00:00:00.000Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show. This is The Andrew Lawton Show. Brought to you by True North.
00:00:10.700Coming up, journalist Paul Wells endured six weeks of Public Order Emergency Commission testimony.
00:00:16.680We talk about the big picture of the convoy and the government's response to it. Straight ahead.
00:00:21.540The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:24.780Hello and welcome to you all. This is The Andrew Lawton Show, Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show here on True North.
00:00:32.460As we near the holidays, we are taking advantage of there being a bit of a lull in the news and talking about some of the big picture ideas,
00:00:40.120going in depth with some of our guests in a way we don't often get to when we're covering the news of the day.
00:00:46.040And today I wanted to revisit the Public Order Emergency Commission, which, as you know, dominated much of my personal time
00:00:53.640and also the time of this show for October and November and the, I think it was done in November.
00:01:00.600Yeah, it just felt like it lasted a lot longer.
00:01:02.920And this was the commission that over a six-week period really laid bare the details of the convoy,
00:01:09.360the police response, the city of Ottawa, the province of Ontario, the federal government,
00:01:14.120how all of these different groups intersected and how they all discussed and viewed this event,
00:01:19.800which everyone can agree was an important thing, but few sides could really agree on the fundamental facts of.
00:01:28.100And that was why it was so interesting.
00:01:29.880Now, there were aspects of this that weren't as intriguing to me.
00:01:33.440For example, I was not personally as interested in the Windsor and Cootes stories,
00:01:38.480because my focus of coverage had obviously been on what was happening in Ottawa,
00:01:42.520which is, I think, what really was the trigger for the Emergencies Act,
00:01:46.820given that the Windsor and Cootes blockades had been cleared well before
00:01:50.880or were underway in being cleared when the Emergencies Act came in.
00:01:55.260So I think that at the same time, it's fascinating to me to take this bigger picture look,
00:01:59.660because polling has actually showed that Canadians think after this whole thing,
00:02:04.000the federal government came out ahead.
00:02:06.020Now, is this because the poll was wrong?
00:06:24.220Yeah. So, I mean, one of the ones which, funnily enough, having said all this, I actually didn't attend,
00:06:30.380was when the head of CSIS said that this event did not meet the CSIS test for being a public order emergency,
00:06:41.720which to some extent the government witnesses spent the rest of the commission trying to sort of
00:06:48.080explain that pretty blatant apparent contradiction.
00:06:52.500And then the testimony of Peter Stolle, which I thought was fascinating because it's another thing that happens in drama.
00:07:02.020Peter Stolle was, until partway through this, the chief of the Ottawa police.
00:07:07.220And no one liked him and no one thought he was effective.
00:07:09.980And suddenly he testifies and his testimony was quite compelling and believable.
00:07:16.500And then, that was on a Friday, on the Monday following, it falls apart because the cross-examination comes
00:07:24.520and his testimony doesn't really stand up to any cross-examination.
00:07:28.980So that was a kind of an interesting, dramatic moment.
00:07:32.420And Christia Freeland, I actually haven't written about this on my newsletter, but I'm going to go over it in the book.
00:07:44.260But she talks about how she discussed the economic impact of the border blockings at Cabinet.
00:07:55.760And the numbers she was throwing around were just orders of magnitude larger than the numbers her own department was coming up with.
00:08:02.680And, like, the real cost of the Ambassador Bridge and the Coutts border crossings were nowhere close to what Christia Freeland thought they were.
00:08:13.340She had kind of misunderstood the numbers.
00:08:16.020And to me, that shows that anyone's appreciation of the legalities of this stuff is very approximate.
00:08:23.760And it's not really based on a careful reading of a test.
00:08:28.660It's, do we feel like using this emergencies act or do we not?
00:08:33.760Yeah, and then come up with an excuse later.
00:08:36.360And not that I extrapolate too, too much from Twitter.
00:08:39.160And I think you were very wise to get away from Twitter many years ago.
00:08:42.460But on Twitter, the sense that I saw from a lot of the federal government's defenders was basically,
00:08:48.100we didn't like the convoy, the government invoked the Emergencies Act,
00:08:52.320and then the convoy was gone in a few days.
00:08:54.000Therefore, we're fine with the Emergencies Act.
00:08:55.860And there didn't really seem to be from the outsider support anyway, this even concern for what the laws were and whether it was legally justified.
