Canadians deserve answers
Too much unknown about rail blockades
When Canada’s ongoing spate of rail blockades finally peters out, this country has some work to do. A parliamentary committee might be up to the job, but even a full-on independent inquiry might not be excessive. A small group of Mohawks in Tyendinaga, Ont., in solidarity with an even smaller group of hereditary Wet’suwet’en chiefs, managed to blockade the Canadian National Railway for two weeks, not just holding hostage a chunk of the country’s economy, productivity and mobility, but demanding as ransom the cancellation of a liquefied natural gas pipelines that all First Nations affected by it, and it seems a comfortable majority of their residents, support.
It’s not a national disaster or anything. But as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau belatedly realized, it’s simply not an acceptable outcome in a democracy operating under the rule of law. And there is every reason to believe it could happen again — especially because we don’t really know how or why it ended when it did.
Operating at peak obnoxiousness, Trudeau had scolded those who demanded enforcement of a court order against the Tyendinaga blockade as boors, violence-mongers and idiots: “We are not the kind of country where politicians get to tell the police what to do,” he huffed. And then, frustrated by a lack of Sunny Ways among the federal government’s negotiating partners, he suddenly told the police what to do — or at the very least what he thought should happen.
“It has been two weeks, and the barricades need to come down now,” he told reporters in Ottawa. “The injunctions must be obeyed and the law must be upheld.”
And then, somewhat astonishingly, the Ontario Provincial Police actually upheld the law.
Incandescent hypocrisy aside, this wasn’t in any way offensive. As Asher Honickman and Leonid Sirota argued in the National Post this week, the principle of independent police operations should not extend to allowing police simply not to enforce the law. But the way it went down was very strange, leaving us with many questions.
Trudeau wasn’t even giving implicit orders to a federal police force, but rather to the Ontario Provincial Police, who had hitherto been as proud not to enforce the injunction as Trudeau had been to support non-enforcement. Surely we aren’t being asked to believe the timing was coincidental, that the OPP and Trudeau independently decided at the same moment that it was both proper and safe to intervene.
So does the OPP take orders from the PM now, or just cues? If so, why? And where was Queen’s Park in the meantime? We know what Premier Doug Ford was doing: Barking at Trudeau to fix the problem. What was Solicitor-general Sylvia Jones doing?
The relatively undramatic end to the Tyendinaga blockade, after two weeks of dire warnings about Oka and Ipperwash reruns, raises another key question: Is there any reason we should believe it was safer to enforce the injunction on Day 14, as opposed to Day One or Two or Six?
Attempting negotiations was a perfectly sensible approach, even though it was very difficult to discern any room for compromise when one of the blockaders’ demands was so simple, blunt and inconceivable: shutting down the Coastal Gaslink pipeline project. But the government is likely to face similarly unbending demands from future blockaders: Shutting down the Trans Mountain pipeline project, for example. Surely we can’t establish “two weeks of futility and then enforcement” as a policy moving forward. (Some might argue it was already established by a 13-day blockade of CN tracks near Sarnia, Ont., in 2013 — but that wasn’t nearly as crippling a blow to the railway’s operations.)
Police in Quebec were perfectly happy to enforce an injunction against a blockade on Montreal’s South Shore, which ended swiftly and without incident. Another on Mohawk territory in Kahnawake remains in place, and Premier François Legault has been excoriated for suggesting police face a heavily armed populace there — but at least it’s an attempt at an explanation. When it comes to the OPP’S inaction, we have none. For that matter, we probably deserve some insight into how protesters were able to set a roaring bonfire next to a moving train in Tyendinaga, wholly unmolested, just a couple of days after the blockade came down.
If the OPP simply defaults to inaction, that needs to change before next time — or perhaps it would rather cede jurisdiction over the railways.
Maybe it makes more sense for a single federal force like the RCMP to be in charge of protecting such critical nationwide infrastructure, and perhaps that force needs new powers. Conservative leadership candidate Erin O’toole proposes a “Freedom of Movement Act” that would “make it a criminal offence to block a railway, airport, port, or major road.”
But the key is enforcement. Surely what these blockaders are doing is already covered off by something in the Criminal Code: common nuisance, or causing a disturbance?
More questions to which all Canadians, not least rank-and-file Wet’suwet’en who just want the damn pipeline built, deserve some credible, official answers.