I read parts of this out loud to my wife, who knows the inside of government better than anyone. This is a great piece of journalism. Substack has given you the space and the freedom to really shine as a writer and analyst.
The biggest problem was that the authorities had no openly announced, widely agreed, strategic goal. You can't have good internal communications when people have no idea what they are trying to accomplish.
Was the goal to let the truckers protest in front of Parliament, for an extended period if they wanted to, could afford it, and had the support, while managing impacts on local residents?
Was it to shut down and clear all protests after a minimal proforma opportunity to "have their say"?
Or was it to smash them, punish those who had the temerity to speak out, and ensure that nothing like this ever happened again?
The fact that support for the truckers was growing rapidly (as more people came to Ottawa and donated) raised the stakes and created panic among authorities.
It's not up to police to decide the goal - that's for politicians. Who hid.
Thinking about this some more, I wonder if the actual reason the EA invocation led to/precipitated a resolution was actually because it resolved the strategic ambiguity clearly in favour of option 3.
The inquiry has explored police decision-making prior to the EA declaration, and found it chaotic and at cross-purposes. I will be very interested to see if it changed post-declaration.
Of course, if the only real function of the EA was communication within the authorities, that could easily have been done without actually invoking the EA.
The use of external consultants for "strategic analysis" (aka PR) and "market research" seems to me a pretty basic admission by Sloly that he had no idea on what to do, and was more concerned with managing the optics than sorting out the mess in the city.
Agreed that this all seems to be beside the point, but it is great insight in the state of our police forces.
Based on this, maybe Trudeau could claim that he had no choice but to act as did, given that he was dealing with such a clown show from the police!
I can't imagine what Ford will say, so I share tour impatience to get him on the stand.
I find it strange that managers have so little faith in the talent of their own organization that they would go out into the marketplace to shop for magic beans and pixie dust.
As in so much reporting today, the main issue is missing. What’s that? The fact that Trudeau did not meet with the truckers or their representatives. Full stop. Had he have “lowered” himself to meet the citizens he “rules” this would have been over on the weekend. That’s the wild card. That’s where the confusion began. Why would the convoy return home after travelling thousands of miles in the middle of winter in freezing weather without acknowledgement by the king? After all, he did make himself available for BLM in a pandemic, didn’t he? He also called Canadians, highlighting RCMP, racists coast to coast to coast at the same time. Remember?
The above statement is the main statement in all of this. Full stop.
The truckers have done a bigger service to Canadians than any other in the history of Canada.
Nothing has highlighted complete dysfunction and corruption in government and their media allies as these truckers have. And that was shown world wide.
Trudeau still remains in the sidelines of blame by media. While he is the only one to blame.
You elected him. We all suffer the consequences.
The truckers did not ask to meet with Ford. Full stop. Ford is not responsible for illegal mandates, which will be proven in court to be So.
At what point is it acknowledged that Trudeau and Singh are the real threat to Canada? The rest are simply pawns to throw under the bus when it suits them.
If this were a conservative government they would be strung up by media day and night, that’s the bottom line. A $16 glass of orange juice comes to mind.
This fiasco has cost Canadian taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars, where is the outrage?
No media reported that Pfizer disclosed last week to the European Parliament that the vaccine was never tested for transmission. Full stop. Media world wide carried that story. Not in Canada though.
So, who should take the blame in Canada? The arm of government, the media that’s who. Period. And still, they have not seen the real damage done to Canada. The destructive path continues.
Trudeau is not the one to blame. Mandates are *provincial*, yet Ford escapes blame for provincial failures because much of the media class finds that blaming Trudeau for not circumventing the constitution generates more eyeballs and clickbait. The Peter Principle premier went AWOL at his cottage in Muskoka-Lago and abandoned the province -- which includes the nation's capital, as much as he protests he "didn't know Ottawa was in Ontario" -- in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, and has no intent of being held accountable for anything for the first time in his life.
Yes, the media is to blame, but not for the reasons you cite: they are not Trudeau's personal propagandists; on the contrary, they appear more willing to protect conservatives at all levels of government (including arsonists like Bergen, Scheer and Poilievre), while pointing fingers at Trudeau for all-and-sundry matters outside his jurisdictional purview. They have learned no lessons from their U.S. counterparts, who are all too willing to fault Biden for the sabotage of DeSantis or Abbott or other right-wing governors who cite "states' rights" and "liberty" as a reason to let a plague spread unabated. But the media's willingness to play along with conservative fostering of civic ignorance does not change the basic facts of the constitution. The separation of powers still matters.
