Judge Paul Rouleau explicitly approves of the invocation of emergency measures by the federal government to put an end to the Freedom Convoy last winter, an event described as a “national crisis” which showed a “failure of federalism”.
“The decision to invoke the law was appropriate,” said Franco-Ontarian judge Paul Rouleau in a long-awaited report tabled in Parliament on Friday.
According to him, “the very high threshold for invoking the law has been reached”, although he comes to this conclusion “reluctantly”. This was the first time the Emergencies Act had undergone such a mandatory review, as the law had never been used in its nearly 35 years of existence.
The emergency measures were imposed nine days from February 14, 2022, and gave law enforcement additional powers, such as freezing protesters’ bank accounts and commandeering heavy tow trucks. A year later, Judge Rouleau concluded that the invocation of the Act had above all a deterrent effect, by discouraging protesters from continuing to blockade Ottawa.
The freezing of bank accounts was a reasonable measure, he judges, and the possibility of requisitioning the tow trucks was an effective measure, but above all to allow the Ontario police to pass the bill on to Ottawa.
Agree with Justin Trudeau
The police authorities were faced last year with a situation which “degenerated and risked becoming dangerous and unmanageable”, after the three-week occupation of the Canadian capital by this vast protest movement opposed to sanitary measures, which joined many Quebecers from January 29, 2022.
The commissioner thus accredits the main argument of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, during his testimony in November, according to which the situation was becoming more and more explosive when resorting to emergency measures.
“It is unfortunate that such a situation has occurred, because in my opinion it could have been avoided. […] Legal demonstrations have descended into illegality, to the point of provoking a situation of national crisis”, can we read in the imposing document of more than 3200 pages spanning five volumes.
Commissioner Rouleau believes that this slippage is the consequence of an “inability to foresee such a moment and to properly manage legitimate demonstrations”. He believes that better collaboration between the levels of government would have made it possible to avoid chaos, in particular by talking to the demonstrators. An expert who called the case a “failure of federalism” had the right words, writes the Franco-Ontarian judge.
In particular, it recommends improving collaboration between police forces, and broadening the definition of a threat to national security in the Emergencies Act to move away from the narrow description of the Intelligence Service Act. Security (CSIS). The Commissioner is sorry that the Premier of Ontario, Doug Ford, refused to testify during the investigation, nothing more.
Font failure
Judge Paul Rouleau severely blames the police forces. Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly would have trusted his subordinates and would not have seen the slippages of the Convoy coming. Before the heavyweights arrived in Ottawa, The duty had yet reported that its participants wanted to stay there for days, even weeks, until the federal government waived its vaccination and health obligations.
“Much of the mess in Ottawa was the result of the OPS mistaken belief [Service de Police d’Ottawa] regarding the duration of the protests,” the report details.
Ex-Chief Sloly had “not developed a comprehensive operational plan to end the protests”. Instead, he had drafted a policing protocol described as a “sub-plan” by Justice Rouleau, which gave his partners the erroneous impression that there was in fact a plan.
Judge Rouleau also recommends that the Canadian government conduct a review of how federal intelligence agencies share their information with other levels of government.
The public hearings showed that problems with sharing intelligence on the Freedom Convoy led the Ottawa police to rely on incomplete reports of questionable professionalism, while reports from provincial agents on the activities of the protesters were accessible to them.
The provinces should also be consulted during the next invocation of emergency measures, notes the Rouleau report. Quebec, in particular, was opposed to this exceptional law applying on its territory. The judge believes that the Trudeau government could have geographically restricted the measures, although he accepts his explanations for having imposed them on the whole country.
After hearing 76 witnesses, including police officers, demonstrators, civil servants and municipal and federal politicians, and then a whole series of experts, Judge Rouleau came to the conclusion that the demands of the Freedom Convoy “were shaped by a landscape in line completely riddled with misinformation”.
The events of the winter, “a torrent of political protest and social unrest”, were extraordinary, “but not entirely unpredictable[s] “, notes the judge. According to him, all levels of government should now study the impact on society of misinformation present on social networks.