Hearings for the Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC) concluded on November 25th, bringing six full weeks of going over the Freedom Convoy with a fine-tooth comb to a close.
A brief summary of what transpired in these weeks would be impossible. With 200+ hours of testimonies, cross examinations, melt-downs and genuine drama by characters ranging from Justin Trudeau to Pat King and everyone in between, entire books could and possibly should be written about this event.
With all the directions the Commission spun off into, one thing that got lost in the shuffle of just about every report on it was the Commission’s mandate itself.
Many seem to have been under the impression that at least one purpose of the Commission was to determine whether or not the Canadian government was justified in invoking the Emergencies Act in February 2022. Lawyers from the Canadian Civil Liberties Association (CCLA) and the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF), among others, spent good portions of their precious allotted time in cross examination pointing at the now famous Section 2 of the CSIS Act and underlining how it’s threshold to invoke the Emergencies Act was not met.
Senior government officials including CSIS Director David Vigneault, having no basis on which to disagree, revealed instead that the narrow definitions of the CSIS Act suddenly had to be “interpreted differently”.
Overlooked in all the Kafkaesque back and forth was the fact that, as much as we might have wanted it to be, the government was not on trial here. In fact, the Commission’s first mandate, as per it’s Order in Council, is to :
(i) direct the Commissioner to examine and report on the circumstances that led to the declaration of a public order emergency being issued by the federal government and the measures taken by the Governor in Council by means of the Emergency Measures Regulations and the Emergency Economic Measures Order for dealing with the public order emergency that was in effect from February 14 to 23, 2022.
For dealing with the public order emergency that was in effect. Quite the opposite of investigating whether or not there was an emergency in the first place, the Commission’s mission statement takes for granted that there was. This was not really in question. Hence the seeming smugness of every high-level government official who testified, but I’ll come back to that.
One might have similarly been anticipating that the actual reasons Canadians stood up en masse last winter might finally be considered in the light of a formal, quasi-legal setting. But again, it was the circumstances that led to the declaration of a public order emergency that were to be unpacked, not the circumstances that led to a lot of pissed off Canadians.
Still, lawyers of the constitutional rights persuasion clearly felt the phrasing of the Order was vague enough to give it a shot. Antoine D’Ailley, counsel representing Citizens For Freedom, made a valiant attempt in his cross examination of Marco Mendicino.
Watch CCF lawyer D'Ailley ask the Minister of Public Safety about the risks of mRNA injections
D’Ailley proceeded to be summarily dismissed by government lawyers for giving voice to “conspiracy theories”, despite having put forth actual documentation. Throughout the hearings, government officials and their legal counsel made liberal use of all the Covid talking points from 2020 as though the mountain of scientific evidence burying their narrative has not grown even bigger since then.
If the Commission was not interested in hearing about why the mandates were misguided, and had already concluded that a public order emergency had occurred, then what did they spend six entire weeks discussing?
The second stated purpose of the Commission was to examine issues related to:
A) The evolution and goals of the convoy and blockades, their leadership, organization and participants,
B) The impact of domestic and foreign funding, including crowdsourcing platforms,
C) The impact, role and sources of misinformation and disinformation, including the use of social media,
D) The impact of the blockades, including their economic impact, and
E) The efforts of police and other responders prior to and after the declaration
Not only do none of these subsections address government overreach, none of them actually relate to the government at all. Instead, they focus attention on the structure, actions, and “impact” of dissenting voices while leaving wiggle room to throw their own law enforcement under the bus, if necessary. It’s no wonder that so many observers were left with the impression that it was the Convoy that was on trial, rather than the government.
Still, if it had been an actual trial, presumably facts would have mattered.
It has long been widely established that funding to the Convoy came from legitimate, Canadian sources. Even back in February 2022, Fintrac had already confirmed that there was no suspicious financial activity involved, and the vast majority of the money came from Canadians who simply wanted to support the truckers.
