Gordon Cameron
Gordon Cameron spoke 932 times across 6 days of testimony.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, Commissioner. This morning, we have the first of two RCMP panels, Commissioner Lucki and Deputy Commissioner Duheme, and I would ask if they could come to the panel. And while they are getting themselves seated, I'll just make a preliminary comment to the parties that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Gordon Cameron, Commission Counsel. Commissioner, yesterday at the close of the proceeding, a matter was raised by Mr. Miller about the state of documents on the party database, and in light of those comments, Commission Counsel investigated the matter last night. And most of the parties will have received and had a chance to review Commission Counsel's email to them explaining what we've been able to learn about that situation, and so I won't elaborate on that, except to say that, two things: We did recognise that there had been a glitch with respect to the uploading of documents, and that was corrected over the weekend. It was unfortunate, but the matter is in hand and the party database is in good form. The other thing we'd like to assure parties, Mr. Commissioner, is that Commission Counsel did have access to all of the documents, and indeed, the parties will notice that the documents, including those that just went up on the party database over the weekend, that some of which are included in our list of documents for the examination of this panel, and so we are prepared to proceed confident that we have had a thorough review of the documents in advance of this panel appearing.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I could ask ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that the panel be sworn.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, Commissioner, Deputy Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Nice to see you again. And I'll begin by reminding you that you met with Commission Counsel back on September 7th, and with you were a number of your colleagues. And you were interviewed, and a summary of that interview was prepared that has since been put on a party database and been made available to the parties. For the record, it's WTS00000069. And so I'll ask you some questions about the adoption of that summary on the record, with the qualification that four of the people who were in that interview aren't here today, so I'll just ask you to confirm that the interview summary is accurate to the best of your knowledge. So the way I'll put it is this: that you have reviewed -- each of you two have reviewed the summary and confirm that insofar as it contains your information you believe it to be true and accurate to the best of your knowledge and belief, and that insofar as it contains the information of your colleagues, you understand it to have been reviewed by them for accuracy and confirmed as accurate. Is that true?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, Deputy Commissioner Duheme, we got another chance to talk to you later on, on October 11th, and there is a separate interview summary of that interview. For the record, that is WTS00000068. And have you reviewed that summary and confirmed that it's accurate?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you adopt is as part of your evidence?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, there is a third summary, and this is the summary of the interview of Ms. Ducharme and Ms.Vinette. And for the record, that is WTS00000067. And since they're in your division, Deputy Commissioner Duheme, I will ask you to confirm that that summary has been reviewed by Ms. Ducharme and Ms. Vinette for accuracy and that it has been filed with the Commission as part of the RCMP's evidence?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And it's adopted as part of the RCMP's evidence?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, finally, there -- the RCMP filed an institutional report that has been on the party database for sometime as DOJ.IR.00000011. And I'm going to ask you to tell us what you can about a recent clarification to the status of that institutional report so that we can make sure the proper version gets adopted as your evidence. Can you help us with that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so the institutional report that is about to be or perhaps already is updated, in any event, will soon be updated to the party database, will have that correction made in it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. And so if I can put it this way, can you prospectively adopt that corrected institutional report as the evidence of the RCMP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes, thank you. And, Mr. Commissioner, for the benefit of parties who may be concerned about a last-minute correction, I can confirm and I think, Deputy Commissioner, I'll ask you to confirm. This is a relatively minor correction to the currency of a version of a document cited in the IR that has, in fact, has been updated and the updated version will be reflected in the as filed version; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. With that administrivia out of the way, Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, I'll ask you some overview questions just to get you to introduce yourselves to the Commissioner and to the parties. And so I'll ask by -- I'll begin by asking you, Commissioner Lucki, to just describe your role within the RCMP. And just so that you don't need to tell us the whole of that, perhaps you could concentrate in particular on your role as it pertained to the convoy and protest events that are the subject to this inquiry.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And with respect to your observation that you were briefing Ministers, would that have included Minister Mendocino and Blair and also presumably the National Security Intelligence Advisor?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you also participated in regular briefings with DCO, PMO and Justice Intergovernmental Affairs briefings where those departments would have been represented?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in particular, you participated -- to that point, Commissioner Lucki, you participated in the Deputy Minister's Committee on Operational Conditions, the DMOC?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And judging from the minutes of the meetings of the SSE and the IRG, you were in attendance at those meetings as well?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you mentioned that you liaised with then Chief Sloly and presumably later on with Deputy Chief Bell. Were you also in regular contact with the Commissioner of the OPP, Mr. Carrique?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. And, Deputy Commissioner, could you describe your role in the RCMP generally and as it had particular application to the convoy and similar events?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. We're going to come back in a few minutes to the federal policing responsibility of the RCMP, but you mentioned an expression in there that might come up later in our discussion. It has been mentioned before in various context, I think you might have called it the gold command structure, but I think the expression is the gold, silver, bronze command structure. Could you just describe how that works for the RCMP and how in some of the contexts it came to bear on the management of the convoy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And that command structure, as I understand it, there wasn't just one applicable to all of the RCMP. That might be implemented in particular jurisdictions or indeed to deal with particular situations or instances; am I right there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So you might, for example, for Coutts or for a province have a gold, silver, bronze structure implemented to deal with events in those locations?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now coming to the RCMP federal policing mandate, this is the first -- just to help you answer the question in context, the first of a series of questions I have to try to describe what the RCMP does with all of those 5,000 personnel in Ottawa compared to what it does with the personnel it has in the provinces where it is police of jurisdiction under contract to the provincial governments. So with that overall picture in mind, federal policing in Ottawa, you mentioned some of the areas it covers, but with respect to the convoy, your particular concentration was on the RCMP's protective policing mandate; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I see. I’ll come back to a distinction there, but how many are in Ottawa, roughly speaking?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’ll do for these purposes. Now, could you expand a bit on the RCMP’s protective mandate, as it’s sometimes called; the Protective Services that the RCMP officer -- offers in the City of Ottawa or the National Capital Region?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if you can describe it, we might come to some particulars as it relates to specific incidents, but generally speaking, what was the impact of the arrival in Ottawa of the convoy; what was the impact of that on the protective mandate of the RCMP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. That’s a helpful example. So if you expected to encounter protest activity as part of escorting and ensuring the safety of the Prime Minister, or one of the other people for whom you’re responsible, and you encounter this protest activity, so if I can put it this way, in the way of your -- that -- the path that you expected to take, your protective policing mandate, would that include dealing with those protesters on a Public Order management basis, or would it deal with getting the -- your protectees where they need to go safely?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Again, at the risk of belabouring the point, I just want to make sure I understand correctly. The impact on your protective policing mandate wasn’t that you had a Public Order mission to clear the routes, it was just that your mandate was more complicated because you had to coordinate with the OPS and make sure your routes were safe?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, another part of your police work, I’ll put it this way, because I’m not sure how it would fall into these mandates; certainly, your federal mandate was to collect intelligence as the convoy was approaching. Now, we’re not going to spend a lot of time on that, and Commissioner, this is the point where I would footnote, so to speak, the witness summary that I referenced at the very beginning because Commission Counsel did do an interview and filed the interview summary of Ms. Ducharme and Ms. Vignette specifically on this point of the RCMP’s collection of intelligence in relation to the convoy, so we’ll just ask this panel a few questions about this. You did have intelligence, an intelligence team analyzing the information available as the convoy was approaching; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Can you just give a quick overview of who those people were?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what -- where was the Combined Intelligence Group working?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, Commissioner Lucki, this is probably something that is best directed to you, because what I’d like to do now is ask you to describe quite a different role that the RCMP performs in the provinces other than Ontario, Quebec, and perhaps Newfoundland, but the role of police of jurisdiction in the provinces and some of the municipalities of those provinces. Can you give us an overview of that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me ask, if I can -- if you can draw a comparison, for those of us who are more familiar with the policing situation in Ontario and Quebec, where we have a provincial police force which is sometimes also the municipal police force, but sometimes the cities have their own police forces. Do I understand correctly that in the province’s other than Ontario and Quebec, that would be the RCMP, you would be the provincial police force, and in some cases, the police force of the municipalities that don’t have their own police force?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So functionally speaking, again, this sounds Ontario and Quebec centric, but the RCMP is the OPP or the Sûreté du Québec in all of the provinces except Ontario and Quebec?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that is arranged by a contract with each of the provinces; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, when you two have left the stand, we’re going to have Deputy Commissioner Zablocki here to describe the situation in Alberta in particular, but I just - - but before he gets up to describe that situation, perhaps, Commissioner Lucki, you could describe the way in which the contracts you have with the provinces, either a single contract or multiple, as you just described, allow you to move resources within a province to areas where they are needed or between provinces when there are higher demands in one province than another?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Which is to say if one province borrows a bunch of your officers from another, there’s a financial arrangement to compensate for that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
All right. Now let me ask you, are there advantages, from an operational point of view, if you are bringing in officers from, say, British Columbia to Alberta, or from northern Alberta down to southern Alberta, et cetera, in having officers with the same equipment and the same training and the same command structure and what not? Does that offer you an advantage that you might not have been able to achieve, for example, when you were coming in to assist in Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, moving a bit closer to home, at least insofar as it pertains to the events in Ottawa, I would like to ask, and these are probably questions for you, Deputy Commissioner Duheme, but not necessarily. So please feel free, Commissioner Lucki, if you are the better person to answer, to talk about the role of the RCMP in Ottawa. We’ve heard about their federal policing role and their protective services mandate, but I’d like to take you back a bit in history and ask you if you can -- well let’s start way back, so to speak. Has the RCMP, at least in our living memory, ever been a city police? The police of jurisdiction in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But there was a time that you’ve outlined in your summary, your witness interview summary, when there was a more substantial contingent of what you might call uniformed officers on the ground in Ottawa. Can you explain when that was and what the purpose of those forces were?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in your witness summary, some of the questions the Commission Counsel asked had you explaining that this perception that the RCMP and the OPS should be working jointly to manage large events in Ottawa hasn’t entirely dissipated from the minds of the people at Ottawa and the OPS. Can you just give us a description of that situation as you see it now?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And would that also be true for other events perhaps elsewhere in Ottawa where your protective policing mandate would be effective? We talked about how in the convoy you needed to move people around the city, elected officials and whatnot, but would that also be true if there were some other event independent of the convoy today that you would -- that your protective services people would liaise with the Ottawa City Police?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, moving to the period immediately prior to the convoy, what did you expect, and I'm saying "you", Deputy Commissioner Duheme, but perhaps, Commissioner Lucki, you also had a view on this, but what did you expect this event to be?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I just cast back to the point about intelligence that was being collected by your INSET and other people in conjunction with the convoy, your forces in Ottawa, including the Intelligence people, would have been aware of the project Hendon, and similar intelligence that was being shared among Intelligence agencies with respect to the size and scope and possible intentions of this convoy; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And despite your having had access to all that intelligence, you still viewed this as an event that the Ottawa Police appeared to have under control and didn't cause you any particular concern other than the extra attention you would have to pay to your protective mandate?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. There is a fair bit of material that's come before the Commission already, and a lot of it is set out in your institutional report and your -- the summary of your interviews, so I won't rehash it all. But I do want to spend some time on the question of the requests by the OPS for assistance and resources to be provided by the RCMP. I'll begin by just asking you to describe, this is probably for you, Commissioner Lucki, the logistical challenges and perhaps administrative challenges that the RCMP faces when it, well, I suppose some of these apply even when you're moving within provinces that you have contracts with, but in all events, the logistical challenges that you had when attempting to mobilise resources to assist in Ottawa, or otherwise, in Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
There is a lot on the record, and -- about how many resources were available when. Can either of you give us the basic facts of how many RCMP resources were available from the beginning to the end of this and approximately when they were made available? I'm going to leave it to other parties to drill down on that, but just if we can have a big picture of what resources the RCMP committed to the events in Ottawa.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. We’re going to come back to Windsor, though if I don’t offer you the chance to say more about that, please volunteer it at an appropriate point. But with respect to what you said, I sense there’s a bit of a glossing over from the initial 50 to the ultimate 650. We all know that there ended up being a very substantial commitment by the RCMP and the OPP towards the very end when enforcement action was imminent, but can you tell me, roughly speaking, what the curve looked like in the first sort of 14 or 15 days before the implementation of the enforcement plan started to become imminent?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s exactly the information I was looking for. Thank you. On that point, can you -- there was a fair bit of controversy both between RCMP and the City of Ottawa and the OPS about just how many RCMP officers were available. You’ve acknowledged some confusion about whether they were available as boots on the ground to be deployed by the OPS versus people you were bringing in to assist in your protective mandate. But can you explain why there was that difficult of communication between the RCMP and Ottawa or the OPS about just what resources you were allocating to deal with the situation in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Clerk, perhaps I could ask you to pull up on the screen SSM.CAN.00008433. And if I’ve got the number right, that should be the letter of February 7th from Councillor Deans and Mayor Watson to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Public Safety. And you’re familiar with this letter, Commissioner Lucki? Or perhaps not the letter, but the substance of ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And I ask this in particular reference to your comment that all of the requests by the Ottawa City or the OPS had been responded to positively by the RCMP and yet, one might say, we have this letter, I would say, going from about as official as Ottawa can get to about as official -- as official as the City of Ottawa can get to as official as the federal government can get in which there is a very specific request for certain categories of police officers, a total of 1,800. And Mr. Clerk, yes, if you’d just -- that’s right. Thank you. Right there. And yet this is February 7th and that’s why I asked you the time scale. You acknowledged to me that the substantial 600-odd figure of RCMP boots on the ground, so to speak, did not get to Ottawa until much after this, and yet at this same time you were assuring Parliament that all of the requests by the OPS had been met. And so the question for you is, how do you reconcile your statements with this letter?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The letter’s February 7th.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. If -- the paragraph that begins, “We ask the Government of Canada and the Province of Ontario to work with us to secure this combined officer surge”, is that what you mean when you didn’t know which -- of which force were being asked for?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
On a related question, during your interview, Commissioner Lucki, you described what you believed to be the appropriate sequence by which the Ottawa Police force -- sorry, Ottawa Police Service should seek assistance when it was beyond its own capacity, and that, in particular, it should go to the Ontario Police -- Provincial Police first, or at least the Ontario government, and ask for assistance, which presumably would be provided by the OPP. And you referenced the provisions of the Ontario Police Services Act as indicating the path for this to take place. But was it your impression that that was the -- that that provision of the Ontario Police Services Act obliged Ottawa to go to Ontario either first or only to get assistance, policing assistance?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that information came to you from Commissioner Carrique?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I want to talk to you now about the role that the federal government, and I'll put in that category for now, both senior officials and politicians, what role they played in your decisions to allocate resources to Ottawa, or as it might be, Windsor, but locations outside where you are police of jurisdiction, and in particular, if I could ask you to go back to the beginning and remind us for a minute who it is you report to and who it is gives you guidance or input on matters such as the events in Ontario.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So but if you can remind us just for a second, who would you have been interacting with to the extent the federal government was either inquiring about or expressing an interest in the situation in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me ask the clerk to pull up PB.NSC.CAN.00008043. And just so that we can understand the timestamps of these, as I understand it, these are about five hours ahead of time because they're in Greenwich Mean Time, so this conversation which is -- begins the timestamp at 5:59 would have been taking place at about 12:59 or about 1 o'clock that day; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I don't think anything turns on that for this particular discussion, but it might later on in the other Teams' chats that we look at. Mr. Clerk, can you scroll down to page 3? And the line I'm looking for is a statement by Flynn to the effect of when the AG starts talking like this. There we are. Can you first tell us who Mark Flynn is?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you -- either of you recall what discussion was being -- usually these Teams discussions are discussions among RCMP personnel at the time some other meeting is going on; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And this February 5th Teams chat is observing a discussion in which we see a reference to the Attorney General talking. So this is an observation about the Cabinet or SSE meeting; is it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And did you understand what Mark Flynn meant when he said -- I say this because you would have been listening to the conversation that he's listening to when he makes this comment, "When the AG talks like this, we better get our own plan going..." And your response looks like you were trying to thumb out ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- Lametti.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I see.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So what did you understand Mark Flynn to be saying when the AG talks like this, we better get our own plan going?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Can you join me in the inference that just by what Mark Flynn said that the Attorney General has said something to the effect that the RCMP might have to take some action?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Well, it doesn't look like I can take it further than that. Let me try another one. Mr. Clerk, can you call up OPP00004583? And on page 3 of that, and we're going to have to figure out who's who in this text exchange. But first of all, Commissioner Lucki, can you confirm that this is a text exchange between you and Commissioner Carrique of the OPP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And I don't know whether to ask you, Clerk, to scroll up or down, but -- there we are. The blue, I believe, is Ms. -- is you, Ms. Lucki, is it ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And in the middle there, you say this, "Between you and I only. GoC..." And by that you would have meant the Government of Canada?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The: "...GoC losing/lost confidence in OPS...we [got to] get to safe action/enforcement." Can you tell me what you meant when you said that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, I'm going to leave to others the more particular comments in your -- the summary of your interview about the leadership of Chief Sloly and the specific Operations of the Ottawa Police Service, but on this point, you talk about the Government of Canada losing confidence in the Ottawa Police Service. What was it in your interactions with the officials and politicians with the Government of Canada that prompted you to have that view?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, I've tried twice to get you to describe what it was that made you believe that the Government of Canada had lost confidence, and I think twice you've told me why one observing the situation ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- might have lost confidence. So if I can bring you back to that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- and ask you if you had some inputs that made you believe the Government of Canada had lost confidence in the OPS.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, if I can take you down, sorry not down, but further on in that text, you say: "...we [got to] get to safe action/enforcement." Can you decrypt that for us?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in the last text here, first of all, the reference in there to the Emergency Measures Act, in retrospect am I correct in guessing you meant the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Okay. So "Cause if they go to the Emergency Measures Act, you or..." And is it ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- "I".
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thumbs are not working ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- with perfect agility here: "...you or [I] may be brought into lead...not something I want." So a concern you had was that if, and this is February 5th, and you're contemplating the possibility of the invocation of emergency legislation: "...if they go to the Emergency Measures Act, you or [I] may be brought into lead..." So that was a scenario you thought was a possible outcome of invocation of the Emergencies Act was that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- either the OPP or the RCMP would be in charge, so to speak, of the Ottawa situation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And if I could ask Clerk to bring up PB.NSC.CAN.00008042, and scroll down to page 2. If I've got the right document, there should be a comment by Whelan, "what is his objective." There we go. Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, we can see from the extract above, that you were a participant in this Teams chat. Again, can I take it correctly that you are in a Teams chat monitoring I think an SSE meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes? And do you understand what Alison Whelan meant by: "What is his objective beyond getting us to take over."
