Public Order Emergency Commission Explorer

The Public Order Emergency Commission (POEC), led by Justice Paul Rouleau, is sitting to “inquire into the circumstances that led to the declaration of emergency that was in place from February 14-23, 2022, and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency”.

The Commission has been a model for transparent deliberations:

• public hearings are broadcast live, and available to stream on-demand with next-day transcripts
• exhibits (evidence submitted by all involved) are available online once introduced in a hearing
• procedural and policy decisions are clearly documented and available online

This website tries to make the Commission’s work even more accessible and transparent, by displaying hearing transcripts in a more user-friendly format. You can explore the transcripts:

• by day
• by speaker

One “volume” of transcripts is published for each day of the Commission’s hearings – see the first day’s volume as an example. These transcripts are produced by certified court reporters. They’re incredibly detailed, accurate documents, making it easier for all to review what’s been said during the hearings.

This website aims to make those transcripts more accessible. It converts the line-by-line PDF format into an HTML format, using paragraphs and other semantic markup to increase the technical and visual accessibility of these documents.

The testimony presented here is taken directly from the transcripts—there are no modifications to the original text, other than to correct a few typos in speaker names—but line numbers are separated, and speaker and heading information is displayed differently.

The conversion of the transcripts from PDF to HTML is an automated process (you can see the data processing code on GitHub). It’s been pretty thoroughly quality controlled and debugged, but it’s always possible some issues slip through.

This prompts a very important disclaimer: testimony from this site should not be taken as authoritative; check the relevant public hearing for verbatim quotes and the associated transcript for the original. For convenience, testimony includes links directly to the relevant page (where a speaker started a given intervention) in the original PDF transcripts.

This site remains a work in progress, with various improvements planned. For any questions, comments, concerns, please contact Lucas Cherkewski. (For technical contributions, see the site code on GitHub.)