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.
Senator, Quebec (Mille Isles), C
That was done with the help of a mediator.
Senator, Quebec (Mille Isles), C
You said that your declaration of a state of emergency in Ottawa was only symbolic. Did you do it for strictly symbolic reasons?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
I believe Mr. Ayotte has more information on that subject, but that kind of declaration coming from a mayor doesn't really confer the same powers as those conferred by a declaration made by the province or the federal government. Many people think that Canadian mayors have the same authority as their counterparts in the United States. However the mayors of American cities have a lot of powers.
Here's an example. I'm going to say this in English because it's a bit easier for me and the subject is more complicated.
It allows us to override the procurement process, for instance. When we had COVID-19, at the start, at the recommendation of city manager Kanellakos, I signed an emergency declaration because we needed personal protective equipment: masks and needles. We had to shift people from one—
Senator, Quebec (Mille Isles), C
Don't you think your declaration of a state of emergency helped you?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
It didn't give the City of Ottawa the authority to compel a company to provide that service.
You don't have to go through three tenders to get smocks, masks and so on. There were no recreation programs during COVID, so we could take people from one collective unit and put them in the test centres for COVID-19, working with Ottawa Public Health, par exemple.
Bloc
The Joint Chair Bloc Rhéal Fortin
Thank you, Senator Carignan. Your time is up.
Senator Harder, you have the floor for five minutes.
Peter Harder Senator, Ontario, PSG
Thank you very much, Chair.
Thank you for being here, all of you.
My questions will be for the mayor, at least at the start. He may want to direct in the answers.
Mayor, your earlier description of how the residents of Ottawa felt at that time resonated with me as a resident of Ottawa. I want to talk a little bit about what the perspective was, being here.
You said that the OPS lost Wellington Street. I think that for a lot of residents in Ottawa they felt that the police action was, in fact, a complete breakdown of policing in the municipality. I wonder if you would share that view that we had a breakdown of policing?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
Thank you, Senator.
I think we're seeing that each and every day during the public inquiry. Clearly, we were overwhelmed at the local level, and the Ottawa Police. There appeared to be a great deal of argument back and forth among the three orders of policing. There was a lack of a clear direction and communication as to where we were going to get out of this mess that we found ourselves in.
Senator, Ontario, PSG
Yes, from my perspective, it was not only that there were silos at the jurisdictional level, but also that there was at least a lack of alignment at the municipal level between the political and administrative arm of the city and the police force itself, and the lack of confidence in the policing leadership. Is that true?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
I think at the start you couldn't say that because you have to assume it's going to take some time to put together a plan of this nature; it's going to require some logistical challenges to bring people from coast to coast—municipal police forces and so on—and put them up. There was no question that by the beginning of the second weekend, a lot of us—me included—were wondering, why is this taking so long? This should have been done when the numbers dropped in the middle of the week, but which then came back up on weekends. That happened, obviously, three weekends in a row.
I think there was a general lack of communication and frustration. In fairness, I'm not prepared to paint every police officer with the same brush. The women and men who were on the front lines in miserable conditions, being spat upon, yelled at and so on, were doing the best they could and I'm proud of their efforts. Clearly, there were arguments at the higher level of policing, where there were allegations of lack of confidence, planning and so on.
Senator, Ontario, PSG
How soon did you lose confidence in the leadership of the OPS?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
Well, I think it probably started to erode by the second weekend. When they arrived here.... I know that I've heard from lots of Monday morning quarterbacks, as constituents; but at the end of the day, nothing like this had happened in Ottawa before. For people to say, “Well, you should have known this; they've booked hotel rooms and so on”, it's easy to criticize.
The fact is we did not have the resources to go and clean it up. To the credit of Chief Sloly—and I know he has taken a lot of criticism—he did lay out in a letter to me, which I co-signed with the chair of the police board to the two orders of government.... We needed 1,800 officers. We could not move in sooner.
We couldn't, for instance, enforce an injunction, the police told me, because we just didn't have the resources to do it.
Senator, Ontario, PSG
But the police board itself was going through a crisis of confidence.
Senator, Ontario, PSG
It just seemed, as a resident of Ottawa, that it was a police failure, a governance failure and a coordination failure all in one.
Mayor, City of Ottawa
It was a perfect storm; that's true. At the end of the day, our council, through a two-thirds vote, decided to remove the chair of the police services board, because of a lack of confidence. The province then moved to remove their three appointees. Then we had a whole new police board. One of the reasons there was this level of frustration on the part of council members was that the chair was going to hire a new chief, so we would have had three chiefs in three days.
Mayor, City of Ottawa
Yes, it was just about like that.
We had Chief Sloly, interim Chief Bell, and this individual from Waterloo.
Senator, Ontario, PSG
On that point, did you at any point in that period seek an Emergencies Act declaration at the provincial level or at the federal level?
Mayor, City of Ottawa
No, because, again, I had two major preoccupations: the first was to get the officers; and the second was to get as many vehicles out of the residential community as possible, because these people were suffering.
I went down there on two occasions, escorted by the police, to see what was going on. There was a pig roast on a spit, there were fires in pits, and there was yelling and screaming. They had these loud train horns that they kept honking—