Juno News - October 20, 2022


LAWTON： The feds knew the convoy wasn't foreign funded


Episode Stats

Length

11 minutes

Words per Minute

162.34988

Word Count

1,870

Sentence Count

108

Misogynist Sentences

1


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 This is now day five of the Public Order Emergency Commission. I did a bit of an experiment on
00:00:05.740 yesterday's show and I spent the entire program talking about what had been happening in the first
00:00:10.880 several days, playing some of the key clips and highlights. I'm going to do a little bit of that
00:00:15.300 today but I'm also going to take a lot of the bigger picture view. Tom Marazzo, who has been
00:00:21.320 on this show before, he was quoted in my book. He was a Freedom Convoy volunteer, big logistics guy.
00:00:28.320 He'll be on in just about 12 minutes time to talk about the negotiations taking place
00:00:33.160 behind the scenes between convoy organizers and the City of Ottawa. Negotiations that are quite critical
00:00:39.960 to this idea of whether or not the Emergencies Act was justified. We have heard a lot of testimony
00:00:47.280 to this point. In fact, it's just after four o'clock right now and since 9 45 this morning with a couple
00:00:53.580 of breaks there notwithstanding, former Ottawa Police Services Board Chair Diane Deans has been
00:00:59.720 testifying, talking about all of these calls that she was putting and the police service was putting
00:01:04.760 to get more resources, more officers, calls that effectively went ignored. And I want to play just
00:01:12.120 a couple of the highlights that have come out from Diane Deans' testimony so far. One of them I found
00:01:17.980 kind of interesting here and I want to pull up the clip, it's actually two clips because she was,
00:01:24.040 it seemed like surprised that the police service didn't want to give her, a city councillor who's
00:01:30.820 responsible for basically the ways and means of policing, keeping the lights on at Ottawa Police
00:01:35.980 headquarters, surprised they didn't want to give her like the detailed breakdown of what their tactical
00:01:42.020 plans were to go after convoy protesters. This was an exchange from just about an hour and a half ago.
00:01:50.360 In your witness statement you say that when you requested to see the plan you would receive
00:01:55.860 wiggle words. Can you explain what you mean by that? Well I think just what I've been describing
00:02:02.400 here this morning that we'd see parts of a plan, we'd hear little bits about, you know, there's going
00:02:09.260 to be some form of an operation but, you know, I recall at one point Chief slowly telling me that
00:02:15.980 he couldn't share the details because, you know, it obviously the element of surprise is important
00:02:21.920 in this operation. We heard a lot of evidence this morning about the plan. So you testified that there
00:02:30.340 is always some tension between the police and the police services board about the sharing of
00:02:37.040 operational planning details, right? Right. And we spoke before the break about the sensitivity
00:02:45.840 of intelligence information and I suggest to you that there are very similar sensitivities
00:02:52.720 involved in sharing operational information. Yep.
00:02:58.440 The information of police operations is considered highly confidential for safety reasons. Right.
00:03:04.740 Including the safety of officers. Right. And as chief of police, the safety of officers would be of the utmost importance, right?
00:03:14.900 Of course. And like in the case of intelligence reports, it was not the practice of the board to demand operational planning information prior to the convoy, right?
00:03:30.540 I don't think we demanded operational planning information. I think we, you know, inquired about operational issues in accordance with what we understood that limit to be under the act.
00:03:52.280 Fair. So prior to the convoy, you wanted some high-level operational information, but you weren't asking for tactical plans, for example.
00:04:01.960 No.
00:04:03.040 You agree with me on that?
00:04:04.440 I do.
00:04:05.020 Okay.
00:04:05.240 So it was a bit of an odd exchange in some regards because we had on one hand, the police services board saying she wanted more information.
00:04:15.560 She seemed a little bit perturbed. She wasn't getting that, but also an admission that no, the police services board who are bureaucrats and counselors would never have access to just that minutiae of where the police are going to position and all of this other stuff.
00:04:32.580 So I think that there's a bit of a weird dynamic taking place now.
00:04:36.860 This is a woman who, when the convoy was underway, accused them of being terrorist.
00:04:42.280 She said that, I can't remember if it was during a meeting or in an interview, but called the convoy protesters terrorists.
00:04:48.300 Yet oddly, Diane Dean was actually like treated as an asset by convoy leaders and convoy organizers.
00:04:55.700 They were being very nice to her. Brendan Miller, who's been the lead lawyer representing the Freedom Convoy, was thanking her for her service on the police services board, was complimenting her.
00:05:06.440 They were all laughs.
00:05:07.620 And it seemed like there is a little bit of a sense of trying to pick the enemy of your enemy.
00:05:14.900 And I think that there's a lot of issues that Diane Deans had with Jim Watson.
00:05:21.120 They played, and I'm not going to make you suffer through it, but they played this 10-minute long, surreptitiously recorded conversation.
00:05:29.300 Diane Deans recorded it.
00:05:30.980 It's a team's meeting between her and Jim Watson.
00:05:33.720 And it's about her decision to appoint an interim chief to replace Steve Bell, when there was this point at which Ottawa had like three police chiefs in the matter of 24 hours.
00:05:43.740 And Jim Watson was expressing his dislike of that decision.
00:05:47.840 And the police service lawyer was really going after Diane Deans for recording this.
00:05:52.940 And it was kind of an odd dynamic about, you know, like nothing to do with the Emergencies Act, nothing to do with horses trampling over an Indigenous woman,