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Clerk, could you give Commissioner Lucki the context there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me ask you more directly then, rather than through what we have to agree our difficult decipherings of long ago, choppy text messages. But were you having discussions with senior officials or your Minister about the possibility of the RCMP actually taking over policing in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And were you getting input from senior officials or your Minister, or other Ministers for that matter, to the effect of, “What more can you do? Can’t you do more? Couldn’t you be in there?” Statements like that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The question to you, “Do you have everything you need,” is, I think, substantively different than, “Are you doing everything you can?” or, “Can’t you do more?” or, you know, “We’ve got a terrible problem in Ottawa. Why aren’t you in there helping to solve it?” Were you getting input like that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But did you get a sense that the senior officials or the politicians, understandably concerned about the situation in Ottawa, were asking you what you could do? Not what resources you needed, but what you could do to solve the problem in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I’ll ask this question generally. Did you ever get a sense in the input you had either from the senior officials, your Deputy Minister, or others, or the Ministers, your Minister or others, that pressure was being put on you that if I can -- I think you’ll understand, if I put it this way, that crossed the line in terms of the propriety of officials and politicians giving you direction about how Ottawa should be policed?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Coming back to this point about -- I think it might have been you, but somebody used the expression a line between church and state, which whether that’s what you meant in the context, we’ve all assumed means the line between the political side and the policing side, and all of the both jurisprudence and analysis that’s been done on where that line should stand. So my question to you is, where does the RCMP look for guidance on where that line is? And I’m just going to insert, parenthetically, we’ve had a lot of information about how the Ottawa Police Service has, between it and the City Council, the Ottawa Police Services Board, and the same will be true of other police of jurisdiction of various places. We don’t see the same between you, the RCMP, and either the senior officials or the politicians. So where do you -- where does the RCMP look to help find that line between what we’re calling church and state?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you for that. Is there some institution or body though ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that stands between you and your Minister the way that one might analogize to the Ottawa Police Services Board standing between City Council and the Ottawa Police Service?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, repeat that? I missed that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And so if your Minister or a Minister were to cross that line, it’s simply a function of you having to say, “You’re over the line, Minister", or otherwise, defend your own jurisdiction, so to speak. There's no institution that protects you from that. Everybody is just expected to follow the rules or you call them out.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I'm glad you went there because that was the next question I had because the provincial and municipal police forces have already run into problems with this -- those problems of generated Commissions of Inquiry that have made recommendations and given some guidance and perhaps this Commission will add to that body of material. But how would you envision this further or better guidance, and you might have noticed that Deputy Minister Stewart made the same observation yesterday, that there was room for development on this point, but how would you envision that? What would it be contained in it, some policy guidance document, and is there work on this now?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And to be clear, you -- I heard you say that this wasn't an issue with respect to the convoy or the blockade, but it is a topic you believe should be addressed; is that fair?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I want to come back on a particular point of interest that has attracted some attention already before the Commission and that has to do with -- well, perhaps I could ask, Mr. Clerk, for you to call up WTS00000068. And if you can get to page 10 of that? No, you had it there. And I recognize that handwriting.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Deputy Commissioner, this question is for you because am I correct in identifying that as an extract from your notes?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And perhaps you could first read, for those of us who haven't learned to decipher your handwriting, read the two asterisked points that are in your notes there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I was just going to take you to that. If you look in the typed text below your written note, you describe roughly what you just said, that the note reflects a call with Deputy Chief Steve Bell of the OPS concerning the OPS's request for resources. This is your note of what Chief Bell -- sorry, Deputy Chief Bell told you?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if I ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I can pull up your notes if you want, but I ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- can confirm for you that that is what you have indicated earlier.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if you can help us with this, and you're not the first one to speak to this statement or comment, what did you understand Deputy Chief Bell to be meaning when he said -- well, first of all, Peter's Peter Sloly; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
"He's going to ask double of what he needs." Can you understand what -- explain at least what you understood Chief -- Deputy Chief Bell to be saying?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I understand that an integrated planning cell, which we've sometimes heard called the IPC, was established by the RCMP and the OPP on about February 8th; is that your recollection?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as I understand it, the purpose of the IPC was, among other things, to review such planning as had been done to date and to further develop the plan to deal with the situation in Ottawa; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Did that effort, that is the establishment of the integrated planning cell, allow you, and presumably the OPP, but allow the participants in the planning cell to put a finer point on the resources that would be required to deal with the situation in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. I'll ask this question in an open-ended way. Do you feel that the February 8th timeframe by which that integrated planning cell was established, did you feel that the situation in Ottawa could have been handled more effectively if that integrated planning cell was established earlier in the process?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So did you view the integrated planning cell as strictly an enforcement -- a mechanism to organise enforcement?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And we'll come back to that very point. But just so I understand correctly, what you're saying is you don't mobilise your Public Order Units right away when there's still a viable option of a liaison solution to the situation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I'd like to move on to another topic now. And for that purpose, Mr. Clerk, could you call up OPP00000151. And the topic here is, not everybody monitors these proceedings as closely as some of us do, but what we're calling the "engagement proposal". I think you're familiar with that I think, at least from our interview with you, Commissioner Lucki.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So I just want to ask you some questions about your involvement in this. And maybe I'll just throw it out to you to describe how you first learned about this possibility, what your involvement was with Deputy Minister Stewart and in connecting him ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- to Marcel Beaudin, et cetera. So if you could just begin at the beginning and tell us what you can about that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, we did hear from Deputy Minister Stewart about the evolution and ultimate demise of this proposal, but in terms of your observation of it from its conception through to the end, did you hear it discussed among either officials or at the IRG? Did you have input on it to the IRG as to whether you thought it was a viable proposal?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I can switch gears here a bit.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Actually, Mr. Commissioner, this would be a very good time to break, yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Commissioner, and Deputy Commissioner, we understand from the records, we can call them up if it's helpful to you, but that on or about February 13th, you got a sense that the plan that your Integrated Planning cell and Chief Sloly had been working on had come to a state of fruition or maturity. Is that about the right timing, February 13th?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we've heard some evidence about this from the other police agencies, but just for your perspective on it, this was a team effort, so to speak, by planning experts, subject matter experts from the RCMP, the OPP, and the Ottawa Police Service?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as I understand it, you in particular, Commissioner Lucki, and perhaps the rest of your team who looked at it, were generally satisfied with the plan as an Operational Plan to deal with the situation in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And would it be correct to say that on your observation of the plan it was developed in reliance exclusively on your existing legislative and common law authorities?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for drawing -- I’ll say carving out the Ontario emergency plan. But if I can be more refined then with my question, the plan, as you understand it, and Commissioner Carrique understood it, was drafted without any reliance on any of the powers that might be available to the enforcement forces ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- from federal emergency legislation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did any of your subject matter experts involved in the integrated planning cell, that is the RCMP experts on that team, express any concern to you that the plan was deficient because of gaps in existing authorities?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, you -- we’re now going to move into a time period that ends up being densely packed with meetings and activities and the development by you and your team of key messages and everything. This is the 12th, 13th, and 14th, the days leading up to the invocation of the Act. And I understand that on February 13th, you attended, you, Commissioner Lucki, attended -- I’m going to insert parenthetically there, when we say “attended a meeting”, sometimes this would be virtual, sometimes it would be physical, or was it always virtual?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And on February 13th, if I can refresh your memory, there was a DMOCC at around noon and a briefing with Minister Mendicino and Blair at about 1:00 p.m., an IRG at about 4:00, and a Cabinet meeting at about 8:30? Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the subject matter of all of these meetings was the convoy and blockade situation across the country? Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
We have a number of your key message documents that you developed for presentation or delivery to these meetings, and I’ll just you the sort of big question we’re trying to get some elucidation on here, and then we’ll break it down in as many parts as you think would be helpful in your remembering what went on in those probably very densely packed days. But the question we’re trying to get to is how much of your key messages got delivered to the DMOCC, and the IRG, and Cabinet? Because we’ve tried to follow the sequence of events, and we do this forensically by watching your Teams chats and trying to figure out, as you folks are watching the meetings going on, whether you ever got a chance to speak at a given meeting or whether your points were ever discussed, et cetera. So rather than me trying to create that whole forensic analysis as to what happened on the 13th, to your efforts to educate the IRG and Cabinet on your views about these events, maybe I could just put it over to you and say if you remember those days, the development of those key messages, and how, if, when you were able to deliver them in those various forums?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let’s call up the key messages document to see if we can see what it is you were hoping to, and as you just described it, in some cases able to communicate. And this would be SSM.CAN.NSC.00002906. Now, we’ve seen several, I don’t know if they’re drafts or variations of this, do you know what different documents were used in different contexts, or if they are just drafts of a single document?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if we could just scroll down? And as we’re looking at this, Commissioner Lucki, is this something that you would read from or jump through? How did your presentation tend to go?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you would use -- was there PowerPoint or was this piece of paper distributed among those who were in attendance?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So these were just your speaking notes?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. You mentioned that you would be among the first to speak at these meetings. Were you, in affect, Cabinet and the IRG’s window into the law enforcement situation for the purposes of those bodies’ understandings of the convoy and the blockades?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So to the extent that the OPS or the OPP have information about the status of the protest or blockades in their various mandates, that came to cabinet, or the IRG, or the DMOCC, through you?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If you look, we scroll down the page to the heading, “Additional Supports”, it’s, I think, page 6 of this document. Now, can you explain what this section of your speaking notes is about?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, did you consult other police agencies in the course of compiling this list of possible other authorities for ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So there might have obligations of confidence ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that prevented you from consulting outside the RCMP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Over to you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can we scroll down further, Mr. Clerk, in this document? It’s the paragraph that begins, “That said”, the one that’s up there. And I’ll read it and you can read it with me, and then I’ll ask some questions. These are your notes and presumably what you said to the IRG and Cabinet on the relevant occasions: “That said, I am of the view that we have not exhausted all available tools that are already available through the existing legislation. There are instances where charges could be laid under existing authorities for various Criminal Code offences occurring right now in the context of the protest. The Ontario Provincial Emergencies Act, just enacted, will also help in providing additional deterrent tools to our existing toolbox.” And then the bullet below that: “The existing tools are considered in our existing plans and will be used in due course as necessary.” As I say, this set of speaking notes had been in various iterations and also ended up in an email that you sent to Mr. Jones, the Minister’s Chief of Staff. Was this point that you mentioned here in your addresses to the IRG and Cabinet -- was that also something you had expressed to, for example, Deputy Minister Stewart or Chief of Staff Jones before these speaking points were distributed or before your email on the topic?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If it helps you, it was in between the IRG -- it was -- if you look at the time stamp ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- it was right in between the IRG and the Cabinet meeting you sent, in effect, these points, including -- sorry, your speaking points, including these two bullets here. Had you had these discussions about your views on existing authorities with any of the officials before the circulation of these notes?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I can ask the clerk to call up PB.NSC.CAN00008041. This is another one of the Teams chats. And if you look at the time stamp again allowing that these are stamped five hours ahead of the time zone that we would have been here in Ottawa, you’ll see the date is February 13th. And if you just look from the first page to the last, you see it covers a period of time up to, looks, like, 6:35 p.m. at the very end. Are you able to -- if I ask the clerk to scroll ahead to the end of the document just so that Commissioner Lucki can see the range of the discussion there. The point I wanted to draw your attention to in this particular Teams chat, Commissioner Lucki, is at page -- well, it’s page 19 of this document. Mr. Clerk, maybe if you can find that. If you go down to the first -- yeah, there we are. Now, if we look at the time stamp at 10:21 p.m., this would actually be, if I understand correctly, 5:21 p.m.? Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And now you’re nodding there, Commissioner Lucki, but ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- the transcriber will want to hear yes or no. Thank you. And again, just so the parties and viewing public can understand what’s going on here, this is a discussion that you and your team are having sort of offline. These aren’t actual comments in the meeting. You’re -- well, were you present at this IRG meeting? I believe this was the IRG meeting of the 13th.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So have you got your phone out and you’re -- and you’ve got your team watching at -- on their computers in their offices, perhaps?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You think the team was actually there.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well, you might -- you might get some insight as we go through your comments here because you’re asking somebody in the first entry here whether you are the next up on the agenda. Someone suggests that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- you’re not. And then someone says, “Situational updates”, et cetera. The next is you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so -- and the question we’re wondering, it then goes over to -- Mr. Clerk, if you can just scroll down the page to a point where -- there’s an entry under “Flynn, Mark” on page 20. That’s it. “Situational update”. And then it says, under number 2, “Minister Mendicino may turn to Commissioner Brenda Lucki”. And I guess since these are from your notes, you may also ask to speak, et cetera. Do you figure that that’s where you got asked to give the situational update with respect to Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Could we have 8041 brought up on the screen? Sorry, PBS.NSC.CAN00008041.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Oh, I’m sorry. Right. Then it’s page 12 of that document I’d like to look at. And there’s a section under Mark Flynn. And I'll just read it for you: "OPS just confirmed the plan is finally reviewed and approved. Their planning group will integrate here with our group." And paragraph, sorry, parenthetical comment "(This came from Carson)." And I take it that's Carson Pardy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Were you able to update the IRG with that development when it came in on your phone?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, if we could turn up OPS00014566. And I don't know if you recognise these, Commissioner Lucki, but if it helps you they're described to us as the notes from Chief Sloly's scribe of a meeting. And we'll get to a point... If you ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If you scroll down, Mr. Clerk. There's a point where there's a meeting with Commissioner Lucki, it's about two pages down. There we go.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So that's, again, if you understand these to be the notes of then Chief Sloly, this is a meeting between him and you and Commissioner Carrique of the OPP. The point that I'm interested in, in light of the conversation we just had, is the second bullet under the redacted section, where Chief Sloly, and again, this isn't your note, it's his observation of what he understands you to have told him: "...did not get the prime minister briefed on the plan." Can you understand why Chief Sloly would have had that impression?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I believe that's right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Oh, okay. Sorry, that's even more helpful, then. So ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But the scribe has recorded you as saying that you didn't brief the Prime Minister on the plan. And you're -- you don't have an explanation for why that would be there? Do you think ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- you said something that would've given the scribe the impression that that was what you were saying?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Is it possible that the IRG on the 13th, you didn't reached on the agenda or you didn't get a chance to say what you'd wanted to say about the plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Commissioner, if I can just have an indulgence here because I would like to see if need to pursue that point any further, just by seeing if I have a different version of the February 13th IRG minutes. No, I will move on.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Maybe, Mr. Clerk, if you can put 8041 back up. Thank you. Yes, I see what's happened.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If you go to page 20, down the -- towards the bottom of the page. You make the comment, Commissioner Lucki: "[S]o doesn't look like I will be reporting on anything." And what we were wondering is if that is why you said to Chief Sloly the next day that you didn't report to the Prime Minister on the development of the plan.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- again, because I want to be fair to you here just to make sure you have the best recollection you can of this February 13th meeting, because you can see you here saying "doesn't look like they'll be reporting on anything", Andrea Howard observes that they are on the last item, which I'll infer was the last agenda item. And at the top of the next page, Mr. Clerk, if you can scroll a little further, "He may not go to you."
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well, the timeframe on the timestamp is 10:55, which would be 5:55 ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- in the afternoon, which would have been when the IRG was sitting. Okay?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then I'll just -- I think you inserted a bit of exasperation or humour into this discussion at the -- if you scroll down further, with the ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- hypothesis that you did not get reached. You say: "[P]lease...do not invite me to cabinet." So with that recollection, and I thank the Commissioner for taking me back to that document, does that help you recollect that maybe you didn't get reached at that IRG meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
In fairness to your recollection, there was another -- there was a Cabinet meeting the same night. Do you know whether you spoke at that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I'll ask you, then, to go with the hypothesis for now, acknowledging that your memory is just based on these notes, that you prepared the speaking notes in which you made, roughly-speaking, two points. There was a -- we didn't take you through it, but it was a description of the status of the OPS, RCMP, OPP plan that you wanted to -- had intended to present to the IRG, it was your point that you believed that there were enforcement options still to be exhausted, and that the plan had been developed without reliance on any special measures, and you had those two points. You weren't reached on the agenda by hypothesis if these Teams chats are accurate, and that would also explain why you might have said to Chief Sloly the next day, "I didn't brief the Prime Minister on the plan." If I put all of that together to you, does that help you accept the proposition that you didn't present your key messages to the government on the night of the 13th, and that is why you told Chief Sloly the next morning that the plan hadn't been briefed to the Prime Minister?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But I want you to concentrate on that scenario then. Cabinet is on the verge of invoking the Emergencies Act. You are their window on law enforcement, you told us this earlier. Your update to Cabinet, as it is deciding whether to invoke the Emergencies Act, is that the police now have a plan. They've pulled it together. And that you, as the Commissioner of the RCMP, consider that plan to be workable without the authorities of the Emergencies Act, and that doesn't get delivered, your messages don't get delivered to Cabinet when they then deliberate on the invocation of the Act. You appreciate the significance of that scenario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Let me summarize what you're saying and then put a question to you. As I hear what you're saying, though you didn't get a chance to present either the plan or your view that the invocation of the Act would be taking place before law enforcement tools had been exhausted, even though you didn't get a chance to deliver those messages at this meeting, you feel that in general those points had been briefed up to your -- the officials that you reported to; is that what you're saying?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So acknowledging that there might have been some less precise messaging to the officials and to government before the meeting where you didn't get called, nonetheless, you appreciated the significance of those meetings that were taking place on the 13th and you appreciated the significance, I assume, of the fact that you hadn't got a chance to give those key messages that we've looked at before. Did it occur to you that you should make sure that government was aware of your views on these points before it came to land on the invocation of the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That's fair enough. And I won't ask you to speculate or hypothesize about what might have happened if you had had an opportunity to deliver these two messages, but I think, as I understand what you've said, knowing the gravity of the issues that were facing the IRG and Cabinet on the 13th, you prepared your key messages with those two points that the police services had come together with a viable plan and that you considered that there were still law enforcement tools to exhaust before emergency legislation is necessary; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now if we move on, there's another constellation of events happening on the 14th, so we're going to go over to the 14th. And the -- this involves a series of crisscrossing emails, and I'll ask the clerk to first call up PB.NSC.CAN.00008485. And I'll ask, first of all, because this is a name that's new to the cast of characters so far, a name -- we're not going to see it right away, but just so that we can understand when it comes into the picture, who Adriana Poloz is, and I think this is probably a question for you, Deputy Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Perfect. Thank you. Now, Clerk, if you could scroll down on this a little bit, there's a series of emails by which -- there, we can stop there. This is sort of -- Deputy Commissioner and Commissioner, I don't expect you to have seen this email other than you might have in the course of preparing for this hearing. That is, I don't expect you to have seen it at the time perhaps, but just to set up what is going to come at you so you can understand the context, this is an email from Jody Thomas, and we all know that she's the National Security Intelligence Advisor to the Prime Minister. And it is February 14th, and I don't know if that's a reliable email timestamp, but if -- assuming it's just a normal email timestamp, it's about midday on the 14th. And that's probably going to put us somewhere just after the first Minister's meeting or just before, anyway, right in the context of that event on the 14th. And we have Jody Thomas saying, and I'll just read it out, so that it's on the record. She is writing to Mike MacDonald, and we'll learn later on who he is, but he's another person in the PCO Intelligence apparatus, and he's copied Rob Stewart who we say yesterday as the Deputy Minister of Public Safety. And Ms. Thomas says, "This is about a national threat to national interest and institutions. By people who do not care about or understand democracy. [We are preparing to be violent -- sorry,] who are preparing to be violent. Who are motivated by anti government sentiment." And can you scroll down to the -- a little further, Mr. Clerk, on that? And then, again, we're all going to have to be a little bit detectives figuring out what's going on with these emails because this is a sort of orphan email from Jody Thomas, not obviously to anybody, but is attached to the one that we just looked at, where she says, "I need an assessment for Janice..." And I'll just ask you to speculate with me that that's Janice Charette, the clerk for the Privy Council. "...about the threat of these blockades. The characters involved. The weapons. The motivation. Clearly this isn’t just COVID and is a threat to democracy and rule of law. Could I get an assessment please. David is this you? It [is] a very short fuse. Please call if you have [any] questions J” Now, again, you’re perhaps wondering why I’m reading you emails that aren’t to you or from you. But what we’ll see, and this will be the next email, is that the request for an assessment gets directed to Adriana Poloz, which was why we talked about her. On that point, could I ask the Clerk to pull up PB.NSC.CAN.00003462? Okay. And just to get the sequence correct, let’s go down to the bottom of this, or least to there. If I’m understanding correctly, and maybe, Mr. Duheme, since you ended up getting copied in here, you would be able to help us with this? It looks like the request from Jody Thomas got directed by some means, perhaps, by Mr. MacDonald, or perhaps by you. If you could help us with that? Got somehow directed to Adriana Poloz. Is that how you interpret that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And that’s because it’s going, roughly speaking, from the National Security Intelligence Advisor and her Directorates down to the RCMP’s Intelligence people; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So what you’re saying is PCO is used to getting intelligence briefings from Ms. Poloz’ department, or at least the department that reported to her?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. And then again, Ms. Poloz writing back to Mr. MacDonald, gives an assessment, and we’re not going to read through the whole thing, but Mr. Clerk, maybe you could just scroll slowly down so the audience can get a gist of what’s in there, as I say? We don’t really have time to read the whole thing. The document is available to parties if they want to look at it in more detail. But it’s a description -- we see a reference to Three Percenters, to Diagolon, to Canada First, et cetera, to various movements or individuals that could be implicated in national security matters, and then a reference to IMVE groups, and then finally, in the penultimate paragraph there, reference to blockades at the international borders. So let me ask the sort of chain of command or institutional flow question here to either of you, Commissioner, or Deputy Commissioner. How does it happen that when the NSIA wants a security threat, it doesn’t go through one of you, but goes directly to somebody in an intelligence directorate that frankly none of us had seen before we saw this email?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And -- but the point about briefing you is the one that intrigues me. This wasn’t just a request for a threat assessment by somebody who happened to know somebody in your department. As I think everybody understood at this stage, the NSIA was giving advice to the government on the invocation of the Emergency Act for the first time it had ever been invoked, and that threat assessment goes straight past everybody to Adriana Poloz, and then straight from her back to the NSIA. And is that how you would have expected things to happen if there had been more time or more attention to conventional channels?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s fair enough. And as I think we saw, this was a very time pressured situation. Ms. Poloz was asked to turn it around very, very quickly. Ms. Thomas was interested in a very short order. So it might be understandable that corners were cut or direct contacts were used, as you said. I’m just trying to figure out. You needed up getting copied on this, Deputy Commissioner. Did you appreciate the significance of the fact that people under your command were giving a threat assessment, or at least they’d been asked for a threat assessment, whether that’s how you would describe the product they delivered is another question. But were you alert to the fact that this was a threat assessment going from your people to the Privy Council Office in connection with the invocation of the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Well I think that’s as far as we can take that, unless you have, in retrospect, any -- was there any follow up by you after seeing this? Or any further involvement of Ms. Poloz in this process that we should know about?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
No. Okay. Thank you. Now, we’ll switch gears just briefly, though quite significantly, to talk about protests outside of Ottawa. And I’ll just ask us all to remember, which means you can remind me too, that Deputy Commissioner Zablocki is waiting and we don’t want to steal all his thunder talking about work of K Division in Alberta. But I just wanted to talk briefly about the work that the RCMP was involved in with respect to the blockades and protests outside of Ottawa. And the first of these I wanted to ask you about was Windsor. And in the interest of time, we won’t go through the whole sequence of events that led up to you getting involved in Windsor, but as I understand it, you received a request for assistance in Windsor. And can you begin by telling me where that came from? That is, from Windsor? Or from OPP? Or from Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And can you describe some of the differences between the assistance you were able to provide in Windsor, I’ll say at that relatively early date, compared to the ultimate deployment of your Public Order Units in Ottawa a week or so later? Why -- first of all, one obvious thing is you had units, as I understand it, available in Ottawa who could be redirected to Windsor? Is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So they didn’t have to be brought in from the other side of the country? That was just logistically easier to do; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And was there any difference in your expectation of the ability to work with and integrate the Windsor Police -- with the Windsor Police Service and the OPP relative to the situation you were facing in Ottawa that allowed you to immediately deploy this unit to Windsor?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And at the time you made the decision to -- that it was appropriate to deploy these resources to Windsor, did the Windsor Police Service or the OPP have a plan for their deployment or, I mean, of the same type that you were waiting to see in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So the absence of a plan before the fact needn't be an obstacle to you deploying, or at least sending resources to be deployed by another police force?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I'll leave it to others to see if that should be pursued further. I'll just ask you, was this a situation in which Windsor was a higher priority than Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. I want to talk -- move us over the hump and talk about the operations of the RCMP post-invocation. We are going to circle back on some orphan topics later on, but just keeping in chronological order here. If the clerk could call up OPP0000 -- sorry, 00000788? Now this is February 15th, so the Emergencies Act has been invoked but enforcement action, at least in Ottawa, hasn't commenced on the level that resulted in the clearing of the protest. But if you can -- do you recognize these notes of -- do you recognize -- do you remember the meeting that these are notes of?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If you look at the first statement there, you are attributed with saying, and I'll just ask you to -- before I ask any questions about it, make sure I ask you if you agree that this is what you said, "...we all need to succeed -- need to get credibility and maximize the regs. We are here to help in any way we can." First of all, is that -- does that accord with what you -- or at least the message you remember giving at that meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then acknowledging that you're at the limits of your recollection here, the expression that I wanted to ask you about was "maximize the regs." And can you tell us what you -- if that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So if I can paraphrase, we've been given some new tools, let's use them as fully as we can?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. And, Mr. Clerk, if you could call up now SSM.NSC.CAN.00000408? These we will see when we come up, IRG minutes. And, Mr. Clerk, if you could scroll to page 7? And if I can go -- draw your attention, Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, whichever of you might be able to answer this question, the left -- sorry, right-hand column, the first row, so we're at the word "law enforcement in Ottawa." Do you see that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
It says, "Law enforcement in Ottawa, have been able to secure perimeter successfully without a need to employ any designations through the EA." Can you explain what that indication there is?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
This is the February 23rd IRG meeting.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. That's very helpful. You're not going to get off the stand without talking about tow trucks, so if I could just ask you a few questions about that. So if I could just ask you a few questions about that. As I understand it, Commissioner Lucki, you were, under the Regulations passed pursuant to the Emergencies Act, empowered to instruct tow truck operators to make their services available, but did you ever, yourself or did the RCMP, ever exercise that power in the province of Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And if you can just help us understand what that means. You have the power, but you are able to, at least as you would’ve understood it, lawfully hand that power over to Comm. Carrique, is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Were -- other than delegating that authority to the Commissioner of the OPP, were there any other delegations you made of that power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you didn’t exercise it yourself?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so, to the extent that power was used at all, it was used pursuant to the delegation you gave to Comm. Carrique?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That makes sense. The challenge it poses; not for you, for Commission counsel, is that when we try to trace what happened to that power you’ve handed it down to Comm. Carrique, and so does that mean that you thereafter lose visibility of the use of the power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. I’m just wondering; that delegation authority did not, it seems, include some requirement for the OPP Commissioner to report back to you on the extent to which he’d used those powers?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. Well, then, I’ll ask you to bear with me on the next question and then see if you can assist with it. Were you aware at the time -- there’s been a lot of information since, but I’d like to know if you could try to remember at the time. Were you -- was it your understanding at the time that you delegated the power to Comm. Carrique, that the OPP had already been able to secure the assistance of some tow truck operators without the need for the use of that power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So you can’t assist us with that issue as it relates to your delegated power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
When you delegated the power -- let me see if I can approach it this way; when you delegated the power, were you aware that one of the things that came along with the exercise of that power was an obligation on the part of the government to compensate tow truck operators for their work, ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- pursuant to orders?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And has that come back to you? Has the bill come back, so to speak?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you give us any information about that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
It was a big bill. In the context of processing that bill, for example, and I’ll -- you’ll see why I’m trying to tease this out of you, and if you’re not the right person to answer it, we’ll just have to live with that. But were you self-conscious of the fact that you were giving the Province a way to hand the costs of the towing back to the federal government?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. You realize that that was one of the implications of giving them this power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you probably realized that one of the implications would be that, whether or not the power was needed to compel the use of the tow trucks, it would all be processed that way so that the compensation could come back up to the federal government.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And would it surprise you, then, that some of the tow truck operators decided to go the route where they got paid by the feds and Ontario decided to process it that way, even though they’d been secured before the Emergencies Act was declared?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Mr. Commissioner, I do believe I’ll finish by lunch. There’s one other issue I wanted to pursue. Well, there’s a number of issues that are going to have to fall off the agenda, so to speak here, because of the time. But there is one other issue -- one other topic I wanted to explore before we break for lunch, if I may. I realize I’m a bit over my time, but may I take that...?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I think ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I am prioritizing here. (SHORT PAUSE)
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I appreciate Mr. Miller’s concern. And, Mr. Commissioner, I’ll say to you, and through you to Mr. Miller, we -- though those notes did just go up on that particular database, Commission Counsel did have access of those notes; and, as a matter of fact, I’d recommend the parties that they review the interview of D/Comm. Duheme, the witness summary as it’s called, because that summary was specifically for the purpose of pursuing those notes. So with that in mind, Mr. Miller might be able to focus his conversation on the parts of those notes that he considers important to you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If we could pull up the team’s chat, which is at PB.NSC.CAN00008040. And we’re going to have to ask you, Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, to try and recreate this in your memory again, acknowledging that a lot was happening at this time. It’s February 12th, putting the timestamps five hours ahead. It's earlier in the morning at the beginning, but when we go down to page 2 we'll see a timestamp for... Mr. Clerk, can you scroll down to page 2, a timestamp for a heading to suggest that there is going to be a meeting with Mr. Sloly. Can you just scroll through until we find that? Yeah, there we go. So you are advised, Commissioner, in the course of this Teams chat that you are going to have a meeting with Chief Sloly at 2:00 p.m. And if we go down to page 5 of this document at 6:37 in the timestamp, so I think 1:37 in real time. Now, we're all going to have contend with this. None of us gets to see what's behind the -- well, you did at the time, but you're not going to tell us now.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But you come in at 6:37 with this statement: "[D]isregard, as OPP Commissioner advises there is a pretty straightforward way in that the Minister goes to the Ontario Police Commission." Can you tell us what you were talking about there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
In fairness to you, let me take you to some more of this, and maybe when you see some more context you'll be reminded of what that's statement's about. Mr. Clerk, can we take the -- take us down to page 16 of this chat? And there is the statement "I don't get it."
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I'll read that out. This is you, Commissioner Lucki, speaking: "I [don't] get it...are they going to the province or not regarding PS?" Which you'll probably agree with me is a reference to Peter Sloly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, "I didn't get it." Correct.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
In other words, you didn't hear what they were talking about or you didn't understand what they were talking about?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I see.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. Please, Mr. Clerk, please scroll up to help Commissioner ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. And ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- scroll along so that she can follow the context of the point that I just put to her. Can you scroll down a little further? No, sorry, down, so she can follow the...
