Thank you very much.
Thank you to both witnesses for their testimony. I'm going to direct my questions to Professor Roach.
First of all, it's nice to see you, Professor Roach. By quite a coincidence, we have two U of T law alumni here at the committee, at least two.
I'm going to ask you about three areas of questioning.
You mentioned some of the things you've written about. There are a couple of things of yours that I've read. I'm going to quote to you some of the passages in an article called “The Dilemma of Mild Emergencies that are Accepted as Consistent with Human Rights”, which appeared in a German publication. It touched upon something that you identified a bit in your opening. I want to take you to it.
It's about this idea of possible areas for improvement and the idea that policing is multi-jurisdictional, particularly in a federation like Canada. What you said in that article is this:
One limit of the inquiries triggered by...the Emergencies Act is that they are limited to examining the federal government’s actions, whereas the roots of the Ottawa occupation and the Windsor blockade are in failures of local policing, including planning for protests. There is no requirement that Ontario, which has ultimate jurisdiction over the local Ottawa and Windsor police, will call a similar inquiry. This is an omission given that emergencies are defined as something that exceeds the capacity of the province.
I know you're intimately familiar with the inquiry that Justice Rouleau was leading. We actually saw an effort to have the Premier of Ontario come before that inquiry, which was then subject to some litigation that was successful from the perspective of the premier's not being interested in participating.
Can you tell us, from your perspective, what you would recommend that we should be doing as a committee to try to rectify this situation, given the constitutional parameters that we're operating under or the division of powers? Going forward, how would you see future inquiries involving by necessity all three levels of government when there is an emergency such as this that gets triggered?
It's over to you, Professor Roach.