Police should focus their finite resources on protecting at-risk communities and finding those responsible for acts of violence

After a video circulated online over the weekend of a police officer delivering coffee to pro-Palestinian protesters blocking the overpass at Highway 401 and Avenue Road in Toronto, Liberal MP Marco Mendicino tweeted that such actions “will just embolden more deliberate obstruction of traffic.… Laws exist to prevent this. They need to be enforced!”

Which is a little rich coming from a man who, as public safety minister, oversaw the first-ever invocation of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa — demonstrations that also could have been contained by … enforcing existing traffic laws.

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Perhaps we should give Mendicino the benefit of the doubt and assume he learned a lesson from the Liberals’ heavy-handed approach to that situation — a decision that continues to haunt them politically.

More likely is that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is inclined to pussyfoot around demonstrations by politically favoured groups — such as the Indigenous-led protests in early 2020 that shut down many of the country’s railways and today’s pro-Palestinian rallies — and crack down hard on those that vehemently oppose his government.

As disruptive as the anti-Israel demonstrations across the country have been, they have not reached the level of the Freedom Convoy, which blocked border crossings and brought downtown Ottawa to a standstill for weeks.

Yet for all of Trudeau’s remarks about the convoy being a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views,” and its use of “Nazi symbolism” and “racist imagery,” the pro-Palestinian protests, which have now morphed into........

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