An Emergency in Ottawa: The Story of the Convoy Commission

by Paul Wells

On February 14, 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau made what might be the most controversial decision of his tenure, invoking the Emergencies Act to end a three-week occupation of downtown Ottawa by truckers protesting mandatory COVID-19 vaccine mandates. Proclaimed in 1988, the Emergencies Act is designed to give federal officials extraordinary powers in the event of threats to Canada’s national security that can’t be managed under existing laws. Trudeau used it to make the protest illegal, freeze the accounts and cancel the vehicle insurance of participants, requisition tow trucks to clear protestors from the streets, among other measures. The government defended the first-ever invocation of the act as just and necessary; several premiers and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association called it an assault on democratic rights and civil liberties. As required by the act, Trudeau appointed a commission of inquiry into its use. Last November, justice Paul Rouleau held three weeks of riveting hearings that included testimony by so-called Freedom Convoy organizers, police officials, cabinet ministers, and Trudeau himself.
Award-winning author Paul Wells was a regular visitor to the inquiry. Witnesses described layer on layer of dysfunction and acrimony in every organization that converged on Parliament Hill -- three levels of government, three police forces, and the protesters themselves. How does a society make crucial decisions when everyone is exhausted, nothing works, and the noise from the truck horns and the shouting is deafening? And how do the protagonists regroup to make their case in the sterile, weird environment of a public inquiry? That's the story-inside-a-story of the Emergency in Ottawa.

Genres: Nonfiction, Politics, History, Canada

100 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2023

Reviews

[Sean Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Enlightening and informative. I like Paul Wells' detail and tone he takes on topics. I kept wanting to learn more and wish there was more from Paul on this topic.

[Ty Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I would’ve liked him to cover the legal justification side of things a bit more. But nobody tells a story like Paul Wells! He’s so adept at comparing people’s perspectives and making a compelling drama about it. Great profiles of all the main players in the inquiry, including my friends Mathieu Fleury and Catherine McKenney! Paul Wells is the greatest writer of all time.

[Art Chamberlain · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the convoy protest by one of Canada's most perceptive political writers. My key takeaway is that the incompetent response by the Ottawa police, which included a refusal to talk to the protestors, and the federal and provincial governments' refusal to talk and listen let an issue spiral out of control.

There is a lot of blame to spread around, but the main lesson is what my wife and I learned raising three children: talking and real listening can help deal with many, if not most, problems.

The book includes responses to the earlier book in the series about the Queen's funeral that I also found affirming. Ken Whyte and Andrew Cohen both question and poke fun at John Fraser's adulation of the royal family. Cohen suggests some easy ways we could undercut the monarchy and reduce our support for it, without the unnecessary angst of constitutional upheaval.

[Burt Schoeppe · Rating 1 out of 5]

Very disappointing. Wells' book is an embarrassment.

One quote that gives an insight into the author's thinking. "Imagine a high-rise residential district full of Trudeau-hating, blue-collar workers, besieged by hundreds of lefty city councillors for weeks on end."

Wells misses the point. Blue-collar workers don't choose to live in high-rise residential districts. These workers were sick and tired of people living in such districts making decisions that don't apply to blue-collar lifestyle choices. Such a stammering, self-absorbed analysis.

A second quote that is also more telling. "For most of two years under COVID-19 lockdown, I was my household's self-appointed chief enforcement cop." Who admits that?

Those two quotes are you all need to know about the book. If you agree with either you will like book. If you are a decent human being who believes in reasonable freedom of choice in a democracy, well you find both statements risible.

Wells' final paragraph of the book is the ultimate self-own. "I think the important question is whether we hear one another. Even when we're tired. Even when we're scared." That is contradicted by the thought experiment already highlighted from page 28. If we really want to hear each other try and understand the position other people come from. The members of the Freedom Convoy don't live in "high-rise residential high rise districts". If we want to hear one another ask questions that are relevant to the people you are high-mindedly asking that we hear.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

I will read absolutely anything by Paul Wells, but here he applies his typical acerbic politico-philosophizing to tepid effect. The challenge, I think, is that Wells doesn't have much of a thesis, instead applying his magazine/Substack style to a longer piece: making some interesting observations, asking some interesting questions, and hoping that'll be enough to whet the appetite. It isn't.