The economic impact of the protests at Ambassador bridge was known to be exaggerated, and the blockade was already cleared by the time the EA was invoked. The protest at Coutts ended peacefully and with protestors leaving voluntarily, minus the four people who remain incarcerated to this day. Their cases are pending trial and they have not been convicted of anything.
As for Ottawa, anyone who wasn’t there would only have to browse through the 600+ hours of live-streamed footage uploaded to the interactive map at convoyLIVE.com to understand that the protests were entirely peaceful.
But facts be damned, the government officials who paraded through the proceedings seemed free of any qualms about reciting the talking points they were tasked to utter. Their theatrical “affirming” and “swearing in” on various books had the all the sense of a twisted ritual, in which truth was not so much spoken as magically “created” out of thin air.
They may have stumbled a bit in cross-examination, but all of that was dutifully ignored by the legacy media presstitutes, reinforcing the stories they’d prepared all these intervening months to get straight.
With the press to protect them and the Commission’s mandate worded to deflect attention away from them, it’s no wonder that the (s)elected officials seemed smug. The fact that they were able to redact, however unlawfully, all the documentation they wanted to was the cherry on top.
Yet behind the smugness and smirks, evidence of something else was poking through: the government is terrified. One does not put all these fail-safes in place if one is not scared shitless.
The question is: If government is heavily protected from any accountability, what are they scared of?
For David Lametti it seems to be threats to his person, real or imagined. Testifying that he fled Ottawa during the Convoy to take refuge in Montréal, it turns out that he regularly gets to and fro in an armoured vehicle that costs taxpayers between $70K and $80K per month.
Anita Anand testified to having arranged drivers in Ottawa for the safety of herself and her staff, who she’d encouraged to work from home. Spending time in Ukraine where Russian forces were gathering at the border, on the other hand, did not seem to phase her.
She did seem more than a little rattled during Rob Kittredge’s cross-examination, though. He was asking her about the principle of Cabinet solidarity. It turns out that Cabinet ministers are not allowed to publicly disagree with Cabinet decisions, under the oath of the Privy Council which as it happens was taken by every Cabinet minister who appeared before the POEC. We have no idea what goes on behind closed doors; from this side all we’re allowed to see is consensus.
Watch lawyer Kittredge ask the Minister of Defense about Cabinet solidarity
Cabinet solidarity certainly liberates ministers from personal responsibility for Cabinet decisions. From the other side of the sword, however, it would only take one of them to either suffer a crisis of conscience or simply be the first rat to jump ship to bring them all down. This might have been going through Anand’s mind when she said,
“I believe that we are all committed to our oath and we will make decisions, as I said, on a collective basis. We've done that to date and we will continue to do that. That is foundational to the way in which decisions are made in this country as part of our Parliamentary democracy.”
After watching rats for days on end, if I were Anand I’d be scared too.
But it was Chrystia Freeland who inadvertently expressed the deepest of the government’s fears. In a desperate attempt to connect the protests in Ottawa with a dire threat to the economic security of Canada, Freeland came up with the following story:
“But I do remember one morning -- and I’m sorry, I didn’t write it down in my notebook so I can’t tell you the date, but I remember one morning when I was walking from my hotel to my office, I walked past a parked truck and there was a young woman walking there too. And the truck honked really loudly, and she shouted something not very nice and made an obscene hand gesture, and the truck honked again really loudly.
And I was really glad that I was there, and more importantly, that the RCMP was there, because I thought this is exactly the kind of thing -- like, imagine no-one had been there, it was just this small, young woman, and this big truck, and a person in it. And she was mad, and I just thought, you know, there are dozens and dozens of these things happening every day, and you know, God forbid that one of them should actually flare into violence and physical harm. So I was worried about that too, and that does speak to the economic challenge because many, many Canadians, while this was happening, understood that this -- for them, this threat to Canada’s economic security, for many, many Canadians, it was a personal threat to them, and they felt that their government was not protecting them.
And they were right, we weren’t, for a while. And it was a real danger, I think, that that totally understandable and reasonable feeling that, “My economic security is being undermined by these illegal blockades and occupation. My government isn’t taking care of me, maybe I have to take care of myself.” And that would have been terrible, had that happened. That’s why we have a government.”
