The first ten days of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s hearings have had police sabre rattling, intergovernmental turf wars, municipal palace intrigue, phantom honking, and plenty of incompetence. They’ve had everything. Well, everything except a national emergency.
Anyone watching for bombshell evidence justifying the unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act has, by now, seen the opposite. Every member of law enforcement to testify under oath has said the Emergencies Act was unnecessary.
Some have said it was helpful, but this is a red herring (and not even a surprising one).
Contrary to what Justin Trudeau’s legions of online defenders may think, this doesn’t mean the Emergencies Act is on solid ground. Police used the tools available to them, including when the Emergencies Act was among those tools.
This is neither explosive nor relevant. If Public Safety Canada were to issue police Aston Martins, I’m sure they’d find use for them – that doesn’t mean they couldn’t also make do with Dodge Chargers. This is critical to the question before the Commission.
The Commission hearings are painfully long and dense, and at times have veered into territory that is of little relevance to whether Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act.
Which much hay has been made about the unprecedented nature of the convoy and the use of the Emergencies Act, we can be thankful the act is as direct as it is about when it applies.
For the purposes of this Act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.
The last line is key. The Emergencies Act is not for when police can’t get their act together or for when the federal government is embarrassed by a group of truckers. It’s for when all other laws on the books just won’t cut it.
Inconveniently for the federal government, the police in charge of dealing with the convoy are convinced they did have the existing laws on their side, if not the resources (which could be, and were, assigned without the Emergencies Act).
“I would say they were beneficial, but to say ‘necessary,’ I would say no,” Ottawa Police Service Superintendent Robert Bernier testified Wednesday about the provisions the Emergencies Act brought in.
Bernier also said that the plan the Ottawa Police Service used to remove the protest was the plan he developed before the Emergencies Act was in play.
Last week, now-retired Ontario Provincial Police chief superintendent Carson Pardy sang a similar tune.
“In my humble opinion, we would have reached the same solution with the plan that we had without either of those pieces of legislation,” Pardy said, adding that solution would have taken place on the same timeline as it did with the Emergencies Act in place.
This is a far cry from the debunked claim by Trudeau and his cabinet that police were the ones demanding the Emergencies Act in the first place.
Setting aside the absurd Purge comparisons the Commission heard in week one, no one has offered any evidence of espionage, sabotage, clandestine foreign-influenced activities, state-sponsored violence, or any violence for that matter.
Those are the circumstances necessary to find a “threat to the security of Canada” for the purposes of a public order emergency declaration. I’ve read through them multiple times and still haven’t found anything about bouncy castles, hay bales, and pig roasts.
The Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act, which sets out the above criteria, specifically says it “does not include lawful advocacy, protest or dissent.”
One detail that has become abundantly clear throughout the Commission is the federal government’s refusal to engage with convoy protesters, even when the City of Ottawa was producing results through its own talks with them (which I describe at length in my book).
One need not like the convoy, agree with its message, or respect its tactics to accept that it did not create an emergency. And even if it did, police already had the legal tools to deal with it.
I can hear the critics in the distance shout, “Well, why didn’t they?” It’s a fair question, and one that comes back to the internal politics of the Ottawa Police Service, which at one point went through three chiefs in as many days. There were different views on how to handle the protest, with some prioritizing deescalation and negotiation more than others.
There was good reason for this, as it was through negotiation that convoy organizers agreed to get the trucks out of residential neighbourhoods and onto Wellington St. before Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act halted the already-underway relocation.
This week, we learned that the the deputy minister for Public Safety Canada brought a proposal to cabinet about the possibility of negotiating, but was shut down. It’s almost as if the Emergencies Act was not the last resort, but Trudeau’s desired choice.
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Excellent. And so was your book.
Brilliant as always Andrew.