All of this has become necessary because we have always been late. None of this would have happened if Bruno Marchand had been mayor of Ottawa rather than Quebec. Or if we had listened to the famous maxim: “To govern is to foresee. »
Posted at 6:00 a.m.
We won’t dwell on this for long, but everything that happened in Ottawa was predictable and avoidable. A highly publicized convoy of semi-trailers whose intentions and destination are known could have been diverted without giving it the possibility of taking the city center of the country’s capital hostage.
We will have time, in the weeks and months to come, to find those responsible, but it is already clear that we will have to look to the municipal and police authorities of the city of Ottawa, the provincial government of Ontario, which has been for a long time to absent subscribers and also to the federal government, which has long waited for others to act.
Summon the Emergency Measures Act would not have been necessary if the competent authorities had acted in time. After all, what needed to be done was not that complicated: it was to move or tow a few hundred trucks from downtown Ottawa.
It was not easy, it was necessary to provide technical means and to prevent violence, but it is certainly not impossible in the country where the telephone, insulin and pacemaker were invented.
Importantly, it didn’t require invoking the new version of the War Measures Act. And if the Trudeau government invoked it – despite the objections of several provinces, including Quebec – it was only because it had lost political control of the situation and had to give the impression of doing something. .
By dint of waiting for the occupation of Ottawa to resolve itself, we have created others, such as that of the Ambassador Bridge between Sarnia and Detroit. To the point where it took an intervention from the White House to convince Canada and Ontario to act. Let’s just say that’s not exactly the kind of attention Canada likes to get from the President of the United States.
Moreover, one is entitled to ask what are the powers of the Emergency Measures Act which the government absolutely needs.
But if we have come to that, according to the government, let’s see if the law can still have some useful effects. Especially for its financial powers which will make it possible to examine a very disturbing aspect of this whole crisis: that is to say the financing coming from the United States.
Funding from abroad for a movement that resulted in the illegal occupation of Parliament Hill and much of the city of Ottawa as well as major border crossings is not trivial and c is disturbing. Especially since we know that we have had to deal with a very well organized and very well financed movement.
We also know from leaks that a good half of the donations to Canadian truckers came from abroad, mainly from the United States, at least on one of the crowdfunding platforms used.
In addition, when the financing of these platforms like GoFundMe or then GiveSendGo dried up at the beginning of the month after they realized that the money thus distributed was supporting an illegal occupation, we found other forms of financing. , or cryptocurrencies, which implies well-organized financing.
We can fear links that would become increasingly close between the most right-wing movements in Canada and those in the United States. Movements supported by the media where it is fashionable to denounce the “socialist regime” which prevails north of the border. When it’s not to claim – some ironically, but not always – that Justin Trudeau is the son of Fidel Castro.
As said at New York Times Professor Stephanie Carvin. of Carleton University, “the biggest mistake here in Canada is to think that the movement [des camionneurs] was infiltrated by extremists. It’s an extremist movement that has gotten everyone’s attention.
But if half of the financing came from abroad, it is also because the other half came from Canada. And, on this side, the government should wonder about its own attitude in all this file.
As Liberal MP Joël Lightbound pointed out, the government has exacerbated tensions since the election campaign by the tone it has used towards the unvaccinated.
The Emergencies Act is only the extension of this attitude. It is to be hoped that its use will be limited in time as well as in its effects and that afterwards the government will adopt the tone of reconciliation.