“Criminalizing Dissent”

OTTAWA — A lawyer for some organizers of the so-called “Freedom Convoy” protests was ejected from the Emergencies Act inquiry on Tuesday after repeatedly interrupting the judge who is chairing the process.

Commissioner Paul Rouleau raised his voice and called on security to remove Brendan Miller, a lawyer for a charity created by protest leaders including Tamara Lich.

Miller was expressing frustration about how documents provided by the government had redactions, and demanding that a staff member in the office of Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino be called to testify.

A Durham Regional Police officer has been ordered to work an additional 60 hours after taking aim at the police chief on Instagram.

The decision follows an Oct. 5 disciplinary hearing where Constable Clayton Harnum pled guilty to one count of discreditable conduct.

The charge stems from an Instagram post he shared earlier this year in support of his wife, Const. Erin Howard, who is also a Durham police officer. Around Jan. 24, Howard posted a video of herself to social media. In the video, she appears in uniform while delivering a message of support for the “Freedom Convoy” which occupied downtown Ottawa.

The warm front that passed across Ottawa on Monday morning was caused by a collective sigh of relief emitted by a number of senior ministers and government staffers, after Canada’s top spy revealed in testimony that he advised the prime minister to invoke the Emergencies Act last February to break up the Freedom Convoy.

“CSIS told government Freedom Convoy didn’t pose national security threat day before Emergencies Act invoked.”

That was a headline in the National Post this week describing documents tabled at the public inquiry into the Trudeau government’s suspension of civil rights last winter to deal with the truckers’ protest in downtown Ottawa.

Canada’s top public servant provided a written recommendation to Justin Trudeau that supported the idea of invoking the Emergencies Act in response to convoy protests across the country, but also cautioned the Prime Minister that such a decision would be vulnerable to a court challenge.

The Feb. 14 recommendation from Privy Council Clerk Janice Charette was among a flurry of memos and around-the-clock meetings she discussed in detail during testimony at the Emergencies Act inquiry on Friday.

Don’t worry, if a particular law, let’s say, the Emergencies Act, doesn’t say or do what a government wants it to say or do, in Justin Trudeau’s Canada you can just pretend it does. The rule of law? Constitutional norms? Parliamentary supremacy? Pfft, those are for dorks.

Almost no one — not CSIS, not the Ontario police, not even the prime minister himself up until the last minute — really believes the Freedom Convoy protests counted as a threat to the “security of Canada” as defined in legislation, or otherwise met the standard for declaring a national emergency.

OTTAWA – Cabinet ministers did not exhaust every option they had to resolve the protests blockading Ottawa streets and border crossings across the country last winter before turning to the Emergencies Act, a federal inquiry heard Friday.

Thousands of protesters rolled into Ottawa in big rigs and other vehicles to voice their opposition to COVID-19 public health restrictions and the Liberal government.

After the first weekend, it became clear the protesters did not plan to leave downtown Ottawa, where they set up camps in the middle of city streets. That’s when cabinet convened to review what the federal government could do to end the protests, said Jacqueline Bogden, the government’s deputy secretary on emergency preparedness.

OTTAWA — In freezing the bank accounts of Freedom Convoy protesters, Finance Canada bureaucrats said they did not intend to hurt protesters’ families’ ability to buy groceries or pay child support, though they admitted that may have ultimately happened, the Emergencies Act inquiry heard Thursday.

It is an unfortunate fact of human nature that there will never be a shortage of people to run Gulags.

More than half of the donors to the GiveSendGo convoy protest crowdfunding campaign who have not yet received refunds are Americans, CBC News has learned.

CBC analyzed documents tabled by the commission of inquiry into the convoy protest that paralyzed downtown Ottawa for three weeks, and the donations data made public when the GiveSendGo Freedom Convoy crowdfunding website was hacked.

That analysis shows that an estimated 59 per cent of donations — accounting for 46 per cent of the GiveSendGo Freedom Convoy money that was frozen by a Canadian court order — came from donors with postal codes indicating they lived in the United States. An estimated 35 per cent of the donations and 50 per cent of the frozen funds came from donors with Canadian postal codes.