Trudeau defends use of emergency powers
TORONTO — Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will testify before a public inquiry Friday on his decision to invoke never-before-used emergency powers to clear the self-described “Freedom Convoy” demonstrations by protesters, including some truckers, who for several weeks paralyzed the nation’s capital and snarled trade at major U.S.-Canada border crossings.
His highly anticipated testimony will close the six-week inquiry in Ottawa, where life was upended in late January when big rigs and other vehicles rolled in to blockade roads, including the main drag in front of Parliament, to protest pandemic health measures and Trudeau’s government.
The demonstrations lasted roughly three weeks.
In a country where officials are careful to hew closely to talking points and requests for public records take years to process, the inquiry has offered a rare peek behind the curtain at the mechanics of police and government — and the dysfunction and rivalries that complicated the response to the blockades.
“At the municipal level of police and the interaction between police governance, police and the municipal government, there was infighting, incompetence and lack of preparedness,” said Michael Kempa, a criminologist at the University of Ottawa.
“At the provincial level, there was total indifference to responding with provincial powers ... and then [at the level of ] the federal government, there was mass confusion.”
Thousands of pages of documents, including text messages between cabinet ministers and intelligence reports marked “secret,” have been introduced as evidence, and more than 60 witnesses have testified. They include Canada’s top cop, chief spy, mayors of cities big and small, cabinet ministers and convoy leaders.
Few witnesses have emerged unscathed. A lawyer for convoy organizers was ejected after seeking to advance a baseless conspiracy theory. A cartoon in the Globe and Mail depicted inquiry participants as clowns. The exception was Paul Rouleau, the judge leading the inquiry, who thinks, “Beginning to see a pattern here . ..”
At issue in the inquiry is Trudeau’s invocation on Feb. 14 of the Emergencies Act, a 1988 law that’s supposed to be a tool of last resort, available only when no other law can respond to a national emergency. He revoked the act on Feb. 23, days after a massive police operation cleared the Ottawa blockades.
The law gave authorities sweeping powers to create no-go zones, to temporarily freeze bank accounts belonging to demonstrators and their major donors and to compel tow trucks to clear vehicles blockading roads.
Evidence showed convoy leaders raised nearly $18 million through crowdfunding, cryptocurrency and e-transfers. On one crowdfunding platform, 51 percent of donors identified as American, 43 percent as Canadian.
The Emergencies Act requires a public inquiry be convened to determine whether the threshold for its invocation was met. But as the hearings wrap up, testimony on several key questions — including whether the convoy represented a national security threat, and whether the declaration was needed — has been mixed.
Some police officials said the powers were helpful but unnecessary. A document from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service said invoking the law “would likely galvanize the anti-government narrative” among some protesters and could advance “radicalization pathways toward violence.”
When talk about the act first surfaced, Royal Canadian Mounted Police Commissioner Brenda Lucki testified, she “had no idea what exactly that meant.”
On the eve of Trudeau’s declaration, she said, there was a police plan to end the demonstrations — but she didn’t share that information at cabinet meetings that day.
Asked if she should have, Lucki said, “I guess in hindsight, yeah, that might have been something significant.”
Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor of international relations at Carleton University, called Lucki’s failure to disclose that information “mindboggling.”
CSIS, the intelligence service, assessed that the demonstrations weren’t a national security threat as defined by Canada’s national security law.