Learning the lessons of the trucker convoy

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s invocation of the Emergencies Act last winter had long ago found support among Canadians as a response to the protests that had clogged the nation’s capital and border crossings.

That decision has received the weighty endorsement of Justice Paul Rouleau, though he cautioned it was a conclusion he reached “with reluctance.”

Rightly so.

Rouleau’s exhaustive study of the factors leading to the chaos of last year’s occupation of Ottawa and blockading of international borders confirmed what many Canadians instinctively knew — a series of police and political breakdowns left the Trudeau government no option but to use the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history. It was, Rouleau said in his report of the Public Order Emergencies Commission, a crisis born of a lack of anticipation and collaboration.

That is the takeaway from his five-volume report. We should never have got to the point where the use of the act was even contemplated and for that, there is ample blame to go around. Trudeau shares in that blame, and he was right to show some contrition Friday.

The fault with the anticipation begins with the Ottawa Police Service which ignored intelligence indicating that this trucker convoy was a different challenge than the regular protests those living in the national capital know so well. Former chief Peter Sloly thought he was going to deal with a traffic problem. Rouleau concluded that the police operational plan “counted on the best and did not plan for the worst.” Ottawa police were also beset with communications and strategic breakdowns. Rouleau concludes there were so many problems at so many policing levels, that any effort to lay it all at the feet of Sloly smacked of “scapegoating.”

The lack of collaboration was termed nothing less that “a failure of federalism” by Rouleau. Instead of politicians working toward a solution, Canadians got partisanship, buck-passing and political toxicity. Canadians needed their leaders to rise above politics, but “unfortunately, in January and February 2022, this did not always happen,” Rouleau wrote.

Again, there is much blame to pass around, but the lion’s share clearly falls to Premier Doug Ford and Sylvia Jones, then the provincial solicitor-general. Ford “abandoned” the residents of the province’s second largest city, acting only when trade was threatened at the Windsor border. Jones claimed 1,500 OPP officers were on the ground in Ottawa. It was really 1,500 officer shifts. An honest mistake or political spin? We don’t know because neither Ford nor Jones would testify or even sit for an interview with commission counsel.

Have our political leaders learned from this crisis? Trudeau, finally, said Friday that he regretted his public comments about a “fringe minority” taking to the streets, a comment Rouleau said added to the frustration of the protesters. There is a very small number of people who deliberately spread vaccine misinformation that led to death and hardship for some Canadians, Trudeau said, but they represent “a small subset of people who were just hurting.”

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who coddled the convoy at its outset, tried to make the best of an uncomfortable position and failed, trotting out his now familiar litany of misery in the country, claiming he only backed law-abiding protesters and saying Trudeau caused the unrest and wanted the occupation. Poilievre was still preaching to the darkest impulses that led some of the protesters to occupy the capital or block border crossings.

Rouleau also wrote eloquently about the rise of populism that led to the so-called “Freedom Convoy,” something he said transcended anger with vaccine mandates. Over the past decade, he said, it has been driven by economic marginalization, social anxiety and distrust of political institutions.

The Emergencies Act should never be imposed lightly and the threshold for its use must be the highest possible. But our leaders and police must also learn from this and ensure we never get to this point again, because the sentiments that fuelled the protest have not disappeared.