Former Ottawa Police Chief Says Main Challenge in Dealing With Convoy Protest Was Resources

Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly appears as a witness at the Public Order Emergency Commission in Ottawa on Oct. 28, 2022. The Canadian Press/Sean Kilpatrick

Former Ottawa Police Service chief Peter Sloly told the Emergencies Act inquiry that as the convoy protest started to take shape in Ottawa earlier this year, he didn’t feel another police force was needed to control the demonstration.

Sloly resigned on Feb. 15, a day after Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to clear convoy protests, amid criticism of how he handled the response to the protest.

The Public Order Emergency Commission has been formed to evaluate if the invocation of the act was justified, as required by law once the act has been used. Sloly is one of the many witnesses who are testifying until late November, after which the inquiry will enter a policy discussion phase, before submitting a final report to Parliament in February.

“My challenge literally up until my last day in office wasn’t additional legislation or injunctions,” Sloly said at the commission on Oct. 28.

“It was resources.”

Early in his testimony, Sloly got emotional as he described how his officers dealt with the situation.

“They were doing their very best under inhuman circumstances,” he said.  “It was too cold and it was too much.”

Intelligence

Sloly also said he didn’t expect the convoy protest, which converged in Ottawa on the last weekend of January, to last more than the weekend.

A person crosses the street beside a big rig parked on Metcalfe Street in downtown Ottawa during the second week of the Freedom Convoy protest against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions, on Feb. 7, 2022. The Canadian Press/Justin Tang

“He was not aware of any intelligence report nor does he recall receiving any intelligence briefing that said that, on balance, the convoys would occupy and blockade Ottawa, that the occupation would last for months, would involve thousands of trucks and protestors, and would be able to defeat OPS’s capabilities,” says his witness statement for the commission.

Supt. Pat Morris, head of Ontario Provincial Police’s Provincial Operations Intelligence Bureau, said in his own testimony at the commission on Oct. 19 that by Jan. 20, the provincial police force believed that the convoy protests would be “a long-term event,” and they shared that information with other police forces. But he says Sloly “was not happy” with the OPP’s intelligence briefings.

In his testimony, Sloly questioned why he was not receiving intelligence from federal agencies on what was coming as truck convoys and other protesters were converging in Ottawa from different parts of the country.

Sloly also said looking back even now, he doesn’t think the intelligence he was getting would lead to the conclusion that the protest convoy would stay in Ottawa for a prolonged period of time.

“To this day, even with the benefit of hindsight, I do not have any clear impression or saw any clear conclusions that we were going to have anything more than what I was being briefed on by my team,” he said.

Resignation

During his testimony, Sloly was asked about a public comment he had made in February while he was still chief of police that he was “increasingly concerned there is no policing solution to this.”

The comment was made a day after a Feb. 1 meeting of Sloly and other senior officers, where deputy chief Patricia Ferguson asked about “the possibility of military being called in or a state of emergency being declared,” meeting notes tabled at the commission show.

Sloly said at the commission that the protest “was a national scope event,” and that he was referring to the size and scale of the protest being beyond what one police force could handle.

On Oct. 27, the commission was shown text messages from a Feb. 5 conversation between RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki and OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique where Lucki said the feds were losing confidence in the Ottawa police.

Sloly said on Oct. 28 that in his dealings with officials from the three levels of government, he felt they had low level of support for his leadership, but said ultimately the decision to resign was his own.

Sloly also told the commission he didn’t think he could have prevented the protesters from parking their vehicles downtown, citing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

“I’m a police officer, not a lawyer,” he said.

The Canadian Press contributed to this report.