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So you can't recall what the people you're listening to -- again, you're, as I understand it, here listening to the IRG meeting of the 12th, and you are -- somebody is talking, and that prompts you to wonder whether they are going to the province or not regarding, if that PS is Peter Sloly, regarding Peter Sloly. That doesn't trigger your memory about what you were hearing that prompted you to say that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That's fair enough. And if we go down -- scroll a little bit further, we see the words "maybe I tell him". Scroll up, please, Mr. Clerk, so Commissioner Lucki can see the lead into this comment. A little up further so she can see what -- "they need to land". Okay. So again, this is a continuation of the discussion you just saw.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then scroll down, please, Clerk. "Something we need to land." Then you say, "maybe I tell him". And scroll down further.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And "yay or nay". Perhaps you're asking your team what they think. And then Mark Flynn says: "Maybe a one on one face to face with the [Minister]?" And then Deputy Commissioner, here you come in and say, "agree and the PM." So I'm guessing that this is something pretty important because what is being proposed here is that you, Commissioner Lucki, meet ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- face-to-face with the Minister and perhaps the PM.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Oh. Well.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
It's about Coutts.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So that answers that. Thank you for clarifying that. One last topic, then, in the five minutes that I'd have, with the Commissioner's indulgence. Could we go to OPP00004583? This is a long document, and perhaps, Mr. Clerk, if you can find page 52. And these texts have already been canvassed somewhat in the hearing, Commissioner, and Deputy Commissioner, but this might be the first time you have looked at them in recent memory. Can you scroll down to the point where Commissioner Carrique says, "With respect to your comments". There we go. So again, to orient ourselves, as I read this, the green is Commissioner Carrique and the blue is you. And this -- do you recollect this exchange? And I'll ask the clerk to scroll down so that she can read the rest of her input to this.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that's you, Commissioner Lucki, saying if you have some ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, I mean that's Commissioner Carrique saying if -- saying to you, "If you", Commissioner Lucki: "...have some influence it would be helpful." And then could you scroll down a little further? And here you are ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- telling the Commissioner that -- when you say "Had DM Stewart" is that you saying that I, Commissioner Lucki, had Deputy Minister Stewart reach out to, am I reading that correctly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Kanellakos?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Steve K, that's ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Ferguson.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So the upshot is you and Commissioner Carrique are talking here about your hope that the new Chief of Police will be someone who’s already part of the command structure?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry. I phrased that wrongly. I didn’t mean that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The new person in charge of the ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Understood. You wanted continuity.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You and Commission Carrique wanted continuity with the work that had been done. I understand that. The question I have, though -- so understanding the sort of logic of the proposition, you mentioned earlier both in the context of these proceedings here and other proceedings you’d been in the division between church and state. Were any red flags going off in your mind when this dialogue took place between you and Commissioner Carrique that you would go to Canada’s Deputy Minister of Public Safety, who would go to an official in the City of Ottawa to exercise influence about who would be the next interim Chief?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, acknowledging that in - - for the reasons we discussed before and your structure and relationship to the people you report to, you wouldn’t have been familiar, perhaps, with the way that the Ottawa Police Services takes its direction. But did -- it didn’t occur to you when you were putting in place this communication from your Deputy Minister to an official -- senior official at the City of Ottawa that an option would have been if such an approach were to be made about the importance of continuity that it would have been better placed to the Police Services Board?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I can summarize, you had an important message to deliver, which was that continuity in command was important and you used a connection that you knew about to deliver that message.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So the message makes sense and, as I say, the path you took, you took simply because it was a connection you knew already existed between Stewart and Kanallakos.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. Those are my questions for this panel.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Commissioner. I have just two areas that I'll re-examine on, if you'll accommodate that. I realize we're running late in the day, so I'll be as quick as we can.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The first of them -- I think they're both for you, Deputy Commissioner. The first one has to do with some answers you gave to questions about meetings you were at with senior government officials where you were -- I'll just use the word uncomfortable. I don't think you voiced a strong principal objection, but you were uncomfortable that perhaps that line between government and police might, if not be crossed, I think you used the word it was getting blurred by the presence of those senior officials at the meetings. Do you recall that evidence?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And do you remember which meeting it was that brought that to your ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that focussed your attention on that point?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Do you recall whether there was more than one meeting where you had this same discomfort?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you. The second line of questions has to do with your answers to questions about freezing bank accounts or giving banks information that they would use, as you put it, to exercise their discretion to freeze accounts. And I'm not going to -- well, let me begin by reminding you of the two caveats you made, and, and just so you know that these questions are asked with those two caveats in mind. The first one I remember was you saying, "We didn't write this law." And the other one was, "We had maybe 24 hours to implement it, so we had to move very quickly so."
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well put. So both you had to initiate action and then the financial services industry had to react to that all within a very short period of time. So we accept those caveats but I want to ask you about your -- the way you phrased it, which is that the notices you gave to the financial institutions didn’t require the financial institution to freeze the account, it gave them the discretion to form their own view about whether the account should be frozen. Now, what I’ve got in front of me is the Act -- or, sorry, the regulation and the actual notice that the RCMP served on financial institutions but let me see if I can do it without taking you to those documents. Would you agree with me that, in effect -- you strike me as a practical man, Deputy Commissioner. In effect, once the financial institution got one of those notices that, absent, for example, that you gave some exceptional information that the bank had that the information they’d been given by the RCMP was just wrong -- absent that information, they were effectively bound by the regulations to take measures to stop dealing with that customer?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And would it be fair to say that you fully expected the financial institutions to stop dealing with these customers as soon as you gave them the name and they confirmed that they held accounts in that name?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, thank you. That will serve for my purposes. And so, Mr. Commissioner, those are my questions in re-examination.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good evening, Deputy Commissioner Zablocki. My name's Gordon Cameron. You might remember we met out in Saskatoon for the interview of you and your colleagues. And -- now the summary of that interview that you will have looked at to confirm its accuracy has already been adopted by those who preceded before you, but while I've got you on the stand, what I'm going to do is just ask you to confirm that you did review that summary of your interview and to your knowledge and belief it's accurate. Is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Please go ahead, then, thanks.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Well, thank you for that clarification and correction. And with that correction, you can confirm that the summary of your interview is otherwise accurate?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. I'd like to begin by asking you to describe some of this -- well, let me ask you, you were in the audience when the Commissioner and the Deputy Commissioner were testifying earlier today?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Yeah, sorry. Some of this will repeat that, but just so that you can put your evidence in context, can you describe what division of the RCMP is under your command and how that fits in with the national -- the way that the RCMP is organized nationally?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we've heard that the country is divided up into divisions and we're going to hear a little bit about the interaction between your division, "K" Division, which is geographically Alberta -- and if I've got it correctly, "E" Division, which is geographically the Province of British Columbia; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you also interact with the prairie provinces or any of the other divisions than "E" Division?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Can you describe what role the RCMP plays as the police in the Province of Alberta?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. That’s a very complete description. Now, just because I want to get past the conception a lot of us have that the RCMP is only a national or is Canada's national police force, when you are the police of jurisdiction, when you are, in effect, the provincial police for the Province of Alberta, you're wearing RCMP uniforms, correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But you are, in effect, the same type of police force as the OPP is in Ontario or the Sûreté du Québec is in Quebec; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the same is true of "E" Division in British Columbia? They are the provincial police of British Columbia?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And you described the way that your policing can flow down to municipalities, and with respect to Coutts in particular, which we're going to obviously focus on today, was there any other police force with jurisdiction in Coutts or the vicinity relevant to the blockade at Coutts, other than the RCMP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And just -- I'll just see if I can refine that a little bit. That was all the RCMP "K" Division as provincial police, not any of the municipal, not where you were providing municipal police forces?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Can you help us with -- I'll give the acronym and the name -- the Community Conflict Mediation Group, the CCMG, and where that fits in your organization for "K" Group? Doubtless, it's the same for the other divisions, but if you can describe it for "K" Group -- "K" Division for us?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And are some or all of the members of the CCMG full time and dedicated to that role, or are all of them, perhaps, some part time? How does that get structured in "K" Division?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But if an event arose where some interaction with a Public Order incident is required, you would call on those people, perhaps take them out of whatever other station they're in, and bring them to the location where they're required?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And is it fair to say that in "K" Division and in the Province of Alberta, those officers would get some reasonable level of experience at that work, given both the environmental and perhaps Indigenous issues that are encountered in the Province of Alberta?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, coming to the events in question at Coutts, can you describe first, just to begin the story, where you first -- where and when -- where you saw the protests forming up, when you first became aware of it? How did this first come to your attention, or perhaps people who report to you, when it first came to their attention?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
At the time that you were performing all of these preparatory measures and analyzing the intelligence, did you or the people who were doing the intelligence analysis for you form a view about whether the people who were planning the slow rolls, as it was initially envisaged, whether they were associated with or aligned with the other convoy events that were emerging and coming all the way from Vancouver towards Ottawa and from other locations ended up being various other ports of entry and ultimately Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I’m going to try to do this without a map, but you mentioned Highway 4. And would it be fair to say that the Coutts Border Crossing is a particular place on the Canada/U.S. border that one can drive up to and there’s a CBSA border point there, but that the slow rolls wouldn’t just be at the border point? I mean, I think was one of the things you’ve described in other parts of your evidence, ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- that the whole highway was vulnerable to whatever -- the whole highway down to the border point was vulnerable to whatever activity that the slow rolls would engage in? Maybe you can just describe the geography for us on what a challenge that presented to you from a policing point of view?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. While you’re on that point, I’ll mention it because it becomes relevant to the developments later on, but what I was describing was that you didn’t just have a particular border point to be considered about that anywhere along the road accessing that border point could effectively block the border point. But another point you just mentioned is that in terms of controlling that roadway, there were certainly some vehicles, such as farm vehicles, which could go around any policing effort you might undertake on the highway. Did I get that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now maybe you can take us to the day that the blockade actually materialized and how the K Division forces dealt with that, how the blockade materialized, and how the police reacted to that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Did you, Deputy Commissioner, or the people working in K Division on this, on the reaction to this slow roll, which ended up becoming a blockade, did you form a view about whether that particular truck that jackknifed itself and blocked the road, or others who followed the same pattern, was that, as you and your forces perceived it, the intention of everybody on the slow roll or was that the actions of some smaller part of the slow rolling trucks?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Did you mean they got trapped in it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, you described fairly extensive planning and preparation and anticipation, that is advance knowledge and consequent planning and preparation and anticipation of the slow roll. And yet we’ve heard that -- it’s in the evidence of the Mayor of Coutts, that he thought that the RCMP were caught off guard by the blockade. Were you caught off guard by the protest and the slow roll, or by it having turned into a blockade by this jackknife that you described?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And during those first few days that you described, the 28th, 29th, 30th, while you were trying to marshal your forces in case enforcement action was necessary, was your CCNG group in trying to deal with the protestors?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, taking us onto the 28th, 29th, 30th, and do I understand correctly that part of the forces you marshalled in anticipation of potential enforcement action was to get some heavy-lift towing capacity arranged in case it was needed?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you know why the towing capacity wasn’t there after your -- by the end of the day of the 31st?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And throughout the remainder of the event at Coutts, did you ever manage to regain commercial towing contracts or commitments from either those companies or others at Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’m just going to take a slight digression, Deputy Commissioner, and talk about a topic that I saw pass by as you were describing the geography and the scenario, and I’m going to begin -- I’m going to talk about the efforts that “K” Division to see if you could get the protesters to relocate or otherwise carry on their protest in a way that wouldn’t, well, block traffic or, put another way, be illegal. And I’m going to begin that with a quotation you might recognize. This is Chief Supt. Daroux who is the -- you’ll know as the Officer in Command of the Southern Alberta District. And this is the quotation from him that I’ll put to you and then ask you to comment on: "Our first, and typically most effective, approach in moving a protest into a lawful state is communication. At Coutts, we engaged our Community Conflict Management Group to move the protest back to a lawful state." (As read). And that’s the end of the quotation.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I just want to ask you about that concept ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- of the -- that the -- that is, as Chief Supt. Daroux put it, the step number one when confronting a protest that has become unlawful is to see if you can find a way to make it lawful again. Have I caught his thought correctly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what types of steps were you hoping to take, or the people working in “K’ Division, to see if that could be done with respect to the protest at Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I want you to -- I’m just going to interrupt you there but please ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- hold that sequence because -- because I do want you to continue on with how you attempted to find that. But just if I can ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- explore that thought and that you were describing before about trying to balance the interests of the protesters and the interests of the law enforcement that’s present ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- the -- I think you’re describing a tension where the protesters want visibility, and perhaps they even want to be a nuisance or cause people to pay attention to them, do something to attract attention, and yet you want to make sure they -- you want them to be able to do that much; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so there’s this tension between you wanting to make sure things are legal and not be disruptive and the protesters wanting to be somewhat disruptive so that they’re getting attention, and so one thing you described is moving them to an area where they’re not obstructing as much traffic and yet still have the visibility they’re looking for so they can make their point.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And is that also the thinking behind approaches such as opening one lane or letting so many cars through an hour, in other words, so that they’re having some disruptive affect but not to the point where you would call it an illegal disruption?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And part of your CCMG group would be having these discussions with the protesters to come up with some give or concession that allows them to have a highly visible and -- highly visible protest appropriate to their objective and yet ideally not be illegal and to be as -- to not -- to be as -- to allow things to go ahead without as much disruption as possible. Is that fair?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now -- so now, there -- I interrupted you on that point of the objective, and you were about to describe how your folks attempted to accomplish that by relocating the protest at Coutts.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And how did that -- did that succeed in solving the problem at Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Did they say why?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Did you form a view? Talking again about our balance, did they not consider that that lawful protest site would give them the visibility and the disruption they wanted to make their point?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And at some point I understand, well for some period, for the first week or so, I understand that you were attempting to minimise enforcement in the terms of traffic tickets or other Highway Traffic Act offences. Is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you perceive any beneficial impact of that enforcement from your point of view? Did it have the effect you were hoping it would have?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, as this -- as these events are unfolding, as you've described, the attempt to set up lawful protests on the attempt to establish Checkpoint 10 and its evolution, have you yet started to bring in resources from either within the Province of Alberta down towards Coutts or from "E" Division in British Columbia over to Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you describe, do you need to engage any of the provisions of the agreements you have with municipalities in Alberta or other segments of Alberta to move those resources down to Coutts, or as long as it's within Alberta do you have the unilateral ability to move around?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you tell me how they contract -- I'm not going to ask you to be a contracts lawyer, but just as from an operational point of view how it works between when you seek resources from another province?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And when the Commissioner sends out that letter, is she, and we'll use "K" Division and "E" Division here, and the Commissioner wants resources to go from "E" Division to "K" Division, and she writes to the ministers of the respective provinces telling ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- them of her intention, is she asking permission to do this or is she invoking a right that the RCMP has under those agreements with the provinces?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And have there been occasions when the Commissioner has asked that resources go from "K" Division over to "E" Division?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And when you get resources from "E" Division to come and work with you in "K" Division they are basically the same. They are RCMP officers wearing RCMP uniforms who've been trained with the same equipment and went to the same college, etc. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, on February 3rd -- you might recollect this. We can call it up if it's necessary -- but you might remember writing to Minister Savage in Alberta, and in that letter, you made this statement, that: "The situation at Coutts does, in my opinion, constitute an emergency in the Province of Alberta." Do you remember saying that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And when you said that -- well, obviously, you viewed the situation as an emergency -- were you making reference to Alberta's emergency legislation or anything else in particular that prompted you to use that expression, or was that just a characterization of what you were facing?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So this is different than the Commissioner giving notice to British Columbia that you're going to borrow some of their resources. Here, you're giving notice?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
In both ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. Thank you. Can you tell me about your efforts to obtain towing assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And was your effort to obtain towing assistance with Canadian Armed Forces equipment wholly independent from the request by the Province of Alberta to Ottawa to obtain assistance from the Canadian Armed Forces?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I see. So you each knew that the other was making the request and it was basically for the same end result, which was that the Armed Forces' towing equipment be able to help out at Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you both got roughly the same answer?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, are you aware that -- our reference for this is what Alberta has said in its institutional report -- but you might be aware of it as well, and I think you've spoken about it in your interview summary, that eventually, Alberta acquired, bought some -- the Province of Alberta bought some heavy lift towing capacity. Are you -- can you tell us about that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And was it ever -- was that equipment ever put into service for the purpose of clearing Coutts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But was it used to move protester vehicles?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Was the heavy lift towing equipment used to lift heavy vehicles?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Involved in that incident?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Understood. Thank you. I want to talk to you about the incidents or incidences or the continuum of your concern about firearms among the blockade participants at Coutts. And if I can begin by putting it this generally. It's our understanding that you had -- the RCMP had concerns about firearms at Coutts as early as the early days of the protest, that is, around February 1st. Can you explain how that happened?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That is, no one was willing to point a finger when you went and asked about it; is that what you're saying?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then around February 9th, there was new information about another issue with firearms, and you're going to want to be cautious, and you've probably thought about this a lot as you prepared this testimony, so we're not going to -- we're going to try not to ask any questions that elicit answers that you're reluctant to give, but can you tell us what you can about how that, what we'll call more serious incident involving firearms at Coutts first came to your attention, and how it evolved?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I understand you were prepared to take further investigative steps but that the events were precipitated by an incident at the protest site. Can you take us through that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes, I understand that you were prompted -- your forces were prompted to act on its concerns and move in and make arrests and conduct searches, and that that was prompted by an incident involving a vehicle that - - well, it's probably the incident you were describing earlier - --
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- the collision ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- between one of the trucks and one of your officer's vehicles.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if you can just describe it in numbers of arrests and charges and firearms seized, can you give us a description of how the operation proceeded?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the -- there's probably a long list of charges associated with that, but can you give us a general description of what criminal charges came out of this operation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I want to just ask a bit about the relationship between the people who were involved in this -- in the firearms offences and the rest of the protesters, and I'm going to -- my starting off point for that, Deputy Commissioner, is to ask it this way. There's some information in the public domain about how you learned about these individuals and the firearms cache, but I'll let you use your words to make sure you're comfortable with how you describe it. But the way you told us earlier was that it was your liaison group that first learned or started the investigative steps with respect to this firearms cache and arrest; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
What I'm trying to find out is did you -- if you're allowed to tell us, did you learn about the individuals who were involved in these firearms from your interaction with the other protesters on the site?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So it was an investigative effort through which you, in effect, penetrated enough to get the intelligence that allowed you to make these arrests and these seizures; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now with that said, can you tell us what impact, at least as you saw it, this incident of the arrests of the individuals and the seizure of the firearms, what impact that had on the other protesters, the ones who weren't involved in the arrests and who weren't charged or otherwise connected in any way with the investigation that resulted in the arrest?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I'll try to get you to expand on that and so I'm just going to lead you even more than I have so far. You sense that the rest of the protesters -- I'm going to use the word were embarrassed by or ashamed by but wanted to distance themselves from the people who had the firearms and were arrested. Is that the sense you got?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you. And do you have anything else you would like to tell us about how the matter wrapped up? I mean, it came to a pretty prompt conclusion, if you put it in a summary way of after the arrests, basically, the protesters, they wanted to clean up the site, but they did that and then left; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But it was agreed that they could stay in the location for a few more hours to clean it up before they left?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much, Mr. Commissioner. Those are my questions of Deputy Commissioner Zablocki, and I will hand it over to the next parties.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You're not going to want to hear this, Mr. Commissioner, but I have one question in re- examination.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Clerk, could you please call up PB.NSC.CAN.00008508? And, Deputy Commissioner, I'm just going to ask a few questions because I might be able to show you a document that you're more willing to talk about than the newspaper article you were willing to talk about with my friend Mr. Miller.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
It should be an RCMP K- Division criminal law -- there we go. Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You recognize this document, Deputy Commissioner?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And I just -- the only questions I have about this is to ask you if, first of all, does this document accord with your understanding of the -- at least the publicly available information about the investigation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the point that I'd like to draw to your attention is the section under assessment, which reads, "To date, there has been no information uncovered to suggest that there is an organized effort between individuals charged in Alberta and individuals involved in the Ottawa protest." Do you see that there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that's your understanding of the assessment of the criminal investigation to date?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I have no other questions. Thank you, Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, sir. My name’s Gordon Cameron. I have just a few questions to finish off your examination by Commission counsel this morning. Let me begin, just so that I don’t get it wrong for the whole examination that I did, do you prefer Ossowski or Ossowski?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Ossowski, thank you. And I’ll apologize if I speak in the present tense because I acknowledge you’ve since retired. So if I talk to you as if you’re still in charge of CBSA, just ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah, just make the time change on my behalf. But certainly, when you were at CBSA, CBSA had, and you would have had overall responsibility as its president or deputy minister, the Intelligence and Enforcement Branch?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And am I correct -- I’m just going by website information, so if I get it wrong, please correct me -- that Ted Gallivan, as executive vice president, would have had that under his purview as well?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And tell me briefly why CBSA has an Intelligence and Enforcement Branch.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And it’s a fairly substantial department within CBSA?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. And they produce what we’ve learned to call “intelligence products” for use by CBSA management and personnel?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. So they would take in information and distill from it the information that’s most likely relevant to ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- CBSA’s mandate and then distribute within the organization?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And it seems, just by instinct, that the two concerns here will be using that intelligence and those assessments to protect the security of Canada in terms of people who might be coming into the country and to protect your personnel who have to deal with these situations on the frontline; is that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, you produced for the Commission, helpfully, a series of these situational reports and intelligence assessments, if I can use that term, and I’d like to call up the first of these, if I could, Mr. Clerk, SSM.NSC.CAN000000068. I say the “first”; it isn’t the first sequentially, it’s just the first I’m going to refer to. And we can see that is a Situation Report for February 14th at 10:30 in the morning. Is this a type that you’re familiar with, Mr. Ossowski?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if the clerk can just scroll down the page so that people looking at the screen can see the -- just the type of content in this sort of report. We see a description of each -- of several ports of entry. And keep going, Mr. Clerk. I’m going to ask you ultimately to get through to page 8 but just scrolling through, people can see the type of statistical and observational analysis that this type of report would give to your personnel for the objectives we just described. And when we get through to page 8, there’s a table and then a heading, “Intelligence and Law Enforcement” -- sorry, “Intelligence and Enforcement”, and then underneath that, a heading, “Intelligence Landscape”. And I’m going to make the point of observing the parenthetical comment, “(Updates in red)”, and then the first heading there is “BLUF”. Can you tell us what that acronym is for? Do you remember?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Bottom Line Up Front, so it’s a compact presentation at the top of the assessment that gives the high-level view?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
To the bottom line.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And the words there: "As of February 14th, 2022, at 08:30 ET, the overall threat to CBSA officers and infrastructure is low." And this is February 14th, the convoy and the protests have been going on for more than a couple of weeks. I just wonder if you can confirm for me, because it’s certainly the impression that Commission counsel got, that that had been the BLUF in these reports throughout February, that is exactly as it appears there. Is that your recollection too?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. That’s actually a very helpful addition for the point I’d like to see if we can learn from the next document. And so, Mr. Clerk, if you could pull up, same prefix, but 1519? SSM.NSC.CAN.00001519. And so here we have the Situational Report. And you’ll recall that the last one was for 10:30 in the morning. We are now at 4:00 p.m. in the afternoon; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And was it typical for these Situational Reports, at least during -- you’ll note that it’s a Situational Report specific to the COVID-19 mandate protest. Was it typical -- and its our impression from your documents that these would be produced twice a day, one in the morning and one in the afternoon?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And again, Mr. Clerk, if you can just scroll through and take us down to page 8? Again, the same type of situational analysis of the various crossings with tables, and statistics, and maps, and what not. Then we get, again, our BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front. And we have the same statement as we saw in the last one, and that as you confirmed, had been in all of the BLUF, Bottom Line encapsulations of intelligence and enforcement at this time, February 14th, 2022, though now later in the day. The overall threat to CBSA officers and infrastructure is low, but there’s now an addition.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the addition to this BLUF is: “There has been a significant operational impact that may result in a threat to Canada’s economic security and prosperity.” Now, you know why you’re here today, and we’ve all been watching the progress of events in the first couple of months of February, so you’ll appreciate the significance of the date, February 14th; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
