Showing posts with label POEC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label POEC. Show all posts

Saturday, February 18, 2023

Today's News: Justified


TL;DR In October, I wrote that I hoped the Public Order Emergency Commission looking into Trudeau's use of the Emergencies Act to shut down the FreeDumb Convoy Ottawa occupation and border blockades should answer five questions: 
1. Whose side were the police really on? 
2. Whose side are the media really on? 
3. Whose side is the public really on? 
4. Conservatives, WTF? 
5. Are the hearings going to be a clown show? 
Paging throgh the POEC Final Report released today, I wanted to see if any of these questions were considered, either directly or indirectly. 
Commissioner Paul Rouleau found that Ottawa police were inept and unprepared, but I haven't come across any discussion of whether some police were acting as Convoy supporters or enablers. I couldn't find discussion of how many Canadians actually supported what the FreeDumb Convoy was trying to do. Pandering to the Convoy by Conservative politicians isn't mentioned, even though it is noted that the Ford government dropped the ball.  Also not discussed is whether Canadian media gleefully embraced the Convoy initially because it was an embarassment to the Trudeau government. 
But at least Rouleau ensured that the hearings were not a clown show, though Ford refused to testify. 
One point that Commissioner Rouleau does make clear in the report is that the outrage at Canadian border vaccine requirements - the rationale for the Convoy's entire existance - was based on a lie. Maybe the truth will never be believed by the Freedumbers, but at least the truth is in the report:
...on October 12, 2021, the government of the United States announced [emphasis mine] that, starting in January 2022, all inbound foreign national travellers crossing United States land or ferry ports of entry would be required to be fully vaccinated. This included those travelling for essential purposes, including commercial trucking. Then, on November 18, 2021, Canada announced that its border rules would also change ... 
The effect of these new rules was that foreign truck drivers would be barred from entering Canada unless they were vaccinated. Canadian truckers, who have a constitutional right to enter Canada, would not be barred from entry. However, if unvaccinated, they would no longer be exempted from the requirement to quarantine, which would have a significant impact on their ability to engage in commercial trucking. 
In practice, they were more impacted by the American rules that barred them from entering that country entirely. However, as I mentioned earlier in this chapter, several protest leaders believed that the American authorities decided to impose their vaccination requirement only after Canada did so. 
This was not the case [emphasis mine] but does go some way to explaining why protesters may have focused their anger toward Canadian authorities and believed that a repeal of the Canadian requirements would have allowed unvaccinated truckers to continue cross-border work ...
Rouleau continues:
In some circles, “the trucker” became a symbol for hard-working Canadians who, despite their contributions to society, were having their lives and livelihoods upended by government COVID-19 regulations. 
This narrative was a contributing factor that helped to animate the Freedom Convoy.  
(Volume 2, page 98-99)

Tuesday, December 06, 2022

Today's News: What we learned

This weekend there was a fascinating article in the Globe and Mail summarizing what was learned from the Emergencies Act testimony at the POEC. Here are some revelations of note: 

Convoy leaders egged on the protestors but did not risk their own trucks:
...only through the inquiry did the public learn that while the leaders encouraged others to put their trucks – and therefore their livelihoods – on the line, most of the convoy leaders did not. Mr. Barber removed his truck, ‘Big Red,’ from the “red zone” after the second weekend. Mr. King left his motorhome in a “secure location” and hitched a ride downtown. Ms. Belton left her big rig at home, as did Mr. Dichter.
Stephanie Carvin, an associate professor at Carleton University and a former federal intelligence analyst, said the convoy leaders have shown – at the protests and in the inquiry – that “they see reality entirely differently.”
“They’re not delusional,” she said, but added, “I’m not sure anything would have convinced them that they were causing harm.”
Ottawa police failed:
...In an emergency situation, a police services board and a police chief are the only ones that can ask the OPP to take over when a police force is not providing “adequate and effective” policing, Prof. Kempa said. Mr. Sloly’s senior commanders believed he thought that other police services coming to Ottawa to help craft an enforcement plan illustrated a plot against him, the inquiry has heard.
Police stood by as protesters formed supply lines of fuel-filled jerry cans and indiscriminately set off fireworks near condos and office buildings. Yet Mr. Sloly testified that the chaos never met the threshold where he should have relinquished command. And then-Ottawa police board chair Diane Deans testified that she couldn’t recall if the board ever considered making a request to the OPP.
The chaos should have triggered an automatic threshold for the OPP to take control, but no such mechanism exists, Prof. Kempa said.
The Ontario government failed:
...the Emergencies Act assumes all parties do their jobs, as expected, not that the Ottawa police would be “dysfunctional” or that Mr. Ford would decide “he didn’t want to get involved and kick it up to the federal government.”
“It assumed that the Ontario government would be working and solving this and it wasn’t. So what do you do?” she said.
And Canadian intelligence agencies weren't as helpful as they could have been:
...The inquiry has heard that the protests in Ottawa and elsewhere did not rise to the level of a national-security threat, under the CSIS Act. Yet CSIS director David Vigneault testified that he recommended the act’s invocation – after receiving a legal opinion from the Justice Department that the Emergencies Act could take a broader interpretation than the CSIS Act.
On Feb. 14, about an hour before the act’s invocation was announced, Mr. Trudeau received a memo from Canada’s top public servant recommending the act’s use. A detailed threat assessment was meant to follow “under separate cover,” but it did not. Jody Thomas, national security and intelligence adviser, had sought that threat assessment earlier that day but she testified that it “fell through the cracks and we were overtaken by events.”
I'm not sure what the POEC will make of all this, except perhaps to conclude that Mulroney and Beatty were maybe indulging in a bit of wishful thinking back in 1987 when they thought the process of declaring a state of emergency would be polite, orderly, and unencumbered by bureaucratic incompetence at several levels.

