Justin Trudeau had already won the battle of public opinion, last November, with his appearance before the Commission on the state of emergency responsible for examining the use of this exceptional law which suspended certain rights of demonstrators in the Freedom convoy. On Friday, he received the blessing of the president of the Commission, Franco-Ontarian judge Paul S. Rouleau.
The holding of this commission and the publication of the resulting report are an obligation contained in the Emergency Measures Act. It must be noted that the judge did not spare his efforts. The report comes in five volumes totaling 2321 pages with appendices. The task was “monumental”, he says, and he mentions without false modesty that he produced a “thorough and comprehensive” report.
The commissioner did not content himself with an overview of the circumstances that led the Trudeau government to declare a state of emergency and the actions it took thereafter. It is the whole phenomenon of the convoys that he examined as well as the reaction – deficient, it was noted – of the authorities in the face of events. The movement is analyzed: its evolution, its leaders, its organization, its participants. The financing of the convoys, whether from Canadian or foreign sources, as well as the role that disinformation and social media have played in the rise of the movement are reviewed. Of course, the failures of the police do not escape his scrutiny.
Since the Act passed 35 years ago had never been used, the judge could rely on no precedent to decide whether or not to pass judgment on the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke it. Although it is up to the courts to decide, the magistrate decided to present his own point of view and he did well. He concluded that “the very strict criteria” for resorting to the Act have been met. The Trudeau cabinet had “reasonable grounds to believe”, as the legal expression goes, that a “national crisis” existed.
Paul Rouleau comes to this conclusion “reluctantly” and “reluctantly,” he writes. ” […] reasonable and informed people might come to a conclusion different from mine. Because it is abnormal that the State should suspend the rights of citizens to enforce order. One thing to remember from the voluminous report is that recourse to the Act could have been avoided if the competent authorities had done their job. It was the series of mistakes they made that caused the crisis.
Such a situation demands that all levels of government “work together for the common good”. It is necessary that “their leaders ignore politics”, underlines the judge, an allusion to the premier Doug Ford, who did nothing to ensure that Ontario fully assumes its responsibilities on its territory, for fear of alienating itself right-libertarian sympathizers and other citizens who drink in populist misinformation.
The events represent not only a failure in terms of maintaining order, but are also “a failure of federalism”, believes the judge. In order to “preserve national unity while supporting regional diversity”, cooperation and collaboration are required. It recommends that federal, provincial and territorial governments set “national standards” for policing major protests. The judge, appointed by Jean Chrétien to the Superior Court of Ontario in 2002, expresses in his own way the centralizing evolution of the Canadian federation. If the provinces or municipalities that are its extension do not properly assume their responsibilities, national standards must be enacted and it is up to the federal government to ensure that they are respected. This is the same reasoning that Ottawa invoked for health funding with the implicit consent of Ontario. Some provinces are too happy to shed their responsibilities, which nevertheless fall to them by virtue of their constitutional jurisdictions, to leave them in the hands of the “national” government. We are witnessing a form of consented infantilization of the provinces, which leads to an increasingly unitary federal state and a federation that is less and less real.
Obviously, in Quebec, the point of view is not the same. There is no Quebec government that would immediately accept that public security in Quebec be supervised by Ottawa. In fact, it happened once, in 1970, with the War Measures Act being invoked under false pretences. But this is another story.