As the date that the Government invoked the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you recognize that language, “There has been a significant operational impact that may result in a threat to Canada’s economic security and prosperity” as language that is lifted from the section 58 justification that Canada used for the invocation of the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’m not going to say it’s the same language, so let me put it this way. It’s the concept that you will have been familiar with, as having been part of the section 58 ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- explanation; correct? Thank you. And so I’m going to circle around to this later, but can you tell me, do you have any knowledge as to why your BLUF report, which throughout all of the protests had been describing the risk to your front-line personnel and the guidance for your management, why it changed from a description of the threat being low to your officers and infrastructure to the addition of this point about “operational impact may result in a threat to Canada’s economic security and prosperity”?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. And thank you for that. Let’s look at another sequence of similar threat assessment or situational reports. Mr. Clerk, could you call up SSM.NSC.CAN000000064? Now just have a look at that Mr. Ossowski, and perhaps as the Clerk scrolls down, you’ll be able to just tell us roughly speaking, what -- this is a very similar looking report, although different in some respects. Can you describe what type of report this is?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And again, scrolling down just so Mr. Ossowski can see the report as it progresses, but stopping there, please, Mr. Clerk. Again, we have a BLUF, Bottom Line Up Front, description under the same type of heading, “Intelligence Landscape”. And again, for this report, it says that at 8:30 in the morning, on February 14th, and I’ll quote: “…the overall threat to CBSA officers and infrastructure remains low.” And do you see that, Mr. Ossowski?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you agree with me again, so that we don’t have to go through them all, and perhaps subject to check if you do want to, that that had been the report given in all of these reports throughout February?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And Mr. Clerk, if you could next call up SSM.CAN.00006200? And I think we’ll see that, as you described it earlier, a wide distribution email with similar situational information. And if you could just scroll through it, Mr. Clerk? We’re looking for page 4. Bottom of page 4. Again, tables and statistics about activity at the various border points. And then we get the “Intelligence Landscape” “BLUF”. And I’m sorry, you know what I forgot to do? Was to get the date and time of this. Mr. Clerk, could you go up to the top please? Thanks. So we are now the next day. So this is February 15th. Thank you, Mr. Clerk. I just wanted to make sure we understood this. So this is the next day’s report of the same type. And when we look at the “Intelligence Landscape” Bottom Line Up Front, we see the same word about -- sorry, same words about the threat being low, but now there’s some more words: “…but caution should be exercised in light of recent reporting surrounding IMVE groups.” And do you know why that appeared on February 15th, the day after the invocation of the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you see that before the sentence we were just talking about, IMVE groups, we have a repeat of the observation that the protests at POEs have significant operational impact that may result in a threat to Canada’s economic security and prosperity. That one that we saw last time in the other report; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now your explanation, as I understood it earlier, for the appearance at the end of the day on February 14th in 1 type of report and then in the next day on February 15th in the other type of report for the appearance of these references, in the intelligence landscape description of the threat to CBSA officers and infrastructure, this sudden appearance of references to a threat to Canada's economic security and prosperity as being not motivated, in your view, by an effort on the part of the drafters of these reports to repeat the government explanation for invoking the Emergencies Act, you're confident of that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I think you'll agree that a threat assessment is meant to be a guide to action and policy, not to serve as a vehicle to rationalize it; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And, in fact, if your personnel get the idea that the content of these threat assessments that they are getting are driven by an attempt to repeat government talking points, it's going to dilute the utility of those assessments to your personnel and to their ability to protect Canadians?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So it's important that the explanation you gave, that is that it was more or less a coincidence that this language appeared immediately after the invocation of the Emergencies Act, that it was just a coincidence and not an attempt to repeat the government's talking points for the invocation of the Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Another point that chronologically, because we're at the end of the process here, chronologically at the invocation of the Act, you mentioned that the only -- you mentioned in answer to questions by my colleague, Ms. Heine, that the only input that CBSA gave to Cabinet when it was considering how provisions in the Emergencies Act could assist CBSA's mandate was to observe that you didn't currently have the authority to prohibit entry on the grounds that people were heading to one of these protests and that that would be useful to you in terms of the objectives that Cabinet appeared to be trying to achieve. Do you remember that evidence?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if we can call up, Mr. Clerk, SSM.NSC.CAN.00000405? This is IRG minutes for February 20th. Do you recall participating in IRG meetings, Mr. Ossowski?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And, Mr. Clerk, if we scroll down to page 6 at the bottom of the page -- so just slow down a little bit, Mr. Clerk, so we can get the context here. Can you go up just a bit? So this is the IRG reporting on progress and with respect to actions that have taken place consequential on the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and then we have some input from CBSA at the very bottom. And, Mr. Ossowski, did you provide that input to the IRG?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you participate in person or virtually in this meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And for your virtual participation, was this you speaking, or had you submitted a report to this effect?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you would have been briefed in advance, I suppose, for a -- even for the President of CBSA, an appearance at the IRG is a significant event. You'd have had your staff brief you on this input?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, can you just slow down a little bit and repeat that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And had you made any other reports to the IRG about similar instances in which the Emergencies Act powers had been used by CBSA?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I think it was the last time also?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And so as far as CBSA is aware, the authority in the Emergencies Act that empowered CBSA to deny entry to people was with respect to a couple who were turned away on February 19th?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that's the totality of it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. Those are my only questions.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Just briefly I'd like to take the witness back, and, Mr. Clerk, could you call up for me, please, SSM.NSC.CAN.00001519? And go to page 8 of that document. Mr. Ossowski, this is the February 14th in the afternoon, the one that is dated February 14th, 2022, 1600 Eastern Time. And this is the one we looked at before where the sentence is added to the bluff, bottom line, up front heading of the Intelligence Landscape, and on the next page, a line was added: "There has been a significant operational impact that may result in a threat to Canada's economic security and prosperity." And when I asked you questions about this before, I might not have gotten as complete an answer as I should have about why you believe that sentence appeared on that document. Do you know where it came from? That is, where the person who added that sentence got the information and why they decided to put it there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So if I can just put a little flesh on what you were saying. What you're saying is when this point was put to you in your interview by Commission Counsel you then followed up on this point?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you repeat that again? It sounds like you consulted with the person who added this sentence, and the answer was they decided to add the sentence.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Mr. Commissioner, that's the only matter I wanted to follow up on.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, Commissioner. We have now the panel for Transport Canada. Could I ask that the witnesses be sworn?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon, gentlemen. My name's Gordon Cameron and I have some questions for you on behalf of Commission Counsel. First, I would ask you to cast your minds back to August 30th of this year when you were interviewed by my colleagues in company with some of your colleagues. And so what I'm going to ask you to do is confirm to some extent what you can confirm and to some extent what you can confirm on behalf of your colleagues, and in particular, have you reviewed the summary of that interview that was prepared by Commission Counsel?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you, Mr. Dea?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And to the extent that that summary captures information that you two provided to Commission Counsel, can you confirm that it's accurate and that you adopt it as your evidence before the Commission?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And to the extent the information is that of your colleagues at the interview, can you confirm that it was reviewed by them for accuracy and believe it to be accurate?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And also, Transport Canada filed a -- an institutional report with the Commission. Can you confirm that that document is accurate and that it forms part of the evidence that Transport Canada has submitted to the Commission?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. Now, let me ask you each, gentlemen, to introduce yourselves and describe the role you have in Transport Canada.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And Mr. Dea, can you give us an outline of your position and what you do there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And if I can go back to you, Mr. Keenan, and ask you to describe -- it would probably take you all day if you were comprehensive, but just describe what Transport Canada does, what its jurisdiction -- what is the federal jurisdiction that Transport Canada administers?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I'm going to ask you to expand on exactly that last point that you mentioned, that road transportation -- which of course is, for a truckers' convoy, the more relevant aspect of your department's jurisdiction -- for road transportation, you have this divided jurisdiction where there are federal responsibilities but there are also provincial responsibilities. If you could just describe to some extent what that division is, and then I'll ask you to expand on how that prompts you to have interfaces with the provincial and territorial authorities.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for that. And now, if you could help us with the second half of what you were describing, which is as the result of that interplay between the federal jurisdiction over some aspects of transportation by motor vehicle and the jurisdiction of the provinces over other and territories over other aspects, you have quite a bit of intergovernmental connection at your level, and probably at the level of the people that work with you. But can you expand on that for us?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, with that background in mind, both the complexity of the overlapping jurisdictions and the extent of your network, the network that your department is responsible and presumably also you personally have between the federal government and the provincial government, I want to take you to the beginning of the convoy and the days as it is just sort of starting to appear on the horizon. What did Transport Canada see, when, and what was your reaction?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I'm just going to stop you. Just -- we've heard about that, and -- but I'd just like you to rewind just a little bit, describe the committee again, and what your role is in it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so I had interrupted you there when you were describing the invocation of the ADMNSOPs meeting that you attended as the convoy was coming onto the horizon.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. So you were describing the DMOCC. Please go ahead with that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you describe the steps then that your department started to take to respond to the emerging convoy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Why don’t you list those now and we’ll go from there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Maybe I could ask the Clerk to call up for us PB.CAN.00000860? Now to assist you, Mr. Keenan, I’ll draw your attention to the upper right-hand corner of this page where it says, “Working Draft February 13, 2022”. But we haven’t found a later draft, and I think that you’ve confirmed for us already that this is effectively the final version of this strategy. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And describe if you can what you were trying to accomplish with the strategic enforcement strategy.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. We’re going to come back to the aspect of inter-provincial cooperation in developing this strategy. While we’re, though, describing the items you mentioned earlier in your list of points that Transport Canada mobilized to react to the situation, can you tell us about the tow truck policy or the approach that Transport Canada developed to the point you were describing about the need for heavy lift tow capacity?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And whatever happened, then, with the tow truck strategy? Did it get implemented in any measure?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I can capture what you’ve just said and then I’m going to ask you some questions about this, the purpose of developing the tow truck strategy was to come up with a solution to all of the parked trucks that -- that is sort of obvious on its face, and you describe an effort in which you and your colleagues try -- thought of everything you could to deal with the fact that you needed to move these big rigs, different ways of either getting them to go on their own or to move them with tow trucks. And ultimately, by the 13th, you’d basically decided there was not a viable solution with the authorities you had at your disposal. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, on that point, what I’d like to hear is your response, if you’re familiar enough with the facts I’m going to suggest to you. The Commission has heard evidence from different representatives of the Ottawa Police Service and the Ontario Provincial Police that they had had some success in securing voluntary compliance from heavy lift tow truck operators without -- this is before the Emergencies Act gave them authority to compel that. So I’m not going to ask you to offer a view on the truthfulness of that because I don’t think you were directly connected to it. But do you -- did you have information about that effort by the OPS and the OPP at the time you were developing this tow truck strategy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did your partners include representatives of the OPS, the OPP and the Ontario government?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
This is a perfect time.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon again, gentlemen. If I can pick up roughly where we left off, we had run through the lifecycle of the tow truck strategy. And I wanted to ask you some questions, and this will, to some extent, bring back in your enforcement strategy and your tow truck strategy, but just talk to you about the point we began with, which was your federal, provincial, territorial coordination as you were trying to come to solutions. And in particular, I'll call up a document, though I don't know if we'll need reference to it, but we'll get it on the screen just in case we do. It's SSM.CAN.00000363. And to -- while that's coming up, Mr. Keenan, you'll recollect, perhaps that on February 7th, Transport Canada, Public Safety, and CBS convened a feds, provinces, territories discussion?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And now, you can see on the screen an email, "My notes from the FTP call". And if you -- if to recollect your memory, and in response to any of my questions you want to have the clerk scroll down and help you through your answers, please feel free to do so. But perhaps just generally, who convened the meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what was the purpose of the meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then you have the notes there that -- well, actually, I suppose I should back up a second. It was a federal, provincial, and territorial meeting. Without listing all the names, can you just describe the categories of people who were participating in this?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Significant in number, and it sounds like the senior or close to the most senior officials in their portfolios for each province and territory?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And under the fourth bullet there is a Transport Canada proposal, and the first bullet, I'll help you through, I believe maximum enforcement strategy is one of the early monikers for what became the strategic enforcement strategy; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So there's your strategy and some bullet points for it. Did you present the strategy, you or one of your officials?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then, Clerk, if you could just scroll down a little bit. And then, Mr. Keenan, I'll ask you, what was the reception to the strategy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
With respect to the protest in Quebec City?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. And then how did Ontario receive the strategy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now we're going to go to the next day after this FPT meeting, February the 8th, and we're going to talk about a letter you received and that I think you know well by now, from the Ontario Deputy Minister of Transportation, your counterpart in Ontario. Before we get there, I'd like to put up, if you could, please, Mr. Clerk, PB.CAN.00000820. And this is an email chain that starts with the transmission of the letter, but -- okay. If you could go back to the top, please, Clerk, just for a second? So not sure where this ends up taking us through, but if you scroll down, you'll come to a paragraph, "We have had several discussions..." There we go. So this is your contribution having received the letter. And I'll just read this out, so that it's in the transcript. "We have had several discussions with Ontario about enforcement options. Ontario has always been cautious and reserved about making full use of its authorities under the Highway Traffic Act but was engaged. This letter..." And I'm going to try to ellipse your typos here, but, "This letter [...] represents a pull- back from those discussions. It is consistent with the pattern we saw in the last 48 hours where Minister Mulroney is unavailable to talk to Minister Alghabra." And then it's got your name at the end. Have I been fair to the typos there and ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
We've all been there. Now we're going to go to the letter in a second, and you'd already mentioned that in the FPT meeting you sensed some coolness to Ontario and some of the other provinces about the enforcement strategy. But the reason I wanted to begin with this email is you foreshadow by saying the letter was a less than embracing acceptance of the enforcement strategy by Ontario. And you're saying that that is consistent with the pattern in the last 48 hours. Can you explain what you mean by that about Minister Mulroney, which would be an Ontario Minister, being unwilling to talk to Minister Alghabra or unavailable?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And just so we have the cast of characters accurate, for those who haven't been following this too closely, Minister Alghabra was the Federal Minister of Transport and Minister Mulroney was Ontario's Provincial Minister of Transport?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now if we can go to the letter? Clerk, it would be PB.CAN.00000821. Now you by now, I'm sure, are quite familiar with this letter, and as a matter of fact, it's had some airtime at the hearing already in front of other witnesses, so we don't need to spend too much time on it, but perhaps you could explain to me the substance of this response and your reaction to it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you. And with that response, I’ll ask my colleague to pick up a new line of questions, Mr. Commissioner. Stephen Armstrong, Commission Counsel, will pick up for a section of questions, and then I’ll come back to finish.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I’ve been told I’ve got 30 minutes left, and I think I can probably eliminate some material and get this done in that time. And for those of you who’ve been following the last hour or so, I can point out that tomorrow the Finance panel comes on and we’ll have another perspective on the similar analysis about the impacts of that. So in the spirit of if you liked this, you might like that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Gentlemen, if I can take you back to the narrative of the development of the federal government’s response to the convoy, we were just talking about the letter from Ontario saying that they weren’t enthusiastic about the enforcement strategy for the reasons articulated in that letter. I’d like to pick up now where things went from there beginning with a question to you, Mr. Keenan. Did you brief that letter up to Minister Alghabra?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you have discussions with him or give him feedback on what you thought the implications of that letter were for the development of your enforcement strategy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you give us a few minutes on that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, leading up from the time of the letter towards invocation on the 14th, what was Transport Canada’s role in developing the government’s thinking on the potential use of the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And tell me, as you're doing this thinking on February 11th, Ontario adopted its emergency measures. And how did that emergency measures, and how did that have an impact on your thinking about, first of all, how you viewed the Ontario measures, how they might have counterparts in other provinces or federally?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you -- did that prompt you to either think about or perhaps even encourage other provinces to consider similar measures that they might be able to take in their jurisdictions?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, the next point I'd like to bring to your attention as we're following this chronology, the -- there was an email thread on about February 10th. And Mr. Clerk, if you could call up SSM.CAN.00000374. This is the email thread started by the Deputy Clerk, Ms. Drouin. And again, this is a document that's received some attention already in the hearing. We don't need to go into it line by line, but you might remember this as the enquiry by Maître Drouin as to whether or not there is an opportunity for this concept of a trade corridor that might assist in giving federal jurisdiction that could prevent obstructions at border crossings. Do you remember that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if we could just scroll down in the email a bit. And if we can start by going to the bottom just so we can see the actual proposal. There we are. I'll read it out: "As you know we are looking at different options to get jurisdiction. One of the questions I received is: Can we declare the region of the Ambassador Bridge a trade corridor and then get jurisdiction?" And then if you -- you received that and considered it, and we'll now look at your response, Mr. Keenan. So Clerk, if you could scroll up again. Further, please, to Mr. Keenan's thoughts. Okay. Now, you have a number of points that you mention in here. It's a four-part answer, and because we've only got a little bit of time, perhaps you could just give it to us in bullet points, and then I'm going to ask you to talk in some detail about this. But if you can just give us the quick overview of your thoughts about the trade corridor idea.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. If we could, Mr. Clerk, just scroll back up to the point. First of all... Down, please. So the -- your first point is there is no such thing as a trade corridor. I think we get that. The second point you described to us as being there are authorities but they don't work in this context because they only cover the -- you're thinking of only cover the actual facility itself. And the third one intrigues the reader because you say: "The Ontario Ministry of Transportation [continues] to suggest the feds have full authority to manage international crossing, but this purposefully confuses authorities between governments." And I think this was your point here, that when Ontario says, "they are your bridges so you can control the blockades", you think Ontario, this is my expression not yours, Ontario is being cute because everybody knows the problem isn't in the centre of the bridge it's on provincial territory with provincial jurisdiction or municipal authority. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. Now, did Ms. Drouin's proposal go any further than this, than your critique of it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. A welcome pivot, as you described.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. Moving ahead to February 13th, so we’re now just coming right up to the invocation of the Act, you participated in a DMOCC meeting where the potential use of the Act was contemplated. Do you recall that meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you recall, we’re not going to ask for a roll call or perfect memory, but who was at that meeting, to the best of your recollection?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Mr. Clerk, perhaps it would help Mr. Keenan if we called up his notes of that meeting. It’s SSM.CAN.00000399. And what you can see here, right at the beginning of the notes -- first of all, are these your notes? I assumed that, but I should get you to confirm it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And your first point, I think is self-evident. The next one: “Rob and I argued that Emergencies Act can backfire in building more energy.” We heard some evidence from Mr. Stewart on that point. Can you give us your perspective on that point?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s a helpful point. And if I can key off that and ask you, having weighed that point into the balance, that is, the potential adverse effects of invoking the Emergencies Act, did you express a view at the meeting about whether you thought the invocation of the Act was appropriate at this time?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. That’s a very helpful answer. And I’ll use that to just ask the last question, which is, having been in the position you were, which appears to have been very senior in the Federal Government and very intricately connected with your counterparts at the provincial and territorial governments on the Transportation portfolio, which turns out to have been quite involved in the Government’s reaction to these events, are there things you could -- you wish -- the Commissioner should take into consideration in contemplating recommendations for how you would have been better able to handle a problem like this if they’d been in place, or looking into the future, what structures, regimes, or tools you would hope to be in place if you encounter a situation like this again?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. Those are the questions of Commission Counsel for this panel.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
No thank you, Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, Mr. Commissioner. Gordon Cameron on behalf of Commission Counsel. And you have before you this morning a panel of witnesses representing the Department of Finance of the Government of Canada. Could I ask that the witnesses be sworn or affirmed?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, and bonjour, panel. We will begin with some formalities, the adoption of your witness statements and the such, and I will ask you questions for 20 minutes or so, then I will hand it over to my colleague, Ms. Shuhaibar, who will cover a specific topic with some of you, and then I'll come back up to finish it off. So if we could begin with those formalities. We want you to put onto the record some of the documents that you've prepared for the Commission and that Commission Counsel prepared in conjunction with you. And in particular, if I could begin by talking about the institutional report that was filed by the Department of Finance. And it doesn't matter which of you adopts it for these purposes, but I'll ask you, Mr. Sabia, if you reviewed that document, confirmed it for its accuracy and can adopt it as part of the evidence in the Department of Finance before the Commission?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And you were interviewed as part of a panel, and a interview summary was generated as a result of that interview. And for each of you, I'd like to confirm that you reviewed that summary of your interview for accuracy, that you do believe it is accurate, and that you adopt it as part of your evidence before the Commission today. Can I ask each of you to confirm that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, I'll ask you the easiest questions, I think, for today, which is to introduce yourselves to the Commissioner, with a description of who you are and what your role is in the Department of Finance. And so let me begin with you, Mr. Sabia. If you could tell us your title, your role, and how that fits with the Department of Finance.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That would be helpful. What the Department does and how you oversee those activities.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And with that introduction, perhaps, Ms. Jacques, you could describe your responsibilities in the Department of Finance.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Just so that I can make sure it's clear to the people observing who aren't as familiar with all of these process as some of us have become so far, is it correct to say, Ms. Jacques, that you and the people who work with you in your section were primarily responsible for developing the legislative instruments and then particularly the Emergency Economic Measures Order that we will end up talking about today?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Mr. Mendes, could you describe your role?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. And I think we'll probably find that most of Ms. Shuhaibar's questions will be directed to you, but if you have something to contribute to the questions I ask, please feel free to do so. If I could begin by asking you, beginning at the beginning chronologically, when, from the Department of Finance's point of view, the convoy and protest events that we've been talking about in this Commission first came on the horizon as an issue for the Department of Finance?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now that was very helpful, including because it just cleared out about five pages of questions that I ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
No, that's exactly what I was hoping you would talk about, and as a matter of fact, you said we might get into more detail about the specifics of how these events had an impact on your thinking about Canada's reputational concerns and trading concerns, so if you have more to say about that, please elaborate.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you. And on that note, which I think is a good segue, I will hand the podium over to Ms. Shuhaibar, who will have some questions about the economic impacts that were of concern to the department, and how that played out. (SHORT PAUSE)
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Well, the good news for you, Mr. Mendes, is you can probably get through the rest of this without answering any more questions. Feel free to if you have input, but you’ve had your workout for this morning. Where we’d like to go now is the approach that the Department took as the convoy was becoming an issue and your department was being approached to consider possible options from the Department of Finance’s point of view for dealing with the issues that the Government was facing with respect to the convoy. And let me ask you to just begin by describing when this approach was made to you, how did the Department of Finance view the tools that it could add to the Government’s kit for dealing with this situation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But we are going to - - for the reasons you just mentioned, we’ll leapfrog your initial interest in seeing if there was something you could do under either the Proceeds of Crime legislation or the Bank Act. But the memo that you did for your Minister on that point happens to capture some thoughts that I want to use as we move ahead into the legislation that was actually used. So if I could ask the Court to call up SSM.CAN.00003764? And this is a memorandum from you, Mr. Sabia, to the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Finance, Minister Freeland. And because you seem to have some law against dating documents in the federal government, I've had to figure out that this is a February 9th memo. Does that sound about right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And this... If the clerk could just scroll down. It basically describes exactly what you just encapsulated in your earlier comments, Minister Sabia. Keep scrolling, please. There, we have the initial point, the possibility of looking at this under the proceeds of crime legislation, and then there's a page of that. And if you get up to the top of page 3, where there are some redactions, you see -- now these are options under the Bank Act, as you'll remember from the time at which this particular memorandum was developed, but they ended up being brought forward into the legislation. And by the way, Ms. Jacques, please feel free to chime in if this is your territory. But in terms of what we'll call "freezing accounts", but I think there's a more cumbersome way of describing it, refusing to have dealings with or transactions with the customer, et cetera, et cetera, but if you'll -- I think you'll understand what I mean when I talk about freezing accounts.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The two options here, if I can describe them compactly, the first one is that the government create some sort of authority which simply directs banks to freeze accounts without the bank having any discretion in the matter. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then the second option is one in which the bank is -- the person is identified, but the bank then exercises its discretion as to whether or not that person is engaging in activity that should result in their bank accounts being frozen. Is that fair?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And so as Deputy Minister Sabia said, the option that had more attraction to you because it was much faster, you didn't need legislation, and because it was national and could cover both categories of institutions. And I think, just to complete that point, Mr. Sabia, you would add the ability to capture insurance -- the insurance industry if you were able to have a regime that covered the whole country?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And at the time you were developing these options, and this is February 9th, things were moving quickly at this stage and transitioned into consideration of the possibility of incorporating similar authorities in emergency legislation, I understand you were having consultations with the financial services industry as to how they would be able to work with these if you did enact them. And one of you could describe that for the Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, can you describe the feedback you got from those institutions, in particular, their reaction to how they would administer a regime in which they were being asked to freeze accounts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in A, B and C, we'll just talk about A and B, and the first is, you're saying to the banks, "We can either give you a list of people whose bank accounts need to be frozen and then you freeze them, that's option one, or you, the manager of the bank, can watch the news and read the paper and look at your customers and try to figure out which ones of them are engaged in illegal activities and what you should do about their accounts." The way I've described it, Mr. Sabia, I think you're probably going to foresee what the reaction was of the financial industry as to which of those two options they would have found easier to administer.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And again, for one of you, perhaps now we're over to Ms. Jacques again, as I read the Emergency Economic Measures Order, it ended up being a hybrid of those two options, one and two. Can you describe that for us?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And sorry, you trailed off at the very end of that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now that -- I want to chase down exactly those last words you used including the word "vet". So they would -- the idea is -- of the Regulation as you conceived it and as ultimately it was enacted, was that the banks would receive some information from police authorities. As you say it turned out to be the RCMP. And then they would vet that information and exercise some discretion as to whether or not they should take measures under the Order to, as we're saying, compactly freeze the accounts; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So they could take option number two, if they were able to with, as you described, their algorithms if they could detect suspicious activity. They could come to their own conclusion and freeze an account. But to go back up to option number one, which is the one that I was concentrating on, if the RCMP gave them information, you describe them as vetting that information and deciding whether they should freeze the account.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If we could call up, Mr. Clerk, PB.CAN.00000781? Thank you. And I don't know if you would -- if any of you would recognize this. Denis Beaudoin is an officer with the RCMP, and he filed this affidavit in the context of some of the litigation that's going on in connection with the invocation of the Act. And if you could scroll down ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, if it's important to you, I'll just explain. This is an affidavit that was filed in court in the context of litigation that was initiated in challenging the invocation of the Act, so the RCMP is explaining what they did and with the Regulations that we're talking about here.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry, the Order, yes. And if you could scroll down, Mr. Clerk? It's just to the body of the -- and at paragraphs 8 and 9 of this affidavit he's describing your Regulations and then as not specifying, "...a procedure through which the financial service[s] providers would identify individuals..." And then in paragraph 9 -- can you scroll down a bit further? Thank you. He says, "In practice, the police provided financial service providers with information about particular individuals or entities, which the financial service providers could use in conjunction with other information at their disposal to make their own determinations about whether they needed to take [any] steps to comply with the Order." Do you see that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now do you recall that in your own institutional report, and, Mr. -- I wish we could keep two things up at once, Mr. Clerk. I might ask you to go back and forth, but in any event, if you could call up DOJ.IR 0000000030? And go to page 11 of that document. And then a little -- scroll down just a bit further. Thank you. That's perfect. The paragraph that begins "The Department of Finance did not have any information..." That's not surprising. If you look at the second sentence, "The Department of Finance played no role in the process through which financial institutions identified the accounts that they froze. The RCMP has stated that at no time did it provide a list of donors to financial institutions. The Department understands that the RCMP provided a list that included identities of individuals who were influencers in the illegal protest in Ottawa, and owners and/or drivers of vehicles who did not want to leave the site. At no time was that list provided to the Department." Now what we have here then is the Department of Finance, and this is your Regulation, Ms. Jacques, so you probably had something to do with the drafting of this part of your institutional report; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. Did the Regulation or the -- sorry, did the Emergency Economic Measures Order in effect get drafted by you and your department?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. Okay. And the point here is that you take no responsibility for -- that is, the Department of Finance takes no responsibility for which accounts got frozen, that is, you just drafted the regime that allowed that act -- that freezing of accounts to take place; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, Mr. Clerk, as I said, we are going to hop back, if we could, to 781, same section. So the RCMP gets -- I'm going to call it a hot potato, but gets tossed this hot potato of these Regs to freeze bank accounts. And it's about to toss the potato over to the banks and with the caveat that Officer -- or I believe it's Superintendent Beaudoin makes that -- and I'm reading from paragraph 9. Thank you. "...the financial service providers with information about particular individuals [...], which the [...] service providers could use in conjunction with other information at their disposal [et cetera]." Now you might have heard or seen in the CBA's institutional report in this proceeding that as far as they were concerned, and I think they gave this feedback directly to the Department of Finance as well, when they got that list from the RCMP, they considered it to be effectively binding on them to seize the account. That they did not, in fact, have any discretion. Do you remember hearing that from them?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. When you say part of the exercise of their discretion was making sure the person whose name was given to them by the RCMP was one of their customers, that's just a name check; right? That's not an exercise of discretion?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So they make -- they do a name check and that's the extent of their final decision?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Fair enough. Mr. Clerk, could you just scroll further down in this document, and we're going to go a few pages down until we get to Exhibit A. Right there. So this is an exhibit to the affidavit of Superintendent Beaudoin. And if we go down, we see -- do you recognize that form, Ms. Jacques?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
We don't have enough time, so I'm going to ask you to take my word for it. This is the form that the RCMP developed to give to the banks; okay? And then there's some verbiage there that we're going to come back to in a second, but, Mr. Clerk, can you scroll down a little bit further? There's the page where the RCMP fills in the information, the owner of the vehicle perhaps that's parked in the blockade, or who knows what other information CPIC checks, the Canadian Police Information Centre and other information. So this is the form that goes to the bank.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I take your point, as you put it earlier, we were not a party to that process, so I will accept that qualification. Now, Mr. Clerk, could you go back up to that paragraph that -- the thing the bank sees when they get this form with a name on it, that they’ve got to decide is one of their customers. And look at the paragraph that begins, “The information.” The information which -- I’ll ask you to go along with me; it’s the information that I just scrolled you down to about the information on the person who might be the bank’s customer: “The information being disclosed is relevant to individuals or entities that are engaged, directly or indirectly in an activity prohibited by sections 2 to 5 of the above noted Emergency Measures Regulations.” And the paragraph above that, the second sentence: “I am engaged in the collection and disclosure of information to entities...” That’s the banks; right, Ms. Jacques? “...to entities that have a duty to determine as defined in Section 3 of the Emergency Economic Measures Order.” S, can you follow the thrust of this document, that this is what the RCMP gave to the bank to do what has been called, both by your description and your information -- sorry; your Institutional Report, and by the RCMP and Supt. Beaudin’s affidavit, the exercise of their discretion whether or not to freeze this bank account. They are being told that they are being given information about a person who is a designated person under your Emergency Measures Order, right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But I think you’ve captured well what probably the average reader would infer from the documents we’ve just been looking at. If you’re a bank manager, and you get this -- the RCMP sends you this form, and it says the person listed below is a designated person under the Emergency Measures Regulations, and you, as that financial institution ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Let’s take that quibble from the Government of Canada’s counsel. It doesn’t say the person is, it says: “The information being disclosed is relevant to individuals or entities that are engaged directly or indirectly, in...activity...” And Ms. Jacques, you know that what that is, is the definition of a designated person under the Order, right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If you’re a bank manager and you get what -- this piece of paper from the RCMP, and you do the name check, you freeze the account, right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. So you say we were not a party to this part of the process, we had D/Comm. Duheme say, “I didn’t write this law; we just implemented it this way, and it was up to the banks to decide.” And so the question is, if the Government is saying that these measures were the right thing to do, right, and the Department of Finance says, “We had no part in the enforcement of this,” and the people who had enforcement in this stage, “We didn’t write this law,” who takes responsibility for the fact that these accounts were frozen; that people couldn’t pay their rent, that people couldn’t buy their groceries; who takes responsibility for that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let’s move to that point exactly. In your Institutional Report, and we can call it up if you want, but you described one of the purposes of the Emergency Economic Measures Order as to dissuade ongoing participation in the protest; remember that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you might not have heard the evidence of D/Comm. Duheme, but he used the expression, “Deter and disrupt”. So the concept of deterrence from the RCMP; from Department of Finance we have the concept of dissuasion, so probably synonyms for the same concept.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’ll just expand on that, or allow you to expand on that, Mr. Sabia, because I think that’s a good point. One of the prime objectives of dealing with the convoy problems in a way that the Emergency Economic Measures Order was fashioned, was to find a way to bring a peaceful end to the demonstration, because if you could do it with freezing bank accounts, or whatever other measures were necessary, that was a awful lot better than having to go in with police and clubs, right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And again, I think I’m trying to amplify your point, better than going in with the police, if you can get it to happen the way you just described?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
By all means.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s an advantage.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
It’s a logical sequence. What I’m trying to find is who says, “We were the ones who seized the bank accounts or froze the bank accounts”? You know, the banks say, “We were told to do it.” The RCMP says, “We didn’t tell anybody to do it.” You say, “We weren’t involved in this.”