00:09:05.980They were just happy with the outcome.
00:09:29.800The federal government, more than the other players in this thing, decided what the story was before they observed the unfolding of the event.
00:09:40.720You have government communications staffers discussing essentially narrative before there are trucks in Ottawa or before there's, you know, protesters trucks in Ottawa.
00:09:52.700And once you've done that, I mean, you know, there's people in Ottawa, I think of the former journalist Ellie Alboy, has written really thoughtfully about how if you become invested in a narrative, then you resist integrating new information that conflicts with that narrative.
00:10:13.140So if you think that these truckers are monolithic, antagonistic, and dangerous, then it becomes hard to swallow any information to the effect that some of them were, but some of them weren't.
00:10:52.920That phenomenon you describe is very much akin, I'd say, to conspiracy theorists, where once they've baked in that idea, anything that they're presented with that counters that only basically fuels the conspiracy.
00:11:06.860You know, they dismiss things that counter it and they elevate things that support it.
00:11:10.740And what I found interesting in terms of understanding the convoy, and that was a big reason that I wrote my book, is I felt that people were not getting the complexity of this, is that people who were part of that movement kind of saw it as being a feature and not a bug, that they were not monolithic, and that there was no central hierarchy, and that they couldn't order anyone to do anything, and that it was very grassroots.
00:11:33.560And it was interesting that that ended up becoming one of the key arguments against them in the commission hearings, especially when it came to this negotiation that had taken place between convoy organizers in the city of Ottawa.
00:11:46.120The government's position was, yeah, but I mean, by their own admission, they weren't a homogenous group.
00:11:50.680They were all, they couldn't force anyone to do anything.
00:11:52.720So that disjointed nature actually became, I mean, to the government's view, a liability of the convoy.
00:11:58.740Yeah, so the question that comes up is, why should the federal government talk to anyone in this group?
00:12:02.640Because they can't, they can't bring anyone along with them.
00:12:07.940Yeah, even if they sat down with Tamara Leach and worked things out, there's no guarantee that that extends to the other however many thousands of people were there.
00:12:16.460Yeah, it's like pushing a string uphill.
00:12:39.420It's going to be frustrating for a lot of people who are looking for a winner and a loser, a hero and a villain.
00:12:44.480But it is striking that the federal government was not against negotiating with any of these protesters.
00:12:54.920They were against federal officials negotiating with the principals, but they were super happy to have people from the city of Ottawa negotiating with them.
00:13:01.380But they were, they were all for having proxies talk to the protesters.
00:13:06.300They, they were less excited about doing it themselves.
00:13:09.100And the proxies, the people from the city of Ottawa, especially the then mayor's chief of staff, were furious about this.
00:13:17.440You know, we take it on the chin for sitting down with these people.
00:13:22.160And, and meanwhile, they're complaining about federal politicians, federal policies, and, and, and, and, and the, the city of Ottawa didn't, didn't like being put in that position.
00:13:33.980So, I mean, so I've asked myself, you know, hey, smarty pants, if, if, if, if you, Paul Wells were the prime minister of Canada at this time, would you sit down and talk to anyone?
00:13:47.180Would you as prime minister designate someone to talk to them?
00:13:52.660It's not as clear to me that, that, I mean, remember during the Oka crisis, not a perfect analogy,
00:13:59.220but the, the, um, provincial minister of justice sat down and talked to masked indigenous protesters, you know?
00:14:08.260Um, you know, the whole point of negotiation is you do it with people who disagree with you.
00:14:15.280You don't do it with people who agree with you.
00:14:16.880That's, that's called agreement, you know?
00:14:19.540Looking at, yeah, I would agree with that.
00:14:22.720And I think that one of the big, if we were to take a parallel history here and see what would have happened if the question that I'm very curious about is what would have happened if the government had not settled on as clear a narrative as they took with the fringe minority, with unacceptable views, the standing with swastikas, really leaning into that.
00:14:45.220Because certainly my sense covering the convoy is that people were more frustrated with that than they were with vaccine mandates themselves a week into it.
00:14:54.700It's that, you know, Justin Trudeau's response to this, the government's response to this actually started to inflame more pushback.
00:15:01.640Now, it's entirely possible that that wouldn't have made a difference, that, you know, the government just standing up and saying, we condemn this protest, this is a lawless protest, it would have been the same.
