Janice Charette
Janice Charette spoke 361 times across 1 day of testimony.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
My name is Janice Charette; J-a-n-i-c-e, C-h-a-r-e-t-t-e.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I do.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I can.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I am.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I was named as the Interim Clerk of the Privy Council in March of 2021, so that is about 18 months or so ago, and I was confirmed in the role as the Clerk of the Privy Council in May of 2022.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’ve been a senior public servant for -- actually I think I’ve been a Deputy Minister for almost 20 years. Before being named as the Interim Clerk of the Privy Council, I was the High Commissioner for Canada to the United Kingdom, or Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and previous to that, I was actually serving as the Clerk of the Privy Council. I’ve held roles as the Associate Clerk of the Privy Council; Deputy Minister of Intergovernmental; the Deputy Minister of then-Human Resources and Skills Development; of Immigration, Refugee, Citizenship; Associate Deputy Minister of Health; and, as you can tell, a number of roles over my career.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes, okay.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Oh.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I wrote the words, “Slow down” just so that I would try to remember that. Thank you, Commissioner. So the Clerk of the Privy Council and Secretary to the Cabinet is the full title of the position. And I would say that that basically encompasses three roles. The Privy Council Office is the department of the Prime Minister. And so I serve as the Deputy Minister of the Privy Council Office, and the Deputy Minister, therefore, to the Prime Minister. I am the most Senior Public Service Advisor to the Prime Minister and to his Office. I’m responsible for the overall management of the Privy Council Office, and the discharge of all of our functions and responsibilities. And making sure that -- so that’s kind of the administration side, but I’m also the advisor on all matters that would before -- be before the Prime Minister for his consideration and decision. Second part of the role is the Secretary to the Cabinet. And in that respect, I’m responsible for helping to organize Cabinet meetings, make sure that the agendas are set, the attendance is set, the information is available for Ministers to deliberate on; that the meetings are supported with things like translation, all of the kind of staff support; that the decisions of the Cabinet are faithfully recorded and therefore comm -- and communicated out as necessary. And I’m responsible for overseeing the implementation, then, of those decisions. So anything to do with how Cabinet operates its decision-making structure, I am responsible for. Obviously working with the team in the Privy Council Office, both in the advisory function and the Secretary to the Cabinet function. And then, finally, in our system, the head of the -- the Clerk of the Privy Council has a third role, which is the Head of the Public Service. And I think if you look at the Institutional Summary for the Privy Council Office, we try to describe that in the Canadian’s version of the Westminster System, the Public Service is a professional, non-partisan Public Service. And I am responsible, as the Head of the Public Service, for, amongst other things, providing an annual report to the Prime Minister on the state of the Public Service. In this respect, I also provide advice to the Prime Minister on the appointment and performance of Deputy Ministers and other senior officials. And, basically, for making sure that the Public Service is ready to be able to serve the needs of the government and of the country, today, and also a stewardship role into the future. So those are kind of the three roles. And I would say the other thing that might be relevant as we get into this conversation is the Clerk of the Privy Council is one of a community of Deputy Ministers. I think in -- the expression would be primus inter pares, you have -- you are one amongst others, and I very much work with the community of Deputies, in order to be able to discharge those functions.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s it.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can I just add a little bit to that, if that’s all right?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So perhaps I’ll just add two things. I think one of the operating styles that Madam Drouin and I’ve tried to follow is that if I’m not there, Nathalie is briefed up enough to be able to handle or to be able to deal with any issue, and vice versa, so that we are not completely interchangeable, but there is leadership at any point in time, because people have holidays or whatever else to do. And secondly, I don’t think either one of us mentioned that we also have a number of Ministers within the Privy Council Office portfolio, and I might forget one here, but I’ll try not to. So the Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs, who are supported by the PCO.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Minister LeBlanc. That’s right. The Government House Leader. That’s Minister Holland. The Quebec Lieutenant, which is an intergovernmental type of function. That’s Minister Rodriguez. The Minister of Emergency Preparedness. That’s Minister Blair. And I have no forgotten.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And of course the Deputy Prime Minister, that’s right. In her role as the Deputy Prime Minister, she also gets support, of course, from the Department of Finance. But in her role as the DPM, we do provide her some support as well.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sure. I think the term that Madam Drouin used of organic maybe applies here. There are many, many routes in terms of the flow of information and advice between myself and the team in the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister’s office and the team that support him there. When it comes to the Prime Minister himself, it gets more structured. And I’ll come back to that in a moment. There would be daily conversations going on between PMO and PCO staff, whether it’s around information exchange, trying to think about how to manage an issue, surface a problem we’re trying to solve, exchange information. Any number of things in the course of a day would take place. In terms of the advice to the Prime Minister, when it comes to the exchange of information with the Prime Minister, in some cases you will see, I think even in evidence, of documents that have been submitted to the Commission that if it’s for the purposes of just sheer information, you would see a briefing note perhaps prepared by one of the Deputy Secretaries to the Cabinet. But if it contains advice, it contains a recommendation, if write to the Prime Minister for the purpose of decision, that would come through me. In some cases, some of those briefing notes may also go through Madam Drouin, and if I’m not around, Madam Drouin can sign off on briefing notes, decision notes for my -- over my signature.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think that would be fair to say, yes. As well, we have a number of opportunities to provide oral information, oral briefings to the Prime Minister as well. I have a regular bilateral meeting with him every week, which is joined by the Chief of Staff to the Prime Minister. That is Katie Telford. And sometimes other members of the Prime Minister’s staff will join us. And that’s a session where sometimes the Prime Minister has items, I might have items, the Prime Minister’s Office may have items. But what’s kind of our regular once a week touch base, traffic management, advisory, decision, kind of -- whatever is on the issue plate of the day. Every second week, the Deputy Prime Minister will be joining into that meeting as well. So that’s our regular structure. We may have issue-based meetings or briefings with the Prime Minister. We’ve done -- for a very long time, we were doing frequent, three times a week briefings of the Prime Minister and his office, sometimes with Ministers on the covid situation, for example. That might involve senior officials from other departments, Dr. Theresa Tam, the Chief Public Officer, officials from Public Health Agency and Health, and so on and so on. You get the picture. When there is a Cabinet meeting that the Prime Minister is involved in, we almost always have a pre-brief session with the Prime Minister where we’ll go over the agenda, the kind of show, who is going to say what, the key issues to be deliberated, so he has a focus on, in addition to the written briefing material we would have provided, kind of what are the key issues he's trying to adjudicate at the session, what are some of the perspectives he may want to be listening for, where is the area or the zone for a possible decision. And we would be doing that before a Cabinet meeting, for instance. And certainly, I think which will be relevant to the work of the Commission, before an Incident Response.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right. So to cast your mind back, we were in January of 2022. We -- the country, like many other countries around the world, was dealing with the Omicron variant of covid. We actually had, I believe in mid- January, record levels of hospitalizations, even higher than previous peaks of the covid outbreak. And so the vast majority of the public service was working remotely, although there were some people, but dint of their function who had the need to come into the office to access secure materials or so on. But it was kind of -- the public health advice was to be working remote by default, and that’s where the bulk of the public service was. The same thing for, I think it’s fair to say, for the Prime Minister, Ministers, and political staff. So we were all working remotely. I remember this well because there was a Cabinet retreat that was held in the week of, I have a little calendar here to try to remind me of dates, the week of January the 24th. That would have been the first Cabinet retreat that had taken place since the Government was formed after the 2021 election. And I think everybody was hoping that that was going to be an opportunity for a face to face, and unfortunately it ended up being a virtual. We are very fortunate to have secure video communications so we can actually have Cabinet meetings held virtually, and so we were able to do that in the week. There was a lot of other issues that were before the Government. I think you would have heard from other witnesses as well that we were monitoring the potential for an emerging situation in Ukraine and trying to prepare for what possibly could happen at that point in time. And so as we came out of the -- came out -- the Cabinet retreat, I believe, was two or three days, and that’s when we started to hear the early signals that there might be a protest or a series of protests happening in Ottawa, and potentially other locations. Now, I should say that as of January the 15th, there was a change in the public health measures related to covid that affected truckers in the country, affected cross- border traffic, and that change was for truckers that were unvaccinated coming back into the country. They were -- they had been previously exempt and they were now going to be subject to public health measures. And so we were monitoring very closely both the implementation of that measure, as well as the talking to the trucking association and monitoring, because it was clear that at that point in time, despite the very serious record levels of covid we were facing, that Canadians were kind of getting a bit fed up at that point in time with the restrictions, and the measures, and what they were having to deal with. And so that was very much on our minds. We were getting ready for the return of the House of Commons. They had been on a Parliamentary break coming out of the holiday season and the House was due to resume on the 31st of January. And so as we went into what I think others have described as Weekend 1, the weekend starting Friday, the 28th of January, we were monitoring and waiting for the protest that we had understood was going to be arriving. And that’s kind of the context at the very beginning, if that’s helpful.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m happy to add to that.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The first briefing I had with the Prime Minister was an oral briefing on the 30th of January. I think you’ve heard testimony from other Privy Council Office colleagues that there were PCO/PMO briefings that had been going on in week before that there had been daily Ministerial briefings going on starting, I think, on the Thursday before that. So on the Sunday, the 30th, there was a telephone call or oral briefing with the Prime Minister, including members of his staff, other members of the Privy Council Office to basically kind of give him a situation report. At that point in time, it was Sunday, I believe it was evening, and it was pretty clear that the protestors weren’t leaving. So we had a situation in Ottawa and our thoughts were turning immediately to the House return the next day and whether there was any issues we had to be thinking our way through in terms of the safe conduct of Parliamentarians actually accessing the Parliament buildings. As you may recall, Wellington Street was a bit of a challenging area. As the head of the Public Service and responsible for our department, I also had to think about what instructions we were giving to public servants, some of whom were still required to be going into the office about whether we were closing buildings or leaving those open. So that was really the first briefing with the Prime Minister, kind of a situation report, what was happening, giving him information. We were able to tell him that there had been Ministerial briefings, that there was lots of outreach going on by Deputy Ministers across we call it the Town, across Ottawa, across departments and agencies. And so that was -- and I wouldn’t say that we sought any decisions from him at that point in time other than to have a conversation about were we well connected, for example, were the right people talking to Parliamentary officials, to the Sergeant at Arms, the Parliamentary Protective Service. Were they connected up to the -- to law enforcement and security agencies to make sure that, you know, Parliament at the centre of our democracy could function well starting the next day.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Could I just take you back one moment?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
When you referred to other Deputy Minister colleagues, I know that yesterday as well you heard from colleagues from the Department of Finance. And so another big preoccupation as we were kind of starting up our work at the end of January was we were in the beginnings of budget preparation for budget 2022. So the Prime Minister, the Deputy Prime Minister, myself, the Deputy Minister of Finance and our teams, both their -- the political teams and the public service teams were thinking our way through what was going to be the economic strategy for the country at a time when, you know, we had hoped to be through the worst of the economic impacts of COVID and, frankly, we weren’t as a result of the fact that we were kind of facing another wave. So that was also kind of a contextual factor that I think might be helpful and relevant as we get later on into the discussion.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don’t know that I attended every DMOC. I attended some of them, so Deputy Minister Operational Committee, for the acronyms. I know you’ve been through them all now. You’re an expert, actually, I’ve heard. But I don’t think I was at all of them. I would have -- those were chaired by the National Security Intelligence Advisor. I would have been at some key ones or I thought I either needed to give direction or to hear, particularly at certain points in time, but I wasn’t involved in the day to day.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