The reason Trudeau did not meet with the convoy clowns is because *they had intent to kill him,* whereas the First Nations did not. Go back and watch Pat King talking about putting a bullet in his head, and how he groomed Trudeau's mentally-unstable stepbrother thinking he could get an "in" with the family. He did not meet with the Indigenous railway protesters either, not in person anyway. But he sent negotiators because there was a willingness to negotiate, and their concerns were based in some semblance of legitimacy. Contrary to the nonsense being peddled by faux-libertarian "freedom fighters," anti-vaxers are not a "discriminated group" and certainly not more so than the Indigenous peoples of the land.
The fact is the convoy did consist of a lot of ignorant and selfish rabble who did not represent "truckers" as a profession (the majority of whom did the right thing and got vaccinated), and who get their news, their medical advice, and their understanding of "alternative facts," from the likes of snake-oil peddling, radicalizing charlatans like Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones, who have given a hearty endorsement to the CPC's boy wonder sitting in the driver's seat (or booster seat) of the big rigs. The prime minister was under no obligation to "negotiate" with a decentralized and foreign-supported band of ragtag January 6th cosplayers who sought to overthrow the government, inflict torture upon innocent civilians in the surrounding areas until they achieved their petulant demands, and harm or even kill the PM and his young family.
Literally the only person in this entire pathetic scenario who did his damn job -- and who even did Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, and Scott Moe's jobs when push came to shove (literally), and invoked the nuclear option to *make* the police get out of the hot tubs, stop taking selfies with criminals and actually do *their* jobs, was... Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau will rightly end up with a lot of blame on his doorstep. The buck stops there. But your comment pretends there was nothing Ontario could have done to assist the beleagured OPS. This is hogwash. The PM should have applied increasing pressure on Ford to order the towing companies to start removing trucks. Those towing permits exist at the pleasure of the province. If they had hauled off a few trucks early on, it would have sent a huge message to the rest of the pack and likely the Emergencies Act would have been unnecessary.
Try listening to the inquiry. This was all underway. It was stopped by the Act one day before it would be implemented. Facts prove it from the timeline. Trudeau did not want resolution. He wanted vengeance. The police are thrown under the bus, which is how Trudeau governs. It’s never his fault. There were several ex and retired military and police within the convoy. You will hear from some of them as the inquiry proceeds. One was a strategic military planner. Try not to dismiss the experts within that group. They did not talk to media. Why you didn’t hear about them. This is in my opinion, what the real threat to Trudeau was. He could not afford to confront real experts and be made a fool of.
That is so right. PM Trudeau was willing to negotiate with the indigenous protesters in 2020 who put a halt to our national railway system for weeks, but refused to recognize those folks he many times maligned and referred to as a fringe group, and essentially being unCanadian. He stoked the fires of discontent., to the point where they jumped into their rigs, sometimes taking along their loved ones. Driving for days they headed to Ottawa to face their accuser, but alas, he would not appear.
I think this had an impact on why there were no discussions with the protesters: the government's position on mandates was so absurd and indefensible, it simply couldn't have survived any sort of rational discussion.
Trudeau had no reason to meet with them (if you can even define who "they" were).
They didn't want to meet with him, they wanted to remove him from office - and the entire government.
What made the EMA inevitable were the border blockades and the threats against airports - blocking trade routes is, literally, an act of war which not only put our economy in danger it also threatened thousands of jobs.
The EMA was justified on those grounds alone.
And don't give me that spiel about the blockades coming down before the EMA was declared - they came down because they knew the EMA was coming and they faced the chances of losing not just their rigs/vehicles and livelihoods but also their children - the ones they were using for shields.
After that, clearing out Ottawa was simply icing on the cake.
As I recall, the blockade of the Peace Bridge began to evaporate after the removal of a few trucks. It was also reported that these first towing actions were actually performed by US companies. If this is true, it has significance in establishing whether the Federal and Ontario governments could have used existing tools to break the logjam. Can someone here shed any light on this?
reminds me of an old comedy "The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming!"-just not the real Russians-thank God or we would be in trouble with our oh so comical way of dealing with conflict.
Belief in consultants needs to be stamped out like belief in astrology or witches.
It's worst with IT - where we routinely see the worst government waste. Managers all don't believe their own staff know their own business, nor are smart enough to learn how computers work. Mostly, I suspect that a modern manager rarely understands how his own business works, having been rotated in recently from another management job of a completely different business function.
