Justin Trudeau called out for labelling convoy protesters but Emergencies Act report finds he met threshold to shut them down

OTTAWA—Police dysfunction, stubborn politics and a failure of federalism turned last winter’s “Freedom Convoy” protests into a national crisis that warranted the first-ever use of the Emergencies Act, Ontario Justice Paul Rouleau concluded in a much-anticipated report.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau holds a news conference on Parliament Hill following the release of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s final report on the federal government's use of the Emergencies Act. He is joined by Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Rouleau determined — “with reluctance” — that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government met the “very high threshold” to trigger the act and create a host of extraordinary police powers to quash the protests. But Rouleau also called the protests “legitimate,” and blamed government leaders and police for failing to “properly manage” the demonstrations against COVID-19 health measures, which he described as a predictable response to a disruptive pandemic.

“Had various police forces and levels of government prepared for and anticipated events of this type and acted differently in response to the situation, the emergency that Canada ultimately faced could likely have been avoided,” Rouleau wrote in the report, which was released Friday. “Unfortunately, it was not.”

Rouleau blamed the police for a “series of failures” that “contributed to a situation that spun out of control.” He called the crisis a “failure of federalism,” concluding that — at least sometimes — political leaders from different levels of government did not “rise above politics and collaborate for the common good.”

In Ottawa, Commissioner Paul Rouleau makes a statement following the release of the Public Order Emergency Commission’s final report on the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act.

Rouleau also singled out Trudeau for using inflammatory language when he said during the crisis that protesters were part of a “fringe minority” with “unacceptable views.” This made the situation worse by “further embittering” protesters towards government authorities, Rouleau wrote. Even though Trudeau may have been referring to racist and extremist messages — Nazi and Confederate flags were spotted at the Ottawa protest — Rouleau wrote the prime minister should have acknowledged “the majority of protesters were exercising their fundamental democratic rights” to denounce what they saw as government overreach.

Speaking later on Parliament Hill, Trudeau expressed regret about his words about convoy protesters for the first time.

“I wished I’d have said that differently,” he told reporters.

He added that there is still a “very small number of people in this country who deliberately spread misinformation that led to Canadians’ deaths” during the pandemic.

Trudeau also recognized that governments, including his own, could have worked better together during the crisis. He pledged to carefully study and respond to Rouleau’s 56 recommendations — which call for better intelligence-sharing between police agencies, changes to the Emergencies Act and improved government transparency, among other things — within six months.

“We didn’t want to have to invoke the Emergencies Act. It’s a measure of last resort. But the risks to personal safety, the risk to livelihoods and, equally, the risk of people losing faith in the rule of law that upholds our society and our freedoms — those risks were real, and responsible leadership required us to restore peace and order,” Trudeau said.

In Calgary, Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre — who expressed support for convoy protesters during the crisis — accused Trudeau of fomenting the crisis by making COVID-19 vaccines a political issue in the 2021 federal election.

“He thinks that if you’re afraid of your neighbour, you’ll forget that you can’t pay your rent. If you’re afraid of a trucker, you might forget that you’re hungry and take your eyes off of the guy who caused the problem in the first place,” Poilievre said, blaming the prime minister for inflation and a host of other problems.

Spanning more than 2,000 pages, Rouleau’s report serves as the punctuation mark to a yearlong debate over the protest crisis and the government’s controversial use of the Emergencies Act to end it. As required in that law, the government launched a public inquiry into the episode and appointed Rouleau to oversee weeks of open hearings where police, bureaucrats, protest leaders and politicians — including Trudeau himself — testified for hours about what happened.

Civil liberties groups, federal Conservatives and convoy leaders charged that the government went too far — even violated constitutional rights. The move gave police extraordinary powers to outlaw public assemblies, compel tow truck drivers to help clear blockades, and ensure banks freeze the bank accounts of protest participants.