My first DMOC was, like Mme Drouin’s, the 9th of February.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would say that I was at the meeting of the Cabinet Committee on Safety, Security and Emergencies, the SSE Committee, on the Sunday, the 6th. That’s the only one of the three meetings that you describe that I was at. So I was trying to get a sense -- that was at the end of weekend 2 -- trying to get a sense from Ministers and from my colleagues kind of what the situation was and what the sense was about how this was all going. I got a readout, a debrief, from the Cabinet Committee meeting on the 8th of February from my colleagues who were there, and it was certainly clear to me that the level of concern, anxiety and the situation itself was escalating. And so that was the reason I chose to go to the DMOC meeting on the 9th and to hear out my colleagues in terms of -- and to give direction at that point in time. And it was through the course of that day listening to them and other meetings that took place during that day I’m happy to tell you about if you’d like that I formed the view as we went into the 10th that it was time for me to provide the advice for the Prime Minister to decide to -- as to whether or not he wanted to convene an Incident Response Group meeting.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Of course.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I -- so I don’t know whether Mr. Duheme himself was at the DMOC meeting. I was not speaking to RCMP colleagues or a broad selection of colleagues working in the National Security and Intelligence Public Safety space on the 8th. That really started on the morning of the 9th for me after I heard the readout. So I think maybe the date, if I’m not wrong ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think it might be the 9th.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I certainly was at a meeting at 9 o’clock in the morning -- sorry, 8 o’clock in the morning on the 9th, which was a DMOC, so it’s not unreasonable to think that the Commissioner of the RCMP -- either she was there and brought Mr. Duheme with her or he was attending for her. Either one of those two things is possible, so.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I never had a one-on-one call with Mr. Duheme, so ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- it would have been in the context of a broader meeting. It looks like, from what you have heard, that if PS is, in fact, the Public Safety, there was others there as well. Let’s talk about what the meeting was about. So having heard the readout from the SSE meeting on the 8th -- I should add as well there was a debate in the House of Commons on the 7th of February, if I’m not wrong, on the convoy situation. Parliamentarians, House of Commons, Member of Parliament can trigger a debate if they wish, and I gather the Speaker consented to that and so there was a debate. So there was rising levels of concern. That was obvious. And we heard this from the SSE Committee as well, and so I went to the DMOC meeting which was taking place at 8 o’clock in the morning on the 9th. And my purpose there was really to do a couple of things. I was there to make sure that I was hearing firsthand from Deputy Ministers and agency heads who have responsibilities in this area who had been meeting with the National Security Intelligence Advisor through the days previous to that on their assessment of the situation, and I wanted to provide my direction to them as the senior public servants, that in my view this was a very serious situation, that we had rising levels of questions from federal ministers, who were asking "How is this going to end? What can we do?" And so my commentary at the meeting, I think I was at two DMOCs on this day, as a matter of fact. Certainly at the first meeting at -- in the morning, my objective, my intention was to try to say to my Deputy Minister colleagues, "We have to leave no stone unturned. We have to make sure that we are looking at every power, duty, every authority we have, every resource we have to make we are bringing the full power of the Federal Government and its resources to try to help those who are frontline responsible to manage the situation." I'm not an expert in any of these domains. I would be conveying, like, "we've got to get on this, and we've got to use", like this -- I think you heard the expression this morning, you know, this is an "all hands on deck". I don't know why we use naval references, but all hands on deck situation. And I would've been saying all hands on deck. No idea too crazy. Let's look at absolutely everything. Let's look at every law we have, every resource we have. And including in that, what would it mean, you know, how does law enforcement actually -- well, like, how do the structures work? Who is responsible for what? You know, if it gets beyond the capability of one particular, you know, like a local police force, like the Ottawa Police Service or the RCMP acting in its local capacity, say in Coutts, you know, what happens then? Where does it go from there? Who takes over from that? How does that all work? How does the jurisdiction work? What are the responsibilities work? So this is not a -- my direction to the sense there was any direction was to let's get on this work. We need to get this work done. I think you heard a lot from Ms. Bogden this morning about then what she was doing the whole day long to try and collect up this information. But that would have been my intention. I didn't tell people what to do, I was asking -- we've got to get this work done.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I'm not sure I had reached the conclusion it was time for some federal action. It was certainly ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was certainly the case - --
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was time to consider -- to be ready to respond. I think the other thing is, and cast your mind back to, you know, the public environment at that point in time, this was all happening in Ottawa, a lot of it on Wellington Street. You were looking at the coverage in the media. You were seeing the Parliament buildings behind it. So there was a lot of questions being asked of federal ministers, "What are you doing? What are you doing? What are you doing?" And so certainly, we had the sense coming out of the meeting on the 8th they were impatient to know what they could do, and that was my direction to the town at this meeting is go and figure this out. "What can we do? Be as creative as you can. Really think outside the box."
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So perhaps I can say in addition to that meeting with Deputy Ministers there was another meeting with deputies later in the day. I think if you -- you'll hear from the Prime Minister and ministers next week, but in addition to what the Public Service was doing, and outside of these official kind of Cabinet committee meetings and daily ministerial briefings, the Prime Minister was also speaking to his ministers, either one at a time or in small groups, in more informal conversations, getting his own direct kind of "What's happening? Brief me on this." talking to his own team. He'd been talking to mayors, he'd been talking to other stakeholders. And through the day on the 9th, as he was talking to his ministers, a number of which those interactions I was party to, I'm not always, but a number of those, certainly conversations with the Minister of Public Safety, Minister Mendocino and the Minister of Emergency Management, Preparedness Management, I can never remember, Minister Blair, you could feel that, you know, we were moving to a -- it felt to me like we were moving to a place that we had to be ready in case ministers and the Prime Minister actually wanted to look at what our options to be able to act. And so as the day turned over from nine to ten, I certainly formed the view that I believed it was time for the Prime Minister to convene the Incident Response Group. There was another informal call amongst Prime Minister and ministers that morning, and after that I gave my advice, and the Prime Minister accepted it and chose to have a meeting, an in-person meeting, which was unusual at the time because of course we were still working remotely, but given the stakes of what we were talking about and the nature of the situation we were dealing with, my advice was I thought it would be important to have an in-person meeting, and we did that at an offsite.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I guess I can try. Certainly what I saw, the parts that I will be part of ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- I was part of a Deputy Minister's meeting in the morning. I would have had various conversations, either individually or with -- in small groups with the Privy Council Office, officials, or other Deputy Ministers and senior officials through the course of the day. I may have spoken to, I can't remember exactly, the Prime Minister's Office. I certainly was part of a meeting that the Prime Minister had, as I said, with Ministers Mendicino and Blair, as well as other members of the PCO and the Prime Minister's Office, and I believe their staff. I don't know whether there were any other senior officials from outside of PCO in attendance. There was a second meeting of the Deputy Ministers Operational Committee on the 9th. When I came to work or got up for work on the 10th, I was -- one of the first things I had was a email from Ms. Bogden with their results of her overnight work, not a practice we like to encourage in the PCO, but very dedicated, and came up with, kind of pulled together everything that basically I had -- all the product of the work that I had tasked on the 9th. And we were in the morning of the 10th. There was another informal conversation, and then there was an IRG in the afternoon.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I can't remember whether it was the 9th or the 10th. I -- I'm sorry.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I will defer to Madam Drouin's memory on this one.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We knew that there had been a lot of conversations going on between our colleagues in other departments, at Transport, Public Safety, RCMP, CBSA with their provincial territorial counterparts, in some cases with local and municipal counterparts, there had been meetings going on with the City officials in Ottawa, all around to try and understand the situation. There was this "What could we do?" That was the -- I mean I think, as we were going into, now, the third weekend, we were really feeling kind of a crescendo escalation, although the situation changed from day to day and the sites changed from day to day.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Would it be helpful for me to just -- I don’t know whether you talked about what the Incident Response Group is with Ms. Bogden this morning.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay, I’m happy to do that. So the Incident Response Group is a committee of cabinet. It is usually chaired by the prime minister. Although it can happen without the prime minister, these ones did not. They were all chaired by the prime minister. They include a collection of ministers that are necessary to deal with either a national crisis, an emergency. That could happen in Canada; it could happen outside of Canada but affect either Canadian interests or Canadians. And so I think you did hear testimony this morning, perhaps, from Mr. Hutchinson that the IRGs have been used, for example, with wildfires in British Columbia, for dealing with Hurricane Fiona in Atlantic Canada. It was also used, subsequently, to deal with the illegal invasion of Ukraine by Russia and dealing with Canadian interests and Canadians as a result of that. So it could be a crisis that emerges domestically that affects Canada or a Canadian crisis. It is unlike other cabinet committees, and I think you did talk about this a bit this morning with Ms. Bogden. Cabinet -- the structure of cabinet is cabinet is the decision-making structure. Cabinet committees make recommendations which are ultimately ratified by cabinet. So it's kind of the -- the work gets divvied up amongst cabinet ministers. There’s -- because there’s a lot of decisions that get taken, kind of more thorough deliberation, and then they come to cabinet for final deliberation and decision-making. The Incident Response Group, the IRG, is unlike those other cabinet committees. Because it is about the management of a crisis or an emergency, it has decision-making powers with the prime ministers in the chair.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So that was such a ling explanation, now I’ve forgotten your question. I apologize.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Oh, the IRG can make decisions like, “Okay, we think we need to ask a minister to do something, to make a telephone call, to go on a visit.” They -- it could we need to make sure that these resources are actually being allocated to a particular situation. It could be tasking further work like going away and looking at whether there’s a regulatory authority that needs to be triggered. So it’s anything to do with federal jurisdiction, to use a good term, anything that’s in federal jurisdiction but an existing power, an authority, a resource that could be deployed either to help to resolve the situation or to deal with a Canadian in need.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The only ability to invoke the Emergencies Act -- the decision-maker there is the Governor in Council, so that’s the prime minister in cabinet with the approval of the governor general. And then, of course, there’s an approval process requiring a vote by parliament, and I’m sure we’ll get into that.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
This reminds me of your question, actually. So what did we do ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
What did we do at the IRG on the 10th of February, I think?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The truth, yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I’ll start, perhaps, and then you can add if you want, Madam. So this goes back to the kind of -- Track 1/Track 2 goes back to the conclusions of the IRG meeting on the 10th of February where the prime minister heard from a variety of senior officials on what the situation, their kind of overview of the situation, the treat and risk assessment the NSIA, from agency heads; then he turned to his ministers for their view of the situation, who they’d been speaking to, what was happening, what they thought needed to be done. And coming out of the meeting on the 10th, in the way the conclusions of the meeting and the tasking coming out of that meeting was, there was two tracks of work to be done. Track 1 was everything that could be done within existing authorities, existing jurisdiction; although it may take new resources to do those things, what’s everything that we could do within the existing set of powers, duties, and functions under law? And then Track 2 was, are there new instruments that we might need; are there new legal authorities that we might need? So this looks to me like what we would have tabled -- I think this is true -- this is what we would have tables as a supporting document, an input to the deliberations of the IRG as the results of what had -- the work that had been done since the meeting on the 10th. And so it goes item by item and it describes, well, what was -- what were we doing under Item 1, and a bit more description of it; who was the lead on that, if any supporting departments; what the status of it was; if there were any documents. And if you go to number 3, you’ll see that there are some supporting documents and any other notes. So we were able to, on an ongoing basis, be in a position to provide ministers with an update on all the work that was underway across all the departments across both Track 1 and Track 2.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Was that good?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah, and they’re all of different sizes. I mean “establish a clear leadership table”, that’s a relatively simple thing to do. And you see “daily DMOC schedule”. Some of the others are a lot more complex, complicated, and involve a lot more parties to do.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The tow-truck strategies. There’s a lot about tow trucks.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would say that, again, context matters here. We were the 12th of February and as this track was being put together, we had a situation that was moving very quickly. There was a lot of inputs of information. We had very organized ways to get information through some of the agencies and a lot of that fed in through the National Security Intelligence Advisor, through organizations like the Integrated Terrorism Assessment Centre which operates as part of CSIS. What it felt to us at the time -- and I think, as the time went on, we both found out some things that told us we didn’t have a gap -- some people knew things, it’s just we didn’t have necessarily a way of sharing all the information. So I would say as you read here, the intelligence gap, and it goes on to specify open source, non-criminal, non-terrorist. So we thought we had -- we knew law enforcement was collecting up intelligence, wasn’t necessarily sharing it with us, nor necessarily should they have, because it was operational information. Terrorists, that would have been specific agencies that were collecting that. But it fell to us when it came to open source and that there were things happening, particularly in the offline space and through earned media that perhaps we didn’t really have a full 360-degree view on. And I would comment here that one of my observations is that on the public service side, we don’t tend to be as skilled and as literate -- I'm making a huge generalization here, but stick with me -- we don’t tend to be as skilled or as literate in the use of social media as the team that supports ministers and the prime minister on the political side. That’s very much kind of in their wheelhouse and we don’t tend to do as much of that. And so even going back before convoys and back to kind of through the election and afterwards, I was -- I would find myself on occasion hearing the prime minister's office staff, Ms. Telford and others, talking about things that they were seeing on social media that I just -- I wasn’t seeing and I wasn’t necessarily hearing or picking up. Those wouldn't have been the same places I would get information. They wouldn’t be the normal kind of inputs that I would receive. And so as we sat -- and this is one of the interesting things about the Incident Response Group -- unlike other Cabinet committees, ministers, the prime minister at the table, but senior officials are also at the table able to participate in the conversation. Normally in Cabinet or Cabinet committees, officials are there and we're called on to speak. We don’t kind of participate in the conversation. But given the situation we were faced with, everybody was kind of trying to workshop this together. What could we do? And it became clear in the conversation, which is why you see this in the tracker, that there were -- there was things happening in the open source, in the social media environment that we just didn’t have a very good handle on. And so that was one of the things, like, how could we close that gap? How could we figure that out better? And I think you see products later that we have attempted to actually try to figure this out.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes. We were looking at standalone -- we were looking at authorities under other legislation, standalone legislation that could have been done in the financial area, I think, for example. You may have heard some of that yesterday from the Department of Finance, Mr. Sabia, and the Department of Finance colleagues, or the Emergency Act, which is really a legislation of last resort. So were there other things that could be done, other legislative steps that could have been taken? That’s -- but I'd say that we were trying to do this not so much inventing legislation but trying to understand the nature of the gaps and therefore, what would be the solutions to try to fill those gaps as opposed to kind of think up, you know, new legislative solutions on the spot.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah, exactly.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
