Police officers move in to clear antigovernment demonstrators in Ottawa Feb. 18, 2022.BRETT GUNDLOCK/The New York Times News Service
Anyone who has ever watched a busy, intricate TV series and later read a review that connected some dots they missed might find the final report of the Public Order Emergency Commission slightly familiar.
There was a mesmerizing, maddening quality to a lot of the testimony Justice Paul Rouleau marshalled as he led the inquiry in the fall. Over and over, different people would confidently recount an event, situation or even a specific conversation, and at no point would it be obvious that the two parties were in fact describing the exact same sequence of events.
Depending on who you asked, the protests were an obnoxious, threatening occupation, or a huggy celebration of community – basically Woodstock in Carhartt gear. The police response in Ottawa was either led by a noble chief doing his best in impossible conditions, or by a misguided, tantrum-prone control freak.
And, depending on who was talking, a credible plan was in place to clean up the whole mess without mashing the Emergencies Act panic button, or the federal government had to invoke the act because nothing else was going to work, and everyone knew it.
The breakneck pace of the hearings and the firehose of disclosures heightened this crazy-making quality. Lawyers had little time to push back on inconsistencies, even if witnesses could be nudged toward something approaching a reconciled set of facts.
The self-serving nature of some narratives was obvious. But often it wasn’t. People were simply peering into the same room through different windows and coming away with wildly divergent stories about the scene before them, as people do. This injected a messy human element into a dusty bureaucratic process.
Now, Justice Rouleau – who presided over all of this with the sort of preternatural calm substitute teachers can only pray for – has produced a five-volume, 2,000-page sniff test of these competing and conflicting stories. In the careful, quasi-legalistic parlance of the report, the phrases “I do not accept” or “I am not satisfied” act as his understated truth siren.
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At length, he unpacks the total disconnect between the beatific way convoy participants presented the protest and the harrowing way the residents of Ottawa saw it. Justice Rouleau writes that he accepted that many of the participants wanted a peaceful protest – including organizers who realized that misbehaviour was bad PR – and that, in some cases, they may simply have seen things differently. But he dismisses the notion that they could possibly have been oblivious to what was going on.
“I do not accept the evidence espoused by the organizers that they were never aware of harassment, intimidation, or other non-peaceful conduct by protesters,” he writes. “Their knowledge of actual and potential violence or harassment can be inferred from their own evidence.”
One example arrived in the testimony of Chris Barber, a convoy leader who cheerfully recounted participants nearly coming to blows over disagreements.
Another of Justice Rouleau’s reckonings arrived when he examined the myriad weaknesses in the police response. He gave particular attention to former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, whose colleagues blamed him for all manner of miscommunication, poor decision-making and petty turf wars. In his own testimony, Mr. Sloly seemed both puzzled and wounded by the way he was perceived.
In his report, Justice Rouleau notes that Mr. Sloly had been a successful policing leader for three decades and that the deck was stacked against him in Ottawa, even before the “truly unprecedented event” of the convoy took over the city’s core.
“It is all too easy to attribute all of the deficiencies in the police response solely to him. This would be unfortunate and indeed, inconsistent with the evidence,” Justice Rouleau writes. “Some errors on Chief Sloly’s part were unduly enlarged by others to a degree that suggests scapegoating.”
There was one other scapegoat figure to whom Justice Rouleau applied truth serum. RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki featured as a main character at the hearings. Her pivotal role seemed to hinge on her haplessness. It emerged in testimony – including Commissioner Lucki’s own curiously nonchalant account – that she had gone to a high-level meeting armed with notes about an integrated police plan aimed at ending the protest. But, for reasons that remained mysterious, she never delivered that update, and the federal government went ahead with the Emergencies Act the next day.
During the hearings, this revelation seemed like a thunderous plot twist that led to unprecedented legal measures being used unnecessarily, but Justice Rouleau dismisses that idea.
“I accept that it would have been preferable for Commissioner Lucki to provide a further update on February 13,” he writes. “But I am not prepared to find that it would have made a difference.”
Rather, his assessment is that by this point confidence in the police to execute any plan was so low, the protests so many-tentacled and the level of worry so high, that even if Commissioner Lucki had delivered her update, it wouldn’t have changed a thing.
At another point in his report, Justice Rouleau frets about misinformation and disinformation permeating every aspect of the convoy, the inquiry and Canadian society itself. These forces are “inherently destructive and divisive,” he writes, and, as everyone saw last winter, they get in the way of the public and its government having any sort of useful conversation about how to run the country.
Corrupt information thrives in a landscape where people learn there is no objective truth to trust – or that even if there is, it’s so hard to find that it might as well not exist. Justice Rouleau’s report stands as a bracing antidote to that, quietly and calmly laying out that everyone is entitled to their own opinions, but not their own facts.