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And thank you. That is exactly what I wanted to make sure we got to before we finished with the panel. Now, on a related point, I was moving on to the issue of the idea of the use of these account freezing or otherwise preventing people from dealing with their savings, as a deterrent, as opposed to a tool to stop the criminal activity or the illegal activity because it’s -- you’ll appreciate, you’re nodding, Ms. Jacques, they’re two different concepts. One is you cut off the flow of money to stop the illegal activity, and the other is you deprive the person of access to their funds as a deterrent so they go home and hopefully go home without the police having to engage in public order activity. Those are the two different concepts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. That’s how I’d understood it, but I appreciate the refinement. As I say, the first concept, I think, is intuitive to the observer. That is, stop the money from going to the people who are committing the activity. But did you appreciate that you were moving to a different level? I mean, in the first -- when you go to the deterrent mode, because you’re starting to affect more than the protestor, and you know that; right? In the first scenario, you’re saying to the protestor, “We are going to cut off the money you’re using to buy gas for your truck,” or whatever. And in the second mode, you’re saying, “We are going to cut off your family’s money that they use to buy groceries and pay their rent. So you’d better get out of this protest.” Right? You’re nodding.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the question is, did you appreciate the significance? Are there other examples where the Department of Finance has used its authority, or the Government has used the authority on the instruction or advice of the Department of Finance to have that type of effect? Where you’re not just trying to stop illegal activity by cutting off the funds that flow to it, but you’re trying to deter the illegal activity by getting at the family and the other people who need that money.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And I don’t know if you followed the evidence before the commission, but apropos the point of the deterrence, that there have been police witnesses who’ve said they saw your measures work because they heard of people getting calls back from North Battleford or whatever, ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- “Come home. The account is frozen and I can’t buy groceries.” Right? The police saw that as your measures working, because they were affecting people who had nothing to do with the protests other than that they were family members. So I put it to you that you must have realized that would be one of the effects of freezing the accounts in the way that they were?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. And Mr. Commissioner, I've used up my time, so I'll pass the podium over to those who want to cross-examine and perhaps pursue some of these issues further.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon. My name is Graham Reeder, counsel for the City of Windsor. I'm going to direct my questions to Mr. Sabia, but I invite input from Ms. Jacques and Mr. Mendes should they be in a better position to respond. I have some questions about the work the Department of Finance did to assess the economic impacts that was detailed in the Department's institutional report. So your study on the economic impact of the border blockades was informed by figures from Transport Canada indicating that roughly $390 million in daily trade flows of goods were being disrupted by the blockades at the Ambassador Bridge; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Just very briefly, Mr. Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Presumably primarily for you, Mr. Sabia, and you, Ms. Jacques. As you might know, the Commissioner has a mandate to look into the future and make recommendations about the lessons that have been learned, and if you can contemplate for a minute the lessons that the Department of Finance has learned; and, in particular, from the steps that were taken with the financial institutions. Now, we heard evidence from both of you, Ms. Jacques, that there was a very short period of time within which you had to draft these regulations, and from you, Mr. Sabia, the very short period within which you had to consult with all sorts of other outside institutions to see if you could make these work. And we’d heard earlier from the RCMP about how quickly they had to move as well. And so looking to the future, I’m wondering if the Department of Finance would consider it useful to have a sort of protocol in place in case this type of situation arises in the future about the factors that you would take into consideration if you had to move very quickly again in the future to take similar steps.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And thank you, Mr. Commissioner. That’s my only re-examination.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, Mr. Commissioner. Gordon Cameron for Commission Counsel, and this morning we have a panel of three witnesses combined, two from CSIS and one from ITAC. If they could come forward and we’ll have them sworn. (SHORT PAUSE)
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good morning, and this is now our third opportunity to see each other and go through the evidence that you’ll be giving to the Commission this morning. And what I’d like to do is begin with a little bit of housekeeping. I’ll remind -- Mr. Commissioner, I’ll remind parties through you that we have already had the interview summary of these three witnesses adopted during the closed session, which took place on November 5th. We also had the confidential and public versions of the Institutional Report adopted during that session, but the one item that has not yet been adopted is the summary that was posted yesterday of the closed session. And so witnesses, I would you ask each in turn to confirm that you reviewed that summary for accuracy and adopt it as part of the evidence of CSIS and ITAC before the Commission today. Can you each confirm that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And now to begin, for those to whom each of you is not already familiar to the public, if I could ask you, Mr. Vigneault, to begin by describing your role and function within the -- within CSIS.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me, if I could ask the Clerk to call up -- just on that point because you’ve set out your mandate in your Institutional Report. Mr. Clerk, could you pull up DOJ.IR.00000001? And I’m inferring from the number of this document that CSIS was the first federal government institution to get its Institutional Report filed. And, witnesses, if we go to the second page -- Mr. Clerk, if you could scroll down just -- exactly there, thank you. And we see in the second sentence there, and I’ll read it and you can follow along with me, Mr. Vigneault: “CSIS’ core mandate is to investigate threats to the security of Canada and advise the Government of Canada on such threats.” See that there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you confirm that is the core mandate of CSIS?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, Ms. Tessier, you are the Deputy Director of Operations at CSIS; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you describe your role in that position?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The way we’ve found it convenient to describe it to those who aren’t familiar with the bureaucracy of the Service is to describe you as the most senior intelligence officer in the Service; is that a fair description?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Ms. Chayer, you’re with ITAC. Could you tell us what your role is there, and in general terms, what ITAC is? We’ll go into a little more detail later but just for introductory purposes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And can you describe, in general terms, the relationship between ITAC and CSIS?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. You used a phrase there, and I’ll just take you to the words that are used in your materials, which is that ITAC operates under the authorities of the CSIS Act. Now, we don’t see ITAC mentioned in the CSIS Act; am I correct there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So can you explain for the Commissioner why you would characterize ITAC as operating under the authorities of CSIS Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So you -- the institution put itself under the authority of the CSIS Act even though it's not mentioned there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Nice move. Is -- when you say ITAC is responsible for determining the national terrorism threat level, can you explain how those determinations are made?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. But why don't you describe exactly that, the input that you have and then the role that the Director plays in that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And just before we go over to you, Mr. Vigneault, as to your role in this, perhaps, Madam Chayer, you could explain whether there is any relationship between the definition we've seen a lot of in this hearing, that is, the 2(c) definition of threat to the security of Canada and the conclusion you and your organization makes on the national terrorism threat level.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I understand what you're saying, the recommendation that you make as to a threat level isn't a recommendation that a 2(c) threat has been found ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
These are independent concepts?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now over to you, Mr. Vigneault, when you receive the recommendation from ITAC, what's your role?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And tell me, is this sometimes a subject of dialogue between CSIS and ITAC where you receive a threat level recommendation and perhaps ask for more information, or query the conclusion, or give other feedback?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, witnesses, we are going to go through an exercise that we've colloquially, Commission Counsel have colloquially called CSIS 101, similar to some of the questions you got asked in your interview and in the closed session. Probably, Madam Tessier, these are mostly for you. This is your working, the concepts you work with every day, but other witnesses, please feel free to add or qualify as you think appropriate. And these questions, witnesses, will be about your core mandate, so your -- what soon we will come to call your section 12 mandate, but your mandate to investigate threats to the security of Canada. And so let's start with section 12, and, Mr. Clerk, if you could call -- well, you might already have it on hand. It's the same document, the DOJ.IR.00000001, and page 2. You have in the second paragraph that begins pursuant, an extract from section 12, which I'll just read for the transcript. Pursuant -- and the first part is a lead in, and I'll mention when the quotation starts, "Pursuant to [section] 12 of the CSIS Act, CSIS..." And here the extract from the Act begins, "..."shall collect, by investigation or otherwise, to the extent that it is strictly necessary, and analyse and retain information and intelligence respecting activities that may on reasonable grounds be suspected of constituting threats to the security of Canada and, in relation thereto, shall report to and advise the Government of Canada."" Now perhaps I'll put it over to you, Ms. Tessier, to describe the function that section 12 serves in the CSIS -- in the core mandate work of CSIS.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And we'll probably come back to this as we're discussing some of the other definitions, but is it fair to say that if we go to the second line there and the words "information and intelligence respecting activities", that activities is a central concept in section 12 and in your mandate?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And -- yeah, section 2 particularizes the types of activities that could form threats, but in particular, you're not investigating ideas. You're investigating activities; right? You're investigating when perhaps ideas motivate people to action.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And the standard which we've already seen talked about a fair bit in the hearing to date is in the third line there, that is to conduct an investigation, to have the authority to investigate these activities, the grounds of proof are described there as reasonable -- sorry, "activities that may on reasonable grounds be suspected of constituting threats", so sometimes shortened to reasonable grounds to suspect, and that's the basic threshold that decides what -- I'm going to put it in my terms, when you go from being a sponge, just absorbing information and monitoring situations to actively collecting and investigating a target; is that a fair description?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Mr. Clerk, could we go over to page 6 of this same document, and at about three-quarters of the way down that page, there is the heading Targeting Authority, and the first sentence describes a standard for your operations. It's the second paragraph that I want to focus on for a minute here, and this is, if you were to ask the question, "Activities of whom or activities of what is it that you're investigating?" And so you would use the expression, if I can ask you to confirm this to make sure I've got it correct, Ms. Tessier, the activities of an individual, a group of persons or an organisation. Is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And to follow through with the definition we've just worked with: "...whose activities are reasonably suspected of constituting a threat..." And then this is expanded in the second sentence of this same paragraph, which I'll read: "CSIS may also target issues or events to allow for an investigation of activities which are reasonably suspected of constituting a threat to the security of Canada that arise because of or are related to the issue or event..." And then parenthetically you give the example of: "...(Threats to Vancouver 2010 Olympics)." And perhaps you could -- the example, Threats to Vancouver 2010 Olympics, is helpful. Perhaps you could help us flesh out the concept of targeting issues or events with another example of an issue or event that might have come under the Service's attention for the purposes of an investigation of a threat?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you have an example of when an issue might be something that is constituting a threat?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I got lazy there in my description. What you're talking about is an issue or an event in relation to which there could be activities that themselves constitute the threat; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And -- so if I can take you back to the question. Is there an example that comes to mind of where an issue might give rise to activities that constitute a threat?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Could -- in this context, could an issue be an ideology, like Islamic terrorism?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And -- so we've got, if I follow this correctly, looking at these -- at the listings in paragraph 2, we could have an individual, a group of persons or an organisation who could -- any of those could be involved in activities, or the target could be issues or events that allow for an investigation of activities that are suspected of constituting a threat because of or related to the issue or event. So it can be a permutation of those three categories of targets on their own or in conjunction with an issue or event?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, let's get to that more refined level of description of the threat activities, and and a good place to find that... Mr. Clerk, if you can go back to page 2, we'll see in the footnote to page 2 the extract of section 2 of the CSIS Act. And just, Ms. Tessier, to help put this in context, section 2 of the CSIS Act is the section that contains a long list of definitions, one of which is threats to the security of Canada; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I say that, because sometimes we talk almost exclusively about section 2 as if threats is all it is. But it's -- when we say 2(c), we actually mean the threat -- the definition of threat to the security of Canada, that is, the third of the subcategories of threats to the security of Canada; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And is it fair to say that for the purposes we are talking about in relation to the convoy, the blockades, the protests in January and February of this year, that certainly the concentration, and ultimately, I think, the exclusive area of interest for potential threats or for investigation of threats would be 2(c). Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And I'll just read that out again so it appears in the transcript: "...activities within or relating to Canada directed toward or in support of the threat or use of acts of serious violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada or a foreign state..." And so that we don't have to keep repeating that, in your community you often refer to "threat-related activities" as a compact way of describing 2(c)?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Other phrases I have seen are "threats of serious violence" and we all build into that, we know it has to be all of those others words, including "ideologically motivated", et cetera. But if you hear me use that expression "threats of serious violence or activities directed towards serious violence" you'll know that I'm talking about a 2(c). We agree on that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I -- so you might want me to always add the words "for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective" to the end to complete?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
2(c) we'll know what you mean.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, assuming you meet your reasonable grounds to suspect threshold under section 12, then depending on the urgency and seriousness of the threat and the resources you have available, you could decide to open an investigation and then you have to decide what investigative tools you're going to use to pursue that investigation. Correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And where I'm going to take you here is that there are certain investigative tools you can use having only that reasonable grounds to suspect as the standard of certainty you have, that is, generally-speaking, we'll call them the "less intrusive investigative tools"; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Surveillance, collecting information from open sources, basically building a file, but not going so far into a level of intrusiveness that you would actually need a warrant; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. and then, if the circumstances, which might be the seriousness of the threat or the difficulty you have in collecting information on it, so indicated appropriate, you might then apply to a court to get more intrusive -- to get authorities, judicially granted authorities, for more intrusive investigative techniques; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. I'm going to try to break that up into smaller pieces and suggest that what you realize is that you need more investigative authorities than you have without a warrant, and then you see if you have reasonable grounds to believe that there is a threat to the security of Canada because you know you are going to have to satisfy a judge on that point before you will get the warrant; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the reason I want to break it out there is I think you’ll agree, if we can make this observation, that the higher evidentiary threshold of reasonable grounds to believe there’s a threat to the security of Canada, that standard of certainty has to do with the fact that you are using more intrusive techniques. You always had the authority to investigate once you passed the reasonable grounds to suspect threshold; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So the higher threshold of reasonable grounds to believe isn’t what gives you the authority to investigate, it’s what gives you the authority to use more intrusive investigative techniques?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And in terms of resources, another factor that I would expect to play into this analysis you do is that you’ve only got so many intelligence officers, you’ve got a lot of information coming in, so there’s some proportionality and triaging, et cetera, that you do when you decide which threats that do plausibly meet the reasonable grounds to suspect threshold, you’re actually going to devote your resources to and how much resources you’ll devote to them?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, on that point, I’d like to make an -- or ask you to make an observation that we’ve seen in your interview summary, and it’s come out in the materials that the parties have already seen, and it has to do with the allocation of its counter terrorism resources that the service has devoted to, and here we’re going to introduce the acronym, I think almost everybody knows what it means now, but IMVE, ideologically motivated violent extremism. And so can you tell the Commissioner, relatively speaking, of the -- all of the resources of the service that are devoted to counter terrorism operations, what proportion of those resources are devoted to dealing with the IMVE threat?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And how does that relate, say, to the proportion that -- and I’m just going to ask you to make a rough approximation here, that would have applied 10 years ago, say?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So even with the -- where then to the extent there are still threats out there from organized terrorist groups, like Al-Qaeda or other groups that hook so many of your resources back around the turn of the century, you are now devoting either half or more than half of your resources exclusively to responding to the IMVE threat? Is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, at that point, I’m going to ask Ms. Khan to come up and expand some more on that threat and the way that the services handle it, and then I’ll come back afterwards with some questions that follow on that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Witnesses, what I’m going to do is pick up now with following on that helpful information you were able to give us about the IMVE space and how it fit in with your observations of the convoy and protest and blockade activities. I just want to run through, and this will all sound familiar, and indeed parties who have had a chance to read the summary of the closed session, this will be similar to a series of questions that you answered there, leading up to some context that I want to bring to the questions that follow. So what I’m going to do is just ask you about your involvement in the government and other law -- sorry, not other law enforcement, in the government, in the law enforcement, and other intelligence communities as you were all watching the protests and the blockades, et cetera, evolve. So first of all, as the materials indicate, I think you’ll agree that CSIS attended -- had a representative attending and participating in the ADMNSOPs meetings. And I think we know that acronym now, so I won’t bother spelling it out. Can you confirm that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. And a CSIS representative attended the DMOC meetings in relation to the convoy and blockade events?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you had regular interaction with the NSIA about the convoy and blockade events?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you were a member, when it was formed, of the Combined Intelligence Group that was set up so that all the intelligence collected by the various law enforcement and intelligence agencies could be shared among the parties involved in the convoy and blockade events?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And CSIS was a member, or at least had a representative at INTERSECT meetings that a broader group of law enforcement and first responder personnel involved in major events such as the convoy posed for Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And indeed, if we step back to before the actual formation of the Combined Intelligence Group, it looks, from the documentation, that CSIS was receiving intelligence such as the Hendon Reports that were generated by the OPP and other information that once they became involved, the OPS was also generating with respect to intelligence on the convoy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And if we could call up the -- again, Mr. Clerk, please, the information -- sorry, the Institutional Report, 00000001, and go to page 13? At about halfway down. Now here’s, I think, exactly where we were picking up, Ms. Tessier, with your comment about the dynamic nature of the events that were unfolding in front of you and putting it in a context of what I was just describing about your many faceted interrelations with the intelligence and law enforcement community. It says here, "CSIS continually monitored streams of intelligence and shared information with domestic and foreign partners, including through the One Vision processes with the RCMP and police of jurisdiction to assess threats of serious violence in relation to the Convoy." And here I'm going to ask you to remember and see if you can provide for me in this open forum that your classified institutional report contained an actual itemization of all of the agencies. And I don't need you to be more specific than you want to be, but it was tens or dozens of agencies that you were collecting and sharing information with; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So the extent that there was intelligence or information available in relation to potential threats to the security of Canada as defined in the CSIS Act, it was received and considered by the Service?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now if we can look at one other -- where you were giving input, we looked at where you were getting and sharing intelligence stuff, where you were giving input to government. If we go to page 13 again, just a little bit higher -- well, I guess immediately above where we just were. Cabinet meetings. You and -- was that, Mr. Vigneault, you were attending mostly the SSE and the IRG meetings?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Where your role was, and I -- and quoting here at the end of the paragraph, "...to provide updates on national security threats that may arise and answer questions." So that was your role at those Cabinet meetings; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. Now if we can go to, Mr. Clerk, the witness summary, which is -- the interview summary, which is WTS.00000060, 60, so 6 0s and then 60. And -- thank you. If you can go to page 5, about two-thirds of the way down? And this is -- just to situate you, this is a paragraph from the summary of the interview we had when we were meeting with you earlier in the year. And it reads in the first paragraph under the word -- under the heading "Intelligence." "Mr. Vigneault stated that at no point did the Service assess that the protests in Ottawa or elsewhere..." And then there's a parenthetical definition of what that refers to. "...constituted a threat to the security of Canada as defined by section 2 of the CSIS Act, and that CSIS cannot investigate activity constituting lawful protest." And I'm going to ask you to hold these thoughts in your mind, but I'll just, on that point, you recollect telling us that during the interview, Mr. Vigneault?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. And if we go to page 8 of the same document, about halfway down, under the heading "Recommendation to Cabinet", the first line there is, "Mr. Vigneault learned that the EA..." Which would be the Emergencies Act, "...referenced the threat definition set out in section 2 of the CSIS Act once the federal government began to seriously consider invoking the [Emergencies Act]..." And then there's the parenthetical date bracket there between the 10th and 13th of February. And you, "...requested that the Service prepare a threat assessment on the risks associated with the invocation of the [Act]." And then the last sentence is the one I was going to link to the earlier one you made, which is, "He felt an obligation to clearly convey the Service's position that there did not exist a threat to the security of Canada as defined by the Service's legal mandate." And again, you recollect telling us that during the interview?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And your legal mandate, as we saw it -- I don't think we need to call it up because you can probably recite it from heart and thus recognize it when I put it to you. That legal mandate that you're describing when you say "as defined by the Service's legal mandate", is to investigate threats to the security of Canada and advise the Government of Canada on such threats; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If we can go now to, Mr. Clerk, WTS00000079, this is the public summary of the closed session we had on November 5th. And the bottom of page 5 of that. And I'll read there, "Mr. Vigneault explained that the advice and the assessments they would be giving to government, is taken in conjunction by the decision maker with all of the other different pieces of analysis, for the..." And, Mr. Clerk, if you can scroll down to follow with me? "...different pieces of analysis, for the decision maker to make a determination in the end if this is a threat to national security or not. When CSIS looks at national security, in this case, their assessment was that this was not a threat to national security, within the confines of the CSIS Act." And do you remember saying that, Mr. Vigneault?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then if we -- sticking with you, Mr. Vigneault, for one more over at the top of page 6 -- sorry, the bottom of page 6 over to the top of 7, "Mr. Vigneault confirmed a statement from the Commission's interview with CSIS..." And you might recognize this as the one we started out with, "...[the] interview with CSIS and ITAC to the effect that at no point did the Service assess that the protests in Ottawa or elsewhere ([defined as] the "Freedom Convoy") constituted a threat to the security of Canada under section 2 of the CSIS Act, and that CSIS cannot [sorry, cannot] investigate activity constituting lawful protest unless conducted in conjunction with a threat- related activity." And then you conclude that paragraph, "Mr. Vigneault confirmed that, to the extent that he was able to give input on this topic at Cabinet and IRG meetings, this was the view [...] he expressed." And again, do you recall making those statements?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now over to you, Ms. Tessier, at the top of page 10 of the open summary, sorry the public summary of the closed session, we have your description, and I'll read it out, "Ms. Tessier explained that the Service's determination that the convoy and related protests did not constitute a threat to the security of Canada was not made by a singular analyst or executive. Rather, strategic analysts provided multiple assessments throughout the relevant period, which were approved at higher levels before they were disseminated. Mr. Vigneault explained that the assessment process is not a binary one, but an ongoing, dynamic consideration of whether the information collected was rising to the level of a threat to national security." So I think, Ms. Tessier, you can agree with both the first and second part of that statement. That is, you can agree with Mr. Vigneault, because that's your point about the dynamic nature of the assessment; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And, Mr. Vigneault, you remember adding that to Ms. Tessier's thought there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now I'd like to take you to page 8 of the open summary -- sorry, the public summary of the closed session. And moving to the bottom of that page, the "Advice to Cabinet" heading, and here, in the open -- sorry, Mr. Clerk, I've confused you. Just for a second, if I could ask you to go to the very top just so we can situate ourselves. Here we've started in the closed ex parte session, the examination by Counsel for the Government of Canada. So if you can scroll back down to the bottom again. And here, Mr. Vigneault, I will read the paragraph that the preceding paragraphs are leading up to, the preceding ones I've cited to you: "Mr. Vigneault stated that at the end of the February 13 IRG meeting, following the discussion of the Emergencies Act, he was asked by the Prime Minister to provide an opinion as to whether he supported the invocation of the Emergency Act. Mr. Vigneault explained that based on both his understanding that the Emergencies Act definition of threat to the security of Canada was broader than the CSIS Act, as well as based on his opinion of everything he had seen to that point, he advised the Prime Minister of his belief that it was indeed required to invoke the Act." And again, you remember saying that during the closed session?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And if I can just break that out a bit. If I understand what you're saying there, you have an understanding, and we might find out later in the week where you got that understanding, but that'll -- I'll let you keep that as an mystery for now, you had an understanding that the Emergencies Act definition of threats to the security of Canada was broader than the CSIS Act definition; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for that elaboration. Now, if we can go back to that sentence at the bottom of page 8, I understand -- I think the words do speak for themselves, but I want to make sure I understand your sense of them, that based on your understanding that the Emergencies Act definition of threats to the security of Canada was broader than the CSIS Act, then it says: "...as well as based on his opinion if everything he had seen to that point..." So if I'm understanding the way you've put those two together, that if you take a broader definition and then look more broadly you come up with the advice you gave to the Prime Minister of your belief that it was required to invoke the Act.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, I want to sort of insert a parentheses or come back to an observation. And Mr. Clerk, can you call up SSM.NSC.CAN.00000216. These are IRG meeting minutes for the February 13th meeting, and at page 12, we'll find the report to government that you commissioned, Mr. Vigneault, when you learned that the Government was considering the invocation of the Act. And you've mentioned elsewhere in your evidence, I think it's now well understood by the Commission and the parties, that as you learned that the Government was considering the invocation of the Emergencies Act, a concern that you had because of your understanding of the IMVE space, and feel free to join in, Ms. Tessier, if you want to add here, the concern was that the invocation of the Act actually had the potential to, I think the word "inflame" is used, but to raise the temperature and actually increase the risk of the threat of serious violence. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So if I understand the purpose of this report, it was to alert the Government to a potential movement in the threat environment, and by that -- I'll tell you what I'm trying to get at. You weren't, by offering this assessment or deciding to do the assessment, concluding that the Government itself was, by invoking the Act, engaging in activities that posed a threat to the security of Canada?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And this document, perhaps also in the spirit of things we see in your annual reports or some of your reports to Parliament, CSIS sometimes repairs -- prepares reports to Government related to threats to the security of Canada that aren't actually premised on the commencement of an investigation based on reasonable grounds that the activity poses a threat, but it's simply advice to the Government, a report to the Government on threat-related issues. Correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And if we can go back, then, Mr. Clerk, to the Public Summary. That's WTS00000079, and just wrap up the chronology, and indeed this examination, by going to page 7 of that summary. We're now at the stage where the Act has been invoked, and the point I understand you to be making in the paragraph that begins "Mr. Vigneault explained", the point being that after revocation you continued to provide input, both to partner agencies and to Cabinet, through the IRG, about the evolution of the protests, the blockades, et cetera, the convoy. So you're continuing to give input proactively, but you weren't actually asked the question, "Should we revoke the Act?"
