Saying Ontario can’t afford the disruptions of border blockades and the “siege” of downtown Ottawa any longer, on Friday Premier Doug Ford declared a state of emergency across his province.

Here’s what you need to know:

What does the declaration mean? An emergency declaration gives a government the power to ignore some of the rules it otherwise imposes on its own actions. In this case, Ford said Ontario plans to levy fines of up to $100,000 and jail people for up to a year for blocking critical infrastructure, from border crossings to bridges to health facilities to municipal streets. It will also “consider taking away the personal and commercial licences of anyone who doesn’t comply with these orders,” he said.

How long will this last? Solicitor General Sylvia Jones said the initial declaration is to last 42 hours, but it could be extended. The Ontario government also plans to put a version of the measures into regular legislation this spring.

Why now? The blockade at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont., seems to have been the breaking point. “Our economy in Ontario is built on trade, especially with our partners in the United States,” Ford said, and the goods that cross it are critical to the auto industry, other factories and food processors. While he appreciates the right to protest, he said, “that right cannot and must not extend to cutting off that lifeline.”

Besides the immediate impact on factories that don’t have inputs or the capacity to move their outputs across the border, U.S. politicians very quickly began using the blocked link as evidence for why relying on Canada as a trade partner is a bad idea.

Has it made any difference yet? Before Ford spoke, demonstrators in Windsor opened one lane for traffic entering Canada. The Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association also went to court to seek an injunction to order the protesters out, with the backing of the City of Windsor and the Ontario government.

“A shutdown of operations would be catastrophic and it is proving to be catastrophic,” the association’s lawyer Mike Wills argued in a virtual hearing—and he added that a lack of parts is also stopping car repairs, not just manufacturing.

Justice Geoffrey Morawetz granted the injunction—curtly sweeping aside objections from lawyers speaking on behalf of the Windsor demonstrators—and ordered the blockades to be cleared by 7 p.m.

Besides auto parts and food, what’s the Ambassador Bridge important for? It’s a huge conduit for the Canada-U.S. trade in medical products. According to Statistics Canada data obtained by The Logic, Canada exported more than $2.2 billion in medicine over the bridge in 2021 and imported more than $1.9 billion worth. We also imported more than $1.4 billion in blood products and vaccines (which are part of the same trade category). They’re dwarfed by auto-related trade and food products collectively, but still in the top 10 categories of goods that move across the bridge.

Tim Brady, the chair of the Ontario Pharmacists Association (and a pharmacist in Essex County, just outside Windsor) said in an interview that pharma imports from the U.S. are mostly brand-name drugs, including patented formulations of common medications such as insulin. Although individual pharmacies stock on something close to a just-in-time model, the distributors that serve them typically keep a week to two weeks of supply on hand in case of unexpected interruptions.

“If it became critical, they would probably shift to other means of transport,” Brady said.

Why is the bridge so vulnerable? Partly because it’s old. Completed in 1929, on the Canadian side it connects to a spaghetti plate of city streets.

The main approach, Windsor’s Huron Church Road, was once a provincial highway but in the 1990s it was one of several such roads then-premier Mike Harris’s government downloaded onto municipal governments to save the province money. That complicates the question of jurisdiction a little, since the blockade has been on a city street (municipal), leading to an international border (federal), and the key powers and resources to break the roadblock are provincial.

The new Gordie Howe International Bridge, under construction nearby, will run directly off the end of Ontario’s Hwy. 401, a provincial road, the just-departed former chair of the Windsor-Detroit Bridge Authority, Dwight Duncan, told The Logic. He was Ontario’s finance minister before heading the authority for six years.

“When designing the border transportation system many different scenarios were considered, including those that may result in the restriction of access to the ports of entry or bridge, such as a protest,” Heather Grondin, vice-president of the authority, added in a statement. “Security features and processes have been built into the design and developed with agencies.”

The authority has been watching the Ambassador Bridge blockade closely, she wrote, and will consider any lessons in its operational plans once the Gordie Howe bridge opens.

Plus, of course, there’ll be another bridge: “The most important feature is with the new bridge there will be redundancy at the border crossing,” Duncan said.