00:15:10.260But do you think that that was a policy, or do you think that was a political decision for the government to lean into that narrative, or do you think that was just what they believed?
00:15:25.180But I'll say something, because I've been fairly agreeable until now, but I'll, I mean, I'll tell you who would be inclined to not, to not like truckers who had, who strongly disagreed with them about vaccine policy.
00:15:39.680It would be Justin Trudeau, because in the summer of 2020, a guy drove a truck halfway across the country and onto the lawn of his residence, the prime minister's residence, in a vehicle that contained several loaded lawn guns.
00:15:53.520So, that is the sort of incident, incident that the rest of us can shrug off or laugh off or, you know, but if someone had driven a truck up onto my lawn, I would tend, and gotten arrested with a lot of, with a lot of weaponry, I would be inclined to remember that.
00:16:14.980And to integrate it into my thinking about people who disagreed on, on vaccine policy, driving large vehicles, you know, and you can also bet that the most lurid examples of extremism and unpredictability were the subjects of intelligence reports that were getting to the prime minister's staff.
00:16:36.060And I guess what I reproach in the prime minister is he was unable or unwilling to realize that this wasn't many thousands of people like that.
00:16:49.260It was many thousands of people who had, you know, ways of expressing a disagreement that he might not alight, but, but that everyone in this story was a Canadian is kind of the story that is kind of the conclusion that I draw.
00:17:06.480And caricaturing the other people in the story doesn't capture its complexity.
00:17:14.700I mean, so one of the things we both saw was that every group that came, you know, the police of Ottawa, the RCMP, the federal government, the various levels of government, they were all dysfunctional.
00:17:28.740By the beginning of 2022, they were all exhausted.
00:17:31.820They were all operating on less than perfect information.
00:17:34.480Uh, and, um, uh, so they were all making pretty lousy decisions.
00:17:41.560I'm, you know, like, and we would, we would be surprised to hear, uh, that anything else happened.
00:17:48.280I mean, by the beginning of 2022, if you tried to get a faucet fixed in your kitchen, uh, the, the, the repair company would send over somebody bedraggled and exhausted and almost in tears.
00:17:59.580Like that's, that's just the way life was at the beginning of this year.
00:18:30.460And some of the convoy, uh, volunteers and supporters that I, I kind of was following on Twitter and whatnot around then were, were sort of laughing at that because they were saying, well, yeah, we were cold too.
00:18:41.900But, but you are right that that was exacerbating something that in Ottawa, the police did not feel they were prepared for.
00:18:48.740And I think that was one of the big failings here is that in Ottawa, you had this sense that no one was accepting, no one was taking the convoy at its word here.
00:18:58.980When they said, yeah, we're all driving to Ottawa and we're all going to stay there for as long as it takes.
00:19:02.720Like that was something that no one in the policing side of it, certainly not the Ottawa police really bought.
00:19:10.800Um, uh, well, and I think the police had different narratives and, and, and it's also interesting to me that kind of the relative gold standard in terms of police intelligence, uh, and response to large, uh, high conflict events was the Ontario provincial police.
00:19:31.620Um, uh, frankly, because they'd had a lot of practice, uh, and, and very different approach from the Ottawa police service throughout.
00:19:40.840And, and although the OPP got along pretty well with the RCMP, also a different approach from the RCMP who are the OPP.
00:19:47.300They are the police who aren't in the big cities in Ontario.
00:19:50.360So they're the police from hockey country, essentially in fishing country.
00:19:55.600And, you know, they live on highways, they, uh, eat in restaurants where a lot of the, uh, protesters, uh, would eat.
00:20:04.300They, uh, you know, watch the same, uh, shows they, uh, you know, are on the same Facebook, uh, uh, groups.
00:20:14.860And, uh, uh, a lot of big city folks were surprised and concerned to learn that, that the OPP knew a lot of the, the, you know, uh, had spoken to a lot of the protesters and, uh, sometimes showed some sympathy for, uh, how they went about their day.
00:20:32.640But it, it would be amazing if that wasn't the case.
00:20:35.820It's, there's almost nobody in the OPP lives in downtown Toronto.
00:20:39.740And so they had different reflexes from anyone else.
00:20:44.160That's, that's quite a brilliant analysis of that.
00:20:47.900And I hope you expand on that a bit in your book, because I do think that, I mean, there, there was one story that I wrote a few weeks back that was based on an audio file of a recording that I got between OPP and, and convoy organizers in which the OPP were actually apologizing for the Ottawa police fuel raid.