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And with that, Mr. Commissioner, I will conclude I think a few minutes early.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner, two brief points of clarification, I hope, though I see my friend, Mr. MacKinnon, rewrote the summary himself while delivering it to the witness so it might be that it’s had the salutary affect that we need here. I think this question is for you, Mr. Vigneault, and I’d that the summary of the closed session, which is WTS, zeros, 79, you brought up, and if we could to the top of page 9, maybe the bottom of page 8 and the top of page 9. Thank you. And this passage has had some discussion a fair bit already today so I won’t repeat the whole thing but, Mr. Vigneault, I think what some people have expressed some puzzlement about is just the way you’ve phrased it. And you know that if I tried to say something in French, you would have to cover your ears, so I’m not faulting your English here; it’s just that sometimes we see Francophones express things this way and I want to see if I can offer you an alternative expression in English or, if you’d prefer, just ask you to say it in French. The way you’ve phrased the last eight or 10 words there allows for two meanings in English that I don’t think -- I think you intended only one them. So it says: "…he advised the prime minister of his belief that it was indeed required to invoke the Act." And some people are wondering if “it” has any meaning other than an article that is reflexive to invoke the Act. So one way of rewording that might be, “Advised the prime minister of his belief that the invocation of the Act was required,” or, “It was,” as Mr. MacKinnon put it, “necessary to invoke the Act.” Do either of those sound right to you? And if they don’t, please just say it in French and we’ll -- you’ll lose me but the Commissioner will be right on it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, I’m going to tell you that that leaves us with the same ambiguity, so do you want to try it in French?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’ll try it again. Would you think it sounded right if you said, “He advised the prime minister of his belief that it was indeed necessary to invoke the Act”?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Then we’re there, thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then, on another point of clarification, probably this one for you, Ms. Tessier, not everybody followed the graphic about IMVE the way the graphic designer probably hoped everyone would follow it, which is quickly and easily. And we were going to try to walk you through that when we realized you’ve actually got it written out in words in your institutional report. So if you could -- Mr. Clerk, if you could call up DOJ.IR.00000001 and take us to page 7, about two-thirds of the way down. And Ms. Tessier, if this is a question for you, I’ll ask you to look at the verbal description of the placemat which is there and, in particular, if you can confirm that that’s an accurate description of what the placemat is trying to say, with us being especially interested in the paragraph afterwards, “If an actor only demonstrates…”, which the words, for us, seem much clearer than the placemat was able to describe. So if you can confirm that those words are accurate, that will resolve that for us.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, thank you very much. And, Mr. Commissioner, those are my questions.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Commissioner. Gordon Cameron for Commission counsel, and the first witness in this category of ministers is Minister WILLIAM BLAIR, if he could take the stand, and he will be sworn.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon, Minister Blair. I'll begin just with some housekeeping, some formalities, and in particular, what I'm going to ask you to do is recall that you had an interview with me and some of my colleagues on September 6th, and for the record, I'll note for parties that the summary of that interview is WTS000000048 Now, Minister Blair, have you had a chance to review this witness summary that was prepared following your interview?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you confirm that it's accurate and that you adopt it as part of your evidence before this proceeding?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, if we can just go through a little bit of background, for those who aren't already familiar with your role in the federal government recently and before that. You were the Minister of Public Safety from November 2019 to November -- to October 2021; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in October of 2021, you were appointed -- and this is a long title and it requires a bit of updating -- you were appointed as President of the Queen's Privy Council; now you will be the President of the King's Privy Council, I take it -- and also as the Minister of Emergency Preparedness; is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, in the prime minister's mandate letters, that is, the letters that the prime minister writes for each of his ministers to describe what he expects from them during their tenure, the prime minister assigned leadership responsibilities regarding public safety and emergency preparedness, both to you, Minister Blair, and to Minister Mendicino. And so the question is, can you help us understand how that division works under the umbrella of the Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and Public Safety?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah, the scribes at the interview got lost after a few minutes of the interview. Now, if -- that’s a helpful description, Minister Blair, of the division between the two parts of Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness. Here's something that’s more challenging for all of us is if you can describe for us your role as President of the King's Privy Council and how that -- what role you play there? I'll remind you just as what place to start that among other things, you chair the SSE committee, the Safety, Security, and Emergencies committee, but writ large, can you describe that office and what responsibilities come with it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And something we'll come back to in a little bit of detail a little later in this examination, one of the functions of your office includes handling requests for assistance, what we've now learned to call RFAs where somebody from a level of government lower than the federal government asks for the assistance of the federal government in some particular sphere. Can you tell us just broadly speaking how that works? We'll come to the one specific to the convoy in a minute, but just broadly, how that process works.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you describe to me the level of formality that that process follows, and it's probably not the same in every case, but sometimes it's a phone call, perhaps followed up later by writing; sometimes writing followed up later by a phone call. But can you describe for the Commissioner just how the process tends to take place in the example of a typical flood or hurricane?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So if the hurricane's coming up the coast you don't wait until the letter arrives before you start mobilising a response to a request for instance?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I assume that if you do act immediately before the paperwork arrives there will, nonetheless, be the requirement for the orderly administration and documentation of the RFA that the paperwork would eventually come through and then the request be properly documented?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, if you can describe, perhaps, well certainly atypically relative to most other government departments, you are lodged, so to speak, in the Privy Council Office and supported by people also in the Privy Council Office, and one of the people also there is the National Security Intelligence Advisor, Jody Thomas. If you could describe for us how you, as Minister of Emergency Preparedness, work with or relate with, interact with the National Security Intelligence Advisor?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, we've had, as you probably know, already testifying among senior government officials who testified last week, Jacqueline Bogden and Jeff Hutchinson. Maybe you could just remind us, now that you're here, where they fit in the scheme of your Department of Emergency Preparedness.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And a third name that we're going to encounter in some of the documents, and those who have been following will have seen already, Zita Astravas. Can you describe what her role is in your department?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, again, people who have been following this proceeding or following the original events will know that there's another part of your background that ended up assuming special significance as these events unfolded in January and February, and that was your first career as a police officer, and ultimately the Chief of Police of the Toronto Police Service. First of all, can you describe in broad strokes what that experience was, and then I'll bring you back to the particular public order experience that you had in those roles?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now as I understand it, as you were coming up the ranks, you, in fact, served a term as an inspector of a public order unit itself, that is, the actual unit that goes out and deals with public order incidents ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now the one that often gets remembered because it was so newsworthy was the G20 event in Toronto, which ended up being a public order event as well as its political event on its own. And you played a role in that, but it would probably be helpful if you described what role you played, what role you didn't play and roughly how that -- what you learned from that experience.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And as you mentioned, probably in the 30-odd year career, and especially 10 as Chief of Police, there were more than just the G20 event, and the one other perhaps event or series of events that was memorable during that period when you were Chief of Police were the Tamal protests in Toronto. And they -- I mention them because you might find some similarities with some of the events that happened around Ottawa, and if you could just tell us about those events and how they were resolved, at least as best as you can recollect it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if I recollect accounts of those events, one of the things you were able to accomplish with that demonstration was to move it from an arguably illegal demonstration in the sense that it was blocking University Avenue to a location nearby where the demonstration could continue but not be obstructing traffic and potentially breaking the law?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as an incident commander or public order senior police officer, how do you factor in that particular attempted transition; that is, you encounter a public order incident, ideally, you're able to keep it legal from beginning to end, but when it starts to transition into illegality either because it's obstructing traffic or violating some other law, where in your ranking of objectives do you put turning what has become an unlawful protest into a lawful protest?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you might not have monitored this part of the evidence, but we had a similar discussion with Deputy Commission Zablocki of the RCMP about this attempt that the RCMP took in and near Coutts, Alberta to find a legal way for the protest to continue. And let me ask you if you find -- if you found in those days when you were doing this the same tension, because the protesters want to be visible. They want, in effect, to cause at least enough of a nuisance that they're noticed and that they're able to make their point and be heard, and yet, you want them to be as little a nuisance as possible. And is that a tension that your forces and the people you have as your liaison team are trained to try and sort out?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, coming to the events in question, as the matters were developing, there were -- there was a series of what end up getting called briefings on truckers’ convoy among Ministers and senior officials in the government. And it looks, from our account of the documentation, that you attended probably all of them, or almost all of them; is that your recollection?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. There was one on January 28th, and I’m going to ask the Clerk to call up SSMNSCCAN00000251. And if you -- Mr. Clerk, if you can just scroll down, there’s a point where we have a number 18, and there; there we go. And these are the -- this is the notes of the readout, as it’s called, of that meeting. And do I understand the way this is laid out correctly, that beside the number 18 and your name are a series of points that you were making at the meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The one I’m going to ask you to talk about is c, “We need to keep the language down” And probably the people in the room knew what you were talking about, and you probably used more words than just that, so if you could flesh that out for us, what you were -- what message you were trying to get across during that briefing when you said, “We need to keep the language down”?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So minimize name-calling, and that kind of thing, as I understand it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. But is that what you mean by keep the language down; keep the rhetoric moderate on the government side, on the protester side?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’d like to move now to another topic area that it’s apparent that you took a role in, and that has to do with the arrangement of what were called, perhaps, it was -- ended up being a misnomer, but what end -- what were originally called the tripartite meetings. Can you describe, first of all, what those were meant to be? To situate them in time, if it assists you, they were February 7th, 8th, and 10th, the ones that started it off. But if you can just tell us what you had hoped to accomplish with those meetings.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. There’s two topics I’d like to see if we can talk about, and I’ll see if we can do it without pulling up too many documents, but just going by your memories of these meetings. And I’ll just describe the topics and then we’ll try to treat them one at a time, though they might end up getting blended together. One is the fact that you didn’t succeed in getting Ontario, at the political level, to the table, as I think had been your ambition. But the other topic is why there seemed, in at least the records of these meetings, so much confusion or misunderstanding between the City of Ottawa and the federal government, and to the extent they were there, officials of the Ontario government, about which resources would be committed by whom; when; who was actually there, et cetera. The documents just seem to be the equivalent of a whole bunch of ships passing in the night, and nobody understanding what the other person’s saying, and perhaps even a lot of mistrust. So let’s take the first of those issues, the effort you made to include the Province of Ontario and how much success you had there.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Clerk, perhaps you could call up SSMNSCCAN00002676? And just start at the top so we can orient ourselves with what this document is. That’s got a nice, helpful heading there, “Tripartite meeting readout,” and this is a February 10th meeting. And so, Mr. Clerk, if you scroll down to about page 3? Thank you. And just a little further, please, Mr. Clerk, so we get Mr. Blair’s -- Minister Blair’s comments there. And under “BB,” which is doubtless you, there’s this notation: “Thanks - if we can speak frankly for a moment It has come to the media’s discussion that they are not in this meeting for the third day...” And are we understanding this correctly that “They” is Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And so this is the third of your three attempts to table a tripart meeting and the third time that Ontario is missing in action and you referred to a statement from Ontario that your meetings will accomplish nothing. Is that what you’re saying there? Is that what you’d heard from Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And then there’s a discussion between you and -- I take it that’s you and the mayor?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And there’s -- you say, “Good point” -- or sorry, the mayor says: "Good point." And you say -- refine a point he’s trying to make and then the mayor says in the third line: "I can say that I’m disappointed that the province has not come to the table. Premier is telling me ‘anything you want’, but then there is silence." Now, we’ve already heard from the mayor and he’s given his side of this but, from your perspective, was -- were you disappointed that Ontario hadn’t participated in these meetings so far, and was it your sense that the mayor was also disappointed that Ontario, at least at the level you had hoped to have participation, hadn’t shown up at that meetings?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That is helpful, thank you. And the other point, again, the mayor wasn’t only -- as you’ll recall because I think you might say you got an earful from him as well, was the mayor wasn’t just disappointed in Ontario. And the notes, which I don’t think you need to be taken to to remember because you probably had some of the same frustration experiencing these exchanges as one gets just reading them, which is the mayor seems very frustrated that he cannot get the support from either Ontario or from Ottawa in terms of boots on the ground in Ottawa of, in particular, federal -- he’d be looking to you for commitments with respect to the RCMP and there seems to be almost interminable confusion about how many are committed, how many are actually there, different ways of counting how many people are there. Were you able to participate usefully in that discussion? Did you have good lines of communication to the RCMP, because it doesn’t seem that much was being accomplished on that front in these meetings?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, well, that -- you’ve segued right into my next point, which is you -- from your perspective -- and we’ve heard a lot of police perspective from people similarly qualified already but you were in a unique position so we’d benefit from your perspective on why it was, as you saw it, that there might have been some -- a challenge for the OPP and the RCMP to commit resources to solving the problems that Ottawa was facing.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And in that context, did you have a view as to whether there was any logical order of operations, if I can call it that way, in terms of where Ottawa should look to first? We have heard from Commissioner Lucki that she wasn’t standing on protocol here, she was prepared to devote resources as quickly as she could while Ottawa sought help from the province as well. But putting aside those urgent first steps that were taken, did you have a sense of what the proper protocol was for Ottawa to follow in this context, putting in mind both the hats you were wearing as Minister of Emergency Preparedness and your history of having encountered similar situations doubtless over many years in Toronto?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you describe it as a tool that was available. Was it your view at the time, or is it your view now, that it was necessary for Ottawa to take that step before it came -- the City of Ottawa to take that step before it came to the Federal Government for policing assistance?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, you described the use of either the formal use of the Police Services Act, or more likely, when you’re talking about planned events, simply consensual arrangements where looking perhaps months or even years ahead to an event, you can get a multi-police organization team put together. That doesn’t work if the event manifests itself over the course of a weekend. And so one thing that the Commissioner might be interested in your views on is whether it would assist matters to have a protocol in place so that there isn’t quite as much confusion and disagreement about whose responsibility it is to - - who goes where and who provides what, to have a protocol in place and perhaps even stand by memoranda of understanding or something so that it -- within days, rather than weeks, everybody knows who goes where, whose responsibilities are what, and the matter hopefully gets sorted out more quickly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
All right. The speed with which you are able to deliver information, Mr. Blair, is helpful. If not to the translators, to me in getting through my questions in record time. So I’m flipping through some pages here. I want to ask you some questions about a related issue. You talked about Ipperwash. You had the probably not entirely pleasant experience of having a Commission of Inquiry look into the events of G20, not an entirely pleasant experience of having your conduct examined in a Commission of Inquiry. And one of the issues that came up in the Morden Inquiry into the G20 event, and Ipperwash as well, had to do with the extent of administrative oversight and political input to the activities of the police. And so with -- again, with your long policing experience and your role now as a Minister of the Crown, can you start by giving us an overview of where you -- how you see either Police Board or other levels of government officialdom oversight of police, where you see that fits in and how you view what has been called in this hearing so far sometimes the line between church and state or the conundrum of how much police forces should resist political interference and that whole topic?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So sorry. Slow down and say that again, please? There is no?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And when you use “governance” in this context, you’re not talking about the police and his or her deputies. You’re talking about some level of ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And in the time that you were Chief of Police and having this governance relationship with the Police Services Board, would you have considered that interreference, or what is sometimes called directing the police, for that Board to have outlined to you either long-term or immediate priorities or rankings of objectives to accomplish with your available resources?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Actually, slow down for the reporter. The what model?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what about when that effort at direction from the Police Services Board was aimed at a more immediate situation, and I don’t mean a particular investigation or anything of that type, but for example, if the Tamil protest had shut down University Avenue for four days, would you have considered it out of line for the Police Services Board to ask you what you intended to do about it and express to you their view that they considered this a serious problem for the city?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s very helpful. Now, I'm going to ask you to see if you can direct those thoughts to the -- I don't know if unique is the right word -- but at least the different situation of the RCMP which doesn’t have a police services board structure to which it is accountable. The Commissioner reports to the Minister and has a relatively thin statutory framework that delineates that relationship. Have you had some thoughts about what you're calling governance of the RCMP could and should look like if it's different than it currently is now?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you have any specific recommendations or -- I shouldn't say specific in the sense that drafting legislative terms, but what a more complete governance structure would look like for the RCMP?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
But ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- if you want to stop there, then we're going hear from him shortly and ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now, there were a couple of times -- and you might remember them -- I'm going to bring you to one in particular -- where you made comments to the effect of the police just need to do their job. In other words, you made comments that gave the public the impression that you didn’t think the police were doing as much as they could to deal with the situations in both Ottawa and elsewhere in the country. And the Ottawa ones, I think you're familiar with, and we've heard a lot from the OPS about their reaction to your comments, so let me just begin there. Did you have the impression that the Ottawa Police were not doing as much as they could or should have or perhaps as early as they should have to deal with the situation that they encountered when the convoy arrived in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Was?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And I'll ask the clerk -- if I can read this -- to call up SSM.NSC.CAN00003129. Minister Blair, this will be a text exchange between you and Zita Astravas, your chief of staff. And of course, you can see the words that caught our attention when your office sent the Commission this document among all the others, and that is your comment, "The police are finally doing their job in Windsor." And we'll go on to the next paragraph in a second. But had it been your impression that the situation in Windsor was taking longer than it should have to resolve because the police were not doing their job?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you recollect any view you had about the liaison efforts? And we're looking now at the second paragraph, where you say, "it appears they", presumably the police, Windsor Police Force and the OPP and RCMP who were acting here: "...it appears they didn't actually need to offer terms and concessions to the protesters." Can you explain what you were thinking there, if you remember?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. I'm going to move to a different topic. So before I leave, is there anything more you'd like to say about those topics that we've just been covering, about police governance, about the effectiveness of the police operations in Ottawa? I'm not expecting anything more from you, but I'm just about to change topics and so I'd offer that choice.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Although you might not like to change the topic. It's the Alberta RFA. You'll recollect that, I think. And it -- can you just, to those who haven't followed the proceedings quite as closely maybe as the rest of us, can you just outline what that was about and how it came across your desk?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we have heard an explanation from your staff, so I won't ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- ask you to expand on that. But if we could -- it might give you some more insight on that process if we looked at another document. So Mr. Clerk, could you call up SSM.CAN.NSC.00002689. And if the system is working, this will be the unredacted version of a document that has been redacted to the parties until just about right now. And you can see, that there's a -- we're at February 11th here at this exchange of emails, and the email we're looking at right now is from Ms. Astravas, and she's recording that the PMO has approved, and this, we're going to find out when we go down here, is followed by an email from you. And I'll suggest to you you might recognise it, but you're commenting here on the response to Alberta, and if I have got that right, what you're saying is, "It's a weak response", that is, the response you or the Federal Government is giving to Alberta: "It's a weak response but all we have. I approve. Please advise Alberta." And if I've correctly characterised that as your message in relation to the response to the RFA, why were you describing it as a weak response?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So one reading of "it's a weak response" would be "we, the Federal Government, don't have a good rationale for denying this RFA, that is, it's a weak response to Alberta." But that's not how you intended those words to read.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You meant it's a ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So you would say it was a complete and logical response, but it was unfortunate in that it was -- you weren't able to deliver anything?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. Now, moving chronologically through events to the consideration of the Emergencies Act. As it came up, you participated in the SSE meetings and then the IRG meetings when that -- when the forum transitioned to the IRG. Were you present at or represented at all of those meetings?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And if you can describe in general what was Cabinet, or at least those of -- members of Cabinet who were gathered in those meetings, looking to you for and what were you able to contribute to the meetings?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now I have a particular question and it comes out of something we discussed in the interview and that I believe you have a view on. You were participating in these meetings as events were coming to a head. We had IRG meetings coming up towards the IRG meeting immediately before invocation on the 13th. And I'm going to get -- in your interview summary, which the parties have already seen you outline the reasons that you thought were certainly bearing on your thoughts as you were contemplating the propriety of invocation, but there was a particular subpoint that I wanted to ask you about, which was whether you were aware of, as I think you've probably heard about now, at the time you were contemplating this and ultimately giving your input to the Prime Minister on the 13th, whether you were aware of Commissioner Lucki's views that she thought that there were still law enforcement tools available to the RCMP to deal with the situation in Ottawa and elsewhere in Canada.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Or before?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as -- I'll just -- to be clear, despite having been at all of the SSE and IRG and ultimately Cabinet meetings that were considering invocation; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now can we come to your -- you don't have to do them off by heart, although you might remember them. I can help guide you through them, but as I recollect it from our interview with you, you had categorized the reasons that you thought invocation of the Act was important. And as -- I don't want you to characterize these necessarily as the advice you gave Cabinet because that would be a confidence of Cabinet. So if you can just describe them to us as how you were viewing the matter as you were contemplating invocation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And when you describe your observation that the impact on a critical infrastructure elevated the situation that the blockades, the convoy, the protests, et cetera, elevated that to a national emergency, when you say that the impact on the critical infrastructure, when I think of infrastructure, I think of physical built bridges and roads and trains and things like that, but I don't think there was any actual harm to those. So I take it you're talking about the impact on trade and the economy and people in the vicinity, their lives, things like that, not the infrastructure itself?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And if I can remind you, you had a fourth -- believe it or not, you just did go through three of your factors; they sort of got lumped together, but your fourth had to do with your view on whether or not the existing legal authorities were adequate, whether they had been exhausted, et cetera. What was your view there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And coming to the end of our time and to the end of the part of the story that the Commission hopes to have you talk about; you observed, not as a police participant but as an experienced Public Order Commander, the enforcement action that eventually came to pass in Ottawa when the plan -- the joint forces plan was implemented. Did you have observations about the propriety, effectiveness, timeliness, et cetera, of the police action once the plan was in place?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you, Minister Blair. And thank you, Commissioner. Those are the questions of Commission Counsel. I think pretty close to on time.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Oh, there you go.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Commissioner. I have just one area that I'd like to explore with the witness.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Shouldn't take more than a few minutes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Minister Blair, at a point earlier in the evening when you were being asked some questions by Counsel for Alberta, you discussed the possibility -- you discussed the fact that you were facing a vote in the House, and you thought a letter from Alberta might be useful in garnering some support in that cause. And I'd like to ask you about in general the efforts that you made to gain support for either that vote or just generally public opinion in terms of the invocation of the Act. And so if I could ask the Clerk to call up this document, OPP00004583? And when you get it, to go to page 54. It's PDF 54. Should have -- yes, there we are. Thank you. This isn't an exchange that you're involved in, Minister Blair, but you're mentioned in it. Commissioner Carrique is in green on the right of the screen and Commissioner Lucki is in blue on the left of the screen. And she says this, the text begins with something that appears just a continuation of an earlier conversation, and then she says, "Has Minister Blair hit you up for a letter to support the EA?" And I guess the first question is, did you hit up Commissioner Carrique for a letter to support the EA, and we're using that colloquially, and we wouldn't be suggesting there was necessarily anything wrong in you having contacted Commissioner Carrique.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well, you've -- as in some other instances, you've followed right to the end of my line of questions, and so thank you, Commissioner, that completes the questions on that topic.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Commissioner, if I could just ask if -- I don’t know if people still use the expression, the division bells are ringing?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. And fortunately the timing won’t be precise, but it would be timely now to break if we want to do it in-between examiners, because it appears that otherwise it would be right in the middle of the next examination.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I think 10 minutes is all that’s needed. We’re just at the end of a question period, and so we’ll alert if it’ll be any longer than that.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
