An Emergency in Ottawa
But not for Paul Wells
I just finished reading Paul Wells’ mini-book/long essay on the Rouleau Commission and the Freedom Convoy. It’s a quick read and fun in places. It is part of a new publishing venture called the Sutherland Quarterly.
Paul has published some extracts from “An Emergency in Ottawa,” in “The Line” substack, (consider this also a plug for “The Line)” here:
But once past the fun, which is mostly provided in pen portraits of some of the key participants in the Commission hearings and some right-on witticisms, there is a puzzle, at least for me.
The puzzle is, what did Wells actually make of it all?
I ask as someone who followed the Rouleau commission public hearings day in and day out, wrote a lengthy research paper for the Commission (which may or may not have been read--who knows), wrote about many aspects of the testimony in this substack, and, as an Ottawa resident, witnessed (fortunately at a safe remove) some of the events of the Freedom Convoy occupation of the capital.
I am still wrestling with what to make of the Freedom Convoy and did not find myself particularly enlightened by the treatment of the convoy protests in Justice Rouleau’s final report. Sometimes even-handed, an epithet earned many times by the Justice, can just be an erasure.
I get that Paul Wells would like to bring the whole affair down to earth. It reminds me of the famous remark made by British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain to his then Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, in the wake of one of the many crises of the 1930s, that he should “take an aspirin.” Paul has a similar bromide suggestion in mind.
For Mr. Wells, the Freedom convoy protests were largely a matter of people being “pissed off” after years of ever-changing COVID restrictions, and the government over-reacting. There is a fair amount of caricature layered in to this depiction.
Paul’s take is that the missing element was a willingness on the part of the federal government to “talk” to the protesters. Talk about what, and talk with whom is never quite clear. He just likes the idea of talking as a de-escalation tactic and his hero is an OPP Inspector, Marcel Beaudin, who headed the Ontario Provincial Police force’s PLT (public liaison teams) and was a big advocate for engagement with the protesters.
The penultimate argument in the Wells’ essay is this:
“I think the important question is whether we hear one another. Even when we are tired. Even when we’re scared.”
It’s a nice thought and deeply Canadian in spirit.
I would like to agree, but…I don’t buy it.
Had Wells’ wanted to engage with the argument a little more deeply he would have had to give a fuller picture of the failure of negotiations at the Windsor blockade, a more accurate account of what happened during the Coutts blockade, a more objective picture of the reasoning behind the federal government’s decision not to engage with the protesters in the Ottawa occupation. He might even have needed to mention the effort by protesters at the Surrey BC, border crossing to remount a blockade after the invocation of the Emergencies Act.
Above all, Wells surely needed to do battle with the Prime Minister’s own reflection on the question of talking to the protesters—that they didn’t come to Ottawa to be heard, but to be obeyed…
The question that goes unanswered in the Wells’ account, and indeed in the Rouleau report, concerns the anti-democratic spirit of the Freedom Convoy protests. That is the question that needs grappling with and that is the legacy left behind. There is where the fun and the quick accounts go to die.
Wesley, you seem to fall on the "big up" side of the Convoy. Where the Convoy presented an actual threat to the governance, economy and peace of Canada. Fair enough. You live in Ottawa and, while your excellent work which I have followed for years, likely gives you access to intelligence estimates the rest of us are not privy to, it also smacks of seeing the Convoy through the legacy media lens.
Scary guys with beards and Big Trucks, Big Trucks, had a street party in Ottawa and at a couple of border crossings, bouncy castles and BBQs. If this is a threat to the Canadian State we have a rather serious problem.
The fact is that those bearded guys, with a few excavators, which they own and know how to operate, could close every border crossing, every airport and every port in under two hours. (A fact which the RCMP saboteurs at Coutts who disabled the excavators knew all too well). This Convoy was uniformly peaceful. I suspect the next, if it happens, will not be.