[Adam Dodek · Rating 5 out of 5]

Superb

[Andrew Baldwin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I have already written a review of this book on the OPL website, and will not repeat what I wrote there, except to reiterate my admiration for Burt Schoeppe’s excellent Goodreads review. As Schoeppe says, Paul really shows no empathy towards the blue-collar backbone of the Freedom Convoy, and makes no effort to see things from their point of view. I would add that this is a recurrent problem for city-slicker Paul. He is not offended by the Trudeau Liberals’ heavy-handed gun grabs directed at so-called assault-style weapons. He asks plaintively, why does any Canadian actually need to own a gun? He can’t see the viewpoint of a young mother who carries a rifle to protect her children against a potential cougar attack when they go for a swim, an Indigenous hunter whose livelihood requires that he carry a gun or a sportsman who sees a shooting event as their path to the Olympics. His mind only too often sees things from the perspective of the commissar, not the commissar’s victim.
Unless I missed it, Paul doesn’t make any mention of the Omicron variant of COVID-19 in his book, which arose in the early months of 2022 in Canada, about the same time as the Freedom Convoy demonstrations. This seriously undermined if not destroyed the government’s case for vaccine mandates, which seemed useless to stop the spread of the Omicron variant. However, he couldn’t have been unaware of this, which seems to be why he doesn’t really bother to defend the Trudeau Liberals’ position that the vaccine mandates for truckers were necessary. Instead, he lays great emphasis on how polling data told Trudeau that vaccine mandates made a great wedge issue with which he could win the 2021 election and once again have a majority government. He seems to believe that it would simply be clever politics to make truckers lose their jobs, and inflict pain and misery on Canadian families in an unworthy cause, if only it allowed his hero, Justin Trudeau, to get his majority mandate! As it happened of course, the 2021 election was, as one wag described it, the most expensive cabinet shuffle in history. Trudeau didn’t even succeed in regaining a plurality of the popular vote, which he had lost in the 2019 election. His faulty electoral calculus led to the Freedom Convoy protests that otherwise never would have happened. Yet it is the truckers that arouse Paul’s dislike and disdain, not Justin Trudeau.
Now the Trudeau regime has been confined to the dustbin of history, and most of the tedious, hagiographic books on Trudeau will soon be forgotten. However, this slim book, because of its brevity and its superior writing, could be an exception. A new edition, edited and annotated by a professional historian without Wells’s crippling adulation of Trudeau, could provide a cautionary tale to future Canadian journos. Even an intelligent, knowledgeable journo like Paul can become spellbound by an incompetent, narcissistic politico who has done so much to make so many Canadians miserable and unhappy.

[Martin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was a good overview of the convoy and the commission process, but some parts were missing, which I imagine might be more due to the limits of the format (novella-length books) than Wells choosing to outright ignore them.

The insight into the policing matter and the conclusion(?) that the heart of the problem was a defiant standing of upper levels of government to communicate with the protestors and front-line policing agents was a thought worth reading about and I'm thankful the time Wells took to explore it. The connection drawn to Ipperwash and policing reluctance to make moves that would repeat that disaster again was also eye-opening.

I would have loved to have heard more about Doug Ford's role (or lack of) in this, the results of the commission, and what fallout there has been.

If Wells was to write a longer tome about this period of Canadian history, I would be eager to read it.

[Kamil · Rating 5 out of 5]

A tidy recounting of the convoy protest, its political origins, and the subsequent inquiry into the whole mess. Very few actors come away looking good. The Ottawa police service was out of its depth and the OPP and RCMP had their hands tied by a premier and prime minister who both refused to engage for their own political reasons.

Among the few people who come away looking competent are an OPP investigator and Ottawa city bureaucrat who seemed to be gaining some traction by working collaboratively towards de-escalation. That is, until the PM invoked the Emergencies Act and the problems of effective governance - its practices of leadership, its methods of communication - were shunted aside, their various proverbial cans kicked down the road to the next crisis.

[Matt Cote · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting take on a difficult time in Ottawa. I appreciate Wells' appeal to empathy, and learned a TON about Canadian policing theory with respect to protests, and that a lot of it comes back to Ipperwash. I was struck how much this give-and-take and collaborative / conciliatory approach echoes what I have learned in other places like "A Fair Country" and in the "Nations of Canada" Podcast. It seems that some of the attributes that we think of as most Canadian (compromise, conciliation, communication) are in fact, native to this territory and have existed long before any European saw it. I very much appreciated this modern example of what I'm learning about in Canada's long history.

[John Matthew IV · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a good review on the events around the Trucker Convoy and associated events. It is by no means definitive.

Paul is a great writer but I would rather read something more comprehensive.

[Kirsten Smith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tidy little book that reminds me how good Paul Wells’ writing is.

[Jim Kokocki · Rating 5 out of 5]

a great read on failures of communication and leadership at various levels of municipal, provincial and federal government

[Stewart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Paul Wells’ characteristic humour and insights make this a tremendously worthwhile read. His in-depth coverage of the ins and outs of the Freedom convoy and the Rouleau commission are insightful and informative.