"That selfish a fashion"

Jim Watson and the dignity of Ottawa

Ottawa lawyer Paul Champ cross-examining Ottawa mayor Jim Watson, Tuesday

In the quarter-century since Jim Watson first became mayor of Ottawa — he has served in two stints, from 1997 to 2000 and from 2010 until very soon now — he has become an expected, indeed almost assumed, feature of the city’s landscape. He is Ottawa’s longest-serving mayor. It feels strange that he isn’t running again. Perhaps he had no choice, because the light-rail transit project that became his white whale has smashed his boat to kindling. The campaign to succeed him has turned into a nailbiter.

And now here he was on Tuesday, spending most of the day testifying to Justice Paul Rouleau at the public commission examining the first-ever use of the Emergencies Act to quell February’s truck-convoy siege against Ottawa. The main theme of Watson’s testimony was the use of novel policy instruments to keep the peace. But an important subtheme, a discordant countermelody, was distaste. The protest that became an occupation and then a debate in legal ethics was always, for Jim Watson, an indignity visited upon his neighbours by strangers whom he will not forgive.

Too much of what went on while the protesters were in town was “completely despicable behaviour,” Watson said. He talked about the Shepherds of Good Hope, an Ottawa Lowertown charity that works to feed and shelter people. “Having people bully their way in to get a free meal? That was just abhorrent.” As it became clear thousands of protesters didn’t intend to go home soon, “We started to see fireworks go off, hot tubs brought in. The public, who were living here, recognized that this was a horrific situation.” Watson found he was getting a runaround from two other levels of government whenever he asked for police reinforcements to “kick these yahoos out of our city.”

For a cordial and, now, gently aging man of 61, Watson is pretty good at finding folksy terms to describe his various predicaments. He was playing “whack-a-mole” chasing protesters from one site to another. A plywood shack used to store propane canisters was a “tinderbox.” All the shuttle diplomacy between various factions and jurisdictions left him feeling “a bit like the meat in a sandwich.”

But again and again, there was the almost Victorian sensibility, the sense that the convoy protesters didn’t upset Watson because of their early tactical successes or their shaky grasp of microbiology, or not only because of that, but most of all because he found them uncouth.

This was much more of a running theme in Watson’s commentary than any sense of personal physical discomfort or any threat to his safety. He mentioned only once, and only in response to a question from one of the constellation of lawyers acting for interested parties, that he had received, “I think, one or two or three” threats. “A couple people were charged. Some guy from New Brunswick was coming down here with guns in his trunk to shoot me and he was arrested.”

That little flash of what-the-hell-was-that came after yet another expression of wounded propriety. “Nothing comes close to it,” he said, comparing the convoy to the rest of his political career. “You know, I think back to my first month in office, I was thrown into the ice storm. That was dramatic but it was not hurtful to people. It was difficult when people lost electricity and so on, but this was something that affected thousands of people very personally. And it was unacceptable behaviour by fellow Canadians to come into someone else’s neighbourhood and act in that selfish a fashion.”

Something about all this made me flash back to when Donald Trump had been president of the United States for a while. Watson was the most prominent Ottawan to make a point of skipping the annual 4th of July party on the sprawling grounds of the US ambassador’s residence. What he didn’t like, he said then, was the Trump administration’s “puerile attitude.”

In the context of the truck convoy, perhaps the strongest expression of Watson’s esthetics appears in a “readout” — a rough transcript produced at high speed — of a Feb. 8 phone conversation between Watson and Justin Trudeau. The prime minister asks the mayor how he’s doing. “A challenge for everyone,” Watson says. “Still a pretty unstable situation. Nasty people out there that just don’t represent Canada. Reminds me of the Republican Party down south. Can’t reason with them, so vulgar, and hateful, attacking people, ripping masks off, honking their horns.”

Watson must know there are people who would be close to gleeful at the thought of pursed-lipped Laurentians being put off their diet of crumpets by a few thousand unfussy visitors from the world of honest work. Watson is entirely unimpressed by this line of argument. His message to the Ottawa-deserved-what-Ottawa-got crowd: “How would you like to have 40 18-wheelers outside your window for weeks?… How would you like that in Winnipeg” or Edmonton or a hundred other communities? “Downtown Ottawa isn’t just some sterile entity,” he said. It’s home to thousands of people, very few of whom work on Parliament Hill or have drivers to get them home from receptions on the Hill. That’s why, when the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, Watson and the new chair of Ottawa’s Police Services Board, Eli El-Chantiry, wrote to the prime minister to thank him.

It’s probably appropriate, as I survey the mayor’s various assertions of rectitude, to point out that by the late stages of the February blockade, Ottawa’s city council was a wreck of recrimination and bitterness. Diane Deans, the councillor who headed the arms-length police services board, had quit after trying to find a replacement for Sloly, but Watson’s management technique was the focus of a lot of councillors’ wrath. Video from that meeting, embedded here, shows how angry councillors were at him. Watson can be too clever by half, and manipulative. It’s one reason he eventually wore out his welcome with the voter coalitions that used to return him almost automatically to City Hall.

We’ll get to some other things Watson said about the Emergencies Act, and some things he said that might shine a light on the question of its utility and proper use —the main themes of Justice Rouleau’s inquiry, after all. But I want to get back to the record of that phone conversation between Watson and Trudeau. We get so few chances to hear how politicians talk when they expect we won’t hear.

In the readout of the call, the two men kick off with pleasantries — “Hello, Jim!” “Hi, PM, how are you?” — and then compare notes on the state of the unpleasantness. Watson is strikingly on-message, even dogged. He needs help from anyone who can provide it, and this guy Trudeau can provide some. So Watson asks, again and again, for RCMP reinforcements.