Sunday, November 20, 2022

Cold weather blues and other news

So pending Twitter's possible demise, I have now signed up at Mastodon and at Tribel -- I'm not sure either of them can work as easily as Twitter did so we'll see how it goes. 
Here are my links to these sites, if you have to find me someday soon: 
I haven't made many posts on these sites yet and I'm not sure how much I will be able to use them, because they don't seem to have easy ways to save posts or to embed them here on Blogger. 

Moving on to today's news, here in Saskatchewan tonight, its COLD. Damned cold.
People have already died of exposure in Saskatchewan this winter: To humanize and publicize the problem,Yann Martel writes of his 36-hour "homeless" experience
Over and over, I met people who showed me the respect and dignity that poverty and homelessness so quickly strip you of. 
That’s how we begin to deal with homelessness in our city, by re-humanizing people from whom so much has been taken. Homelessness is not a cancer. It’s the suffering of fellow citizens, and if we don’t help them, we’re all brought down, the homeless and everyone around them, residents, business owners, the city, everyone. 

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Today's News: Updates

Just a short one tonight. 
 First, about the POEC hearings: And some of what we are hearing is just BS: CSIS, on the other hand, says this: An interesting point here: I know what was happening to people in Ottawa during the FluTruxKlan occupation was terrible -- here is an excellent list of everything the FluTruxKlan put them through.
But I think it was the border blockades that really caused the most trouble for the country as a whole -- senseless, chaotic, jeopardizing the economy, shattering international relations. The border blockades ranged from 3 days at the Pacific Highway Crossing in Surrey BC, to 18 days at the Coutts, Alberta crossing, and included 6 days at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor Ontario and 6 days at Emerson, Manitoba. 
It was nuts, nonsensical -- even if Canada had been willing to let unvaccinated truckers into the country, the United States was not, so Canadian truckers would still have needed to get vaccinations before they could cross the border.  This made it impossible to negotiate an end to the blockades. No level of government - municipal, provincial, federal - could meet the FluTruxKlan demands because they didn't make any sense.
But nonsense never stopped the FluTruxKlan!
And it was the border blockades that really made this into an international story.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Five questions for the Public Order Emergency Commission

Over the past several months, I have been collecting comments and tweets related to the FluTruxKlan, anticipating the upcoming Emergencies Act inquiry and the likely shit-show we will be seeing in the media .
I expect we will see a lot of hysterical tut-tutting about how the Emergencies Act was all just SUCH an OVER-REACTION by the Trudeau Liberals because all our provincial governments - Conservative (Ford, Kenny, Stephanson) and NDP (Horgan) - were doing lots of great stuff pretty soon right away so everything would have been JUST FINE because any day now they would have got a grip and the Convoy would have faded away and ...blah, blah, blah. 
The Commission into the use of the Emergencies Act to end the protests is supposed to start this week and continue through November. (It had been scheduled for September but was delayed for Commissioner Paul Rouleau's surgery).   
The inquiry witness list was dropped this morning.
The Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) website is here and they are looking for comments:
As the months have gone by, we have found out more about what was happening in Canada last January and February, in Ottawa and across the country: When I review the tweets I flagged over the last few months, I have five questions that I hope the Public Commission will answer: 
1. Whose side were the police really on?
2. Whose side are the media really on?
3. Whose side is the public really on?
4. Conservatives, WTF?
5. Are the hearings going to be a clown show?