The trial is going on now in Ottawa. The judge is Justice Paul Rouleau of the Ontario Court of Appeal. Our federal government is the accused. The accusers are people who came to Ottawa with their convoys of trucks. They came to visit and they stayed. They caught the fancy of the mean and angry in Canada and beyond. They fund-raised $24 million to over-stay their welcome in the nation’s capitol.
Justice Rouleau explained in the beginning of his inquiry that it was a legally required investigation into the use of the 1988 Emergencies Act. Was it necessary? His report to parliament will contain his finding.
But we are the jury. What was the cost in pain and suffering of living in downtown Ottawa? Was it frightening? Or was it just fun and games? Maybe that depends on your perspective.
The opinions of the police were varied. Were the Ontario Provincial Police and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police looking down on the plaints of the Ottawa police? Were they helping or hindering? Then Ottawa police chief, Peter Sloly, might have been better off conferring with his old friends on the Toronto police. They had let anarchists run wild in Toronto in the summer of 2010 and then kettled citizens out for a Sunday night stroll in retaliation. There was no inquiry for that fiasco.
But just listen to the perpetrators of the convoys to Ottawa. Like the storied pied piper of Hamelin, they gathered the innocents and the evil, the rowdies and the mischief makers, the has-beens and the wannabes. They came, they partied, they annoyed, they blew their horns, they acted stupid. They were not good guests.
Yet, they were welcomed by politicians such as Pee-Pee Poilievre. He went to the bridges of highway 417 to welcome them. He brought them hot coffee from the parliament building. He knew they were disruptors and he welcomed them.
They were not welcomed by the prime minister. He has yet to testify. After three weeks of chaos on Wellington Street, the prime minister and his cabinet acted. This inquiry is charged with seeing if invoking the emergencies act was justified.
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Copyright 2022 © Peter Lowry
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