In Windsor, you know, we had -- Bridges and Tunnels Act allowed us to actually control or have jurisdiction over the bridge, but the plaza, the roads going into it, well, that’s a bit more complex of a story. So was there a way to look at that piece of critical infrastructure and say, "Okay. This whole trade corridor, the roads leading into it, the plaza, is there a way for us to get jurisdiction over that so that we could manage?" It wasn’t just the blockade, as you recall the film footage on this is fabulous in a not very good way, but it shows you just -- like, it wasn’t just the bridge, right? There was 10 kilometres, sorry, of trucks backed way up. So the problem wasn’t just what was happening on the bridge, it was the entire trade corridor, and the Ambassador Bridge is a pretty important piece of our trade infrastructure.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So maybe we'll do this as a tag team because Madam Drouin was there in March of 2020 and I wasn’t, and then I could kind of pick it back up in February of 2022. Is that okay?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would certainly defer to ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Maybe both. I would defer to Madam Drouin on the early stages of the public health. That certainly, as it came to be February the 9th and we were looking at what could we do, the potential of the Emergency Act, which I'll underline had not been used since 1988 -- also contributed to when I thought about my advice to the prime minister, ministers were actually going to consider options put before them by officials, including the possibility of triggering the Emergency Act. That required an Incident Response Group. Now, you would -- I think you've been hearing in the testimony, you know, this is kind of a careful build up of all the deliberations, but when we were starting to talk about this as one of the potentials, I thought that the prime minister and ministers needed to be sitting in a structured Incident Response Group to understand, to be briefed on and to deliberate on that serious a matter.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay. So the chronology of the 13th. So there was a lot.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was a Sunday. That’s right. Also Day 17, at the end of the third weekend. I think you’ve heard testimony from other colleagues and others about kind of what was going on in terms of the protests, what was happening at -- we had all been, when we weren’t working and on calls, we’d been watching the law enforcement action that had been taking place in Windsor for example. We were watching what was happening on our television screens. But there were calls and meetings that took place that day, which are the focus, I believe, of your question. I don’t recall myself participating in a DMOC that day. I may have. I just can’t remember, to be honest with you. My focus was really on getting ready for the IRG meeting at that point, just given the escalation that had taken place, the fact that we were in -- we were at -- we were coming to the end of the third weekend. I think the IRG was in the afternoon on the 13th, if I recall correctly. So we were getting ready for that, making sure the materials were ready and so on, collecting up all of the latest inputs. We were at the end of the third weekend. Ottawa was still a significant site of what I think was generally considered at that point to be an illegal protest. There -- make no mistake, there were people who were there for a lawful protest, but at that point, the totality of the situation in Ottawa was an illegal protest, an illegal blockade. And what was going on in Windsor. And we saw the size of the effort that was required to bring Windsor under control and the duration of the effort. That took days to de-escalate and to eliminate -- to get to a point where that situation was settled and the port of entry was able to open, but we didn’t know how long it was going to be sustained. So all to say, it was a series set of circumstances. Other ports of entry were kind of on and off. The situation was quite volatile. So at any point in time, there were lots of different inputs. We went into the Incident Response Group in the afternoon of the 13th of February and through conversations that we had had internally, my -- the proposed agenda for the IRG was a bit different than it was on the 10th or the 12th. And if you look carefully at it, you’ll see that we have switched the order of items. The first item is not what you would normally expect as a situational overview and update. Ministers and the Prime Minister had been meeting on the 12th, they’d been meeting on the 10th, they’d been getting this constant feed of information. So the advice of the Prime Minister was to turn, at that point, immediately to -- given we were at the end of the third weekend, we still had a very challenging and I believe the conclusions we had were a dangerous situation, a complex, volatile situation. What were the options. What were the decisions available to Ministers? And then after a long series of deliberations, then there was, is there anything new to add? And so an upside-down flip of the traditional agenda. And the conclusion coming out of that Incident Response Group was the Prime Minister was convening the Cabinet on the evening of the 13th of February, a virtual Cabinet call, luckily we had that secure video capacity to do that, to consult with his Cabinet on the overall response. And at that point, I think I’m allowed to say, of course, including the invocation of the Emergency Act as one of the decisions, the potential decisions to be considered by Cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can you tell me who has written this or who is supposedly speaking at this? Like, what’s at the top of that?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Ten (10:00) o’clock meeting.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
From? Chief Sloly or from?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So OPS. Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So OPS meeting with the OPP Commissioner and the RCMP Commissioner?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s what it looks like. Okay. Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I wasn’t at this meeting. I don’t know how accurate ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- these notes are. And I will tell you for a fact that one of the things that’s written here is not accurate, because at 10:00 o’clock in the morning on the 14th, no decision had been taken about enacting the Emergency Measures Act, which is not the name of the legislation anyways. So with that out of the way, what happened at the IRG and the Cabinet meeting in terms of the materials, the inputs to the deliberations before the Prime Minister and the Cabinet, I think is the essence of your question. And so I would differentiate between how IRGs work and Cabinet. I think I said this a bit earlier. An IRG meeting, it’s really kind of everybody around the table trying to provide a contribution with the Prime Minister in the chair kind of deciding who gets to speak what and running the meeting, as you would expect. And so that’s a bit more of an opportunity for senior officials, including the RCMP Commissioner, to contribute. Whereas Cabinet is a different kind of a meeting. It’s a more structured formal meeting. The Prime Minister runs it. It’s tradition that Ministers speak and officials only speak if they’re called on by the Prime Minister. So a couple of things about this. Commissioner Lucki was a participant in the IRG and she was an attendee, I would say, at Cabinet. She was a participant, as I was a participant, at the IRG. And then an attendee and a secretary at the Cabinet meeting. I think it’s fair to say on the evening of the 13th when these two meetings took place that we had been hearing various versions of the evolution of a plan for the situation in Ottawa, as we had been hearing about law -- at a very high level, not at a detailed tactical or operational level, about the planning around what to do about Coutts, what to do about the situation at Emerson, what to do about the situation at Windsor. And so we’d been hearing about the evolution of the Ottawa plan. We’d been hearing about the conversation around the setting up of an Integrated Command Centre, so that RCMP and OPP resources, along with OPS resources, could be organized and share information and so on. But we’d heard a lot -- we’d heard often about a plan. What we hadn’t seen at the end of the third weekend was anything happening on the plan. And so the plan, which there had been various conversations about the Ottawa plan, there was no -- to the best of my recollection, the Commissioner or did not speak in detail at the IRG about the operational plan, but there were conversations about the fact that police were working together to have a plan, to resolve the situation in Ottawa, as you would expect them to. We had a horrific situation in Ottawa going on. You would expect that law enforcement at all levels were trying to figure out what to do about it. When it came to Cabinet, as I said, it's a different structure. The National Security and Intelligence Advisor provided an integrated brief to the Cabinet, which takes as inputs information that is provided through the colleagues who would be represented, for example, on the DMOC. And that would include the information that would have been fed in by the RCMP, by Transport, by CBSA, by CSIS, by PCO, by Global Affairs across -- again, and then the National Security Intelligence Advisor would provide that integrated view. The RCMP Commissioner, as any agency had a Deputy Minister, as a Minister who's also a member of the Cabinet, and we have obligations as Deputies to make sure when our Ministers are going to a Cabinet meeting, they're briefed, and they have our perspectives. And so my expectation would have been she would have also been briefing her Minister, Minister Mendocino, if she had things that she thought were relevant to the conversation. And so there was no explicit conversation either at the IRG, to the best of my memory, in detail about the plan but there had been many conversations leading up to that, as well as at the Cabinet meeting would have been the integrated view from the National Security Advisor, which has been the practice, I would say, without getting beyond the Cabinet confidence waiver that you have from the Prime Minister. It's fair to say that that has been the practice on other issues on which the Cabinet has been confronted. Situation in Ukraine, for example, the NSIA, the National Security Intelligence Advisor provides an integrated brief to the Cabinet pulling together all the information, so part of it's time management and one integrated brief. I guess the last thing I would say is that Commissioner Lucki, as the head of the RCMP, I recognized as the Clerk of the Privy Council that as the person who was in charge of the RCMP, there might be times when the RCMP Commissioner may have information that she did not want to provide in front of a large room of people, whether that's Ministers or officials, for whatever reason. There's sensitive information. And so I think it's part of my responsibility to make sure the RCMP Commissioner knows that if there's anything that she thinks that I need to know, that she has an open door to me. And also, that if she thought the Prime Minister needed information, that I would facilitate that. And I don't know whether there -- you know, I don't think there's any case in which the RCMP Commissioner has reached out to me to provide information that I have not had a chance to have that engagement with her. So we'll come to the conversation about what would have changed, if anything, if we'd known about it, in my view, just to give you the kind of the Cole's notes version of where we're going, it was one factor, one site, one moment in a complex situation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I'm not sure I would say earth shattering, but that there had been evolutions of the plan with law enforcement with OPP and the RCMP working together with the OPS, but I didn't have a detailed level of -- Cabinet was not provided with any detailed level of knowledge about the contents of that plan, how it was going to work, when it was going to work.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Or how, or what the plan exactly was.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Seven ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can you back up for just one moment, please?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sorry, just to remember -- I want to remember something. Okay. Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Friday.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think in the conversation around the management of the situation including the invocation of the Emergency Act, it's fair to say that Cabinet was briefed that there were tools and authorities in many organizations that had not been fully deployed, including in the RCMP. Think about the situation facing law enforcement on this third weekend. You know, they'd just been through the situation in the RCMP, along with OPP and Windsor Police Service, managing a significant situation in Windsor. They had this very difficult situation in front of them in Ottawa. RCMP was managing Coutts. There was a lot on the plate of law enforcement. It's a very difficult job at the best of times and these were not the best of times and very difficult conditions. And so that our police said that there were existing authorities -- we knew that there were existing authorities that hadn't been fully used. There were trucks parked on Wellington Street. You don't get to park on Wellington Street. So there were authorities that had not been fully deployed. There -- from municipal all the way through to Criminal Code, as the Commissioner indicates here. You would expect that the police were continuing to look at every available tool that they had to be able to deal with the situation. And so I can tell you that, to the best of my memory and my recollection, Cabinet were informed that, yes, there were tools and authorities. Track 1, go back to the tracker, there were Track 1 that hadn't been fully deployed, but the question was whether or not they were going to be adequate to be able to deal with the totality of the situation. That I think was the matter before Ministers.