Minister was so ‘concerned’ police had lost control
Mendicino testifies at inquiry
OTTAWA • Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino was so “concerned” that Ottawa police had lost control of capital streets to Freedom Convoy protesters that he wanted to tell them to “get control of the situation” and start removing vehicles within a day.
On Feb. 6, just over one week after protests began in Ottawa, Mendicino’s chief of staff Mike Jones sent a text message to the prime minister’s deputy chief of staff Brian Clow that sheds light on his boss’s apparent frustration with the Ottawa Police Service (OPS).
The text messages, made public at the Emergencies Act inquiry Tuesday, also reveal that Mendicino worried about the prime minister’s safety as parliamentarians returned to the House of Commons, and that he wanted to publicly call on police to begin removing vehicles and clearing the streets of Ottawa in short order.
“My boss is pretty amped up; He’s concerned that OPS have lost jurisdiction as there’s no control at all over what’s happening on Wellington (Street). Also concerned for pm safety if he is returning to this this week,” Jones texted Clow.
“He wants to go out and say that OPS needs to get control over the situation, and if they need more from OPP they should make that clear but they should get working on removals within the next 24 hours,” his text message continued.
“And if they aren’t going to do it then we may need to look at other measures,” Jones said in another text, without any more detail.
Testifying at the Public Order Emergency Commission Tuesday, Mendocino explained that one of those additional measures was providing the Ottawa police with RCMP or Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) support if necessary. “One of the other potential measures that we could explore … was how do we get more boots on the ground to help the Ottawa police service?” he said.
The commission is determining if the federal government met the legal threshold to invoke the exceptional powers of the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14. At issue is whether Freedom Convoy protests represented “threats to the security of Canada.”
Throughout his testimony, Mendicino spoke of fears the RCMP commissioner Brenda Lucki passed on to him of the presence of weapons at various protests, namely at the blockade in Coutts, Alta., and possibly in Ottawa.
Lucki testified last week that she didn’t speak to cabinet before they decided to invoke the act, but passed along the information to Mendicino’s chief of staff in the early hours of Feb. 14 that she believed existing authorities could still be used to end the protest — and that police had a plan in place to do so.
Mendicino said cabinet was not aware of that information, but had he been it wouldn’t have “substantially changed” his opinion.
More concerning to him was information Lucki shared the morning before that Feb. 13 meeting, when she told him about the presence of weapons at the Coutts border crossing. RCMP eventually made a significant arrest and seizure of weapons at Coutts.
“She underlined for me that the situation in Coutts involved a hardened cell of individuals who were armed to the teeth with lethal firearms and possessed a willingness to go down with the cause,” he said.
“It spoke volumes about what her state of mind was, which was that this was potentially an escalation of violence that could result in there being gun violence and potentially serious injuries or even fatalities to members of law enforcement and Canadians,” he continued.
He also noted “early reports” from OPS that guns had been brought into Ottawa and “potentially into the parliamentary precinct.”
Mendicino said the early information he received was the same as many other agencies, suggesting that the convoy would only stay through the first weekend. He had concerns of the accuracy of that information.
He said when he saw trucks lined up the length of Wellington Street in front of Parliament, he feared the protesters were not moving. “That ... suggested to me that we were going to be in it for quite some time rather than just the weekend,” he said. “The concerns that I were expressing was that by that first weekend, it was my opinion that it was virtually impossible to enforce the law on Wellington Street.”
Mendicino said he heard from sources through the protest that there were essentially two groups — a large one there simply to protest, and another much more organized and prepared to be violent.
“There was another group that had other more extreme objectives that was much more sophisticated and organized and it’s my recollection that that latter group was interspersed in a number of different locations very tactically,” he said.