But in his report, Rouleau agreed with the Trudeau government that there was a “reasonable belief” the protest crisis met the required definition of a “threat to the security of Canada.” In invoking the act, the government claimed the crisis posed a threat of “serious” political violence — a claim that was hotly contested during the inquiry after it became clear Canada’s spy agency didn’t believe that definition was met in the context of its own governing legislation.

But the Trudeau government concluded it could take a broader interpretation than that of the spy agency in triggering the Emergencies Act, and Rouleau agreed. The federal cabinet had information indicating such a security threat, Rouleau concluded, noting that known “ideologically motivated extremists” were at the protests; that Trudeau, Ontario Premier Doug Ford, and a host of other politicians and police leaders received threats; and that the “rhetoric of the protests” became more violent, including through “references to assassination” and calls to force out the elected Trudeau government.

Rouleau also pointed to how the RCMP seized a cache of guns and body armour at the convoy blockade in Coutts, Alta., which he called a “concrete manifestation of the very risk” the government had identified.

“When the record is viewed as a whole, the inference connecting the protests to threats of serious violence and the achievement of political or ideological objectives is readily and reasonably available,” Rouleau wrote.

The Emergencies Act also requires that no other law in Canada can address a crisis before the act can be invoked. Here, too, Rouleau concluded the threshold was met, stating that many provinces were affected and protests groups were spread out across the country.

“It was a national situation, requiring national measures such as cutting off funding to the protests, which no province had the authority to do,” he wrote.

The special powers created under the act were also largely “appropriate,” Rouleau concluded. Problems he highlighted included his view that the power to create no-go zones was too vague, and that the power to freeze bank accounts didn’t give authorities enough discretion about who to target, and didn’t include a mechanism to ensure accounts were unlocked after illegal activity stopped.

Yet in a short speech after the report was tabled in Parliament, Rouleau stressed that his conclusion the Emergencies Act was justified is his own subjective assessment.

“I do not come to this conclusion easily, as I do not consider the factual basis for it to be overwhelming,” he said. “Reasonable and informed people could reach a different conclusion than the one I arrived at.”

Despite generally agreeing with the government rationale, Rouleau also concluded the need to invoke the act in the first place was avoidable — and that it was government and police failures that made it necessary.

He said much of the “disarray” that occurred in Ottawa — where the protesters staged a three-week occupation around Parliament Hill — was due to local police’s mistaken belief that demonstrators would leave after a few days. This was contradicted by available Ontario Provincial Police intelligence, which highlighted for weeks ahead of time how protesters might stay until their demands to lift health restrictions were met. But top brass in the Ottawa police didn’t see these reports because they had no system to ensure they were properly distributed, Rouleau wrote, questioning why intelligence wasn’t gathered at a national level for what become a national event.

There was also a “breakdown” in the Ottawa police’s command structure, with abrupt shifts in responsible personnel during the crisis; a failure to properly use police negotiating teams; “poor communication” within and between police forces; and tensions that caused then-Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly to lose trust in some of his officers, Rouleau wrote.

Governments are also to blame for failing to prevent the crisis that warranted the use of the Emergencies Act, Rouleau concluded.

Looking at the Ford government in Ontario, the judge noted its “troubling” reluctance to get directly involved until the convoy blockade of the economically crucial Ambassador Bridge between Windsor and Detroit.

During the inquiry, documents showed that Trudeau told then-Ottawa mayor Jim Watson that Ford was “hiding” from his responsibility to help deal with the occupation in Ottawa. Then-premier Jason Kenney also sent a text message to a federal cabinet minister that said Trudeau “really screwed the pooch” and that Ottawa’s vaccine mandate for cross-border truckers — one of the catalysts of the convoy demonstrations — was just “dumb political theatre” that left the provinces “holding the bag” on dealing with the protests.

Rouleau concluded such political squabbling hampered the response and made the situation worse.

“Had there been greater collaboration at the political level from the start, it could well have assisted in ironing out the communication, jurisdictional and resourcing issues that plagued the early response to the protests,” he wrote.