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct. A decision was for the Prime Minister to convene a First Minister's Meetings to consult the provinces and territories on the situation to brief them and to discuss with them the possible invocation of the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Let me make sure I've got this straight, how I explain this. Cabinet was aware that CSIS had not assessed a threat to the security of Canada necessary to trigger their authorities under the CSIS Act. To the best of my knowledge to this day thee was no CSIS investigation of the protest, which is what section 2 of the CSIS Act is about. It is about triggering CSIS to use their authorities. They see a threat to national security by a person or a group that would cause them to seek a mandate to actually launch intelligence gathering activities.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That was not the case.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The CSIS assessment and theat legal assessment was before Cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I can tell you absolutely that that was put before Cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And that was discussed. In all of these matters it was a balance, you know? When was the right time to act? What was the right thing to do? Was it too early? Was it too late? Was it too little? Was it too much? And so one of the things that Cabinet had to debate was amongst all of the actions to be taken, what was the possibility that there was going to be a reaction on the part of those who were engaged in the protest activity who were not there for legal purposes, who were not there for peaceful protests, who had other motives? So Cabinet very much had to be briefed and they were briefed by, and they had access to the information from CSIS from us.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I believe there may have been other conversations that happened that night between the Prime Minister and his Parliamentary caucus, but we, the public service is not part of that. So there we go. Sometime between the evening of the 6th and the morning of the 7th my colleagues in the Intergovernmental Affairs team and the Privy Council Office which is led by Deputy Minister Michael Vandergrift would have sent a message out to the offices of provincial and territorial leaders that the Prime Minister was convening a teleconference of provincial and territorial leaders. I think it was taking place at 10 o'clock in the morning which is a little bit early if you're in British Columbia, I suspect. But the objective was -- I’m not even sure that the subject matter was communicated. I think it was an FPT conference call. I don’t actually remember whether that happened late in the night of the 13th or whether that happened in the morning of the 14th, but sometime between those things. As well, I have come to understand as a result of reading the institutional report of the Prime Minister’s Office, there was other conversations going on between the Prime Minister’s Office and the office of other premiers across the country. So it could have been, but they got a heads up earlier. I don’t know the answer to that. But the official communication around convening this call happened sometime between when Cabinet concluded on the 13th, and 10 o'clock the next morning. I don’t think it was a lot of notice, that’s fair to say.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It’s fair to say there had been a lot of FPT leaders’ meetings, First Ministers meetings, going on through COVID, unprecedented. I would argue a number of FMM meetings had been going on since the beginning of COVID. But this was not of the same ilk.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Perhaps.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe it was 10 o’clock in the morning.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay. Another action- packed day. So my notes remind me that there was the First Ministers meeting. There was an Incident Response Group meeting, again on the 14th. The Privy Council Office was busy working, following the First Ministers meeting to pull together a decision note for the Prime Minister in terms of whether or not to actually proceed to invoke the Emergency Act. That all culminated in the mid-afternoon sometime after three o’clock, so collecting up inputs to be able to pull that together. And then the Prime Minister and I believe other ministers together made a public announcement that they were proceeding to invoke the Emergency Act. Meanwhile, kind of in the situation that was still evolving, that morning we had seen the RCMP taking action in Coutts, Alberta, the port of entry at the southern of Alberta. Coutts has never been so famous. We had been advised by the Commissioner of the RCMP at IRG meetings previous to that that without getting into detail, there was reason to believe that there were weapons at Coutts. But when -- after the First Ministers meeting and before the invocation, my decision note to the Prime Minister were finalized. Actually, it might have been even before the IRG, before the FMM. We were seeing the results of the law enforcement activity and what was happening at Coutts and we were seeing the size of the stash of firearms and ammunition that were found in Coutts amongst the protesters. So this was new and I would say relevant information in terms of just the nature of the threat that we were worried about in terms of the risk for serious violence. So FMM, IRG, the invocation decision, I signed the notes to the prime minister representing the culmination of the advice to the prime minister. That was communicated to him. He responded to me and indicated that he was approving the invocation and the news conference was held. The prime minister made that announcement publicly and, at the same time, kind of behind the scenes, I think it’s fair to say, you would have seen kind of gears shifting. The public service was trying to be ready without getting ahead of the prime minister, the cabinet, or the Governor in Council because if we were going to -- if the Governor in Council was going to choose to invoke the Emergencies Act, there was need to be able to move quickly. So we were moving from -- like, this is a matter of days. The 10th and the 12th, we were still in Track 1/Track 2 option, this option that, “Could we find tow-truck driver in the public service?” to, you know, the evening of the 13th, “We might be invoking the -- the Governor in Council might be invoking the Emergencies Act. Who’s going to do what? What’s it going to mean?” And so we were starting to shift those gears while not, as I said, getting ahead of the Governor in Council, so that if the decision was taken, all of the organizations would understand, okay, what would it mean for them? And I think if you -- as an example, if you look in the notes that we saw from Commission Lucki earlier, you’ll see that she was feeding into, “Okay, if the Emergencies Act is invoked, here are some of the things that could be done as a result of that.” So the public service behind the scenes -- the agencies, the departments -- were trying to be ready in the event that it was invoked because we knew we wanted to be able to move quickly. This was a crisis. This was an urgent situation -- to be able to use whatever powers and authorities were going to be given through the Act and the orders pursuant to the invocation of the Act because we knew were in a -- it was urgent. We had time-limited, targeted powers here; how do you move very quickly? And so that was kind of going on behind the scenes. So as the prime minister then made the public announcement, I would say the public service shifted to, “Okay, so now we’re in the business of invoking the Act and here’s what we have to do to make that happen.” At the same time, we talked about -- a little bit about the FMM. I suspect you may want to come back to that; I don’t know. But officials continued to talk to their provincial and territorial counterparts including the Deputy Minister of Intergovernmental Affairs with his colleagues. Madam Drouin, I think participated in some of those calls. It was happening by what I would describe as “sector deputies” kind of talking to their counterparts, “Here’s what this is going to mean. Here’s what” -- and to maintain that kind of open back-and-forth communication as the invocation was being announced and we were moving into kind of that new phase of -- with the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It’s quite possible.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Or miswriting down on my little calendar here. It may be that there’s no 14th and we may have gone from 13th pre-cabinet to the 15th because the 14th was decision day. That’s quite possible.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sorry.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct, yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
A regular cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
M’hm.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sorry, I advise, the prime minister decides, and then the Act is invoked.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m kind of fussy about that stuff, so.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I signed this memo some time, as I said, after three o’clock in the afternoon of the 14th. I remember that because we had been -- there was some -- there was some importance to try and get this moving. Once it looked like that’s the direction things were going to be moving in, we wanted to be able to move quickly. And the prime minister -- he will tell you his own story about this -- he was eager to make the decision and to move forward. So we were -- were moving on. We were trying to move quickly. The actual memorandum, which goes to many pages and has tabs associated with it, was being worked on and pieces were being pulled together even as we came out of cabinet the night of the 13th and through the day on the 14th, and pieces being added to it. The -- kind of the conclusions of the FMM, for example, there’s a paragraph in this decision note. This is the kind of decision note we would send to the prime minister -- I would send to the prime minister kind of capturing all that we thought was necessary, pulling it all together in one spot, the culmination, as I would describe it, of the public service advice to the prime minister on the decision as to whether or not to invoke this legislation. And so just around -- some time after three o’clock in the afternoon -- I think there’s a timestamp somewhere about when my office would have sent it to the prime minister. And then we got a sign, which is how the prime minister indicates his decision. We got a -- an initialed copy back with an “okay” and, following that, the press conference started.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There we go.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Minus ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So 3:41.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So Jeremy Adler was my chief of staff. The address is ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- PCO-PMO. So Jeremy, as part of his role at the time, was responsible for, when a decision note finalized, he would transmit that to the Prime Minister’s Office and then the -- kind of the catcher’s mitt on the other side is a combination of officials in the Prime Minister’s Office, including his -- I see there his -- the head of his executive office, somebody from the policy team, two members of the office of the chief of staff, and the head of the policy team.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah, it’s from my ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s right.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We were operating virtually at this time. Today, it would be a paper version of that note which I would physically sign, and them my chief of staff would transmit that.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We call that “the decision box”, so.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct. A kind of totality.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I am not a lawyer.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I will give you my laymen’s interpretation. But Wellington Street is a main thoroughfare. It happens to be right outside my office. Large trucks being parked on Wellington Street over protracted periods of time, I think, you know, Ottawa’s a -- I think it’s been described as a protest city. Protests happen in Ottawa. It is the seat of government. People come to Ottawa if they want to lawfully protest. And so I think there was -- you know, there was - - we don’t manage those kinds of regular protests, lawful protests. Those are local authorities that do that. By the time we had gotten to Sunday night and it was very clear, the RCMP gave us advice at that point in time that the best of her information, at a minimum, the protestors weren’t going anywhere that week, although numbers did go up and down a little bit. Even if you could kind of ignore the fact that there were, from the minute those trucks parked in the middle of Wellington Street, let’s say they were allowed to do that, let’s say that they were sent there, or allowed to park there, there’s a point at which the protracted existence or parking of those trucks and the activities going on in those trucks represented illegal activity. And I think as we got to the end of the first weekend, a reasonable person would say that we had entered -- we had gone beyond a legal protest and we were into an illegal protest, which isn’t to say that everybody involved was involved in an illegal activity. There was illegal activity, including things like by-law violations. There may still well have been people who were there to peacefully protest. But there was a level of illegal activity going on in Ottawa, I would say, laymen’s view, at a minimum, some would say from the get go, but I would say at th end of the first weekend it's reasonable. My assessment would have been it had become an illegal protest, an occupation almost. That’s what it felt like and was being described by the citizens of Ottawa.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I think you’ve heard others in the Privy Council Office describe us as kind of the place that brings all of the information together, and I think you will have -- there was a discussion yesterday with the National Security Intelligence Advisor about, “I need information for Janice.” So this memo was being pulled together for me to give my final advice to the Prime Minister about the decision to invoke the Act, and there were inputs coming over -- coming from all different parts of PCO reaching out to their networks. And so when we got to this point, it would have been, I think, reasonable to expect that we would have been able to include, as part of the package going to the Prime Minister, here’s a threat and risk assessment that was not able to be -- that was not ready by the time that this memo was being sent. And so the line: “A more detailed threat assessment is being provided under separate cover.” We have looked to see whether or not -- we’ve done -- gone back and search all our records, was this provided under separate cover, did it follow? We’ve not been able to find that. To the best of my knowledge, there was no written detailed threat assessment provided under separate cover. I can tell you that at every IRG meeting that followed, including starting the 15th of February, threat assessments were being provided to the Prime Minister and Ministers as regular part of the IRG proceedings. So there’s no missing note, to the best of my knowledge.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think we hoped for it, but it was not -- to the best of my knowledge, the best of our records, we don’t have a detailed threat assessment written that was provided to the Prime Minister under separate cover.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I guess there’s two parts, I would say, to this. First is there was an assurance of confidentiality in the conversation that happened at the First Ministers Meeting. A number of Provincial Premiers and/or political leaders made public statements afterwards as to their position. So to be honest with you, I can’t remember who was public and who was not. So I’m just -- I don’t want to go too too far in terms of saying who said what around the table. It’s fair to say the Premier of Ontario was public. Other premiers were public in terms of their opposition. That’s pretty clear. But I just -- Newfoundland and Labrador, British Columbia, I think I know the answer to that, I just don’t want to betray any confidences. Maybe Madam Drouin?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah. I think hindsight is 20/20. The prime minister had been leading the First Minister's conversation that morning. I had been participating and others had been participating, and I may not have spent enough time focused on these words myself to make sure they were perfect. There was a lot going on in a short period of time. We were working virtually, and so this is on me if it's not sufficiently clear.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It's true though, the premier of Ontario, when we think about it through the lens of sheer numbers, probably the biggest impact was the combination of what was happening in Windsor and Ottawa, Blue Water, Sarnia, all those ports of entry, slow rolls in and around Pearson, Risk the Rail. Like, that was a very big hotspot. It is also fair to say that Newfoundland and Labrador probably didn’t feel the same way. You're absolutely correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I have a -- looking at the Emergency Act, and I had received a range of advice in terms of the conduct of the First Minister's meeting and what the threshold was. The requirement in the Emergency Act is for consultation, and there had been a consultation with the provincial and territorial leaders through this First Minister's meeting, and that, in my view, met the requirement for consultation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
