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These are all good signs. But it’s also had a much bigger impact than Caledonia ever did. As awful as the situation in that small town was, it was contained there. The province eventually made it go away by buying some land from a developer, thus defusing the situation. But it remained hyper-local. The Belleville blockade by a small group of protesters has shut down the backbone of passenger rail travel and transportation logistics in half of Canada. This is already vastly more impactful for millions of people.

Photo by Dave Thomas/Toronto Sun

The disruption, to this point, has been mild — inconvenient for some would-be rail passengers. The idling of large parts of the CN and Via Rail fleets will take time to be felt, and may first be felt by any employees laid off until operations resume. But Canadians, who probably mostly think of trains as quaint 19th-century choo-choos, don’t realize how essential the rail network is to the shipment of literally everything our economy runs on. What is an inconvenience today will become a crisis very quickly, if not resolved.

And about that resolution — what’s taking so long? CN already has a court injunction calling for the rail line to be cleared. All that’s left is for the police to actually enforce it. They haven’t yet, and put out a statement on Friday that amounted to a whole lot of nothing. It’s not clear what the delay is. Perhaps the police are telling the Ontario government that the time isn’t quite right yet, but that they’ll move in, if and when it’s necessary. Perhaps the police are raring to go, but the government is staying its hand, fearful of a public backlash or escalation. Perhaps everyone in authority in Ontario is simply hoping that the situation in B.C. is peacefully and amicably — and rapidly! — resolved, rendering the solidarity blockades elsewhere unnecessary.