There’s a call coming up at 4:30 that afternoon, he says, “and hopefully more resources from you on RCMP.”

Trudeau, faced with a clear request from a mayor in crisis, asks about the guy who’s not on the call. “Have they (province) indicated they will be there at 4:30?”

Well, Watson says, it’s not clear. Ontario solicitor-general Sylvia Jones is being “disingenuous” with her claims to have sent 1,400 OPP officers. And again, Watson pivots to the message of greatest utility: he’s already asked for as many fresh reinforcements from the RCMP as from the OPP, and since Trudeau’s on the line, well…. “Sometimes I find it in the bureaucracy, not the sense of urgency.” (Again, these quick transcripts are often not quite word-for-word.) “Wondering what you can do to help us?”

Asked a second time, Trudeau this time comes closer to answering. “One of the challenges is that it goes in steps. The first step is to go to the OPP, then RCMP. It’s difficult for us to say what we need to do directly until we have a better idea of what the province is doing.” Then Trudeau finds another topic that isn’t how he can send RCMP to help Watson. “How is your relationship with the police chief and how are you guys working together? There are moments when you are saying one thing and he is saying another, is there anything we can help around that?”

Why, yes indeed, Watson must be thinking. You can send in the RCMP, as I’ve already asked twice. And indeed, he bats away any discussion of Peter Sloly’s role. “As you know PM now is not the time to change courses, we have to do our best to support him.” (Sloly would resign a week later.)

Again, Watson goes back to message. “I’m going to ask after this phone call whether the federal government will live up to its commitment, we need boots on the ground very shortly.”

On his third pass, the PM comes a little closer to an answer. “Listen, yes, you can say yes the federal government will be there with more resource” — Great! How many? When? — “but again, thing that frustrates me… Doug Ford has been hiding from his responsibility on it for political reasons as you highlighted, and important that we don’t let him get away from that, and we intend to support you on that.”

Watson, God bless him, is by now like a dog with a bone. “If they keep dragging their feet, I’m happy to call them out on it,” he says of Ford’s government, sliding right into: “It’d be nice if we have something firmed up with the federal government to shame them.” Hint hint.

His assorted gambits having failed to shake Watson, the prime minister of Canada finally consents to kick the file upstairs to where decisions are made. “OK, listen obviously there are all sorts of different needs, but I will pass along all the concerns.”

In the end, Watson said, everyone came through. “Once they did get engaged,” he said of the often-absent Ontario government, “they were very helpful. The OPP were a very good partner. But it was getting to that point.”

An enduring mystery of this commission is why Rouleau hasn’t invited the testimony of any Ontario government minister. Or if he has sought it, why he can’t secure it. Justin Trudeau will be here later, as will seven of his ministers, the mayors of Windsor and Coutts, all the big deputy ministers (Michael Sabia!) and more. This is a commission of inquiry into the use of the Emergencies Act. François Legault and Scott Moe opposed its use in this case. Doug Ford didn’t. Great. Tell him to pop by and explain why.

As for Watson, there is no question in his mind. “I think the prime minister did the right thing by bringing in the Emergencies Act. Because that solved our problem. It’s easy to sit back and be a Monday-morning quarterback. But the people who were suffering most were the people of Ottawa. Not the people of the West Coast or the East Coast.”

I’d let that be his last word, except it’s actually not the last thing he said. He said this a few minutes later. “You know, as I mentioned earlier I was asked by some students I spoke to at, I believe, Algonquin College the other day last week — They said, ‘what was the most stressful time as mayor this term?’ And I think a lot of them were going to say, you know, the truck convoy. And I said, ‘Well actually, not to diminish the truck convoy, but it was COVID.’

“Eight hundred people died [in Ottawa]. As a result of COVID, thousands more were seriously impacted. People lost their jobs, their livelihood. And that was a challenge that every single citizen of the world had to face The truck convoy was a terrible experience, but it was for a set period of time. Three weeks. It affected dramatically the people in the inner core. But it ended. We're still dealing with COVID and we're still losing people every day.”

The question Justice Rouleau will have to answer is whether the Emergencies Act was needed to resolve the second-worst crisis of Jim Watson’s career, when it wasn’t needed to solve the worst, or any other crisis in the 34 years since it was passed.

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On the podcast: Hope in the shattered American heartland

Hey, it’s Wednesday, so we’ve got a new episode of The Paul Wells Show. My guest this week is Beth Macy, the Virginia journalist and author whose book Dopesick became a hit TV series on Hulu, or as we pronounce it in Canada, Disney Plus.

Macy swore she’d never write about the overdose crisis again after Dopesick. This is an actual promise she made to her husband. But she kept hearing about approaches to treatment that give hope and dignity back to people whose lives have been shaken by opioid use. That’s the story she tells in her new book.

Here’s the episode on Apple Podcasts:

Here’s more on the episode, including all the other places and platforms you can find the show.

Here’s the part where I say thanks. It takes one of me to make a newsletter, and a happy army to bring you this podcast. That’s why I want to thank our Founding Sponsor, Telus, and our Title Sponsor, Compass Rose. I couldn’t get this show to you without their generous help.

The institutional basis for this work is my post as the inaugural Journalist Fellow-in-Residence at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs and Public Policy. Our Ottawa partner is the National Arts Centre. Antica Productions turns it all into a podcast. The Toronto Star and iPolitics distribute and promote The Paul Wells Show. Kevin Breit made the music. Thanks to them all.