Premier Doug Ford and the solicitor general of the province both refused to take part in the commission
A long-awaited report on Ottawa’s decision to use the Emergencies Act during last year’s convoy protest slammed the Ford government for its “reluctance” to act. The report said that the public would have known that their provincial government had not left them in a time of crisis if the Ford government had been more involved.
The finding is part of a more than 200-page summary of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s decision in February 2022 to use the Emergencies Act to end the protests that had shut down the streets of downtown Ottawa for almost a month.
In it, Commissioner Paul Rouleau said, “I find it troubling that the Province of Ontario is not willing to fully join these efforts to solve the situation in Ottawa.”
The report says that Ontario didn’t do anything until the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont., and after Trudeau talked to Premier Doug Ford on Feb. 9, weeks after the protests began.
The report says that during that conversation, Trudeau complained about how the protests were being handled by the government in Ottawa.
Reports say that Ford thought the Windsor blockade was a “bigger issue.
The report says that Ford said that he thought the blockade of the Ambassador Bridge was “the bigger issue.”
The report says that after the blockade was removed, Ford felt “relief.” It also says that the auto and farm industries were “putting pressure on the premier to solve the situation.”
It was up to the province to get involved from the start in a visible, public, and wholehearted way.– Justice Paul Rouleau
Rouleau’s report also talks about how Ontario didn’t want to sit at a three-way table with the city of Ottawa and the federal government. The commissioner says that this decision was based on two ideas.
One was that the province thought the federal government should solve the problem because the convoy was “protesting a federal vaccine mandate on Parliament’s doorstep,” as Ontario’s deputy solicitor general Mario Di Tommaso was quoted as saying in the report.
The report says that Ontario’s second point was that the situation was best handled by the Ontario Provincial Police because it was a police matter.
The report says that Rouleau said that the province is ultimately responsible for making sure that police work well in Ottawa.
Rouleau also mentioned a news release in which Sylvia Jones, who was Ontario’s solicitor general at the time, said that more than 1,500 OPP officers had been in Ottawa since the protest started. In fact, only 1,500 shifts were done by the OPP.
The report says that OPP Commissioner Thomas Carrique and Di Tommaso later called the release of these numbers “unhelpful and unwise.”
The report has a whole section called “Ontario’s absence.” In it, Rouleau says that both the premier of Ontario and the solicitor general used parliamentary privilege to avoid being called to the inquiry.
The province has been asked to comment by CBC Toronto.
Here, you can find out more about Rouleau’s report.