Opinion: The inquiry into use of the Emergencies Act is showing in excruciating detail how Canadian authorities first underreacted and then overreacted to last winter’s convoy protests.
The inquiry into use of the Emergencies Act is showing in excruciating detail how Canadian authorities first underreacted and then overreacted to last winter’s convoy protests.The inquiry has already done tremendous work by giving us a rare look under the hood into police and political decision-making. When it reports next year, it could do an even bigger service by recommending at least two ways to break that cycle of underreaction and overreaction the next time a big crisis comes along.
But some people always fall short in a crisis. The real question is why police failed to use the powers they had to bring the protests under control — and why the politicians stood by helplessly for so long and watched it happen. But the protests showed that’s been taken to an absurd extreme. And you can see why: it’s in the interest of both police and political leaders. It gives police enormous independence from their political masters and it lets the politicians off the hook.
It was always very doubtful that the protests met the legal criteria for using the act — “threats to the security of Canada,” defined in specific ways including espionage or sabotage, foreign-influenced activities, terrorism and suchlike. The government argued this week that it isn’t bound by this definition and can take a wider view of threats to invoke the act.
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