This sentence does not encompass all of the activity that had been going on, and so read on its face, my advice here was the FMM met the requirement for consultation. It does not reflect the fact that there had been a lot of consultation going on between officials, between ministers, and given to understand between political officials. I'm not sure it's fair to say though that all of that consultation through all of this was focused on the invocation of the Emergency Act. The First Minister's meeting when the prime minister spoke to the leaders of the provinces and territories and talked to them about the situation, the considerations around the invocation, that for me was the culmination of the consultation with provinces and territories on the invocation of the Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Also, it's fair to say, which is not -- and you go on to read here -- that it wasn’t the end. The prime minister committed to sending a letter out to first ministers which would set out in writing more clearly the assessment of the underlying risks and the measures to be taken to respond, and he left the door open, both to himself, to his minister of intergovernmental affairs, as well as to his officials or any other minister who wanted to engage, who premiers may have wanted to engage with in terms of input around the evolving situation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s right. But it does speak to, I think, recognizing that that culmination of the -- I mean, the decision to move to the First Minister's meeting to consult an invocation had only happened the night before, so nothing that happened before that really was about the invocation of the Act. The call was about the invocation of the Act and therefore, if there were questions, I mean, it was not a lot of notice, the topic wasn’t clear, left the door open if there were further views.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Where are you? Yeah, I see it now.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I see it now, yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So maybe I'll try and take that in pieces, and if I miss any, come back to me. So I think I mentioned earlier that IRG meetings on the -- now I'm getting confused in my dates -- the 10th and the 12th, the RCMP commissioner had mentioned in her situational update when she touched on activities across the country, she mentioned that there was the possibility of there were weapons at Coutts. And she certainly left us with the impression both in the IRGs but as well in the parallel meetings that are going on with deputies that the situation at Coutts was more complex, so why couldn't we solve Coutts, why couldn't we solve Coutts? It looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed; looked like it was getting fixed, then it was not getting fixed; looked like it was getting fixed, not. And so earlier in the day, we had seen in the media the RCMP having made these arrests, 11 people, and there being weapons in the protest, I can only speak for myself in terms of what my expectations were. The quantity of weapons and ammunition that was discovered by the RCMP in conducting that law enforcement activity was more than I would have expected. So that, to me, indicated a seriousness and a scale of the illegal activity that was either contemplated at Coutts or people were ready to engage in at Coutts or ready to do at Coutts that was beyond what my prior expectations, based on not a lot of information other than there were weapons. I think the second part of your question, if I remember correctly, is related to the movement, the comment about a movement. I think that what we knew at the time, what we suspected at the time was that there was some degree of organization and coordination going on between what I would describe as kind of cells of protest activity going on across the country, but it did not look like a homogeneous, this was one central plan or anything like that. It did look like there was communication. We could see it happening, even to the extent that we could follow it in the social media and in some of the open source -- open media commentary that was going on. It looked like there were connections between the individuals that were involved, but I wouldn't say that this movement, beyond what's described here in terms of what was happening in Coutts, was one holistic everybody in the country all joined together in one big thing.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And there did seem to be different objectives or maybe I could use the term motivations. Maybe that’s not the right word, but different objectives. Some people were coming to protest because they were opposed to the public health measures, which governments at many levels had put into place, vaccination mandates, masking mandates, social restrictions. There were some that were coming to protest because they had more -- they had different objectives. There was talk about overthrowing the government and installing a different government with a governor general and that this new government would pass different rules in terms of public health or other rules. So there was definitely an anti-public health measures, there was some people who just came because there was a protest and they wanted to join and they wanted to say they were opposed to things the government was doing, but there was this other element, and we couldn't just write it off. We had to take that seriously as well.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe that's true.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Incorporated by reference from the Emergency Act, which cross-references to the CSIS Act. Those four bullets are, I believe, in Section 2 of the CSIS Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So the Emergency Act had not been used in the 34 years since it had been promulgated, and so we were using it for the first time in the case of a public order emergency situation across the country. You see the kind of deductive reasoning. I think we go on to explain a bit more of the rationale and the evidence that I relied upon to provide my advice to the Prime Minister. But the conclusion may be vulnerable to challenge, i.e., we could face legal action, judicial review and other challenges by those who don't agree with our interpretation of the statute, and we have since see litigation coming on exactly this matter.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
My view was that it met the tests. Others may not share my view.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Not by me.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Not by me.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That's a good way to put it.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah, that's a good way to put it.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Uncertainty that others will share my view.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There may be uncertainty that others will share that view.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
M'hm.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right. So we had seen, as you indicated, the Alberta legislation, we had seen the state of emergency locally in Ottawa and Windsor. The province of Ontario had moved forward with emergency legislation of its own. And we had -- if you remember back to the long time ago, the Track 1 work, the Sectoral Deputies were trying to work with their provincial and territorial colleagues to see whether or not if we saw some power that was possible under some provincial legislation, could other provinces or territories pick that up and use that in their jurisdiction. By the time this memo was written on the 14th of February, the view that I came to was that whether there were still authorities that had not been fully used, that the situation overall was a national emergency, it was urgent, it was critical. There was the threat of serious violence that put at risk the lives, the health and safety, the security of Canadians, our economic fortunes. And that taken together, that was beyond the capacity of any individual province or territory to deal with. We were seeing this on a national scale and breakouts or incidents from coast to coast to coast, including, you know, cross-border traffic even between I think it was Alberta and one of the territories. This was a situation which had been escalating. I think we were on day 18 of what was happening in Ottawa. This was a scale, this was an escalation, this was a series of volatility. It didn't seem that there was any province or territory that had the power to deal with this uniquely on their own. That there may have been individual agencies that could have dealt with a piece of it. There were individual sites that could have been dealt with through specific tools. There were -- potentially there were individual threats that could have been dealt with by one agency or actor or another. But if you look at the totality of it all, that's what lies behind this advice.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I am.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I'm going to give you the layman's interpretation ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- and my colleague may have things to add, being more skilled in the dark arts of the law. Section 2 of the CSIS Act is about CSIS being able to exercise its authorities to launch intelligence gathering activities against a person or group because they represent a threat to the security of Canada. The decision maker there is CSIS. They judge the nature of the threat and they recommend the activity be taken. Now let's go over to the Emergency Act. The decision maker in the Emergency Act is not CSIS. There’s nothing in section 16 which says the Governor in Council, who is the decisionmaker who’s being asked to make the decision, has to ask CSIS if it’s okay. The Governor in Council is asked to assess whether, on reasonable grounds, there is a -- I want to make sure I’ve got my words right here. That there are reasonable grounds to think there is an urgent, critical national situation where the health, safety of Canadians, their lives, their livelihoods, the national security of the country is at threat of serious violence. That goes back to the CSIS definition, the threat to the security of Canada. Look under, I think it is -- this is dangerous -- at 2(c) of the CSIS Act we rely on. It is either serious violence or the threat of serious violence. And so the Governor in Council is asked to see if they have reasonable grounds to believe that there is all of the other criteria, urgent, critical, national beyond the scope of an individual province or territory to deal with that is of a nature that would be a threat to national security, which is the threat or existence of serious violence. So the Governor in Council’s asked to make that and, in my view, given the totality of the evidence that we’d seen about the fact that we had protests happening Ottawa, Windsor, Coutts, Emerson, Manitoba. We talked about we had probably a dozen of other ports of entry. We’d had risks of -- and threats of blockades of railways, of slow rolls around airports disturbing that and other critical infrastructure. We had the nature of activity including we had had reported to us that there were IMVE, Ideologically Motivated Violent Extremists, individuals who were seen amongst the protest activities, that there was the risk that they or lone actors inspired by them could -- there was the threat from them that they could move to serious violence. We had evidence through both what was being said and in online of incredibly violent rhetoric, of hate speech, antisemitic, anti-gay, transphobia, misogynistic, death threats. Death threats to elected officials, to senior officials, some of which we didn’t even know at the time. We found out afterwards were even worse than we had known at the time of this note being written. We had the threat of weapons, which we had heard about before the 14th and then we’d seen at Coutts and the size of that cache of weapons and ammunition. We’d heard that there were kids and vulnerable people in the -- in some of the trucks that perhaps were being used to try and keep law enforcement away. All of that and we had a sense that this wasn’t a single headed hydra. This was a -- there was a sense that there was organization, there was coordination, there was a degree of coordination, I think, amongst this set of activities that was very well financed. And so not only did we have what we had, but we had the risk of -- and we’d seen this kind of. It would peter out and then it would escalate and peter out and escalate. But if you look over the trend, since the beginning of the protests arriving on that beautiful day on Ottawa on the 28th of January, we had seen a trend of it getting worse and escalating and escalating. Taking together the culmination of all of that, it was my -- it was my view that we met the test of the definition in the CSIS Act that was -- that was to be put before the Governor in Council to make a decision on reasonable grounds as to whether or not there was a national emergency that met the threat of -- threat to the security of Canada involving the risk -- a threat of serious violence to people’s lives, to their health and safety, to their security.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The word “threats” -- the word “threat” here, I think, is used in many different ways. There was no specific site. There’s no specific event. There’s no specific actor, as you said, a bomb threat, an event like, God help us, January 6th kind of an event. There was a series of indicators which, in our view, were the threats of serious violence for all the reasons that I think Mme Drouin and I have tried to explain, individual IMVE extremists who were seen in the crowd, targets, subjects of interest to agencies. So it’s the combination of all of these things and the escalation of all these things which, taken together, were enough for me in my advice to the Prime Minister relying, as I do, in everything I do, on the inputs from the community of Deputy Ministers, the product of my interactions with my PCO colleagues and almost 40 years of experience now as a public servant, that, together, represented my list.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can I try the inverse of that? CSIS does use section 2 of the CSIS Act to trigger the gathering of intelligence about a person or group of people that they think are national security risk. We don’t trigger the Emergency Act every time CSIS triggers section 2 of the CSIS Act. So there’s a definition in the CSIS Act. It isn’t necessarily the fact that -- CSIS is not the decisionmaker in the invocation of the Emergency Act. That’s a separate process by the Governor in Council which relies on the definition that has a different construct. That’s the total layman’s attempt.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was a collective effort.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Right. There was not a lot of time between -- I think we had seven days on the legislation to actual produce and table this document, and it was tabled two days after the invocation because we were trying to move it as expeditiously as possible. So it was a team product. But ultimately I think it’s fair to say PCO would have been involved as the pen holder.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