Whether "everything had been tried" is not so much the criterion I would use, is "have we given the cops enough time?" Yes, I think, they'd had a week or so more than they needed. Whether the OPS and/or OPP could have pulled themselves together in another month is not relevant to me.
What we see here is a road map for future disruptions by the ignorant and misguided in this country. We have seen a devolution of civic responsibility and discourse south of the border. It may well be that after the US midterms the Americans will find themselves further down the road to authoritarianism which will embolden those with similar desires here in Canada. I find it interesting how quickly a cadre of right wing malcontents could organize the convoy which wasn't really manned by truckers but was a brilliant misnomer. Also did anyone notice or was there a media report concerning one Ontario company that positioned at least a half dozen of its white semis at the very front of the line in Ottawa and rapidly removed them just as the reluctant tow vehicles arrived to tow the blockers from the streets? With all the jurisdictional infighting, I applaud Trudeau for invoking the act. We had better be prepared for more civil disobedience in the future. Perhaps our authorities at all levels will take note. Will they have the guts to act quickly or will they be leery to do so in the wake of this enquiry?
Ford is the ONLY individual who is ultimately responsible for both cities and policing in Ontario. He is the obvious one to be called up and put under oath in this matter. The very fact that this cost the country approx. $3B in lost trade is reason alone to pursue this.
I am in the 'conservative universe' and I utterly disagree with Ford's endorsement of the Emergencies Act ]and of course endorsing our main opponent, Trudeau]. Unusually, I would cite the very unlucky Lucki's take that not everything had been tried. A high school friend used to say of my father's car [with which I terrorized the neighbourhood] by say, "If you can afford a Ford, you can afford better". Maybe that applies here...
"Have you summoned a Ford lately?" A Ford Bronco, perhaps, that the premier and his consigliere have chosen to make their getaway in, now that accountability has come knocking on the door at Queen's Park. If not that, then a snowmobile. But while the search for the missing man from Muskoka continues, perhaps the more pertinent question to be asked is why the other conservative riot-inciters are not being put in the hot seat? Candice Bergen, she of "make it the PM's problem" infamy? ("But her emails!") How about Brad Wall and his no-good son? That story seems to have vanished into the ether. Why isn't he being questioned? And most notoriously, what about Pierre Poilievre and his sidekick Andrew Scheer, who missed a golden opportunity to occupy Ottawa in a million-dollar minivan and bring the insurrectionists chocolate milk along with their Timbits?
Poor Michael Wernick continues to be vindicated over and over again, despite the shameless Canadian media class having hounded him out on a rail rather than admit they had become obsessed with the wrong "scandal." If the esteemed fourth estate, including this columnist (the "Truth and Justice"/ "Spite and Malice" cover story being perhaps a more infamous failure than "The Resistance"), had paid more attention to the predecessor of this shambolic display -- United We Roll, in 2019, which featured nearly all of the same nefarious players, along with Rebel Media cam girl Faith Goldy as the opening act -- perhaps there wouldn't have been a "Freedom Convoy" at all.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, so the saying goes, but far too many in Canada's press seem to have their head in a fog. There is a hashtag circulating around social media that the very insular class of Canadian journalists abhor, but it exists for a reason. Mr. Wernick is owed a class-action apology, and Pierre Poilievre is the one who should be chased out onto the unemployment line.
The EA was all about money - it's not like it gives the cops permission to shoot people or anything, we're arguing about *bank accounts*, your ultimate #whitepersonproblem, since previous generations of protesters (Occupy, civil rights) didn't have money to start with.
Did they ever find all the money that was donated? If not, how much is missing? And is RCMP white-collar crime on the problem? With how many officers?
It depends on the definition of "missing". The government stole the money multiple times, and people just kept donating.
But you're right about the EA and the bank accounts - had this protest not been primarily of respectable, previously employed (but not rich) middle class Canadians, the government's attack on dissidents would have been unsuccessful.
Ford really must have something to hide to go all out in stopping his call to testify. I can't imagine what that could be, but my thinking that he was doing a pretty good job as Premier has just taken a hit.
I read parts of this out loud to my wife, who knows the inside of government better than anyone. This is a great piece of journalism. Substack has given you the space and the freedom to really shine as a writer and analyst.
The biggest problem was that the authorities had no openly announced, widely agreed, strategic goal. You can't have good internal communications when people have no idea what they are trying to accomplish.
Was the goal to let the truckers protest in front of Parliament, for an extended period if they wanted to, could afford it, and had the support, while managing impacts on local residents?
