Madam Chair, thank you.
Thank you, Senator Smith, for the question.
That is an issue that the government has reflected on since the invocation of the Emergencies Act and since the Rouleau commission's findings. As I said, the government's intention was to respond publicly within a year, as we'd committed to doing. The court decision that you quoted gave us a few weeks of extra work to reflect on that very issue.
I remember my colleague, the finance minister, was before the Rouleau commission herself, saying that we thought the economic security of Canadians was not the sole determining issue, but it was part of a broad-based government conclusion that the security of Canadians was threatened and a state of public emergency had been reached. Those were the discussions that the government was having at the time.
Certainly, when I spoke to Premier Ford and when I spoke to Atlantic premiers who were worried about pop-up demonstrations at other border crossings.... The premier of British Columbia had spoken to me in light of some reports that the Pacific gateway crossing might be blocked. We had other first ministers, another order of government, across the country, from the Atlantic coast to British Columbia, with a lot of focus on the province of Ontario, telling us—and their police forces were telling them—that there was a real risk of a contagion of these economic blockades. They were expressing very publicly and privately to us the concern that the government needed to bring every possible instrument to bear to bring these situations to a peaceful conclusion.