For correction of our grammar or ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So in my -- to my way of thinking about this, here was the -- what was necessary to meet the threshold. There were other considerations. The term “national interest” for me takes a step back and says, “Okay, so what is in the national interest of the country?” So safety, security, ability to protect lives. That’s core to national interest. But also what’s core to national interest is economic viability, the ability to maintain an economy, to have jobs, to have businesses operating so that people have a livelihood so they can earn an income to support themselves and their families. So the economic risk, particularly at a time -- and I think I tried to set the seed for this when I was talking about the fact that we were just starting budget deliberations as this was all happening. I think Mr. Sabia spoke of other relevant considerations related to the United States potential legislation that was being deliberated at the time which had big impacts on Canada and our competitiveness, our ability to continue to attract investment. So when I think about national interest, our economic security is actually part of that. And that is about the ability to maintain and operate secure borders to see to the free movement of people, goods, and services, across our borders. We do $2 billion of trade a day between Canada and the United States, the single most integrated, I think, economy in the world. And that was being put at risk. You know, foods, medicines, fuel, supplies, at a time when supply chains were already pretty fragile as a result of two plus years of -- almost two years of COVID. So we were kind of shaky. And this was putting that at risk with big border points. If you look at the Ambassador Bridge, Emerson, and Coutts, just those three, that adds up to about $500 million a day and we do about $2 billion a day in trade between the two countries. So it’s a big number. It’s about a quarter of the trade that was impacted, just those three sites. So economic security in terms of being able to access those things, our ability to be a trusted trading partner. So as I said, we were an export -- we are -- Canada is an export dependent economy and we are in the business of trying to attract investment to be able to open new businesses, expand businesses here. There was lots of conversations going on about trying to attract big company names to locate in Canada. That's about jobs; that’s an important part of our national interest is being able to do that. And investors don’t like uncertainty. They don’t like volatility. They like the rule of law. They like stability. They like predictability and this whole situation was putting that at risk. And I guess finally -- which is a little less on the economic but I think also reflected in this section 58 piece that was put before Parliament, is -- are Canada’s international reputation -- we are a G-7 country. We are committed to the rule of law. And what was being seen in some other parts of the world were protests. I think we saw them at a minimum in France, in the Netherlands, in New Zealand if I remember my media coverage right, with trucks with Canadian flags on them. The Prime Minister was getting questions from international leaders about just what was going on in Canada. So the culmination of all of things are about our national interest. And so in pulling together the section 58, it was about a threshold but it was also about the other factors that went into the deliberations around the invocation of the Act. And if I could, while I’m talking about section 58, just for a minute -- I mean, part of -- because we kind of got out of the invocation memo. Part of what I relied upon in my advice around the -- the advice to invoke the Act, was the nature of the Emergency Act itself, temporarily time limited targeted measures that would supplement provincial and territorial and not displace, that were compliant with the Charter. So it was not just about invoking the Act. It was what Act was allowing governments to authorize to have happen. So it was about the nature of those measures but also the accountability framework that it built into the Emergency Act that had not been used before, including things like tabling before Parliament, a justification on why the Act was invoked, an explanation about the consultation with provinces and territories, a requirement for a vote to be held in the House of Commons to approve -- and the Senate. We know the Senate vote didn’t happen because the Act was revoked. But the House of Commons approved the invocation of the Emergency Act. There was a process to establish a joint House Senate committee. There’s this process, a commission of inquiry around what happened, and transparency around what happened. There’s a very robust accountability framework. So the test was met. Here’s my -- I had a level of comfort in terms of the nature of the measures, as extraordinary as they were, as last resort as they were; and an accountability just to complete the pod.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Well, I think you heard about this from the National Security and Intelligence Advisor yesterday. There’s a legal threshold but there’s also a policy context within which the Emergency Act was existing. So we were looking at a range of factors including trust and confidence in our institutions, institutions like law enforcement, institutions like government to actually be able to resolve the situation. And we were seeing a level of public unrest in the country where citizens were thinking about taking matters into their own hands. People were doing counter protests. They were going to the Billings Bridge infamous counter protest to try and show that they were not supportive. This is a pretty risky -- this is a volatile risky situation. So I think there’s a legal threshold with all of the additions that Mme Drouin made, brought our police context around all of this.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So the discussion about when was the to revoke the Emergency Act started relatively quickly after it had been invoked. The threshold was was it necessary to deal with the situation, the totality of the situation facing us? We started to see the impact. We saw Windsor holding, Coutts was holding. Now, we started to see popups in other parts of the country, but one of the biggest situations we were looking at was the situation in Ottawa. We were going into the fourth weekend. There were daily IRGs happening, starting on the 15th, thank you for correcting me about the 14th, starting on the 15th, where there was a daily sense of what's happening, what measures are being used? What else -- it wasn't just like the Emergency Act was invoked and then everything else went out the window. What else can and should we be doing to try to help to address and resolve the situation. And day-by-day ministers and officials were looking at whether or not the situation that -- the sum total of the situation still was of a size and a criticality that we needed to continue. Now, the early days, it's fair to say, we were mostly focussed on implementation of the Act after invocation and who was doing what and how -- what affect it was having. But I would say as we saw the law enforcement activity really starting to take hold in Ottawa on the fourth weekend, the days of the 18th, 19th, more pointy questions were coming back from the Prime Minister and from ministers, "How much longer do we need the Emergency Act?" It had been made -- I think the view with the invocation is no longer than necessary, and if we could get -- move out of is as quickly as possible. And so we started to work on, okay, so what were the criteria for invocation, what are the criteria for revocation. I believe you had some discussion with Mr. Hutchinson, in particular, about that earlier in the day, maybe with Ms. Bogden as well, but there started to be deliberate conversations at the Incident Response Group around were we in a position to revoke, were we in a position to revoke, and finally, that culminated in a discussion that took place on the 23rd of February at the Incident Response Group in which the Prime Minister asked everyone in attendance were you ready to revoke the Act. And following that, I -- he had taken his counsel from his ministers and officials. Again, the group production of a note was done. That was provided to the Prime Minister. He chose at that point -- the decision was to proceed to a revocation, and that was advanced on the 23rd.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Indicators.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Indicators.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I did.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, I don't think so.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can I go back to revocation for just a moment, then?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think when we arrived at the 23rd of February, it wasn't like it was peace and calm across the land, totally, but the assessment, which is represented in this note, is that we had arrived at a point where the Emergency Act was no longer necessary. It was extra extraordinary powers that came with the Emergency Act were no longer necessary, that we could rely on the existing tools, resources and authorities to be able to deal with to the degree that there was any illegal activity going on. But also, we knew, as the protest was being taken down, the blockade was being taken down, occupation in Ottawa, that some trucks were going to other sites. They were going to Vankleek Hill, amongst other places. And maybe there was other activity going on, but it wasn't of a scale, of an intensity, with the threat of serious violence that we faced at the time of the invocation of the Act. So it's not like everything was "unicorns and rainbows" is my expression, but probably not appropriate here. We had not arrived at -- we -- there were still -- there was still a level of activity, including some lawful protest activity, which is reflected in this note, there was still some level of illegality going that we were confident at that point that could be dealt with through -- without the extraordinary measures of the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, that’s not the case. The -- it goes through the Privy Council Office ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- before it will be put in front of a Cabinet Minister.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Not my office -- not the Clerk’s office necessarily, the totality of the Privy Council Office. We have a Cabinet Paper’s Unit, that in particular deals with documentation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That’s correct, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is not correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There was a document made available to Ministers, I believe I referred to it earlier, which had to do with an input, I believe I can say this, I’m making sure I can say this. It was an assessment from the -- from CSIS which related to considerations on invoking the Emergency Act. But there was no -- in the usual course of decision-making by Cabinet, we would -- Ministers would be considering a memorandum to Cabinet, which would frame a decision for them, there was no such memorandum to Cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Does that help?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was an unusual Cabinet, an extraordinary Cabinet called on the evening of the 13th of February.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I did, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The decision was that the Prime Minister would convene a meeting with First Ministers to consider the invocation of the Emergency Act, and to brief them on the situation, and consider any other measures necessary to deal with the totality of the situation facing the country.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sure.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah, I -- as I said earlier, Mr. McAdam, I wasn’t totally sure, I can check and be happy to, ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- whether it went out Sunday evening or fairly early Monday morning. I think we would’ve endeavoured to try and get it out as soon as possible, after Cabinet, so that would’ve been -- Cabinet was at 8:30, you know, we would’ve been into probably 10 o’clock Ottawa time, which is still pretty early in Saskatchewan.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe between Madame Drouin and myself, that was the information that we provided earlier, yes sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
What I said was a number of Premiers shared their responses. I wasn’t in a position to tell you because the deliberations were to be confidential, but we saw subsequently a number of Premiers making public comments that they had made at the First Ministers meeting. Yes, it’s fair to say, I believe Madame Drouin said, there were kind of three groups -- three kind of general groups of Premiers’ reactions, including some that did raise objections.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think that’s -- plus or minus, yes, I think that’s probably correct, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And then if I could add to that? Because of the fact that there was no -- you know, this was called at the -- at quite the last minute, there was -- part of the meeting was briefing. So the Prime Minister was -- it was suggested to him, and he certainly accepted, that the meeting would go as long as the meeting wanted, depending on the wishes of Premiers -- Premiers and territorial leaders.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe so, yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m -- I don’t know that I caught every moment of her testimony, so whether exactly that’s what she said or not I wouldn’t want to say, but I do believe that she was, like many across the Privy Council Office, working to gather inputs for the invocation note.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, Mr. McAdam, that would not be an accurate description. I would ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- say to you, sir, that part of our job in the Public Service, and people who work for me, is to get ready. And so I can tell you that I turned my mind -- and I was the advisor here -- to the advice to the Prime Minister as to whether or not invoke, not at 11:44. There were a number of people, including Ms. Thomas, and others in the Privy Council Office, who were contributing to this decision note, which came to me for my consideration. And as you saw, I signed off on my advice -- I believe we talked about it earlier -- sometime about 3 o’clock in the afternoon. So, yes, work was underway, but I had not turned my mind to the conclusion of my advice.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
My understanding of what was required in the situation. That’s my job.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I knew that there was a possibility of a media availability in the afternoon.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I can’t remember the exact time, Mr. McAdam. I apologize. But it was before the media avail.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay, that’s fair. I don’t know exactly what time the media avail started. There may have been a scheduling -- it may have been a notice that there was going to be an availability. But I don’t know actually what time it started. I’m sure the records would indicate that. But they don’t always run 100 percent on time.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Was being invoked.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
When the Governor-in- Council approved the proclamation ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- which was ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, no, no. It was on the 14th. And you'll see that in the Canada Gazette, the 14th of February.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There was not a loop back to Cabinet in an official Cabinet meeting.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