Of course the gov't should have talked to the Convoy. Informally, as the interim leader of the Opposition, Candace Bergman did.
But the Trudeau gov't's lust for a Jan 6 event over rode common sense. These were "domestic terrorists" financed by Americans, organized by Russians who tried to set an apartment building on fire. All false claims but all promoted by the CBC and echoed by the Government of Canada.
The Convoy came to Ottawa to be heard. Citizens have that right. It's in the Charter. A smart government would have heard them.
About a dozen years ago, Justice Brown of the Ontario Superior Court, had to deal with an aboriginal blockade of a national rail line near Sarnia. There was no genuine land claim involved. It was a purely political gesture, designed to attract attention in Ottawa; and as usual, the people who were being targeted (a railway and its customers), had nothing to do with the dispute, even though they were both losing a lot of money. Because - as is now customary - the police were refusing to enforce an injunction that had been issued in order to bring the unlawfulness to an end.
This is what Judge D.M. Brown had to say about the situation at the time:
With all due respect to the Sarnia Police, local police agencies cannot ignore judicial orders under the guise of contemplating how best to use their tactical discretion. Such an approach would have the practical effect of neutering court orders. It is not the purpose of a court order simply to initiate talks or consultations between the police and those whom the court has found to have breached the law. A court order is not one amongst several chips to be played in an ongoing contest between the police and transgressors of legal rights. On the contrary, a court order is intended to initiate the process of bringing unlawful conduct to an end in a short period of time so that the harm which the court has found to be irreparable is brought to an end. [See: Canadian National Railway Co. v. Plain et al. [2012] 114 O.R. (3d) 27 [2012] ONSC 7356]
Once upon a time, long ago, that was both “the law” and the “social expectation” – as it still is in respect of regulating picketing and labour disputes. But that is not the general case any more. Instead, the property and civil rights of citizens and businesses, can now be held hostage by virtually any grievance group that is sufficiently determined to mount a blockade; while, in the meantime, we are told, again and again, that police have an unreviewable discretion to enforce the law, or not, as they see fit.
Regardless the damage that is being caused to other interests, and also, so it seems, despite the Orders of Judges, whom the police believe they are free to ignore.
Thus, it is solemnly intoned, that no one (not even Judges?) must interfere with, or direct, how police do their jobs, (or don’t) because that would be to “politicize” law enforcement – as if non-enforcement were not a wholly political choice!
So Ottawa becomes like Caledonia. Only bigger. And “law enforcement” becomes a laughable misnomer - an oxymoron.
In the result, what was once once regarded as the ordinary “rule of law” and the expectations of civil society, have now been routinely abandoned in favour of the rule of the mob; and what used to be considered the property and “civil rights” of citizens have now become just matters for “negotiation” with the protesters – who, these days, can even count on having cheerleaders in Parliament, where talk is cheap and the established currency is hypocrisy. There is no law; only politics.
Thus, the reality, today, is that if the protesters camp out in your neighbourhood, or take over your local park, or block a bridge or a street, or a rail line, or impede access to a public institution, citizens have no assurance that it will be brought to a timely end. Nor will they necessarily have effective remedies if their interests are affected or ignored. Even if a former Chief Justice of Canada writes a scolding letter to the Globe and Mail!
For example, are the workers and the businesses in the Windsor area, going to be compensated for the unlawful interference with millions of dollars worth of cross-border economic activity? Are the citizens and the businesses of Ottawa going to be compensated for the unlawful nuisance to which they were undeniably subjected? Will the miscreants ever have to make restitution? We’ll see; but I doubt it, because obstruction and intransigence works.
And for that reason, I suspect that we will to see quite a lot more of this kind of thing. Only the locations, and the placards, and the “causes” will change. Because, all that has really happened here, is that populists have adopted the obstructive methods of progressives and aboriginals, and they have learned, like their predecessors, that they can do so with relative impunity. And that is a recipe for imitation and repetition.