The inquiry into whether Justin Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act was justifiable has a rather peculiar look.
Inquiries normally investigate something that went wrong. Not this one. This one is probing an action that worked, that went off with few hitches, that was met, for the most part, with public acceptance.
The issue of whether the Prime Minister had the right to go so far is a big deal with anti-vaxxers and constitutional scholars and, naturally, the Conservative opposition.
“How many tanks are you asking for I just wanna ask Anita how many we’ve got on hand,” Mr. Mendicino said in response, referring to Defence Minister Anita Anand.
“I reckon one will do!!” Mr. Lametti replied.
OTTAWA – “A fishing expedition”, “little foundation in evidence”, “purely speculative” and a “very significant distraction”.
Those are some of the words used by Emergency Act inquiry commissioner Paul Rouleau in a ruling that sternly dismissed a series of requests by a lawyer for Freedom Convoy organizers relating to government document redactions, a truck license plate and suggestions that a public affairs firm executive was a Liberal “provocateur” who carrried a Nazi flag at the protests in Ottawa.
Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino says the head of the RCMP shared with him sensitive police information the day before the government decided to invoke the Emergencies Act — and warned him that some protesters in Alberta were “willing to go down with the cause.”
“This was a threshold moment for me. There is no doubt about it,” Mendicino told the Public Order Emergency Commission Tuesday.
The minister said he spoke with Commissioner Brenda Lucki on Feb. 13. During that conversation, he said, Lucki updated him on plans to execute a police operation at the blockade near Coutts, Alta.
The question remains … How many RCMP informants were part of this band of revolutionaries?
According to text message exchanges summitted to the Emergencies Act inquiry, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino’s communications director was “encouraging” journalists to investigate who the convoy protesters were before their arrival and where their crowd-sourced funds came from, apparently without knowing if there were any particular concerns to be unearthed.
OTTAWA – Public affairs firm Enterprise Canada says it is considering suing the Freedom Convoy organizers’ lawyer at the Emergencies Act inquiry for making what it called an “absurd and despicable” allegation that one of its senior executives carried a Nazi flag during a Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa.
But Freedom Corp. lawyer Brendan Miller says he is protected by privilege from being sued and he wants two Enterprise Canada executives to testify at the Public Order Emergency Commission about the sighting of Nazi and a Confederate flags during the first weekend of Ottawa protests last winter.
Even the lower standards of Justin Trudeau and his advisers for invoking the Emergencies Act were not met
CSIS Director David Vigneault is the latest senior bureaucrat who seems to believe that it does not matter what the Emergencies Act actually says. What’s written in legislation can be safely ignored if doing so helps the government of the day expand its powers. The act of proposing, amending and passing laws through Parliament is just so tedious.
With a Public Service as partisan as Canada’s all outcomes are predetermined.
OTTAWA — A lawyer for some organizers of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests was ejected from the Emergencies Act inquiry on Tuesday after repeatedly interrupting the judge who is chairing the process.
Commissioner Paul Rouleau raised his voice and called on security to remove Brendan Miller, a lawyer for a charity created by protest leaders including Tamara Lich.
Miller was expressing frustration about how documents provided by the government had redactions, and demanding that a staff member in the office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino be called to testify.
OTTAWA — The RCMP worried that after arriving in Ottawa, participants in the “Freedom Convoy” would try to pinpoint Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s location, documents suggest — just as demonstrators had tried to do during last year’s election campaign.
The concerns are outlined in assessments by the national police force’s intelligence personnel that were tabled as part of evidence presented at a public inquiry probing the Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act in response to last winter’s protests.
The weeks-long demonstrations, which blockaded downtown Ottawa and several border crossings, were driven by opposition to COVID-19 restrictions such as mask and vaccine requirements. Many participants voiced their opposition to the federal government in general and Trudeau himself.
A Durham Regional Police officer has been ordered to work an additional 60 hours after taking aim at the police chief on Instagram.
The decision follows an Oct. 5 disciplinary hearing where Constable Clayton Harnum pled guilty to one count of discreditable conduct.
The charge stems from an Instagram post he shared earlier this year in support of his wife, Const. Erin Howard, who is also a Durham police officer. Around Jan. 24, Howard posted a video of herself to social media. In the video, she appears in uniform while delivering a message of support for the “Freedom Convoy” which occupied downtown Ottawa.
The warm front that passed across Ottawa on Monday morning was caused by a collective sigh of relief emitted by a number of senior ministers and government staffers, after Canada’s top spy revealed in testimony that he advised the prime minister to invoke the Emergencies Act last February to break up the Freedom Convoy.
Conservative deputy leader Melissa Lantsman has challenged Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on his assertion that he wasn’t briefed by security or intelligence officials about China’s alleged funding of 11 candidates during the 2019 federal election.
“Just last week PM Trudeau said he raised the issue with President Xi,” Lantsman wrote in a Twitter post on Nov. 20. “Hard to imagine complaining to the President about something you hadn’t been briefed on?”
… David Vigneault, the head of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, told the Public Order Emergencies Commission about his advice to the prime minister during a closed-door interview earlier this month, according to an unclassified summary.
That summary, released on Monday morning, said Vigneault did not believe the convoy posed a national security threat under the CSIS Act but that invoking the Emergencies Act was still necessary.
Not long ago, I wrote a piece highlighting the arrival of a new form of political control, namely governments’ authorization of banks—without due process—to freeze the bank accounts of members of their citizenry. I noted that this was a form of coercion that had existed in China for some years now, and had recently been adopted by Russia, but I emphasised that it had also been deployed by the Canadian government against a minority of its population—those who participated in the ‘truckers’ protests’—with zero uproar from Canada’s allied nations. I feared that UK parliamentarians had been silent over this tyrannical quashing of the late Queen’s subjects across the Atlantic because, as I wrote then, they were likely “looking over at this innovative model of political control and thinking, ‘Golly, what a clever idea!’”
“CSIS told government Freedom Convoy didn’t pose national security threat day before Emergencies Act invoked.”
That was a headline in the National Post this week describing documents tabled at the public inquiry into the Trudeau government’s suspension of civil rights last winter to deal with the truckers’ protest in downtown Ottawa.