But -- do you want to say something, sir?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah. The decision in terms of invocation was left with the -- was left ad referendum to the decision of the Prime Minister following his consultation with the leaders of the provinces and territories amongst other deliberations that he might undertake.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don’t know, I was kind of looking forward to that again.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Mr. McAdam, can I just correct you? This is not a memorandum to Cabinet. This is a decision note to the Prime Minister, just to be clear, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I wouldn’t say that there was a concern that provinces and territories were not using all of the authorities available to them. I think it was an observation going back earlier in the deliberations around whether or not there was still some scope to work with provinces and territories using their existing authorities to do more to deal with the protest, separate, aside. In terms of the language here, I believe -- again, my layman’s interpretation -- is that the -- what we’re trying to get at in the invocation of the Emergency Act is tht the powers in the Emergency Act are put in place to dela with the situation which is a threat of serious violence, all of those other criteria that you see there, that can’t be dealt with by any province or territory acting individually, uniquely, perhaps properly worded.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No. I think -- sorry, Mr. McAdam, I don’t believe that was the intention of this language. It was meant to say that the provinces and territories could not deal with the situation on their own, and that is why the Governor-in-Council would invoke the Emergency Act to deal with the situation which provides extraordinary powers which supplement those powers and authorities of provinces and territories to deal with the situation which we, as you see here, we think, met the test of a national emergency.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I do not believe that that is the requirement in the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is not, I believe, the requirement in the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don’t believe that is a fair representation, Mr. McAdam. I think it’s fair to say that there was a First Ministers meeting in which the Prime Minister and his ministers -- there are a number of them who were in attendance -- set out the situation, set out the proposed course of action, listened and asked questions of provincial and territorial leaders about whether they had plans, intentions, ideas, suggestions, proposals, about other things that could be done to address the situation. So it’s not -- I think you're mischaracterizing it, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe Mme Drouin said the prairie provinces and the Province of Quebec, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The Governor-in-Council, the Government of Canada chose to invoke the Act. That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I oversee that process.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don’t personally, necessarily, arrange every single meeting, every single agenda. I have a team that works with me on these things. But yes, you are correct to say agendas and attendance. The agenda, I would say, just -- I should clarify in case I wasn’t clear, Mr. Choudhry, that the agendas are proposed to the chair and approved by the chair, so we then issue the agenda ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- to ministers, who then arrive with agenda.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is what I said, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I was advising the prime minister on the setting ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- of the agenda for that extraordinary cabinet meeting. It was not a regularly scheduled cabinet meeting.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would say that, given the topic, I would have expected those deputies to be invited to support their -- and the agency heads to support their minister. I can’t -- I’m just trying to remember whether I actually looked at the attendance list, but I would have expected and I would asked that they be in attendance, yes, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I have a team that organizes cabinet meeting, that’s correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Excuse me just for a second. We’re going to ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Oh, yeah, my colleague, Madam Drouin, is just correcting me that because of the fact we were dealing with virtual meetings as opposed to -- it’s a technicality but, you know, I’ve got to be clear -- important -- that because we were dealing with the virtual meeting as opposed to an in-person meeting, it is possible that the invitation may have come through a different channel their our normal Cabinet Papers Unit that sends out invitations and organizes meetings. It may have come through a virtual meeting organizer which we euphemistically refer to as “the Maple Leaf”.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe it’s between the Privy Council Office and the Prime Minister’s Office.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I have not ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- had a chance to do ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
In the interview summary as opposed to his in-camera evidence.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
M’hm.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe I’ve said earlier that it was.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Can I just take you to the paragraph preceding that, Mr. Choudhry?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The threat assessment was with respect to the invocation of the Emergency Act legislation. And I believe that I have given testimony already that indicates that the invocation of the Emergency Act, as in many things, is a balancing act between “Are you acting too early, too late, doing too much, too little?” and the threat assessment prepared by the Service, which was discussed at the IRG, as Mr. Vigneault indicates, and which was available to ministers, was assessing what the risk was of the invocation of the emergency legislation. ` And the CSIS assessment was that there was a risk, that the invocation of the Emergency Act risked further enflaming IMV rhetoric and individuals holding -- and you can read the rest, “holding acceleration as to anti-government views”. As we had -- we came to see the next day -- or am I getting this right? No, I’m going to stop there.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That was the nature of the threat assessment prepared by the Service, as indicated by Mr. Vigneault in this statement.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The threat assessment prepared by the Service was " The invocation of emergency legislation risked further enflaming the rhetoric and individuals holding acceleration as to anti-government…." (As read).
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
With the full cabinet as opposed to the ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The fact that CSIS didn’t feel that there was a national security -- that there was a threat to Canada ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- required to invoke the CSIS powers and authorities.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m just testing my memory, sir, to make sure I’m giving you the very best information. I believe the -- Mr. Vigneault did not speak at the cabinet.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And can I go on to add one thing, which is in the discussion at Cabinet, I’m going to be careful here, in the deliberations of Cabinet, in terms of the considerations related to the invoking of the Act, it’s fair to say that there was a discussion about the nature of the threat environment, the legal threshold, the tests for invoking, and the evidence that the thresholds had been met.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
To part of it.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe I said, Mr. Choudhry, that Mr. Vigneault did not speak at the Cabinet meeting, ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- and therefore he was not -- he did not speak -- he did not read that into the record himself.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We can go ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m happy to take you through my logic again, if you’d like. I was aware that Mr. Vigneault felt that there was a threshold for CSIS ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- to launch an investigation under the CSIS Act was not met.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
She was one of the advisors that I relied on, sir. She was not the only advisor I relied on.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Sure.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
What makes it reasonable to determine? I don’t understand what your question is.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Where? I'm sorry. I'm a bit behind here.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I haven't read the full document, so I'd have to go back to the top, but I'll ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I did not address the Cabinet at this meeting.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe that’s what I said.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Has not ever, given that the Emergencies Act had not been invoked until February the 14th ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- 2022.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes, I would. That’s also true.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
On invocation then, sir?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Would you -- I'm sorry, can I ask for you to pull it up?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you very much.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The invocation memo, page 11, I believe.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Apologies, Mr. Honner. Just ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think it's fair to say that we have heard from organizations like the -- some of the business people in Ottawa, as an example. We have heard from -- I'm sorry, just give me a minute here to just get my thoughts clear about this.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
External stakeholders and partners would not include a government organization, and if it meant the media, that would have been said as the media. No. These would be external organizations. I believe we had had an ongoing conversation led by my colleague in the Department of Transport and the Minister of Transport with the trucking association, as an example.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We had business associations across the country that were calling for the -- calling on the importance of keeping those ports of entry open. So I think there were a number of stakeholders who were interested in a peaceful resolution of what had become a serious national emergency.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I do, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes, he is.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Canada First.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Those are the three groups that are in this email that Ms. Poloz sent to the Privy Council office.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Maybe I'll do it the inverse way which is, to be clear, as I said, this is an email between someone in the RCMP and someone in the Privy Council office. This information was not contained in the memorandum that went to the prime minister, the decision note. I'm not sure that I turned my mind to the details of who the IMVE extremists were other than to be reported by the RCMP and other security agencies, but there were known IMVE -- I think they used the word "targets", subjects of interest involved in the protests.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That I believe that I was told that there were IMVE extremists by the RCMP and other security agencies, but I can't -- I'm not -- the specific identification of those, I can't give you a comprehensive list.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I'll take your word for that. Can I suggest as well, as I said, this is an input. The official record that I would commend to you in terms of the evidence upon which the Government based the decision to invoke the Emergency Act, as contained in the section 58 justification, which was tabled before the House of Commons, and I think that's the most reliable place to find the evidence that the Government used to rely on to invoke.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct, and this is not in my memo, sir. Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe we heard there was a plan to deal with the protests in Ottawa. I would not characterise it the way you just did, which is to clear entirely. There was, as always, and I think is implicit in the paragraph that I'm trying to read very quickly, and I think we've talked about this, there were authorities, there were bylaws that were not being fully enforced. That was the decision of law enforcement, local law enforcement, as to whether or not they thought they had the resources to do that safely without impairing officer safety. We saw, for example, that they were trying to enforce restrictions on the movement of fuel in and around the convoy in Ottawa, and we saw cases where police officers who were trying to enforce that were being harassed and intimidated and threatened. We saw protesters filling those cans with water as opposed to gas. So there was lots going on. So when it came to the plan, the plan was about how to, as I understand it, the various iterations of the plan were about two parts of this: One was about how do you try and get the numbers down to the core, and then -- so that whatever law enforcement resources were going to have to be used in terms of actual enforcement, you could kind of get the size of the problem down. And the plan, as I believe we had -- had been explained to us was about two phase, but the details of the plan to clear the occupation in Ottawa was not available to us on the 13th of February.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We had heard, as I said many times, about plans that didn't get turned into action.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don't mean to sound dismissive, and so I worry that what I just said sounds dismissive of the very serious efforts of law enforcement at the local level, with the OPP and the RCMP to deal with the various situations. I think they were working as best they could in extraordinary difficult situation to deal with the occupation in Ottawa. And I do believe they gave serious effort to trying to figure out how best to do that. We had heard about this a number of times. The details of any kind of tactical plan would never have been shared with us. I would say that there was no single plan at any single site that would have necessarily changed my advice to the Prime Minister about the totality of the circumstances which led to the invocation of the Emergency Act.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe that is an accurate statement, yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think I would -- yes. And I would also say that there were individuals involved who were there for the purpose of peaceful protest. And there were individuals who were a part of the protest who had other motivations, some of which I believe to have been, as I said earlier, around a policy motive, like getting rid of mandates, or a political objective, like overthrowing the government, replacing them with a new form of government.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
M’hm.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would agree with that.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think that’s part of the reason, and I -- we didn’t have a chance to look in detail at that communications section, but an important part of the roll out and the implementation of the Emergency Act was to make sure that those who were involved in what was becoming covered by the Emergency Act knew and knew to go home. They had heard from Ministers and the Prime Minister, they’d heard from the Premier, it was time to go home. And it was clear then that it was important to make clear to people who were participating what the consequences were of staying.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There was -- there were -- there’s lots of other places to go and protest in Ottawa during the duration of the occupation, while the Emergency Act was being invoked. And we saw people who came back at the end who were protesting at the -- as the Act was being revoked. But while the Act was in place, and in the area that was designated, this was an illegal activity and there were consequences. So they were subject to the discretionary decisions by law enforcement about how to proceed with the implementation of those powers and authorities.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, it does not.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is correct.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The documents before the Governor in Council are different documents. It was the proposed proclamation and subsequent regulations. The last part is with respect to the definition of the CSIS Act. And you were taken to this. And I know that you’ve disagreed with counsel that who is the decision maker, versus CSIS, versus the Governor in Council. But I think you agree that it’s the definition in the CSIS Act that applies? It's not a different definition; correct?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