Read the last part again. “My government isn’t taking care of me, maybe I have to take care of myself”. Here Freeland is tapping into the general public’s innate fear of Chaos, which is really the fear of personal responsibility. As I covered in my previous article on Primal Fears, the elite class (of which Freeland is most certainly a member) relies on knowledge hidden from from us about own own psychology to use our fears against us. The problem for Freeland and her ilk is that we are finally catching on.
Regarding the notion that Canadians might actually decide to take care of themselves instead of handing over that responsibility to government, Freeland laments “… that would have been terrible, had that happened.” Indeed, from the perspective of this government there could be nothing worse than Canadians coming to the realization that we don’t need them.
And it did happen. I witnessed it first-hand during the protests in Ottawa, where the streets were safe, clean and joyful, and the government was nowhere in sight. And as Freeland and every other government official pointed out, it wasn’t just Ottawa.
They frequently used phrases like “whack-a-mole” and “copy-cat” to describe the widespread protests. This was meant to be taken as an explanation for why the EA was necessary, but was actually a revelation of just how terrified the government is that so many Canadians have demonstrated readiness to take care of themselves, peacefully.
This probably freaks the government out even more than learning the extent of support for the Convoy within the Canadian Armed Forces.
All that Canadians needed to restore order in their lives last winter was to get the government mandates out of their way. The paradox of Chaos is that you only create more of it the more you try to control other people. Even so, I’d eat my Canadian flag if this nugget ever came up in the final report of the Commission. In the third and last section of its mandate, it is tasked to:
(iii) direct the Commissioner to set out findings and lessons learned, including on the use of the Emergencies Act and the appropriateness and effectiveness of the measures taken under the Emergency Measures Regulations and the Emergency Economic Measures Order, and to make recommendations, as pertains to the matters examined in the Public Inquiry, on the use or any necessary modernization of that Act, as well as on areas for further study or review.
I sincerely hope that the Commission will find at least some of the measures taken to have been wholly inappropriate, but I’m not holding my breath. More likely, it will highlight the “effectiveness” of the extremely violent measures it took to clamp down on the protests and recommend “modernization” that will render the EA even easier to invoke.
In the meantime, the Canadian government is moving ahead with its plans to sign us all up for the looming global bio-security state. At the recent G20 Summit in Bali, all participating “leaders” signed a declaration agreeing to adopt digital vaccine passports to “facilitate” future international travel.
While the POEC has done its best to focus attention and blame on the Convoy, it’s worth remembering that the Canadian truckers did more than to bring about the repeal of the Covid passports in Canada. They also inspired the rest of the western world to stand up for their own human rights as well. They did it without violence (no matter how hard anyone tries to twist that word into something it is not), and they did it with humour.
If there’s anything that neuters the illusion of control these “elites” have almost as much as people understanding that we don’t need them, it’s being laughed at. Their game can really only be played in the shadows and the POEC brought more to light than ever, even if that wasn’t what it was designed to do.
As more truth comes out, more lies will be exposed. Our job is to continue taking care of ourselves, doing no harm but taking no shit, and laughing whenever possible.
It really should have been called the GOEC : Government Overreach Emergency Commission. You're right though - the whole thing is drama meant to misdirect the focus of credulous onlookers. There will be no getting to the bottom of anything with this farcical sham. We will continue to be penguin marched across the featureless barren frozen landscape of the New Normal unless we wake up really fast in numbers. In the interests of the 4IR Agenda and all the other twisted plans for us useless eaters, the really sinsister thing is the 'efficiency' with which they are weaponizing us against ourselves.
Now would be a very good time for every Canadian to revisit the insights of one Hannah Arendt, don't you think? and maybe B.F. Skinner to boot!
Keep up the excellent writing...for as long as you can.
Un Canadien errant.
you made me laugh. thx for the report and keeping it real. absolutely right, we don't need them, may they come to the light or burn in...