00:21:05.540And, and that was the point where the Ottawa police liaison or the Ontario provincial police liaison sort of took a step back and said, okay, we're, we're not really in the mix here.
00:21:14.460And, and the sense that we really got throughout the, the course of the public order emergency commission testimony is that the OPP really felt like they could use engagement to get through this.
00:21:26.480And, and do you, were you able to identify the point at which the Ottawa police said, yeah, that's not going to do it anymore?
00:21:35.540Well, I mean, that fuel can thing was, uh, hotly contested within the OPS.
00:21:41.100I mean, there were people who thought that, um, uh, it was time to get serious about enforcement.
00:21:47.900And there were times people who said that's exactly the wrong thing.
00:21:51.300Um, um, um, um, the, uh, I'm blanking on the name of the, the, the, the, the, the three letter acronym for the group within the police that would, um, negotiate.
00:22:05.260Yeah, the PLT, the, the whole PLT approach, which was, um, don't enforce, discuss and, and, and, and, um, uh, would often skate up to the line of being palsy-walsy with, uh, with these protesters.
00:22:21.420And, uh, other police officers were not familiar with that whole approach.
00:22:25.760And, uh, and it's frankly shocking to people who didn't like the, the, the, the convoy at all.
00:22:33.300Again, I sort of want to remind everyone that, uh, just about every official who testified at this commission, uh, spoke about getting death threats.
00:22:43.280Uh, this event was, among other things, a machine for generating death threats.
00:22:48.820And Tamara Leach said, Tamara Leach said she got death threats too, and I absolutely believe that.
00:22:54.100Um, but we should, as a society, avoid events that, uh, that lead to everyone being involved receiving death threats.
00:23:01.200And that was one of the, that was another part of this story.
00:23:03.620So, like, another thing that has occurred to me that I, uh, is that the, the lawyer, Paul Champ, who represented the Ottawa's downtowners who took out an injunction against them, his clientele resembles the trucker more close, the truckers more closely than it resembles any other clientele.
00:23:27.560Paul Champ's, uh, uh, clients were not rich.
00:23:30.880They're mostly were not federal public servants.
00:23:33.620They're mostly people who work in the service industry in the downtown of a, of a city where the downtown neighborhoods are not the rich neighborhoods.
00:24:10.840Yeah, and, and I, I'm sort of guilty of that myself, not, not on an individual level, but sort of when I go to Ottawa, because I lived there very briefly, you know, 12, 13 years ago.
00:24:22.760And when I go to Ottawa, I remember that, oh yeah, there are people here that aren't just people that live and work in these few square blocks.
00:24:30.240There are people that do any of the other things that are in a city of, of the size of Ottawa.
00:24:33.980And it is easy, especially if you only, your only experience in Ottawa is on, you know, Wellington Street or a couple of blocks around there.
00:24:41.640And, and I, I think that's a, that's a fair, fair enough point.
00:24:44.340And, you know, I think there were some people that I heard from that were Ottawa residents that were supportive of the convoys aims, but not like, okay, guys, yeah, yeah, I'm, I'm with you, but, you know, get off my street, that sort of thing.
00:24:56.280And I don't know how many of those there were, but it's understandable that there, there would have been some, let me just ask you about Justin Trudeau's testimony here, very briefly, Paul, because I thought that he did very well, given the circumstances.
00:25:27.660He was giving short yes or no answers at various points.
00:25:30.500And I thought he, again, I didn't agree with his justification, but I, I felt he gave as clear a justification as he could have for what his position is.
00:26:03.440He was also clearly part of a well-rehearsed effort.
00:26:08.460I don't, I don't, one day I might find out how many people in this government were working on prepping ministers and the prime minister for their testimony.
00:26:15.260Um, but I was at Halifax at the Halifax security forum and Jody Thomas, uh, the prime minister's, uh, uh, national security advisor was at Halifax as she would normally have been expected to be.
00:26:31.360She had a earbud in her ear the whole night because she was listening to Janice Charette, the, uh, clerk of the Privy Council, uh, testify live.
00:26:43.020And she was not paying that much attention to what was happening in front of her because she was part of this team that was following the testimony.
00:26:51.880He had to bat, bat cleanup on two outstanding points.
