For what it's worth, following are slightly edited excerpts from a note
I wrote last night to a friend in Vancouver:

Herewith brief report on ... demo I attended this evening on Parliament
Hill [here in Ottawa].

First, general atmosphere. Huge police presence downtown, helicopters
circling overhead, etc. Traffic blocked off, including large parts of
the retail area near Parliament. Cops brought in from Toronto, etc.,
police vans parked overtly all over the place, full of riot cops. I
hadn't seen such a police presence since Paris demos in the early 1970s!
...

Quite a large crowd on the Hill. Organizers said about 10-15,000
(estimates increased as evening wore on). More than I expected, in fact.
Hard to know where they were from, as there were few banners, mostly
homemade signs, almost all on the war. Very young; I would say at least
half of the demonstrators were under 25. This is something new here.
Very enthusiastic crowd, clearly focused on the war as the major issue.

Speakers from a very diverse milieu. Weakest were labour movement and
NDP [New Democratic Party, social-democratic]. Strongest by far was
Denise Veilleux of UFP [Union des forces progressistes, new left party
in Quebec], the only one to link the war to imperialism and a system of
exploitation and oppression. She got some of the warmest applause and
cheers.

[NDP federal leader] Layton gave an awful speech -- all Kyoto and
missile shield. Not a word about Iraq.... One of the Arab-Canadian
speakers, at the end of a very strong speech, made a point of explicitly
addressing a comment to Layton: we are glad you came here, but why are
you now going to dine with Bush? You can't have it both ways, Mr.
Layton. He got a very warm response from the crowd.

Bloc Québécois speaker... was much better than Layton, and focused in
on the war. There were a lot of Québécois in the crowd, BTW, although
the UFP comrades tell me the antiwar movement just about died in the
Outaouais [Western Quebec region across river from Ottawa] after
February 15, 2003. A number of Anglophone speakers made a real attempt
to address the crowd in French, too, which got a good response. But 95%
of Layton's remarks were delivered in English...

This was generally an unsophisticated crowd, strongly anti-Bush but few
slogans or signs that went beyond the "no war for oil" theme. Carolyn
Parrish [Liberal MP thrown out of party's caucus for anti-Bush remarks]
got perhaps the biggest ovation of the evening, just for being there I
suspect. Interesting, she said in effect that what turned her toward
criticism of the government's foreign policy was her sympathy with the
Palestinians. Got a good response for that.

A young black guy, I think from Toronto, spoke very strongly, and raised
the question of Canadian complicity in the overthrow of Aristide and
subsequent repression in Haiti.

So those are my eyewitness observations. The demo on the Hill seemed
quite well-organized. [I am told that] some unions put a lot of money
into building it, particularly CUPE. The only labour speaker I noted was
from the Ottawa labour council, and he wasn't much better than Layton.

... Tonight's demo was probably almost as big as the Feb. 15/03 action
here, which was the largest of the prewar demos. Of course, in this case
a fair number came from Toronto and Montreal, how many I have no idea.

Richard Fidler