Update on Emergencies Act inquiry recommendations coming soon, says Ottawa

The federal government says it will have an update in “the coming days” on what it plans to do with the dozens of recommendations coming out of the independent inquiry that investigated Ottawa’s decision to invoke the never-before-used Emergencies Act.

Following six weeks of intense testimony and after reading thousands of pages of documents, Commissioner Paul Rouleau released a highly-anticipated report earlier this year that found Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government met the “very high” threshold needed to invoke the controversial legislation a year prior.

But Rouleau, an Ontario Court of Appeal justice, also wrote that the protests that gridlocked downtown Ottawa in early 2022 constituted an emergency that could have been avoided. He made 56 recommendations to improve the way police forces respond to wide-scale protests and how they communicate with each other, and suggested amendments to the Emergencies Act itself.

While Rouleau called on the government to identify the recommendations it accepts within a year, Trudeau told reporters on Feb. 17  he’d have a plan in place within six months.

“We’ll have more to say on that in the coming days,” Jean-Sébastien Comeau, spokesperson for new Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, told CBC News in an email Tuesday. 

Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14, 2022 to end the protests that had blocked downtown Ottawa’s streets for nearly a month.

Many of the protesters were angry with the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, including vaccine requirements. They parked large vehicles on key arteries in the capital city and honked their horns incessantly for days.

It was the first time the Emergencies Act had been triggered since it was created in 1988.

By invoking the act, the federal government gave law enforcement extraordinary powers to remove and arrest protesters — and gave itself the power to freeze the finances of those connected to the protests.

The temporary emergency powers also gave authorities the ability to commandeer tow trucks to remove protesters’ vehicles from the streets of the capital.

Rouleau found that most of the measures put in place by the federal cabinet were “appropriate and effective,” but he said elements of the emergency economic measures fell short.

For example, the commissioner said, there should have been a “delisting mechanism” for frozen accounts.