(Ottawa) The Trudeau government was right to use the Emergency Measures Act to end the freedom convoy and blockades of border crossings elsewhere in the country in February 2022. Judge Paul Rouleau comes to this conclusion “with reluctance” in his voluminous 2,320-page report released on Friday.
The President of the Commission on the State of Emergency considers that these demonstrations did indeed constitute a threat to national security, even if there was no serious and generalized violence. The government’s concern about the emergence of new blockades of border crossings, railways or ports was also reasonable, he said.
“It may well be that serious violence could have been avoided even without the declaration of emergency,” he admits. The possibility that it could have been avoided does not make the decision wrong. »
In his report, he writes that the organizers of the freedom convoy had lost control. The many trucks had become embedded in the streets of the city center of the federal capital and constituted a risk for the safety of the citizens. The longer the demonstration lasted, the greater the risk of violence.
PHOTO ADRIAN WYLD, THE CANADIAN PRESS ARCHIVES
Judge Paul Rouleau
“The Cabinet had information indicating a threat of serious violence for a political or ideological purpose,” he notes. There were threats to elected officials and public officials, and some protesters were beginning to consider “increasingly the use of violence” to end public health measures against COVID-19.
The judge gives as an example the memorandum of understanding of Canada Unity which proposed to overthrow the government with the help of the Governor General and the President of the Senate. He also notes the “power grab” comments made on social media by Patrick King, one of the protest’s leading figures, and the online rhetoric about holding a “Nuremberg Trial 2.0” with citizen arrests of public health officials. The discovery of a weapons and ammunition cache at the Coutts Blockade, Alberta, heightened fears of “serious violence for a political or ideological purpose.” »
The government was therefore right to believe that “the life, health and safety of Canadians were seriously in danger” and that the situation could degenerate, become dangerous and unmanageable, he writes.
Judge Rouleau noted the “series of failures” by police forces that helped to spiral the situation in downtown Ottawa out of control. “Legal demonstrations have descended into illegality, to the point of provoking a situation of national crisis,” he underlines.
He also points to the “failure of federalism” because governments have failed to set aside their partisanship “in favor of the common good”. Ontario Premier Doug Ford’s inaction in the face of the freedom convoy was repeatedly highlighted during the commission’s hearings.
He specifies that he agrees with the government “with reluctance” since the “State should generally deal with crisis situations without resorting to emergency powers”, except in rare circumstances when it is not in able to “guarantee the safety of citizens and property”.
The judge issued 56 recommendations, including that of modernizing the definition of the state of emergency in the law. He believes that the government must replace the definition of national security threat that applies to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service of the Emergency Measures Act by a new definition that would better capture situations that could pose “a serious risk to public order, today and in the foreseeable future”.