00:06:03.320 nothing to do with the suspension of civil liberties, nothing to do with anything except perhaps a little bit of palace intrigue at Ottawa City Hall.
00:06:11.120 Not that intrigue and Ottawa municipal politics have ever been used in the same sentence before.
00:06:17.600 I want to play another clip for you here.
00:06:20.740 And this is a bit of an interesting one that came about today in which Diane Deans accused Jim Watson of using the convoy to score political points.
00:06:30.160 And I should say, this is perhaps why the convoy lawyer might have thought that she was a better ally as far as legal strategy is concerned compared to Jim Watson.
00:06:40.320 Let's roll that.
00:06:40.960 There was never an intention to hire anyone to be the ongoing chief of police in Ottawa without a process.
00:06:49.360 And I was frustrated that it was characterized.
00:06:53.300 I mean, the mayor's office got ahead of that story in the media by leaking it, which it was confidential information.
00:07:01.640 It was leaked.
00:07:03.600 And they got ahead of that story and characterized it as something quite different than it was intended to be.
00:07:11.220 You felt they were playing a bit of politics with you in the midst of this crisis in the city?
00:07:14.980 Yeah, I guess, I guess to a certain extent, that old maxim about never wasting a good crisis, it also presents an opportunity to settle some old scores.
00:07:27.500 And I guess that's the way I viewed that.
00:07:29.920 Yeah, that's how you felt.
00:07:31.080 Yeah.
00:07:31.780 Accusing Mayor Jim Watson of using the convoy for political gain to force her out of her role as police services board chair and so on.
00:07:40.880 But I want to get outside of the municipal politics here for a moment because one of the big revelations that came wasn't even through testimony necessarily, but through documents.
00:07:50.480 So anyone can do this.
00:07:52.040 You can head to the Public Order Emergency Commission website right now and you can find the documents that have been uploaded as exhibits.
00:08:00.100 And there's a bunch of them.
00:08:01.240 There's video, there's email records, handwritten notes, text messages.
00:08:05.080 I haven't gone through all of them yet or even close to all of them.
00:08:08.200 But in these documents, there are some very revealing details.
00:08:12.280 And one of them is not even groundbreaking because anyone with half a brain knew this.
00:08:17.880 Any Canadian knew this.
00:08:19.120 Any convoy member or supporter knew this.
00:08:21.840 Everyone but Justin Trudeau and CBC knew this.
00:08:25.460 But it bears repeating because now it's in the official evidence for the Public Order Emergency Commission.
00:08:31.520 CSIS confirmed that there was no foreign funding behind the convoy.
00:08:36.680 That foreign actors were not behind the convoy.
00:08:40.400 That this was an organic grassroots movement and more importantly, a domestic grassroots movement.
00:08:48.840 Now this comes from minutes of a meeting held on February 6th.
00:08:53.340 So the convoy is well underway here.
00:08:55.700 And the CSIS director, David Vigneault, says there are no foreign actors identified at this point supporting or financing this convoy.
00:09:04.680 Now, obviously, a few days after that, there would be the leak of donors to Give, Send, Go.
00:09:10.500 And people would find that, yes, there were some donors from there that were from the United States or from the United Kingdom or from, I don't know, Swatiland or something.
00:09:18.820 I think, no, they changed the name.
00:09:20.180 It's now Eswatini.
00:09:21.460 There's a little bit of African geography trivia for you.
00:09:24.340 But I don't know if there were any Eswatini donors to the Freedom Convoy.
00:09:29.200 But nevertheless, people from around the world that resonated with this did donate.
00:09:34.220 But by and large, foreign funding was a minority.
00:09:37.620 And also, it was downstream.
00:09:40.680 It was downstream of the organic momentum and organic support that the convoy had.
00:09:45.960 And that part is so critical here because there's a difference between some guy sitting in the Kremlin putting this huge chunk of change towards this protest movement
00:09:55.520 and an organic movement that people around the world say, you know what, I like the cut of those truckers' jibs.
00:10:01.340 Is jib plural or is jib singular?
00:10:03.300 I like the cut of their collective jib, we'll say.
00:10:06.200 And donating a bit of money because they support it.
00:10:08.880 But CSIS acknowledged, and the government knew, this was not a foreign-funded operation.
00:10:15.760 This was a grassroots movement.
00:10:18.180 And that's so key because if you go back to those criteria to invoke the Emergencies Act that we were talking about at a fairly granular level yesterday,
00:10:26.460 we're not talking about espionage.
00:10:28.360 We're talking about sabotage.
00:10:30.400 We're not talking about foreign interference.
00:10:33.180 We're not talking about threats to Canada's national security.
00:10:36.740 So it's not even groundbreaking.
00:10:39.900 It's not even this huge, giant leap to say, yes, there was no foreign funding because everyone knew that except for the liberals.
00:10:47.160 But I think it's important that we acknowledge this is now in the record.
00:10:51.120 And there's going to be a lot of narrative busting that takes place over the next six weeks
00:10:55.880 as we hear live testimony in real time from so many people that are connected to this at various levels.
00:11:02.020 And even people that certainly aren't on the convoy side have been giving evidence and giving testimony
00:11:06.840 that is fairly supportive of the convoy narrative, which is that this was a peaceful, perhaps disruptive, yes, but a peaceful protest.
00:11:15.720 And remember, the federal government has to be able to prove that there were no other means available to them under law to deal with this problem.
00:11:25.320 If, by the way, if a national emergency even existed, which I highly doubt it did.