Thank you, Chair.
Good evening, everyone.
Thank you so much for the opportunity to be here today.
As the chair mentioned, I'm here with my colleagues, Deputy Commissioner Brian Brennan and Deputy Commissioner Mike Duheme.
Really the primary goal of law enforcement is to always maintain public order and keep citizens safe. As we all witnessed, police services across the country responded to unprecedented and highly disruptive demonstrations, illegal blockades and occupations.
In RCMP jurisdiction, we successfully used a measured approach and existing legislation to resolve border blockades at Emerson in Manitoba, Coutts in Alberta, and the Pacific Highway crossing into British Columbia. The RCMP, Ontario Provincial Police and the Ottawa Police Service established both a national capital region coordination centre and an integrated command centre to ensure continued collaboration, the exchange of information, and coordination of investigation and enforcement activities within our nation's capital.
On February 14, the Government of Canada provided law enforcement with additional tools. The measures enacted under the Emergencies Act provided all police officers across the country—not just the RCMP—with the ability to deal with blockades and unlawful public assemblies. The emergency measure regulations supplemented existing authorities and provided new instruments for law enforcement to address these illegal blockades.
Let's look at some concrete examples.
First, police were able to maintain a secure perimeter throughout the national capital region, and refuse entry to individuals travelling to the illegal protest with the intent of participating. Second, supporting an illegal assembly was also prohibited, and police had the enforcement authority to arrest individuals who continued to supply fuel, food and other materials to an area of an unlawful assembly. Third, there were new powers to compel individuals to provide essential goods and/or services for the removal, towing and storage of vehicles and equipment. I delegated these powers to the OPP, which used them to secure needed equipment to clear the streets of Ottawa.
The goal was to bring a safe and swift end to the illegal blockade. I believe that we all effectively achieved this objective, and I want to thank all of the police officers, from all law enforcement agencies, who joined this operation.
I would now like to talk about the Emergency Economic Measures Order.
It's well known that the “freedom convoy” was well funded, with financial support provided to organizers through a variety of means, including crowdfunding platforms, using both cryptocurrency and money.
Once implemented, these orders allowed the RCMP and its partners to work even more closely with Canadian financial institutions in real time. The RCMP developed a streamlined process where we acted as a central point of contact to disclose information to financial institutions on behalf of provincial, municipal and federal law enforcement.
Once established, the RCMP provided the relevant information to financial institutions, which then had the onus to determine which financial products could and should be frozen. This only included information on owners and operators of vehicles who were active participants in the blockades in Ottawa or convoy organizers.
To be clear, because I know this has been raised in a number of different fora, at no time did the RCMP disclose any information on individuals who solely donated to the convoys or purchased related merchandise.
In addition, the RCMP ensured financial institutions were updated regularly when owners and operators of the vehicles left the protest area. This allowed the financial institutions to better assess and inform their own decisions about when to freeze or unfreeze accounts.
Once the situation was resolved, the government lifted the state of emergency declared under the Emergencies Act.
As of February 23, 2022, RCMP action culminated in the freezing of 257 financial products, which included bank accounts, corporate accounts and credit cards. The disclosure of 57 entities to financial institutions included individuals, owners and drivers of vehicles involved in the blockade and the identification of 170 Bitcoin wallet addresses, which were shared with the virtual asset service providers.
In closing, I really believe that the act provided us with the tools to resolve the crisis swiftly and peacefully, and I would thank you for the time and the opportunity to speak more about this topic.
Thank you.