Thank you, Chair.
Minister, I don't think history is going to be kind to this whole episode of the last three weeks, certainly for the people of Ottawa, who I think rightly felt abandoned, not only by their police services but by three different levels of government.
When I brought forward this motion to ask you and officials to come here, it was for a discussion not so much of the Emergencies Act and the powers it entailed but really of the events that led to our having to enact it. I think that very action represented a failure. The failure was that we needed this massive suite of federal powers to get the job done.
I really want to try to piece this together.
From January 28 onwards, even before the convoy appeared in Ottawa, the warning signs were there that this was not going to be a normal protest. Ottawa experiences protests pretty much every day of the week. We are used to seeing them on Parliament Hill. They stay; they make their point; they make their voices heard, and they disperse.
I'm just trying to find out why the federal government did not step in sooner to provide that coordination, the logistical and intelligence support, to effectively deal with this. We ended up having our capital, our seat of democracy, basically put under siege.