Imad Arraj, who installs HVAC systems and helps his wife run an Ottawa hunting and fishing shop, was at the protest on Tuesday night with a cousin. “It did a lot of damage,” he said of pandemic restrictions. “Me myself, I’m sitting home, I’m just feeling so down because all these friendships that you used to have, get together for a card game or whatever, it’s no longer there. We disconnected from each other.” He spoke bitterly of the 10-person limit on indoor gatherings in Ontario over the winter holidays. “We used to have a lot of people at our house — my brothers, my sisters, my mom come to visit,” he said sadly.Before the Freedom Convoy came to Ottawa, Arraj said, he’d never taken part in a demonstration. “I was in depression, sitting at home. I thought I was alone. I thought I was going crazy. I thought I was the only person thinking that way,” he said. “And when this happened, I came down to see.” What he saw uplifted him. “The love that you’ll receive here, you are never, ever going to see it anywhere else,” he said.For many other Ottawans, though, the protests have been a siege, not a love fest. Locals described the incessant blaring of horns — which have ebbed, but not stopped, after an injunction — as a form of psychological torture. An Asian-inspired ice-cream shop closed for several days after a member of its staff who was walking to work was confronted by two men and shoved to the ground for wearing a mask. “Based on the accounts we’ve heard from our neighbors, this behavior is not an isolated incident,” said a statement on the shop’s Instagram feed.Not everyone at the protests comes from the far right, but the organizers do. Among them are Tamara Lich, formerly a leading figure in the fringe Maverick Party, which promotes the secession of three of Canada’s Western provinces, and Patrick King, a “great replacement” conspiracy theorist who has railed against a plot to use refugees “to depopulate the Anglo-Saxon race because they are the ones with the strongest bloodlines.”The crowds themselves contain a number of extremists. At an encampment an the border crossing in Coutts, Alberta, four people were arrested and charged with conspiracy to murder police officers. Two of them reportedly had ties to a white-nationalist network called Diagolon, whose founder, Jeremy MacKenzie, has been part of the Ottawa demonstrations.