Parliamentarians see no clear justification for the use of emergency measures last February in what they can read from the vastly redacted, disorganized and fragmentary mass of documents that the Trudeau government sent them about the Freedom Convoy.
“If they didn’t find anything on the level of national security, how was the Prime Minister justified in invoking the emergency measures? asks Bloc Québécois MP Rhéal Fortin.
The elected official is one of the parliamentarians who have been entrusted by the House of Commons with the mission of studying how Ottawa has used the special powers conferred by the Emergency Measures Act. This law was invoked for the first time in its history in February, when many trucks were parked in front of the federal parliament.
After several months of waiting, the Special Joint Committee on the declaration of a crisis situation received hundreds of pages of documents from various federal departments and agencies at the end of the summer. This is, in theory, the bulk of the government’s information about the Freedom Convoy protests, which the emergency measures were supposed to put an end to.
According to Mr. Fortin, this way of doing things is akin to “drowning out the evidence”, by mixing relevant information with superfluous information. “It’s a nasty problem. It’s dishonest stuff. We have a mandate to investigate the situation. The government prevents us from being effective. […] They try to make us waste our time, ”he complains.
On the convoy, not on its dangerousness
The duty obtained 1,200 pages of evidence before their scheduled publication by the committee. This number excludes documents that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) added at the last minute.
The pages obtained show in particular that several other border crossings were targeted by small convoys this winter (including that of Lacolle, in Quebec), that the airspace of several cities was closed for fear of their overflight by protesters or even that a US citizen ended up at Canadian customs with a gun twice when he got lost en route to a protest.
Apart from this kind of anecdotes, these documents contain few new elements allowing us to judge the real dangerousness of the Freedom Convoy demonstrators.
For example, the information provided by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), three-quarters of the pages of which contain at least one redacted passage, details the monitoring of interference by foreign governments or ideological extremists planning acts of violence. There is no indication that they detected any of these threats within the convoy.
The closest thing to foreign interference is in a passage from a report by the Ministry of Public Security noting that media close to the Government of India have made “overt efforts” to cover and criticize the Canadian response to the convoy. “The networks of “trolls” and bots [sic] pro-Indian government amplifies these narratives,” it read.
The documentation shows that the government kept a close watch on the possible presence of firearms in Freedom Convoy demonstrators, which CSIS called “a rallying point for anti-government, anti-authoritarian, anti-vaccination groups conspiracy theories and xenophobes from all over North America and other Western countries”.
Other than the large arms seizure in Coutts, Alberta, and various suspected arms acquisitions elsewhere, the visible sections of the documents hardly demonstrate that the Ottawa protesters were actually armed or dangerous.
Missing evidence
Also a member of the parliamentary committee, Conservative Senator Claude Carignan also believes that the information available to date does not allow us to conclude that emergency measures are necessary. That said, departments have censored passages and even whole pages of documents.
“It is redacted with a vengeance, and it is not justified when it is redacted. The other thing is that there are missing documents. There are records that there was a meeting, but the minutes are not there. »
New Democratic Party (NDP) MP Matthew Green voted with his party in favor of emergency measures in February. He too is very disappointed not to have access to all the evidence the government has to justify its decision.
“It becomes a frustration for me at this committee, to ask for documents that we refuse to provide, or to have them in their entirety, since it is impossible to read certain documents because they are so redacted. [C’est] history of invoking the Emergencies Act. I believe it is the committee’s duty to get to the bottom of things, regardless of which side Quebecers or Canadians are on on this issue. »
Liberal Rachel Bendayan “understands the concerns” of her colleagues on the committee, but remains convinced that the merits of the decisions taken this winter will be demonstrated. Although the parliamentary committee must mainly examine how the government has used its special powers, she considers that it “is important to answer this question, if the invocation of the legislation was justified”.
The parliamentary committee is also hearing testimony, such as that of former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly on Thursday, that the police plan to restore order did not require emergency measures, but more of officers.
In addition to the committee, a public inquiry into the reaction to the Freedom Convoy will begin next Thursday. The Commission on the State of Emergency, led by Judge Paul Rouleau, expects to receive documents that the government considers to be covered by cabinet business secrecy. Justin Trudeau and his Minister of Public Security, Marco Mendicino, must notably appear there.