To assist Mr. Miller, and as someone who has encountered over about 30 years similar refusals to answer questions on the basis of National Security, I sympathize with his point. But it is exactly as you described, Mr. Commissioner, the representative of CSIS or another National Security officer is typically saying I refuse to admit or deny; I refuse to acknowledge or disclaim et cetera; they’re not saying one way or another, they’re just saying that as a matter of National Security they can’t take a position on it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. It's Gordon Cameron for Commission Counsel. And my friend for the Attorney General has a statement she would like to make with respect to the evidence of this witness before I commence my questioning.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Again, Commissioner, Gordon Cameron for Commission Counsel. And good morning, Minister Lametti.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I will begin with some housekeeping and ask you to cast your mind back to September 6th of this year when I interviewed you along with some of my colleagues from Commission Counsel, and we prepared a summary of that interview. And for the record, in case anybody's looking for the number, it is WTS6077. Minister Lametti, did you have an opportunity to review that summary for accuracy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you confirm it's accurate and that you adopt it as a part of your evidence in this proceeding?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now if we can begin, I suppose, with the basics, I think a lot of what we would describe as your position and your responsibilities are already familiar to many of the parties here, but just so that those for whom it isn't familiar and for members of the public, could you describe your office? And since I'm going to be taking you to some particulars, but also if you could give us an overview of the dual role you play as Minister of Justice and Attorney General and just describe how that plays out in the context of the work you do in conjunction with the Government and Cabinet?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And thank you for referencing the report of the Honourable Anne McLellan, and I'm going to make a few references to it because I think they help -- as you might remember, she had some compact and forcible ways of describing the two roles, and I'm going to ask that that be put up on the screen, just so that we can look at it and I'll ask you to see if you -- if they accord with your understanding of your role. And, Mr. Clerk, the document number is COM, C-O-M 00000952. And if you can get that up on the screen, I'll ask you to go to page 6 at the top. We don't need to know, for my purposes at least, Minister Lametti, the background to Anne McLellan's report, but ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I imagine you read it very, very carefully when it came out, but we're just -- she was reviewing the roles of the Attorney General and the Minister of Justice, and she had things to say about it in other context, but I'm just going to talk about her introductory comments where she describes in an overview way, I think in most cases quoting from Professor Edwards about the roles as they're known in our constitutional system of government. So the first one, if -- I'm trying to get the top of page 6, Mr. Clerk, and that doesn't look like it to me. It might be that it's a different PDF number. The top says "Introduction". There we go. And the sentence I'll read is the second one, "The Attorney General of Canada has a unique and profoundly important role. They stand at the heart of accountable government as the person responsible for defending the rule of law by ensuring that all government action is in accordance with the Constitution, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms." And I take it from your earlier description that you would agree with her description of that part of your role?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then if we go over, Mr. Clerk, to page 10, if we're working with the same page numbers, it is the page that has the heading "The Attorney General of Canada". There we go. And I'll just read this historical introduction here. The sentence I wanted to concentrate on was the second one, "For that reason, the Attorney General is often referred to as the Chief Law Officer of the Crown." And you're probably familiar with that phrase. Again, I think if not invented by, certainly most written about by Professor Edwards in his work. And then two paragraphs down there, the paragraph that begins "In their role..." "In their role of Chief Law Officer of the Crown, the Attorney General is not accountable to a particular government. They are required to act according to the law and the broader public interest, not according to personal or partisan interests." And again, as I understand your introductory comments, you'd agree with those observations of Anne McLellan as well?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And then if we can go over a page, perhaps two pages, Mr. Clerk, to the page that has at the top of it "The Minister of Justice". And here we have the description of the other role, and we'll just do this as compactly as possible, with the first sentence, "Under the Department of Justice Act, the Minister of Justice is the legal advisor to the Governor General, which means, in practice, that they are the legal advisor to Cabinet." And again, that would accord with your understanding of your role?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. I'd like to take you to some of the documents. These were produced fairly recently to us, and so they aren't organized in my papers, or at least to the extent Commission Counsel has been able to organize them relative to the way they were filed. And I know just from some emails that have come in as we've been preparing for this morning's appearance by you, other parties might have struggled with this as well, so I'll try to help parties along with the way I've organized them at least. And the first one, Mr. Clerk, if you could call up SSM.CAN.00007845. And, Minister Lametti, we're all going to -- you and I and I think the people following are going to have to struggle with two things here. One is how one reads a text conversation when it gets printed out like this, especially when it's broken up into multiple pages, who is speaking in which bubble as we go down. So I’ll ask you to help me with that. I believe that the first bubble there, “Do we have a contingency,” that is you speaking; am I correct there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. The date here is Sunday, January 30th, which would be, you might remember, the Sunday of the first weekend of the convoy arrival in Ottawa.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And can you explain -- by the way, if I understand it correctly, and just look down a bit, this is a text exchange you’re having with your -- with Alex Steinhouse, who I believe is your Chief of Staff?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as near as I can follow it, you’re in grey and he’s in blue ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- for this page, and that gets tricky because it switches around as we go between -- depending on whose phone the message is from. Anyway, if we look at the first paragraph there: “Do we have a contingency for these trucks to be removed tomorrow or Tuesday? (If they were black of indigenous...)” And I was wondering if you can help explain what point you were making to your Chief of Staff when you added the parenthetical comment to the initial statement.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so if I understand that answer, the point you’re making in your parenthetical comment to your Chief of Staff is we must approach this situation mindful of the potential for systemic racism and careful that we don’t ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s well put. So I’ll move on to the next paragraph: “What normative authority do we have or is some order needed? EA?” And there’s been an evolution in the language, and in particular the use of the word, “Normative”. So could you just help us with what you meant by its use there?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay, so we can ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If we can just put, “What existing authority” in there if “Normative” is giving us pause.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So you’re in the old school with me, okay. But the end of the sentence is interesting, “EA, I’m sure is a reference to the Emergencies Act.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And this is the -- depending on how you count it, it’s the second day of the first weekend, maybe the third day of the protest if we count Friday as a day. So the second or third day of the protest, and your mind goes straight to the Emergencies Act in the first text we get produced in these proceedings. Can you explain why that came so quickly to your mind?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Hmm?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s helpful, thank you. And we’ll go to another one of these texts next. This is, Mr. Clerk, the one with the same preceding numbers but the last four digits 7850. Now, again, trying to follow the bubbles here. The blue is now you, or Mr. Steinhouse?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And I think actually the first bubble there doesn’t sound like you talking, it sounds like someone talking to you about what your Deputy has told you, that you’re being invited to a meeting about the convoy. And if it matters, we can look at the PCO’s chronology to confirm that there was, indeed, a briefing on the convoy on that date. But the part that interests me here is your Chief of Staff in the second bubble says -- and here he’s talking -- before you were talking about your initial thoughts on first encountering the convoy. We’re now at Wednesday, February 2nd, so fourth, fifth day, perhaps, in.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Go ahead.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sorry. Sorry; thank you. Yes, Friday, February 4th. And the comments your Chief of Staff makes is: “I believe the angle is incoming the emergencies act.” Now, we’ll have to -- can you help us with “Incoming” or does it just mean what we would infer it, as a sort of slang way of saying the introduction of or the ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Understood, and that’s helpful. Thank you. And do you recollect the meeting and what was discussed at it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well, if -- it sounds a bit early for an SS meeting to me, but I guess the point is that, as near as you can recollect, it is exactly as you described it; a meeting to get ready.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. The next text I’d like to take you to is really leading up to a discussion about how you and Minister of Public Safety Marco Mendicino talked about the situation that Ottawa was facing, and to some extent, the country was facing, even at this early date. And so, Mr. Clerk, if you could turn up the document that is the same prefix, but with the number 7852? And if I’m reading the dates correctly, we are still on Friday, February 4th, as in the last exchange, but that was with your Chief of Staff, I think. This, if I’m understanding correctly, and you can confirm this for me, please, is an exchange between you and Minister Mendicino?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And which words do you claim?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. So Minister Mendicino says to you: “[The] [p]olice have all the legal authority to they need to enforce the law They just need to exercise it, and do their job” You might -- if you’ve been following the evidence of Minister Blair and others who’ve made similar comments?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Understood. And then you make a comment, again, perhaps not unique to yourself, but expressed very, very frankly here: “I was stunned by the lack of a multilayered plan” Now, we’ve heard other expressions like “contingency plan”, but not multilayered. Can you -- is that -- are they the same thing? Is that what you mean here?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’ll just interrupt you to see if I can anticipate what you’re going to say. you’re actually thinking of a plan to deal with the protest, but by now, by February 4th, you’re stunned by the absence of a plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The Ottawa Police not having a plan ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- by that Friday? And you make again, in stark terms, the observation: “Sloly is incompetent” And the words speak for themselves, but was that an observation you were making specific to the situation you were looking at, or was that an opinion that you had developed from some other ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for that. Now, for a second, I’d like us to revert to the comments we talked about at the beginning, where your role was described as, and you acknowledged as being the Chief Law Officer of the Crown in your capacity as Attorney General, and effectively Cabinet’s lawyer, and your capacity as Minister of Justice. And is it fair to say that you would expect your Cabinet colleagues to place considerable weight on your views of the legal issues that were facing the government as it encountered the convoy, the protests, and indeed the policing situation that you just opined on in your note about Chief Sloly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Well let’s see how that plays out with respect to the particular point that has come under discussion by a number of senior officials, a number of police officials, indeed the two witnesses at least who have preceded you, Minister Mendicino and Minister Blair, and that is the line between I think it was perhaps first Commissioner Lucki who called it the line between church and state but it’s generally understood as the appropriate role for governance or oversight of police forces and that it not tread too far into the realm of directing the police and their activities. So that is -- I take it that is a topic on which you, as the Attorney General of the country, would have and would be expected by your colleagues to have fairly well- developed views. Is that fair?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let’s look at these texts, then we’ll come back to exactly that question of where you were relative to the line. Mr. Clerk, could we call up 7851? Again, same prefix, but with the last four letters 7851? The date, if I’m following this correctly, is February 2nd. So the Wednesday of the first week of the convoy’s presence in Ottawa. And again, if I’m following the bubbles correctly, you are having a text conversation with Minister Mendicino and you are in blue and he is in grey? Have I got that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And the comment you make at the top of the first bubble, and again, though we’ll take your caveat that you are texting here and not submitting a memo to Minister Mendicino, you’re sending him a text, but time is short, events are unfolding quickly, and you are entering into, if not already a crisis. And your first comment is you -- you, Marco: “…need to get the police to move.” Right? And then if we look at another text, again, I apologize for the way these -- these are just not filed in order, so I have to go through various documents. The next one I talk to you about is -- Mr. Clerk, it is again same prefix, 7854. So we’re going to go from: “You need to get the police to move.” And again, this is the Attorney General of Canada talking to the Minister of Public Safety of Canada. Now, at this time, I think you’re aware, but correct me if I’m wrong, Minister Lametti, that Minister Mendicino has become, in effect, the interface between the Federal Government, and the City of Ottawa, the Mayor, and the OPS; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes. But here you’re speaking to the Minister of Public Safety, whom you know is the Government's interface with the Ottawa force and city, and you say to him ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
You might not have known it.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I remind you that he actually had the discussion with the Mayor in respect to the Mayor of Ottawa in respect of additional resources being provided by the Federal Government and confirmed to Cabinet that he had authorised that ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And that's a fair qualification. But with that in mind, again, the Attorney General speaking to the Minister of Public Safety, who is the liaison to the Mayor of Ottawa, and this is what you say at the bottom of this text. If you can just scroll down a bit more. Thank you. "Spoke to Doug Downey", and here, again, you are speaking these words to Minister Mendicino, "Need Sloly to be quick, quick, quick." Now, I guess the question I would pose is this: Do you think that the question of whether Chief Sloly should be dealing with the Ottawa protesters "quick, quick, quick" or wait until he believes he has the resources to perform the operation safely, do you think the decision between those two options is an Operational decision for Chief Sloly or a decision that should be influenced by you and Minister Mendicino?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And happily for the point that you've just made, Minister Lametti, you do get sort of air time for that point in the texts that were filed. And so I'll ask the Clerk to call up, same prefix, 7853. And I believe this is an extract of a text between you and Doug Downey. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Can you remind us of who Doug Downey is?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And the words that are on the screen read for themselves. It's the second bubble that I am interested in, and I think at the end of the second bubble you make roughly the point that you were just making to me unprompted. You say: "We can't make operational decisions, but sol Gen can make government priorities clear in these situations, as per Ipperwash Report." And so I'm going to -- I think you've made the point already, and I just wanted to, in fairness to you, point out that you had indeed been adopting that position at the time in your own words, although maybe, even though this is a text will elevate them to the level of seriousness, because you've actually incorporated reference to a Commission of Inquiry report. And ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Understood. And on that point, you've -- we've heard from a couple of your colleagues and a number of senior officials, including police officials at all levels of government, police at the RCMP, OPP and municipal levels, about this question of the topics discussed in the Ipperwash Report in Justice Linden's report and in the Morden Report with respect to the G20 protests in Toronto, and your colleagues, who have spoken before you, have expressed an opinion on this very point you make here in your text: "We can't make operational decisions, but sol Gen can make government priorities clear in these situations, as per Ipperwash Report." Now, I think the Commissioner has set the precedent here that I have to give spoiler alerts in fairness to you, but this question was put by me by Minister Blair about whether it would be appropriate in the case of competing problems in different parts of the province, say, if it would be appropriate for Government or the Solicitor General in Ontario to advise the Commissioner of the OPP, if we take that jurisdiction, though, presumably, it could also apply in other contexts, to advise the Commissioner that among the two public order situations facing the province, the government of the day or the Solicitor General, in particular, considers City X to be the priority situation. The example might be as between Ottawa and Windsor. Windsor is causing huge impacts on the national economy, and so the Province considers that the priority objective for a public order getting public order back under control. Leaving it to the police to decide if they want to do anything about that input, and if so, how they would do about it. They might decide that they can't address that priority question, but the question is, is it fair that that priority be, perhaps even appropriate and necessary that that priority be expressed to the police. And Minister Blair seemed to think not. That that would be going too far even to express a priority. I think we're seeing from your text here that you're going to differ, but again, spoiler alert, Minister Mendicino also had a view on it, though I think his view covered the spectrum from all the way at no to all the way at yes, depending on which part of his answer you focussed on, so you don't have to worry about disagreeing with him. So what would you say about that scenario, where there are competing priorities, and put it at the federal level if that's something that you can identify with more appropriately, where the Federal Government is facing public order issues, perhaps not public order, perhaps environmental issues, that have caused the need for policing resources, but in one way or another a view is expressed or could be expressed by the Government about its priorities, do you think that would be appropriate to communicate that to the police of jurisdiction?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That's the premise of the question ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- not just an inference.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Again, to be fair, there were parts of Mr. Blair's answer where one could draw the inference that the police of jurisdiction and the police who might be able to help from out of jurisdiction would have welcomed some input on this point. For example, you might imagine the OPP saying, "We've got lots of Public Order Units. We can deploy them where the government considers it most appropriate. Operationally, they're roughly equivalent to us. What is your priority? Help us decide." If you got that type of request, it sounds to me like you'd feel comfortable answering the question.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well, we're hoping that the Commissioner might be able to add something to the Ipperwash report by his observations on the events here, so we'd really benefit from more than just ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- punch to Ipperwash, if you could give some ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Thank you for that. I'm going to take you to another series of texts, and this does get messy, so I'm not going to bother with a whole bunch of document numbers. I'll just -- I'm just going to read these in, Mr. Commissioner, and if parties want to try to follow, just because I figured out the sequence of them and it helps follow the -- there's a series of texts between you, Minister Lametti, and your Chief of Staff, and you have to jump back and forth between his set of texts and yours to get the sequence right. So I won't ask you, Mr. Clerk, to call these all up. I'm just going to read them in and then I'll ask you if you can remember what I'm talking about, Minister Lametti. They are 7861, and 7864, and 7863 and 7860, and that takes us through a series of texts between you and your Chief of Staff on ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Not at all. Let's ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. That's a fair point. And ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- certainly the first one, and because I think that will twig what we're talking about here. Mr. Clerk, could you call up 7861? Now it's the morning of Sunday the 13th, so this is leading up to the IRG meeting at which serious consideration is going to be given and ultimately conclude with the decision being given ad referendum to the Prime Minister. And you -- am I correct that you're in the grey there? Have I got the ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. So you observed that we, by which I assume you mean the government, "...are on an inexplorable march to the EA. Not enough happening in Windsor." And then I will, just again, to help you because I can appreciate that you want to be accurate on this, just I'll mention that this is a series of texts in which you are anxious to know the status of two things, whether the Windsor Bridge, the Ambassador Bridge is getting cleared and whether the plan, the Ottawa Police plan to clear the city of the protesters is coming to maturity. And you appear to want in this morning of the 13th the most up-to-date information you can get on those two points. So, Mr. Clerk, if you could ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Sure.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let's see ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
--- let's see -- we'll skip ahead to 7863, Mr. Clerk, if you can bring that up, because there you state it quite clearly. And then just scroll down to the "Thanks Alex". Take a second to read that, Minister.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And do you take -- do you understand now what I was talking about that am I correct to say you are anxious to get as -- the most up-to-date and clearest information you can on those two points?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. And I take it that's because the status of these two points will be at least among the most important points you will want to brief the IRG on, or at least be competent to talk to the IRG about when you have your meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I see.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. In the interest of time, I'm going to move on to another topic, and thank you very much for helping us understand those texts because they -- as you can appreciate, when you see just the little snippets like that, it's hard to understand the context and you've been very helpful in giving that to us.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes, indeed, it would be perfect, Mr. Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. I'll resume the questioning. Just before I move to my new topic, I think it would be a good time just to put on the record, and by all means, Minister Lametti, I'm going to put the Ipperwash report on the record. If it occurs to you to make any reference to it, please feel free. But that would be COM C-O-M 00000828. I don't need it called up, Mr. Clerk, unless the Minister wants to make reference to it, but we'll just put it on the record so it's there in case any other -- so that it's an exhibit on this examination in case any other party wants to have access to it. Now, Minister, history that you and I lived through in our early law careers, and that was the invention or the development of the CSIS Act out of the MacDonald Commission report in the early '80s. If you weren't familiar with that before you took your current role, you're probably pretty familiar with it by now; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you're aware that the CSIS Act was borne out of a very long royal commission of inquiry and longer, I think, in its product than even this Commission will be able to produce in terms of the volume and scope of its recommendations, one of which was the invention of Canada's first secret intelligence agency, first national security agency as an independent entity. You remember that and the evolution through the McDonald Commission Report, then a separate Senate Inquiry into even further restrictions on the scope of CSIS powers and the ultimate emergence in 1984 of the CSIS Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And I think you’ll either remember at the time or you’ll have learned since that the reason the CSIS Act was so highly contentious -- and indeed, I’ll just make a parenthetical comment here. We heard a comment by the CCLA, the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, that they were instrumental in the evolution of the Emergencies Act, and as a matter of fact, they were probably as or more active in the development of the CSIS Act, and Alan Borovoy was lead counsel for the input to the McDonald Commission. And the reason that he was there, and the reason people were so concerned was that it is the development of a secret intelligence agency in a democracy is something that Parliament wants to do very carefully; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. And the points of contention, even if you weren’t following it at the time, you can see from the terms of the Act, now one of the major points of contention was to make sure that the scope of investigation that CSIS was permitted to engage in would be very tightly defined; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Now then along came, a few years later, Parliament and its interest in another new development, and that was the creation of a new Emergencies Act to replace the War Measures Act. And you’ll agree with me that again Parliament was faced with the challenge that it was about to create, in this case a power, rather than an institution, that had to be treated very carefully in a constitutional democracy; right? That is, the power that the Emergencies Act would give to Cabinet to create extraordinary authorities in advance of their approval by Parliament; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And you’ll agree with me that Parliament could have gone pretty much anywhere it wanted to find the threshold that it thought appropriate before Cabinet was able to exercise that power?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what it went to, we now know, was the CSIS Act, where they had just had a similar situation of wanting to make sure that extraordinary powers were appropriately controlled; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And the way they did that in the Emergencies Act was to make part of the threshold for the declaration of a public order emergency the existence of a threat to the security of Canada, as that term is defined in the CSIS Act; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And indeed, the thing you’ve -- I don’t know how much of your -- we’ve all become -- to the extent we weren’t experts on the Emergencies Act before, we’ve all had a very fast education of it in this hearing process, and probably you know more about it now than you did a couple of years ago. But one thing we’ve learned is that when Parliament enacted the Emergencies Act, they didn’t simply repeat the definition. They didn’t extract it and reprint it in the Emergencies Act. They actually stipulated that in the Emergencies Act, the expression “threat to the security of Canada”, has the meaning assigned to it by the CSIS Act; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we’ve tried to find compact ways, just for the purposes of these examinations, to describe the relevant part for a public order disturbance as it’s typically likely to arise in the case of a declaration of a public order emergency, a compact way of describing the subsection (c) of the definition of threat to the security of Canada, sometimes called the terrorism section. It’s the section that you’re probably now as familiar as the rest of us with that talks about activities directed towards, in support of, a threat of et cetera, et cetera, serious violence, and I’m going to paraphrase here, with an ideological, religious, et cetera motivation. So they, in effect, said that in addition to whatever, I’ll call them downstream requirements one might have to also find, cabinet might also have to find, the starting point would be a threat to the security of Canada as that expression is -- with the meaning assigned to that expression in the CSIS Act; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And the starting point, assuming you get there, is you add on to that the features of the situation facing Cabinet that cause it to be a national emergency and not just an isolated threat to the security of Canada.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fully understood.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we appreciate ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. I want to back you up a little bit. You’re familiar, I think, probably from your academic work, as well as your work as a lawyer, with a strawman argument?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Has any ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Has anyone suggested that the Emergencies Act delegates to CSIS the decision as to whether Cabinet can invoke the Emergencies Act or declare a public order emergency?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Has anybody who is a party to this proceeding, let me put it that way, advanced the argument, you just purported, to debunk that Parliament had delegated the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act to CSIS?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The substantive standard contained in the CSIS Act is the one that Parliament said is assigned to the meaning of that standard in the Emergencies Act. That's not CSIS, that's not Cabinet, that's Parliament, what it did in 1985; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
For a second there, I thought you were arguing my case because you were trying to tell me how important the threshold was in the CSIS Act before Parliament would let a secret intelligence agency investigate Canadians in a democracy.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
We totally agree on that. And then a few years later, Parliament adopted that definition as the threshold for the invocation of the Act. It set the very same threshold; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me see if I can approach it this way: Again, just as we -- I won't ask you opinions on legal matters, I just want to see if you agree with me for the purposes of this discussion. That what section 16 of the Emergencies Act, 16 and 17, require is a -- is what lawyers sometimes refer to as a combined subjective, an objective test. That is, Cabinet has to have had a belief that the threshold was met, that there was a threat to the security of Canada, and the belief has to have been on reasonable grounds. Right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Commissioner, I think I can approach it in a way that addresses my friend's concern. Though, to his credit, Minister Lametti was fully able to answer my question and answered it the way I'd have expected him to. But to address my friend's concern, I'll simply read section 17 of the Act to him and then use that as the preface for my point: "When the Governor in Council believes..." And we'll just stop here to say that if we speak compactly and effectively we're talking about when Cabinet believes. Can we work with that premise? Yes? You're nodding.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks: "When the Governor in Council believes, on reasonable grounds, that a public order emergency exists..." So this is why I say that lawyers, especially so highly qualified lawyers as you, see that the Governor in Council has to "believe", it doesn't just have to have reasonable grounds, it has to believe, and that belief has to be on reasonable grounds. So it's -- now, mind you, I don't want to -- your -- if this is pushing the level where you're comfortable talking about it, but that you can see those are two additive things. One, they have to have believed it, and that belief has to have been on reasonable grounds. And I'm just reading the words of the Act. Can you follow me that far?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And then the other thing that the Act requires in section 58 is, and again, I'm just -- I'm not asking for opinions, I'm just going to read the Act to the Minister, that you filed a -- what we called a section 58 explanation, and it's all over the place in the record of this proceeding, and that has, and I'm just reading from the Act: "...an explanation of the reasons for issuing the declaration..." Okay? So would you agree with me this far, what your section 58 explanation has in it are the grounds upon which Cabinet formed its reasonable belief that a Public Order Emergency existed; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, if you were asked to, could you -- the -- or, sorry, I'm going to back up a little further. The section 58 explanation, that is an -- that's not an ex post facto justification of the invocation is it? The Act says that it is to stipulate the reasons that the emergency was in fact declared; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And that section 58 explanation, then, is where the Commission, and parties to the extent they're exploring the issue, can find all of the facts on which Cabinet relied to come to its conclusion that it had reasonable grounds to believe. That it has formed a belief, and that that belief was on reasonable grounds; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Now, that section 58 explanation is going to include other material, isn't it, because it's going to include the material on which -- because the threat to the security of Canada is the starting point. And then what arises from, again, to use the words of the Act, the threat to the security of Canada is an emergency of such a scope that it's a national emergency. Again, I'm just trying to follow the framework of the Act, I'm not asking for opinions. But you -- as I'm saying, that's why there'll be more in the section 58 explanation than just the threat to the security of Canada; right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And probably in the section 58 explanation you would have included the reasons why existing authorities weren't adequate to deal with the situation; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let's -- I'll just see if I can -- just see if I can move you a bit by taking you back to section 58 of the Act. It is in your section 58 explanation that you are supposed to have the reasons for issuing the declaration. So I was just following through the three things that one might expect to find in the section 58 explanation: The grounds for the threat to the security of Canada, the reasons that that -- that arising out of that threat we had a national emergency, and the reasons why existing authorities were inadequate or insufficient to deal with it. I'm not trying to be technical here, but those would be the three topic areas. If you're not comfortable going along with me there, what I'm just trying to find ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Is that because you consider it too subtle or complicated? Because the Act sort of lays it out so formulaically about the process by which Cabinet comes to this decision, finds a threat to security of Canada, out of which or from which arises a national emergency and existing authorities are inadequate; that’s sort of exactly what you’d expect. And, frankly, when you read your section 58 explanation that looks like what you’re trying to do. So I’m pausing by -- if there’s some way we can move ahead with this, that you’re more comfortable with.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I’m going to respect your decision to rely on it. What I’m going to ask you is, again, I think a factual question, in a sense. Presumably, you could -- you could have by now or you could in final submissions -- or one could, the parties could -- identify in the section 58 explanation those facts on which Cabinet relied to conclude that there was a threat to the security of Canada.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I hope my question didn’t ask you to go as far as actually doing it. What I was asking you was if you could confirm that it should be possible for your counsel; frankly, could have been possible before we started this whole thing, but it’s at least possible now, for them to go into the section 58 explanation and tell the Commissioner, perhaps in their final submissions, where in that section 58 explanation one finds the grounds on which Cabinet formed its reasonable belief that there was a threat to the security of Canada.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. But can we at least agree on this, Minister; if there are, or to the extent there were -- to the extent Cabinet did have reasonable grounds to believe that there was a threat to the security of Canada, the Commission will find them in that section 58 explanation, right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
