bus and she came back in within a few minutes and she was literally shaking. She felt so unsafe. There were so many people on our street, so many flags, so much noise, and people making comments to her because she was wearing a mask. English is not her first language. She could interpret the tone, but not everything else. And she was literally shaking.”

For the tens of thousands of people who live in earshot of the protest, it’s been “a living hell,” said the city councillor who represents most of them, Catherine McKenney.

McKenney said that in a streamed briefing Wednesday afternoon with Chief Peter Sloly of the Ottawa police.

“Neighbourhoods are under siege,” McKenney said. “Women are being violently harassed. Seniors cannot go into the grocery story without being yelled at.… What’s happening in our residential neighbourhoods is not mobs. It’s one car, one truck, honking horns, driving down sidewalks—children trying to get to school, constant honking. It is terrorizing.”

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Wednesday night, convoy organizer Hark Singh was on patrol on Wellington outside Parliament, doing security around the parked trucks.

“Somebody came in last night and spray-painted six vehicles,” he said.

What did they spray paint? “Dildos. We got them cleaned off.”

Singh has earrings and a trimmed beard and, he said, a four-year-old daughter who wonders where he’s gone. When I talked to him, he was wearing a toque and a “Fuck Trudeau” shirt under his coat. He pointed out how vigorously the convoy people had collected litter and cleared the sidewalks of snow.

He isn’t a trucker: He said he has an irrigation business in Toronto and helped marshal the convoy that headed out from nearby Vaughan. He also said he thinks people should get vaccinated against COVID-19 if they want, wear masks if they want—just not be required to.

His wife, a lawyer, has had two shots, he said, but what good has it done? “She still can’t go into work.”

Businesses nearby have closed. The Rideau Centre mall announced it would shut until at least Sunday, following a post suggesting protesters were going to stage a mass maskless shopping event. That’s nearly $20 million in lost sales, according to one estimate.

They’re effectively suffering through another lockdown, Singh acknowledged. But those lockdowns are just going to keep happening, anyway, he said, unless people stand up to the governments imposing them.

Singh said he understands it’s an inconvenience for the people who live nearby to have trucks on their streets. “But when has there been a fight for freedom that didn’t come with inconvenience?”

He showed me a tent with a pile of canned and dry food for the taking; in another tent down the street, there was hot chocolate and soup, and while we talked, a guy pulling a wagon came past offering Coors Light or coffee.

Singh said there were four refrigerated trucks around somewhere with perishables, and definitely plans for an influx of reinforcements this weekend.

A little farther east at Rideau Street and Sussex Drive, outside the Fairmont Château Laurier (and a luxury condo building) trucks were parked in a rough circle, headlights pointing inward. You could imagine it as some sort of Mad Max fighting ring, but all that was really happening was somebody playing “Old Town Road” while a pickup on the other side rolled coal and people hung out talking.

At 11 p.m., outside the Prime Minister’s Office, which faces Parliament on the south side of Wellington Street—and where the prime minister hasn’t been, because he’s in isolation with COVID-19—the air horns were going full blast.

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Like Singh, growing numbers of Canadians want public health measures rolled back. But it’s only one message of many, many, many from the convoy, whose stated purpose in coming to Ottawa was to overthrow the elected government and replace it with some sort of ruling committee of the Governor General, senators and convoy members that would invalidate public health restrictions everywhere.

Some percentage of the participants believe ludicrous things about vaccines. Some advertise that they want to hang the prime minister.

They have political cover. Current Conservative Leader Candice Bergen and former leader Erin O’Toole both welcomed them and called on Trudeau to meet with them.

At least that was before the convoy arrived in Ottawa. Yet many days in, a group of Saskatchewan Conservatives went out personally to praise the demonstrators. “It’s great to see Canadians championing freedom on Parliament Hill,” MP Kevin Waugh tweeted, enraging Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson.

Friday morning, Quebec City Tory MP Pierre Paul-Hus wrote that it’s time to end the “siege of Ottawa,” partly because the protest’s motivations can’t even be understood; his Niagara-area colleague Dean Allison countered that no, it should remain.

As I write, Toronto and Quebec City are bracing for convoys of their own. So are Charlottetown and Waterloo and Regina. Toronto hospitals near Queen’s Park are suggesting staff hide that they’re health workers when they come in. A border crossing in Coutts, Alta., has been blockaded for days, with increasing panic about the impacts and the local mayor saying the town is suffering.

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Friday morning, with RCMP reinforcements promised, Ottawa police announced they would crack down on bad behaviour outside the core protest zone in front of Parliament and strengthen roadblocks.

That’s what Ottawans have wanted most. But ending the occupation? Sloly doesn’t see a way. There may be no policing solution, he told city council. Requesting military aid is among the options on the table, but he warned the risks involved would be “massive.”

Residents are suffering, workers and businesses are being damaged, the people doing the harm are doing it in pursuit of demands that can’t be met and the police say they can’t stop it. This is happening in Ottawa and on the U.S. border in Alberta for now. But on short notice, it could be anywhere in Canada.