Was it to shut down and clear all protests after a minimal proforma opportunity to "have their say"?
Or was it to smash them, punish those who had the temerity to speak out, and ensure that nothing like this ever happened again?
The fact that support for the truckers was growing rapidly (as more people came to Ottawa and donated) raised the stakes and created panic among authorities.
It's not up to police to decide the goal - that's for politicians. Who hid.
If only there was a way for important people to meet and discuss all this and agree on how to proceed.
Thinking about this some more, I wonder if the actual reason the EA invocation led to/precipitated a resolution was actually because it resolved the strategic ambiguity clearly in favour of option 3.
The inquiry has explored police decision-making prior to the EA declaration, and found it chaotic and at cross-purposes. I will be very interested to see if it changed post-declaration.
Of course, if the only real function of the EA was communication within the authorities, that could easily have been done without actually invoking the EA.
The use of external consultants for "strategic analysis" (aka PR) and "market research" seems to me a pretty basic admission by Sloly that he had no idea on what to do, and was more concerned with managing the optics than sorting out the mess in the city.
Agreed that this all seems to be beside the point, but it is great insight in the state of our police forces.
Based on this, maybe Trudeau could claim that he had no choice but to act as did, given that he was dealing with such a clown show from the police!
I can't imagine what Ford will say, so I share tour impatience to get him on the stand.
I find it strange that managers have so little faith in the talent of their own organization that they would go out into the marketplace to shop for magic beans and pixie dust.
Lol !!!
Wells: Thanks again for the common sense analysis, something so often missing in contemporary Canadian public affairs.
As in so much reporting today, the main issue is missing. What’s that? The fact that Trudeau did not meet with the truckers or their representatives. Full stop. Had he have “lowered” himself to meet the citizens he “rules” this would have been over on the weekend. That’s the wild card. That’s where the confusion began. Why would the convoy return home after travelling thousands of miles in the middle of winter in freezing weather without acknowledgement by the king? After all, he did make himself available for BLM in a pandemic, didn’t he? He also called Canadians, highlighting RCMP, racists coast to coast to coast at the same time. Remember?
The above statement is the main statement in all of this. Full stop.
The truckers have done a bigger service to Canadians than any other in the history of Canada.
Nothing has highlighted complete dysfunction and corruption in government and their media allies as these truckers have. And that was shown world wide.
Trudeau still remains in the sidelines of blame by media. While he is the only one to blame.
You elected him. We all suffer the consequences.
The truckers did not ask to meet with Ford. Full stop. Ford is not responsible for illegal mandates, which will be proven in court to be So.
At what point is it acknowledged that Trudeau and Singh are the real threat to Canada? The rest are simply pawns to throw under the bus when it suits them.
If this were a conservative government they would be strung up by media day and night, that’s the bottom line. A $16 glass of orange juice comes to mind.
This fiasco has cost Canadian taxpayers millions upon millions of dollars, where is the outrage?
No media reported that Pfizer disclosed last week to the European Parliament that the vaccine was never tested for transmission. Full stop. Media world wide carried that story. Not in Canada though.
So, who should take the blame in Canada? The arm of government, the media that’s who. Period. And still, they have not seen the real damage done to Canada. The destructive path continues.
Trudeau is not the one to blame. Mandates are *provincial*, yet Ford escapes blame for provincial failures because much of the media class finds that blaming Trudeau for not circumventing the constitution generates more eyeballs and clickbait. The Peter Principle premier went AWOL at his cottage in Muskoka-Lago and abandoned the province -- which includes the nation's capital, as much as he protests he "didn't know Ottawa was in Ontario" -- in the midst of an unprecedented crisis, and has no intent of being held accountable for anything for the first time in his life.
Yes, the media is to blame, but not for the reasons you cite: they are not Trudeau's personal propagandists; on the contrary, they appear more willing to protect conservatives at all levels of government (including arsonists like Bergen, Scheer and Poilievre), while pointing fingers at Trudeau for all-and-sundry matters outside his jurisdictional purview. They have learned no lessons from their U.S. counterparts, who are all too willing to fault Biden for the sabotage of DeSantis or Abbott or other right-wing governors who cite "states' rights" and "liberty" as a reason to let a plague spread unabated. But the media's willingness to play along with conservative fostering of civic ignorance does not change the basic facts of the constitution. The separation of powers still matters.