In?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And with that answer, which was helpful, thank you, Minister. With that answer, Commissioner, I will end my examination of the witness.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
There is, and will try to get it in before the division bells call the witness to ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Mr. Chairman, one of the parties, in particular the CCF, the Canadian Constitutional Foundation, and a number of parties by implication indirectly, raised the point that was before you on Monday when the CSIS panel was us, and so I’m going to ask this witness some questions about the evidence that Mr. Vigneault gave and see if he can help us at all with the basis on which Mr. Vigneault that it was appropriate for him to give an opinion to the prime minister about invoking the Act even though he had an opinion as the Director of CSIS that the threshold of 2.c had not been met. So with that in mind, let me ask you, Minister Lametti, if you followed that -- either live or in preparing for the hearing, that exchange in which the Director of CSIS, Mr. Vigneault, had said in a closed session, which go summarized into an open session, that based on assurances he had received, he thought it was appropriate to give an opinion to the prime minister on whether or not the Act should be invoked independently of his view on the fact that 2.c had not been met? Did you follow that issue?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Well, that helps us. When the matter came up -- and I -- Mr. Clerk, are you able to pull up the transcript of the 21st for us just in case Minister Lametti want to see the way that Director Vigneault put it? And I’m looking at page 58 of the transcript. Let me -- while it’s coming up on the screen, Minister Lametti, I’ll -- you’ve read the transcript, but just to put some context from the question, I’ll you about it. I’m at the top of page of the transcript and -- oh, it looks like we might get it up -- 58. And yes, if you could just zoom in so we can get that “So when…”. Okay. And this Director Vigneault speaking: "So when that was first brought up, the fact that the Emergencies Act was using the same words as the CSIS Act to define the threat, so imported into the Emergencies Act, I needed to understand for myself and for, you know, the course of this, what was the implication of that. And that's when I was assured that, you know, they were - - it was a separate understanding. You know, the confines of the CSIS Act, the same words, based on legal interpretation, jurisprudence, Federal Court rulings and so on, there was a very clear understanding of what those words meant in the confines of the CSIS Act, and what I was reassured by is that there was, you know, in the context of the Emergencies Act there was to be a separate interpretation based on the confines of that Act" And so my question to you, Minister Lametti is, what assurance had Mr. Vigneault received that allowed him come to that conclusion that there were different interpretations of the -- of the test under the CSIS Act and under the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Commissioner, the Commission counsel are in a conundrum here, as I think are the parties who have tried to pursue this issue with Director Vigneault, with Minister Lametti, and with others as the hearing has proceeded. We recognize, though, that solicitor-client privilege poses a special challenge for the Commission, not only because of issues of the extent to which you’re able to adjudicate on those issues, but also because the time it takes to resolve them, especially if the matter ends up getting referred to a Court of Superior jurisdiction would be frankly fatal to the timetable that you’re obliged to work by. And so, Commission counsel are not going to call on you to make a ruling on this issue. We would observe that we have, throughout -- that is, from the beginning of this proceeding though until now -- attempted to find a way to lift the veil that has made such a black box of what has turned out to be a central issue before the hearing. Now, if we believed that that prevented you from assessing the basis on which the government came to its conclusion, we would ask you for a ruling on it, but we are confident that there are other ways that we can get the same information on the record or get the same result through legal arguments, and so we’re not pressing you for an issue, we just regret that it ends up being an absence of transparency on the part of the government in this proceeding.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon again, Mr. Commissioner. Gordon Cameron for Commission Counsel. We have to testify now Minister Anita Anand, the Minister of National Defence. And she will be sworn, and she has her own religious book.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
If I may begin, Minister Anand, by thanking you very much for being here today. I know it was a special challenge for you to fit in and we had hoped it to be like a puzzle piece in you schedule and ours, and unfortunately one thing led to another and that didn’t quite happen. But fortunately, it won’t be one of the longest exams we’ve had before the Commission. Let me begin by just doing some housekeeping, and in particular I’m going to ask you to cast your mind back to September of this year when you were interviewed by me and some of my colleagues and then a summary of that interview was prepared. And for the record –- I don’t need this called up, Mr. Clerk, but I’ll just put it on the record –- the summary of Minister Anand’s interview is WTS.00000076. And did you have a chance to review that summary for accuracy, Minister Anand?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you firm that it’s accurate to the best of your information and belief and that you adopt it as part of your evidence for the Commission?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And also the Department of National Defence filed an institutional report. For the record, that’s DOJ.IR00000012. And, again, Minister Anand, can you confirm that that was filed by the Department of National Defence as part of its evidence in this hearing?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. Now, even though we won’t be having a lot of questions for you, they are very, very important questions that have come up before the Commission and been raised by the parties in two areas that I’m going to concentrate Commission Counsel’s questions on. And I’ll just begin by headlining those two areas. One is, the role that the Department of National Defence plays when a province makes a request for assistance to the Federal Government for assistance that is potentially or perhaps best provided by the Canadian Forces. And the second area is, your views as the Minister of National Defence, of the times, if ever, and the circumstances in which it would or would not be appropriate for personnel and equipment of the Canadian Armed Forces to be used in an otherwise civil public order incident. So with that said, I will just ask you to describe a little bit about your position. I’ll begin by asking you to confirm that you were appointed as the Minister of National Defence in October of 2021; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And as Minister of National Defence you’re responsible for both the Department of National Defence and the Canadian Armed Forces; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Please, you can almost certainly do better than I could on that one.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, we’ve heard a fair bit of evidence about the role that the Ministry of Emergency Preparedness and the Department of Public Safety play in the initial receipt, processing, consideration et cetera of request for assistance from provinces. At a high level can you describe the role that the Canadian Armed Forces and the Department of National plays in that process?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Your institutional report, which is –- again, Mr. Clerk, I don’t need it called up, but the one that you adopted early in your evidence refers to two main mechanisms under the National Defence Act by which the Canadian Armed Forces can be called on to support civil authorities, again at a high level. Can you just describe those briefly?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I’ll tell you what I can do, is I can repeat it. Your institutional report outlines two main mechanisms by which –- under the National Defence Act, the Canadian Armed Forces can be called on to support civil authorities.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Can you describe again –- we have heard evidence from Public Safety and Emergency Preparedness about this. You’re actually probably in the best position to look from the top down at the process and describe how you would expect a request from a province to arrive at the Federal Government and make its way through the system and ultimately come to your desk.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, we've heard some evidence about and your -- both your institutional report and your interview summary give some description of the two requests for assistance, the two RFAs for a logistical support from the Canadian Armed Forces that did come through in the early days of the convoy protest blockades, as the name might be appropriate in each context. One was for the Cartier Drill Hall and the other was for some rations, if that’s the right term, for the use on Parliament Hill. And can you just give, again, a thumbnail sketch of each of those RFAs?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. Now, the next topic, I'm, as Commission counsel, just going to ask you to speak on at a relatively high level -- and to the extent parties want to provide the Commission with more information through you, they will pursue it -- but it appears from the evidence we've heard from Emergency Preparedness in particular and to some extent, Public Safety that what gets called in this proceeding the Alberta RFA, the request by the Province of Alberta for assistance from the CAF, didn’t follow the same process to what you call the triumvirate or ultimately to your desk as the first two that you described it. Can you again, at a high level, describe how that process was different from what was ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Fair enough. I hadn’t meant to say “followed a different process”; I guess I meant “came to a different conclusion. So can you tell us what -- and I will caution you. You might remember that there’s a limit on the details with which you can describe the difficulty of this machinery being applicable to the context in which it was hoped to be used that your documents ended up getting redacted on some fine points there. So speak at a high level. What was it in general terms that you were told about -- by your Armed Forces personnel about the suitability of the tow trucks that were otherwise based in the same general area, about their suitability for the task that they were being asked for?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s a perfect segue to the second category that is of interest to the Commission and to the parties which is the propriety of the Canadian Armed Forces being deployed for the purposes of dealing with civil unrest or law and order issues. And you've just touched on one that intersects the two points and if I understood your answer correctly -- and I’ll just put it in my own terms -- the mere appearance of Canadian Armed Forces tow trucks at what is otherwise a public order disturbance, you and your chief of defence staff would worry could be a provocation because the equipment would be immediately recognizable as Army equipment. Is that hypothetical?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let me see if I can break that out into at least two parts. One point, which you were quite eloquent on, and frankly, certainly wasn’t evident to Commission Counsel until we interviewed you back in September on this point, is that there is -- it’s probably very evident to all of the parties who are representing police forces, but the training of a soldier, I will say no longer, because I think it might once have, but no longer includes the type of training that public order units in law enforcement would get in terms of crowd management and the dynamics of that situation, so they simply don’t know what to do when they encounter the crowd. At least, they haven’t been trained to deal with crowds as part of their basic training. Is that the functional point?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Well put. And so let me -- I think implicit in what you’re saying, especially with the eloquence with which you put it, is in addition to being not well trained to engage in a law enforcement context, especially a public order disturbance context, there could be an element of escalation and provocation merely by the appearance of uniformed soldiers appearing in what is otherwise a situation of civil unrest? Is that part of your concern?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
That’s very clear. And let me see if I can bring this close to the end by asking you whether, at the time the Government began contemplating invocation of the Emergencies Act, there was any sense in which your department or the Canadian Armed Forces developed contingency plans or were ready for the possibility that circumstances might degrade to the point where your assistance as the last, the very last resort, might be required?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you very much. Commissioner, those are the questions of Commission Counsel. I think some parties might want to drill down a little further than I have, but that puts the information on the record that we thought was important.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
No, thank you, Mr. Commissioner.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon, Commissioner, our last witness for today is Minister Alghabra, Minister of Transportation. Could I have the witness sworn, please.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Good afternoon, Minister Alghabra. I’m going to start with a bit of housekeeping, as we usually do with the witnesses. I’m going to ask you to remember that a couple of months ago we had an interview where we got some information from you that ended up getting put into a summary form and then sent to you and your staff for review. And what I’d like you to do is confirm that you reviewed, that you considered it to be generally accurate, and that you adopt it as part of your testimony before the Commission today.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And for the record -- I don’t need this, Clerk, but for the record, it’s WTS00000075. And you know, Minister, we’ve already heard from your deputy who -- with whom I canvassed pretty much the same issues that we’re going to talk about today, but our perspective -- our point of interest today is your perspective as the minister. And so let me just begin. As I recollect our interview, you were appointed the Minister of Transport in January 2012; is that correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And can you give us just a brief account of your professional training and how you came into politics and, ultimately, to the position of Minister of Transport?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
The one or two-minute version.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if we can pick up the narrative here, so to speak, at the beginning of the development of the convoy and how it first came to your attention and what your perspective was, what you saw coming and what concerned you with respect to the mandate of your department.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And what issues first -- what issues did the convoy present? I mean, obviously, it's a convoy of trucks and you're the Minister of Transport, but can you tell me about the connection between the federal responsibility for transport and the provincial responsibility for transport, and how you decided your department could become involved helpfully in managing the protest and the convoy?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And needless to say, it didn’t last just the weekend. When did it become apparent that your department was going to be more heavily involved than just observing the events unfold and that you would be asked by the government to take a role in finding solutions?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And we heard from your deputy about the development of what I think was originally called the Maximum Enforcement Strategy, ended up evolving into the Strategic Enforcement Strategy, about seeing what laws from various jurisdictions could be brought to bear on the situation. And we don’t need to rerun the evidence that he gave us because he gave us quite a thorough account of it, but the point I remember him mentioning -- and I'll ask you to comment on from the ministerial perspective, is that just the way the Department of Transport works, because it has to take its federal responsibility and coordinate that with all of the provinces and territories, there's already a very strong network within the Department of Transport with all of the partner agencies or equivalent agencies, including law enforcement and regulation in each of the provinces and territories. And would that level of connectivity and intergovernmental relations also apply at the ministerial level?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And at the ministerial level, did you, for the purposes of implementing -- or I suppose I should say originally developing and then hopefully getting the cooperation of the provinces and territories to implement the Strategic Enforcement Strategy, were you reaching out to your ministerial colleagues at the provincial and territorial level on the plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Let's start with your efforts to engage with Ontario. The timeframe I'm going to concentrate on, just to get the matter focused quickly, is the sort of February 7th, 8th, 9th timeframe. So we are at the point where the convoy has put down roots, so to speak, in Ottawa. There are other events at Coutts and Emerson. And if I could ask the clerk to call up SSM.CAN.00005289, and Minister Alghabra, this will be a text, a series of texts between you and Minister Mulroney, Caroline Mulroney of the Province of Ontario. And would you describe here as your counterpart in the Ontario government?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And if you can just look at the text there, see if that reminds you of the exchange you had -- it might not be necessary for us to go to the ones on the 8th and 9th, though if that would help you remember, we can -- can you tell us what you are attempting to do with Minister Mulroney of the Ontario government with respect to the effort you've just been describing?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And how did that go?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Clerk, if I could ask that you call up WPS000000966. Now this is a bit of a cluttered document, Mr. Clerk, and you can either word search “potato” or scroll down until you come to it. It’s a document -- it’s hard to find; it’s a fair ways in. And you’ll come to a heading “Protests – a political hot potato”. There we go. Thank you. And can you tell me what this – as a I say it’s a bit of a cluttered document and there’s a lot happening in it, but do you recognize this?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yes, an account, a readout of multiple events. But if we look at the paragraphs under “Protests – a political hot potato”, the first paragraph, it reads – and I’ll quote: “There are growing calls for Ford to get more involved in bringing the protest to an end, after all, Ottawa and Windsor are in Ontario.” And then this is a quotation from you: “I call on the Government of Ontario to join us in securing an end to these illegal blockades in several Ontario cities, and to apply the law. Transport Minister Omar Alghabra will hold a news conference on Wednesday.” Now, was this part of your effort to get Ontario engaged in the enforcement plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And were you briefed by your deputy or your other staff on the reasons that Ontario was giving for not being fully enthusiastic about the enforcement plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. But one thing, I was wondering if your deputy or your staff briefed you on, was the concern certainly that the lawyers observing the situation could have had, which is that if you start using enforcement mechanisms for what might be called an ulterior purpose or for some objective other than those mechanisms were designed for, you run into legal issues, including the procedural fairness that has to be applied before the enforcement can be effective, before it can take effect. So you recognized that there were genuine issues that Ontario was concerned about before it could become fully invested in the enforcement plan?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Well, that’s helpful. And as I understand it from our interview on February 9th, you met with Minister Mulroney to pursue this issue further; and can you tell us about that meeting?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And that’s on the records, so thank you for pinpointing that in this chronology.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
All right. Maybe you could flush that out a little bit. I mean it’s a federal problem in the sense that there’s serious problems in Ottawa by this stage, at Coutts and some of the other ports of entry. But I understand that the message you were trying to get across to Minister Mulroney, is that it was primarily the provincial enforcement tools that would be able to solve the problem; is that he gist of it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Yeah. Clerk, could you call up, please, SSM.NSC.CAN00000256. Can you tell us who Mike Maka is?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. This is an email -- it will come up in a second. It will be an email chain. And if we can just scroll down to page two and -- there we go. A readout of your meeting with a member of parliament. And I’m sorry, you might be better at that name than I am.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Kuzmierczak, thank you. Who as I understand it, is a liberal MP from Windsor, Ontario?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. And can you tell us about that; the Clerk can help you scroll down through the notes if you would like to remind yourself, but it might be that by looking at points there you can be reminded of what it was you talked about and what it was of concern to you and your colleague.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And then by now I think most of us know what happened very shortly after that meeting on February 10th when Ontario adopted its emergency measures order, and can you tell me how that had an impact on your perspective of things going forward once Ontario was, if I can put it this way, more onside with the approach that you had been trying to encourage them to take?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, I'd like to take you to your international effort because, I suppose, not exclusively, but perhaps primarily with respect to the Ambassador Bridge, but presumably with all of the border points, you also, in terms of your ministry's multi-jurisdictional efforts to coordinate your transportation function with those of the other jurisdictions in which the vehicles have to travel, you also have a relationship with officials in the United States; correct?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And with Mr. Buttigieg, in particular?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And did you engage with him when Ambassador Bridge was becoming problematic?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
So do you get -- do you have many interactions with Mr. Buttigieg that begin with him reaching to you?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. And here, he's probably not indifferent to Canada's concerns because it's a symbiotic relationship, but he is calling you because he is -- feeling his constituency is feeling the impact of the Ambassador Bridge and nearby ports of entry blockages. Is that right?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Right. Mr. Clerk, if you could call up WTS6075, and go to page 6. By the way, this meeting with Mr. Buttigieg was on February 10th. Now, this is the summary of your interview, and you discuss this at page 6, where the clerk has put you there, Call With Secretary of State Pete Buttigieg. Now, if we look after the introductory paragraph to the introduction to a quote from you, and I'll read the introduction and the quotation. It says: "Minister Alghabra was asked about the following statement he had made in the course of his call with Sec. Buttigieg." So for the context of the readers, that's me or one of my colleagues asking you to elaborate on this statement. In the course of our interview with you, we've asked you to elaborate, and this is a statement you made during your call with Secretary Buttigieg: "But I can tell you - and I just spoke to the [Prime Minister] - that we are running out of patience. If things aren't addressed in the very near term, we as the federal government will step in." And at that point, this is February 10th, as is noted at the top of the page there, was it your understanding that you and your colleagues in Cabinet were contemplating the options that would include federal intervention as to find solutions to the blockades and the convoys?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, right about then, in the course of your discussions with Secretary Buttigieg, Ontario invoked it's emergency order. And would it be fair to say that that went some way to address the concerns and take the pressure off you, at least temporarily, and in particular, Secretary Buttigieg would be able to see that things were happening and enforcement might be not far in the future?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Let's move ahead a few days. And Mr. Clerk, if you can call up SSM.NSC.CAN0000214. These would be the IRG meeting minutes for February 12th. And if we go through to page 7, and if you scroll down to about almost halfway. There we go. "The Minister of Transport confirmed", et cetera. So that's you, Minister Alghabra, reporting, as I'm inferring here, you're reporting to the IRG about developments. And if we go down to just about the redaction where, again, the words the "Minister" is underlined, and I'll read that out: "The Minister confirmed that he is working with provinces on securing tow trucks and that Alberta is looking to purchase at least 2 large tow trucks. Other provinces have been offered support to facilitate purchase agreements for services relating to tow trucks but have shown interest to date."
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
I was going to say, that sentence only makes sense if the typist intended to say “but have shown no interest to date”. But let me ask you to confirm that. Was that the fact, that Alberta was buying some, but the others, even though you’d offered them financial support to facilitate the purchase, they hadn’t shown interest to date?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Please.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And with respect to your effort to encourage the provinces to obtain heavy lift tow truck capacity, did Ontario express any interest in participating in a program like that?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thanks. Now, at the end of that paragraph, we see a report on the situation at Manitoba, which I’ll just summarize by saying Manitoba said, “We’re doing okay on our own, thanks.” So your sense was that Manitoba wasn’t interested in -- it wasn’t sensing that it had a problem serious enough to become involved in the assistance you were offering? Is that it?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. Moving ahead chronologically, Mr. Clerk, if we could turn up the same prefix, but with the last four digits being 0401? We’re now moving ahead to the IRG minutes of the 16th. So we’re now post-invocation. Before we jump over that, is there anything that you think is important to this chronology that involves your particular involvement in the decision of Cabinet to invoke the Emergencies Act?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now let me back up a little bit to, we mentioned your involvement and your Department’s involvement in the enforcement strategy, the strategic enforcement strategy. Your Deputy described a companion strategy that your Department was working on, the tow truck strategy. And as you were meeting with the IRG, is it fair to say that you weren’t the only one around the table who realized that the ability to tow these vehicles was problematic in the situations both at the border points and in Ottawa?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to imply that. Just it’s your brief, so you tell us ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
And so again, recognizing that I have to be more careful about the questions that I ask you than I asked your Deputy, but what we know is that part of what came out of the Emergency Measures Order was an authority to compel tow truck service providers to provide towing services. And so is it safe to say that that was an element of the Emergency legislation that you considered an important part of the overall solution?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Okay. And we have, thank you Clerk, the document for the February 16th, IRG meeting minutes. And if we can go down to page 7? About a quarter of the way from the top, immediately after the redaction. Right. So here you are reporting, and because this is unredacted, you’re allowed to talk about this, somebody has decided that it’s fair game. And it says: “The Minister of Transport confirmed that tow truck capacity challenges appear to be resolved, with Alberta and [Ontario] confirming that they have appropriate towing capacity.” And that speaks for itself, because I don’t want to ask you to expand on that in case it would involve a confidence of Cabinet. But we can get some insight from your -- on this point from your Witness Statement. And can you call that up, Mr. Clerk? I think I introduced it at the beginning as ---
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you. And if we go to page 8 of that, this is again, so the reader puts it in context -- this is the summary of your interview with Commission counsel a few months ago. And you note roughly the same here as you did to Cabinet. “Minister Alghabra noted that a key proposal for emergency measures was the power to compel tow truck drivers to comply with an order to assist in removing vehicles, which was inspired by [Transport Canada’s] Tow Truck Strategy.” Then it goes on to stipulate in fact that: “… this measure […] ensured adequate resources and equipment were available to clear the blockades.” Do you remember that part of your interview?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Now, an issue that you might have heard talked about -- it depends how closely you've been following the proceedings. I think what is not contentious is that not long after the enactment of the -- or the invocation of the Emergencies Act, trucks did get towed and that some documentation indicates -- mostly documentation where the tow truck drivers are seeking to get paid for their services -- that at least the mechanism for compensating tow truck drivers who were asked to provide services or compelled to provide services under the Act, that that part of the system worked. But I wonder if you followed the evidence closely enough to have observed the observations made by some of the police, in particular Ottawa and OPP. Witnesses who have spoken about the fact that they already had tow trucks lined up and available, willing to provide service and that in fact those arrangements pre-existed the Emergencies Act and could have been used without the enactment of the Emergencies Act. Have you followed that evidence and that point f issue?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you for that. Now, those are all of the specific questions I had for you, but I’d like to finish up by asking you if you have anything you’d like to add, just general observations or things you think is important for the Commissioner to hear. And in that category, if you have recommendations about things that could have been done differently, if different protocols or legislation or whatever had been in place when you were trying o develop your enforcement strategy and trying to develop your tow truck strategy, those types of points would be helpful to the Commission.
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Along those lines, let me just follow up with a question that takes us right back to the very beginning of your evidence, Minister Alghabra. You talked about the fact that you have at least an annual of a council of Ministers of Transportation at the federal and provincial and territorial level. Do you think that if, at the next one of your meetings, you put your heads together to see if you could come up with plans, procedures, and protocols so that you're not trying to invent this thing from the start the next time a problem like this arises, that the officials themselves perhaps even without new legislation or perhaps with a view to fashioning appropriate legislation could advance the situation?
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Gordon Cameron, Senior Counsel (POEC)
Thank you, Minister. And thank you, Commissioner. Those are my questions.