In front of a decision maker.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Which is an important safeguard in terms of the actions that are available to be taken by ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I knew we were going to get in trouble with that at some point.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I wanted the proposal around engagement ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- to be considered by the Incident Response Group of Ministers.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, I have a point of view. However, -- I probably did have a point of view at this point of time. This is about the decision to put the engagement proposal before Ministers and the Prime Minister at the Incident Response Group, which happened on the 12th of February.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Do you want to start? No. So can I -- I want to say two things, if I could, Ms. Johnson. The first is that in the note -- the Decision Note that I sent to the prime minister, I did not do a specific assessment of the threat in Ottawa. What I was looking at was the national picture. As for your question about violence, I think was the -- oh, was that the second part of your question, sorry?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think violence has a lot of different meanings and there’s -- I think violence that -- you know, a punch in the face is violence. And it could also be violent when you feel threatened or intimidated, when your ability to go about your daily life is being thwarted, your ability to get to a medical appointment, your ability to access 911 services, your ability to have an ambulance come to your house if in fact you’re in need of medical assistance, if your job is threatened because the supplies don’t get to your factory and your shift doesn’t go in. There’s a number of different manifestations of violence short of the kind of, you know, spectacular -- and I think violence that might have been implicit in something like, I think, the events on January the 6th, which I think I can tell you, as a proud Canadian, I hope I never see here.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe that to be the case. But I think you have to read the two words together. I certainly, when I put my mind to this, thought about a test of “serious violence”.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That was my testimony, yes, Ms. Johnson.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would say that the total picture, in terms of what was happening in Ottawa, including but certainly not specifically the fact law enforcement resources were extraordinarily taxed to be able to deal with both the occupation as well as the regular, if I could call it that way, policing requirements in Ottawa was a sign of the magnitude of the threat and how the threat had escalated through the peace. And I think that -- both the kind of substance of that as well as the dynamic and the escalation were factors in my consideration.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
They may well, yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
If I was the subject of it, I may well feel that way, but ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The groups that you’re describing, Ms. Johnson, I think it’s fair to say, are -- have some form of vulnerability. And so if -- you know, if you’re 2SLGBTQI+ individual and you are subjected to a threat against your choice of your sexual preference, your sexuality, you may find that quite intimidating. And similarly, misogyny, antisemitism, and so on. So some form of identity being threatened, or intimidated, or criticized, I think can be quite jarring.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think, in my earlier explanation, I indicated kind of public unrest, including the kinds of behaviour you describe, with or without the Public Health dimension, would be a manifestation of a situation which would be part of that broad threat and risk environment.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So, Ms. Kubursi, you’re speaking about the weak beginning the 24th of January, the Monday, is that what you’re referring to?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So I think -- I think -- I can’t exactly remember what day. I believe the 24th or 25th, we heard for the first time in a team meeting that there were reports that there were -- there was at least a significant number of protesters coming to Ottawa. I can’t remember whether there were other sites at the time that were mentioned or not, but certainly Ottawa sticks in my mind. And the exact details of that, I’ll tell you, I didn’t retain. We -- there were -- those events were being monitored by folks -- other folks in the Privy Council Office. You may recall earlier I said that there was a cabinet retreat underway and I would -- a lot of my attention was focused on supporting the cabinet retreat. But I had others in the organization, in the Privy Council Office, who were monitoring that and conducting daily briefings with minister’s offices and meetings between the PCO and PMO which led into the ministers, and so on and so forth. So that was the beginning, for sure.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Vehicles.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would say that I did not know how long they were planning to stay or what they wanted to achieve before they were prepared to leave. I would think -- and I have said this earlier -- that a protest was coming to Ottawa. We had a lot of protests. They said they were coming for the weekend. Sunday night arrived; they had not left. This -- we were now into a very different situation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I now know -- sorry, may I add something?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think what we have heard through the work of this Commission of Inquiry is that there were reports, there was more information available that was being shared with law enforcement that we have found out after the fact, and I think the Hendon Reports is an example of the kind of information that was being shared, but that wasn’t my focus at the time.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think it's absolutely true that the more, better information we have about what's happening or what's going to happen will inform our actions every single time. The fact that there may have been information known by some people but not all is, I think what's known in the business as an intelligence gap, and we've taken a lot of steps to correct that in terms of the international dimension of our work, following up on the events of 9/11 to make sure that the information is shared, that there's an ability assess and to integrate threat assessment. And I think the National Security Intelligence Advisor may have talked about some of that. I think earlier I talked about there may have been gaps in what we knew or didn’t know in terms of OSINT, open source information, social media information, and there may have been domestic sources of intelligence that maybe we need to do a better job of pulling together and looking across.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I would add to that. I think a more comprehensive look at our critical infrastructure in the country and what the respective responsibilities are of each level of government authorities and so on, and the -- how information is shared so that that could inform, for example, tabletop exercises or other scenario exercises so that if we have an issue like what happened in Windsor, for instance, we wouldn't have to spend so much time trying to figure out who's got responsibility for the bridge, for the plaza, for the road to the plaza, for highway off ramps, and all of that. It would be -- they would have a kind of a plan in a box that would have been exercised with respect to particularly critical infrastructure in the country, so just to add to Madam Drouin's observation around the Parliamentary precinct in Ottawa and Wellington Street.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes, I do.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yes.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Well, I think there were blockades that started in the week of -- I'll just get my dates here right -- excuse me for a moment, Mr. McRae.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think we were seeing kind of on and off in and around the 5th, 6th. There was kind of slowdowns, slow rolls, up, down, and then the kind of the crescendo, if you want to call it that happened around the 9th, 8th, 9th, 10th.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
There you go.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Perhaps I can add ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- just contextually. Would it be helpful, Mr. McRae?
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
As we went into that week, the 7th, 8th, 9th, I think you’ve heard earlier in our testimony, on the 9th, for example, that I attended a meeting with the Deputy Ministers involved in kind of national security and intelligence, having heard a growing degree of frustration and concern on the part of Ministers with the situation, to make sure that we were looking at all available instruments, all available resources, all available tools, every crazy -- shut down cell towers, as an example, find public servants who could drive tow trucks. Anything to try to help to resolve the situation, because the situation facing law enforcement in Ottawa and in Windsor were complex and challenging. Windsor in particular, we had a lot of concern about, as you know. Our colleagues from the Canadian Border Services Agency directly involved working with the police of local jurisdiction on the ground. But what could we do to help? That was the focus here. Police alone, without more help, were they going to be able to deal with the size and the intensity of the challenge? I think that’s what our focus was in our attempt to try to bring all of the resources and the might of the Federal Government that we could to try to help.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’d say, Mr. McRae, that I was watching these events kind of unfolding on the television screen.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And I think, if I could add, that we saw the complement of law enforcement and the assets and capability that were deployed to deal with the occupation, the blockage at Windsor. I know that some of those measures were left in place even after the Emergency Act was invoked. And the -- to try to make sure that the Windsor Port of Entry, the Ambassador Bridge, was remained open. It was also a concern, as I believe we have found out subsequently, about how much resources this could be drawing away from the potential to deal with the situation in Ottawa. So resources are not finite, as I’m sure anybody who runs any organization understands. So.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I do not believe that would be correct, ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- because we had seen a lot of law enforcement happening in Windsor.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
And so -- but there -- as I said, this was about not just a single site, not just a single threat, not just a single event.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I believe that is correct. And I also know that Federal Ministers were focused on what it was going to take to keep that trade -- that absolutely critical trade corridor open, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I don’t think I can really answer that question, Mr. McRae? How big of a protest? What kind of a protest? Where is the protest? I think that’s ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Okay.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I think it depends who you are. If you are a manufacturer operating a large car assembly plant in southern Ontario, depending on just in time delivery of critical supplies to run that plant and keep your production line going, I don’t think a week is necessarily going to be fast enough. If you were worried about the transport of food, or fuels, or medicine, which are coming across that critical supply point, I think you may have a different measurement, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’m sure everybody would have liked to have it happen faster, but I think in terms of making sure that -- I think issues of officer safety, and so on, were taken into consideration, that a peaceful resolution is really the most important criteria, and if takes a week, it takes a week, sir.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I did not know that.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
That is what I said, ma’am.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
It was the decision that was sought in this document.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
So fair to say, then, this was a decision note by the specific decision that was being sought, and there were other activities underway with the Prime Minister’s full knowledge.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
No, ma’am, that was not what I said.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The option in the notes ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The Prime Minister can decide to invoke; he can decide not to invoke; he can decide to ask for more information; he could call for a meeting. I mean, he has a number of options available to him. To invoke, not to invoke would be two very obvious ones, to be fair, Ms. Bowes, but the Prime Minister can write us back and say, “No,” or call and say, “There are alternative courses I’d like to pursue.”
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We got an affirmative decision to invoke the Emergency Act and to proceed with the implementation.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
We were ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
May I add? We were doing our homework on the 9th to feed into deliberations which became the Incident Response Group on the 10th, and then that homework came back on the 12th with work that had been done after the IRG on the 10th, through the 11th, and back into Ministers on the 12th.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Thank you, Mr. Commissioner. I believe I mentioned earlier that there had been a debate in the House of Commons on February the 7th which would have been, I think, in the form of a take note debate, on the situation overall. It wasn’t specifically based on the Emergency Act. I think as with respect to the role of Parliament in -- and consideration of the role of Parliament, in the invocation note I think I indicated to the Prime Minister the broad outlines of the role of Parliament but I haven’t gone into detail. And there was subsequent advice that was provided to him around that. I think it does come back to the point that Mme Drouin was making. The sequence of events from the IRG on the afternoon of the 13th, into Cabinet the night of the 13th, into the FMM the next day, the Prime Minister’s times and space for final deliberations, mine -- to give him my advice sounds like a long time. It wasn’t a lot of time at this point. And it was also -- we were anxious that that news getting out there, that information getting out there would have had an effect, a cause and effect on the nature of what was happening. And it was already a volatile situation. And so there was to be a debate in the House of Commons. There was to be a vote in the House of Commons. And I would say that we thought that that was the Parliamentary process to be followed in this case. I was going to say something else. I believe the Prime Minister had a consultation with the leaders of the Opposition -- in addition, I believe Mr. Thomas, their National Security and Intelligence Advisor referred to this -- on the evening of the 10th, so after the first IRG meeting. I believe the Prime Minister had a conversation with the leaders of the Official Opposition including Ms. May at the time, to talk to them about the situation. So there was a Parliamentary debate on the 7th. There was that telephone call consultation, not on the EA again, sir, to be clear, but on the general situation. And then we were into the invocation process.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
I’ll try and answer your question. If I don’t get it right, perhaps you can correct me, sir. But when we thought about both the nature of the situation we were facing was national in terms of how it was manifesting in different parts of the country. But also, the people who were participating -- let’s say the truckers in Ottawa, for example. They didn’t just come from Ontario. They came from right across the country. And so to be able to use a deterrence measure to try and encourage people to go home, a deterrence measure -- and that was probably what lay behind the use of the emergency economic measures. We were trying to get people to go home. And the freezing of the assets was a pretty important powerful incentive to go home. Those truckers weren’t all from Ontario. They were from across the country so the use of a national tool, national legislation, allowed us to make sure that we were capturing not just, you know, the people who might have been from the particular site that we were dealing with. Mme. Drouin, do you want to add ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
The financial institutions, for instance, that would be involved across the country.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Commissioner, could I take up the matter of the RCMP ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- point. And no doubt our fantastic legal advisors will correct me if I’m wrong in their eventual information they’ll file before you, but I believe what we were trying to achieve there was a facilitation ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- tool that was available to be taken up, not something that was being force on. So it was discretionary as opposed to obligatory, if that’s -- so -- maybe -- I’m not trying to quibble either. I’m trying to ---
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
--- maybe help you understand.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Yeah.
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Janice Charette, Clerk of the Privy Council (GC-PCO)
Of course.