00:26:55.000One was this CSIS test that, um, did the level of turmoil rise to the level specified in the CSIS Act for a public order emergency.
00:27:03.960And the other was this supposed February 13th plan that the Ottawa police had finally cobbled together to, uh, in concert with the, uh, OPP and the RCMP.
00:27:16.720Trudeau's task was to bomb those two bridges to say the CSIS, CSIS test was absolutely met.
00:27:23.100And the February 13th plan that would have meant there was no need for the emergencies act was a lousy plan.
00:27:29.840And on those two points, I don't think he was, uh, persuasive, uh, but it was impressive that he went in with those two things in mind.
00:27:39.180And he, you know, he made the most vigorous case they could concoct on those two points.
00:27:44.400Um, it, it, it, it shows, as I say, the level of, of, of preparation that, uh, every federal official showed up with.
00:27:52.820I mean, contrast that with poor Brenda Lucky, the RCMP, uh, commissioner who seems to have been cut loose.
00:28:02.320And I, I actually have wondered because early on, I, I sort of assumed that there would have to be a, a fall guy or a, a fall gal in this.
00:28:09.480And I, I, you know, I was convinced early on it might've been Marco Mendicino just because he was the one that was really sent out to sell this, uh, fairly aggressively when it was all happening.
00:28:18.940And, and, uh, now I just wonder if it'll just be Brenda Lucky when all is said and done.
00:28:23.280Um, or maybe they don't need a fall guy because, uh, the, the thing that's a little surprising is that the public opinion polling on this has been rock solid.
00:28:35.580And, uh, and the, the, uh, support for the use of the emergencies act has been solidly higher than general support for the liberal party against its opponents.
00:28:46.540Uh, so that would tend to tell you that, um, the use of the emergencies act and the long, long discussion about whether it was property is the emergency act has actually been, has actually been pulling the liberals up in the polls.
00:28:59.280Um, now, what do you attribute that to?
00:29:02.860Because my, my instinct would be to say that the media's characterization of the convoy has contributed to that perception, but you may have a wildly different one.
00:29:13.740Um, I mean, I, the, the, the thing is I can, I can sort of believe that what in the spring when everyone's watching on TV and they're seeing round the clock, uh, quite alarmist coverage of, of, uh, uh, uh, what's going on?
00:29:29.260What sort of characters the, these protesters were, but months and months and months later, when we've all turned the page and we're all stuck in a courtroom, listening to testimony, uh, seeing, uh, uh, different levels of government disagreeing with each other, seeing cabinet ministers, uh, joking about, uh,
00:29:48.260uh, punitive colleagues behind their back and, um, um, making jokes about sending tanks in.
00:29:53.500Um, um, I think it's basically that months, months later, it's hard to demonstrate large numbers of, it's hard to point to large numbers of Canadians whose lives were ruined by the emergencies act.
00:30:05.420There are still figures who are still facing, uh, you know, criminal charges and they're having to defend themselves and that's, that's unpleasant for them.
00:30:14.180And, and, you know, we'll see how that turns out, but there aren't whole classes of Canadians who, who have no access to their bank accounts, as it seemed, it might be the case early on.
00:30:23.580Uh, and, uh, and, and, and then something else that doesn't get remarked on is, uh, the convoy didn't win because they didn't get a change to policy immediately while they were in Ottawa.
00:30:40.280But all month long, while people were testifying in the, um, uh, in that hearing room at the National Archives, uh, everyone in that room was coughing, nobody was wearing masks, uh, everyone had cough drops rattling around in the back of their, of their mouths.
00:30:59.820Uh, the, uh, uh, no mask, less, uh, uh, uh, less prominent use of, of, of, of, of vaccines, uh, everyone getting along according to their own conception of the rules rather than, than according to fixed rules that were, uh, handed down by government.
00:31:22.940That's the way we were all living our lives, uh, you know, this autumn.
00:31:27.560Um, and, um, and so I think that might lead just about everyone to realize that the, the really, uh, blatant direct confrontation that was symbolized by the, by the convoy versus the police and the governments and so on is not the way we're actually living our lives now.
00:31:46.340And maybe people are chilling out a bit.
00:31:50.980And I think a perfect note to end on here.
00:31:52.700We might not agree on, on everything about the convoy, but I think your perspective on the commission and the broader story here is a really important one.
00:31:59.780Uh, you are doing fantastic work over at your sub stack.