The reason Trudeau did not meet with the convoy clowns is because *they had intent to kill him,* whereas the First Nations did not. Go back and watch Pat King talking about putting a bullet in his head, and how he groomed Trudeau's mentally-unstable stepbrother thinking he could get an "in" with the family. He did not meet with the Indigenous railway protesters either, not in person anyway. But he sent negotiators because there was a willingness to negotiate, and their concerns were based in some semblance of legitimacy. Contrary to the nonsense being peddled by faux-libertarian "freedom fighters," anti-vaxers are not a "discriminated group" and certainly not more so than the Indigenous peoples of the land.
The fact is the convoy did consist of a lot of ignorant and selfish rabble who did not represent "truckers" as a profession (the majority of whom did the right thing and got vaccinated), and who get their news, their medical advice, and their understanding of "alternative facts," from the likes of snake-oil peddling, radicalizing charlatans like Jordan Peterson and Alex Jones, who have given a hearty endorsement to the CPC's boy wonder sitting in the driver's seat (or booster seat) of the big rigs. The prime minister was under no obligation to "negotiate" with a decentralized and foreign-supported band of ragtag January 6th cosplayers who sought to overthrow the government, inflict torture upon innocent civilians in the surrounding areas until they achieved their petulant demands, and harm or even kill the PM and his young family.
Literally the only person in this entire pathetic scenario who did his damn job -- and who even did Doug Ford, Jason Kenney, and Scott Moe's jobs when push came to shove (literally), and invoked the nuclear option to *make* the police get out of the hot tubs, stop taking selfies with criminals and actually do *their* jobs, was... Justin Trudeau.
Trudeau will rightly end up with a lot of blame on his doorstep. The buck stops there. But your comment pretends there was nothing Ontario could have done to assist the beleagured OPS. This is hogwash. The PM should have applied increasing pressure on Ford to order the towing companies to start removing trucks. Those towing permits exist at the pleasure of the province. If they had hauled off a few trucks early on, it would have sent a huge message to the rest of the pack and likely the Emergencies Act would have been unnecessary.
No wonder Mr. Ford doesn't want to testify.
Try listening to the inquiry. This was all underway. It was stopped by the Act one day before it would be implemented. Facts prove it from the timeline. Trudeau did not want resolution. He wanted vengeance. The police are thrown under the bus, which is how Trudeau governs. It’s never his fault. There were several ex and retired military and police within the convoy. You will hear from some of them as the inquiry proceeds. One was a strategic military planner. Try not to dismiss the experts within that group. They did not talk to media. Why you didn’t hear about them. This is in my opinion, what the real threat to Trudeau was. He could not afford to confront real experts and be made a fool of.
That is so right. PM Trudeau was willing to negotiate with the indigenous protesters in 2020 who put a halt to our national railway system for weeks, but refused to recognize those folks he many times maligned and referred to as a fringe group, and essentially being unCanadian. He stoked the fires of discontent., to the point where they jumped into their rigs, sometimes taking along their loved ones. Driving for days they headed to Ottawa to face their accuser, but alas, he would not appear.
The difference is that he hadn't won an election by demonizing and stoking up hatred against indigenous people.
It was different for the vax free. Talking to them (us) might have burst his bubble.
I think this had an impact on why there were no discussions with the protesters: the government's position on mandates was so absurd and indefensible, it simply couldn't have survived any sort of rational discussion.
https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/emergency_inquiry_update_2_real_threat_or_media_hype
Trudeau had no reason to meet with them (if you can even define who "they" were).
They didn't want to meet with him, they wanted to remove him from office - and the entire government.
What made the EMA inevitable were the border blockades and the threats against airports - blocking trade routes is, literally, an act of war which not only put our economy in danger it also threatened thousands of jobs.
The EMA was justified on those grounds alone.
And don't give me that spiel about the blockades coming down before the EMA was declared - they came down because they knew the EMA was coming and they faced the chances of losing not just their rigs/vehicles and livelihoods but also their children - the ones they were using for shields.
After that, clearing out Ottawa was simply icing on the cake.
As I recall, the blockade of the Peace Bridge began to evaporate after the removal of a few trucks. It was also reported that these first towing actions were actually performed by US companies. If this is true, it has significance in establishing whether the Federal and Ontario governments could have used existing tools to break the logjam. Can someone here shed any light on this?
reminds me of an old comedy "The Russians are coming, The Russians are coming!"-just not the real Russians-thank God or we would be in trouble with our oh so comical way of dealing with conflict.
Belief in consultants needs to be stamped out like belief in astrology or witches.
It's worst with IT - where we routinely see the worst government waste. Managers all don't believe their own staff know their own business, nor are smart enough to learn how computers work. Mostly, I suspect that a modern manager rarely understands how his own business works, having been rotated in recently from another management job of a completely different business function.
