Ottawa police, forcibly clearing the truckers protest from the streets, used "tear gas" and "pepper spy" on "peaceful" protesters, according to Rebel News reporter Alexandra Lavoie on Newsmax.
Lavoie shared video showing her screaming in pain after being beaten with a stick, adding she was struck "point blank" with a tear gas cannister.
"I was just doing my job," Lavoie, speaking with a French-Canadian accent, told Monday's "Eric Bolling: The Balance." "I was filming the interaction with the police and the protesters, because it's important to see what is going on on the first line.
"Just to see which side is the violence [was coming] from – I just wanted to report on the real facts and what is really going on there."
Police did not distinguish between protesters and reporters like herself, Lavoie added to host Eric Bolling.
"They just take everybody in the same, both, and they just act – and this is not Canada, what I saw," she lamented.
Lavoie noted a "human chain" to protect the protest encampment was pressed by a riot line of police holding wooden sticks and tear gas guns.
"I didn't really see them pushing the police, just holding the line," she said, before the interaction become violent from one side – that of the riot police.
"They should not have done that," she said. "[There were] children and woman and elderly people present that day – the use of force – they were smashing windows, dragging truck drivers out of their trucks, arresting them.
"It was just horrible to see, using tear gas and pepper spray on the really peaceful people."
Lavoie told Bolling she is fine after being bashed in the face by a wooden stick by the riot- line police – as shown on her video – including her getting shot in the leg "point blank" by a tear gas cannister.
"I don't know if it was on purpose or not," she said of being hit. "I heard the first shot of the tear gas. I saw one of the guns, falling on the ground. I turned my camera, and afterward I get hit three times with the wood stick, and I saw the guns pointing on my legs and afterward when I was on the ground, my face was burning, my leg was hurting.
"It was a point blank tear gas gun, so it was a canister that hit my leg," she added.
Lavoie noted her cameraman was hit in the eyes with tear gas and said she "was completely covered in tear gas."
"I'm actually kind of happy that the aggression happened to me and not to children or another woman, or another person," she said. "I would feel really, really bad for them."
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Eric Mack ✉
Eric Mack has been a writer and editor at Newsmax since 2016. He is a 1998 Syracuse University journalism graduate and a New York Press Association award-winning writer.
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