Declaration of Emergency Committee on Oct. 27th, 2022

Evidence of meeting #16 for Declaration of Emergency in the 44th Parliament, 1st session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was police.

A video is available from Parliament.

On the agenda

Review of the Exercise of Powers and the Performance of Duties and Functions Pursuant to the Declaration of Emergency that was in Effect from Monday, February 14, 2022, to Wednesday, February 23, 2022

MPs speaking

Also speaking

Joint Clerk of the Committee Ms. Miriam Burke

Mathieu Fleury City Councillor, City of Ottawa

Steve Kanellakos City Manager, City of Ottawa

Kim Ayotte General Manager, Emergency and Protective Services, City of Ottawa

Jim Watson Mayor, City of Ottawa

Joint Chair Hon. Gwen Boniface (Senator, Ontario, ISG)

Claude Carignan Senator, Quebec (Mille Isles), C

Peter Harder Senator, Ontario, PSG

Dennis Glen Patterson Senator, Nunavut, CSG

9:15 p.m.

The Joint Chair Hon. Gwen Boniface

Thank you.

Thank you, Senator Patterson. We welcome you to the committee.

I want to come back to the question of jurisdiction.

Mayor, you can talk about this.

The Police Services Act—to my knowledge, since it's been a while since I opened it up and looked at it—would normally say that the police service of jurisdiction would be Ottawa. If there's a requirement in an important investigation—normally it wouldn't be a city the size of Ottawa, but if a smaller department had a major case—then the Crown could step in and ask that the OPP take over the investigation, as an example. That's within the act, as far as I'm familiar with it.

When you look at it now, in reflection, do you see that there should be a provision or some agreement between the three levels of government that would look at how you do an integrated command at the front end of an incident like this, that it would be mandatory versus left to the police agencies to decide?

October 27th, 2022 / 9:15 p.m.

Mayor, City of Ottawa

Jim Watson

I think that's a very good point. I think it would be covered under what Mr. Kanellakos indicated would be the post-mortem that we're going to do. I agree with you; we have to do it sooner than later because we might see one of these incidents happen sooner than later. It's also about people's memories. The longer you wait, the more difficult it is to remember what happened on that specific day or that specific hour, who called who and so on.

Certainly, our obligation, particularly for Mathieu and me, who are both leaving politics, is to make sure that our successors are never put in a position where we have this kind of horrific experience, whether it's a lack of coordination by all three police forces....

We all share the blame. The buck stops with me as mayor. I take responsibility that we let down the people of Ottawa. We have to do better.

9:20 p.m.

The Joint Chair Hon. Gwen Boniface

Maybe to Mr. Kanellakos, at the government level—I'm thinking of your counterparts in the provincial government and at the federal level—again is there something that should be...?

People, the public, would think that these people would naturally work together in this case, but it wasn't necessarily the case. Should that be something that is either covered by agreement or legislatively?

9:20 p.m.

City Manager, City of Ottawa

Steve Kanellakos

What was evident and something that we haven't had to deal with necessarily in the past.... The only other time I can remember is after the shooting of Corporal Cirillo.

There is no memorandum of understanding between the federal government and the City of Ottawa in the federal precinct for how to deal with an emergency of this kind of scale. Even at the provincial level, there are mechanisms with their emergency operations and ours, back and forth, but there isn't a memorandum of understanding, any kind of documentation or pre-work that has been done to understand how we will come together to lead an incident that escalates and scales up so that we can quickly mobilize.

To his credit, Deputy Minister Rob Stewart called me after the first weekend and said that we should talk. I didn't know who Rob Stewart was. He became a key link for me into the federal government and brought the deputy minister of community together with us and the police chief, etc. Eventually it expanded to the RCMP commissioner, OPP commissioner, etc.

That became an ad hoc thing where we came together to discuss situational awareness and what other steps we could take to try to mitigate what was happening. To me, from a lessons learned viewpoint, I've been thinking a lot about these things as they happened. I think it's a pretty fundamental course of action that we need to have for the nation's capital.

9:20 p.m.

The Joint Chair Hon. Gwen Boniface

On that, then, I suspect that it would be helpful to all of you to understand the role of each of the governments and document what that means in advance in a situation like this. There were multiple incidents that were taking place when the events in Ottawa were going on. I think the commissioner of the OPP testified to this today, that he had the whole province, and there were a number of different.... We had all kinds of things going. You could only stretch a provincial police service so far. Like the Ottawa Police Service, they were on their knees when they finished. We need to recognize that.

9:20 p.m.

Bloc

The Joint Chair Bloc Rhéal Fortin

We have completed the third round of questions and are now beginning the fourth and final round.

Mr. Brock, you have the floor for four minutes.

9:20 p.m.

Conservative

Larry Brock Conservative Brantford—Brant, ON

Thank you, Chair.

We talk about takeaways or lessons learned. One thing I've reflected upon about this particular incident is the extreme naïveté demonstrated by so many organizations, from police organizations to government officials to you four gentlemen—specifically Mayor Watson. You all felt that this was going to go away within 48 hours.

This was organized for weeks prior to these truckers and their supporters arriving in the city of Ottawa. They were coming from the west coast, from the east coast and from everywhere in between. Given that their mandate, which was widely shared across all kinds of social media platforms, that they weren't leaving until all federal mandates were removed, how could anyone be so naive to think that in 48 hours, someone who's travelled from Vancouver, British Columbia would just say, “Okay, my point's been made” and then return?

They were there to speak to a government official. That didn't happen. I wanted to throw that out for consideration.

We've heard on a couple of occasions from my colleague Mr. Virani, who took two opportunities to describe the actions of a certain member of Parliament.

I listened very carefully to your responses, Mayor Watson. Clearly, your indignation with respect to that member of Parliament was very evident. You commented that the particular member was giving it “credibility” and that it was “salt to the wound”.

I didn't hear that same indignation when the Prime Minister of this country was the origin of, the genesis for, the anger that many people had about mandates. That's the same Prime Minister who called these people “extremists”, “racist, misogynistic”, those with “unacceptable views”, those who “don't believe in science” and those who take up space.

Were you concerned about the Prime Minister using that language, Mayor Watson?