Whether "everything had been tried" is not so much the criterion I would use, is "have we given the cops enough time?" Yes, I think, they'd had a week or so more than they needed. Whether the OPS and/or OPP could have pulled themselves together in another month is not relevant to me.
What we see here is a road map for future disruptions by the ignorant and misguided in this country. We have seen a devolution of civic responsibility and discourse south of the border. It may well be that after the US midterms the Americans will find themselves further down the road to authoritarianism which will embolden those with similar desires here in Canada. I find it interesting how quickly a cadre of right wing malcontents could organize the convoy which wasn't really manned by truckers but was a brilliant misnomer. Also did anyone notice or was there a media report concerning one Ontario company that positioned at least a half dozen of its white semis at the very front of the line in Ottawa and rapidly removed them just as the reluctant tow vehicles arrived to tow the blockers from the streets? With all the jurisdictional infighting, I applaud Trudeau for invoking the act. We had better be prepared for more civil disobedience in the future. Perhaps our authorities at all levels will take note. Will they have the guts to act quickly or will they be leery to do so in the wake of this enquiry?
Ford is the ONLY individual who is ultimately responsible for both cities and policing in Ontario. He is the obvious one to be called up and put under oath in this matter. The very fact that this cost the country approx. $3B in lost trade is reason alone to pursue this.
I am in the 'conservative universe' and I utterly disagree with Ford's endorsement of the Emergencies Act ]and of course endorsing our main opponent, Trudeau]. Unusually, I would cite the very unlucky Lucki's take that not everything had been tried. A high school friend used to say of my father's car [with which I terrorized the neighbourhood] by say, "If you can afford a Ford, you can afford better". Maybe that applies here...
"Have you summoned a Ford lately?" A Ford Bronco, perhaps, that the premier and his consigliere have chosen to make their getaway in, now that accountability has come knocking on the door at Queen's Park. If not that, then a snowmobile. But while the search for the missing man from Muskoka continues, perhaps the more pertinent question to be asked is why the other conservative riot-inciters are not being put in the hot seat? Candice Bergen, she of "make it the PM's problem" infamy? ("But her emails!") How about Brad Wall and his no-good son? That story seems to have vanished into the ether. Why isn't he being questioned? And most notoriously, what about Pierre Poilievre and his sidekick Andrew Scheer, who missed a golden opportunity to occupy Ottawa in a million-dollar minivan and bring the insurrectionists chocolate milk along with their Timbits?
Poor Michael Wernick continues to be vindicated over and over again, despite the shameless Canadian media class having hounded him out on a rail rather than admit they had become obsessed with the wrong "scandal." If the esteemed fourth estate, including this columnist (the "Truth and Justice"/ "Spite and Malice" cover story being perhaps a more infamous failure than "The Resistance"), had paid more attention to the predecessor of this shambolic display -- United We Roll, in 2019, which featured nearly all of the same nefarious players, along with Rebel Media cam girl Faith Goldy as the opening act -- perhaps there wouldn't have been a "Freedom Convoy" at all.
Sunshine is the best disinfectant, so the saying goes, but far too many in Canada's press seem to have their head in a fog. There is a hashtag circulating around social media that the very insular class of Canadian journalists abhor, but it exists for a reason. Mr. Wernick is owed a class-action apology, and Pierre Poilievre is the one who should be chased out onto the unemployment line.
The EA was all about money - it's not like it gives the cops permission to shoot people or anything, we're arguing about *bank accounts*, your ultimate #whitepersonproblem, since previous generations of protesters (Occupy, civil rights) didn't have money to start with.
Did they ever find all the money that was donated? If not, how much is missing? And is RCMP white-collar crime on the problem? With how many officers?
It depends on the definition of "missing". The government stole the money multiple times, and people just kept donating.
But you're right about the EA and the bank accounts - had this protest not been primarily of respectable, previously employed (but not rich) middle class Canadians, the government's attack on dissidents would have been unsuccessful.
Ford really must have something to hide to go all out in stopping his call to testify. I can't imagine what that could be, but my thinking that he was doing a pretty good job as Premier has just taken a hit.
I suggest you pay special attention to the witness coming up Tom Morasso. Herein lay the truth. You be the judge.
https://www.thedemocracyfund.ca/emergency_inquiry_update_2_real_threat_or_media_hype
Great read. Thanks, Paul. Now we wait to see if Ford will appear. Anyone taking bets?