While Commissioner Paul Rouleau said in his Feb. 17 report that the government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act last year to clear convoy protests against COVID-19 mandates, he said the government could have handled some things better. Trudeau’s way of talking about the protesters was one of them.
Rouleau wrote that calling them “a small fringe minority” and making other disparaging comments “served to energize the protesters, hardening their resolve and further embittering them toward government authorities.”
Trudeau said he has reflected on that over the past months, not just following the release of the commissioner’s report. “I wish I had phrased it differently.”
He said many of the protesters “were just hurting and worried and wanting to be heard.” He continued to criticise, however, “a very small number of people in this country who deliberately spread misinformation and disinformation that led to Canadians’ deaths.”
“I do not withdraw what I said about that small group,” he said. “But I do regret that my comments on that small group might have been depicted as an attack on protesters, generally people who wanted to exercise their freedom of speech.”
Lessons
During his press conference, Trudeau said that the use of the Emergencies Act to clear convoy protests was a “last resort.”“Our job as a government is always to keep people safe. And invoking the Emergencies Act was the necessary thing to do to remove the threat and to protect people,” Trudeau said.
“The Emergencies Act provided us with more tools to safely bring the illegal blockades and occupations to an end.”
He also noted that there are lessons to be learned for everyone involved, including all levels of government and law enforcement agencies.
Rouleau said it shouldn’t have gotten to the point that the Emergencies Act needed to be invoked. He said that there were a series of policing failures throughout the events, and that there was a “failure of federalism” as well.
Trudeau said his government will continue to do “everything we can to work collaboratively across orders of government.”
“I think there are reflections for other orders of government as well, as [to] what they can draw from this commissioners report. And I certainly recommend all of my fellow first ministers to read this report carefully,” he said.
Freeland on Bank Account Freezes
Regarding the freezing of protesters’ bank accounts, Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance Chrystia Freeland said: “Our overriding objective, of course, was to end the illegal blockades and occupation, it was to do so without violence without anyone being hurt. And the economic measures were a tool that really helped make that happen.”Rouleau said these measures were warranted overall, but criticised “the absence of any discretion related to freezing assets, and the failure to provide a clear way for individuals to have their assets unfrozen when they were no longer engaged in illegal conduct.”
Freeland said Rouleau recognized that “work was done urgently at the time and was being done between the government and law enforcement bodies and banks, to ensure that there was a process in place to unfreeze the accounts.”
She said, “In the very horrible event, that this ever has to happen again, for sure, there are some lessons for us.”
