In 2018, when Ontario Premier Doug Ford wanted to slash the number of councillors for Toronto, the province’s largest city, he proceeded like a bull in a china shop. He even threatened to use the Canadian Charter of Rights’ notwithstanding clause to push through legislation a judge had ruled unconstitutional.
Flash forward to 2022.
Ottawa, the province’s second-largest city, is begging the premier to intervene into what its mayor calls the worst crisis in the city’s history. Suddenly Ford has discovered a newfound deference to municipal jurisdiction.
On February 7, Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson sent a strongly worded letter to both the federal and provincial governments.
He said the truckers’ protest, now in its second week, is “having damaging impacts on the well-being of our residents,” who have been “subject to the non-stop honking of large trucks … which is tantamount to psychological warfare.”
He went on to say that Ottawa police lack the resources to deal with the crisis, and asked the two senior levels of government for additional help, in the form of 1,800 police officers and 100 civilian staff.
The responses of both governments have been laconic and lacking any sense of urgency.
Federal Public Safety Minister Bill Blair, a former Toronto chief of police, blandly stated that Ottawa police have the “resources they need” to manage the crisis – when the Ottawa police chief and mayor are saying the exact opposite. But at least the federal government says it is “working on” a response to Ottawa’s urgent request.
The Ford government, on the other hand, has chosen to engage in a bit of gaslighting.
Ontario Solicitor General Sylvia Jones picked a figure out of the air, and said the province had already supplied Ottawa with 1,500 provincial police officers. The Ottawa police chief says that number is closer to 100.
Earlier, Jones had mused in a barely coherent way about the notional jurisdictional barriers to Ontario getting involved in the Ottawa occupation. She mumbled something about needing to get permission to intervene from both the federal government and the Indigenous groups who claim the capital as their traditional, unceded territory.
No Ontario Conservative has ever before expressed the slightest concern for Indigenous sovereignty.
For the record, the Algonquin First Nation’s leadership has said it does not approve of the occupation and questions the authenticity of the handful of protesters who claimed an Indigenous connection.
The fact is that, constitutionally, the government with the main responsibility for resolving this crisis is that of Ontario. Municipalities and municipal police forces function entirely within Ontario law.
The Criminal Code is a federal matter, but, for the most part, enforcing it is provincial responsibility.
And unlike other countries with federal systems, Canada does not have a constitutionally enshrined municipal order of government. Cities, towns and villages are created by the provinces, and provinces have great latitude in what they do with them.
One of the many decisive moves the Ford government could take immediately, if it had the will, would be to invoke Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act.
The city of Ottawa has declared an emergency with its limited municipal powers, which has little consequence. A provincially declared emergency would have more teeth.
Among the many possible emergency orders the act provides for are: to “regulate or prohibit travel or movement to, from or within any specified area,” and to restore “necessary facilities” and appropriate, destroy or remove “property.”
The property Ottawa needs removed or appropriated right now consists of several hundred giant trucks. The city is virtually helpless to get rid of the trucks on its own, because local towing companies, out of either sympathy for or fear of the protesters, refuse to help.
The Ontario government has access to greater resources, throughout the province, and could provide practical help.
Ontario New Democratic Leader Andrea Horwath suggests there are other actions the Ford government could take.
For instance, the province could revoke protesting truckers’ commercial vehicle licenses and their drivers’ licenses. That would remove the truckers’ ability to earn a living.
“It’s certainly a heavy-handed tool, “Horwath said. “But it would be a powerful incentive.”
Initial failure of Ottawa
The city of Ottawa and the Ottawa police were borderline incompetent in their early response to the truckers’ invasion.
It made no sense for the Ottawa police chief to announce, as the protest was getting going, that his force would not hand out tickets to vehicles illegally parked or idling, for fear of provoking the protesters. The message was: if you are big, loud, brash and bullying enough, you can get away with breaking the law.
The police chief has changed his tune and his cops are now handing out plenty of tickets. Those actions have not acted as much of a deterrent, so far, but at least they show the city will not be cowed by threats of violence.
Neither did it make sense for the city to tolerate trucks blasting their horns 24/7 and not seek a court injunction to stop them. It fell to private citizens to do that, in a class action lawsuit. The city did not even have the guts to join in the private citizens’ legal action.
Nor was Ottawa Police Chief Peter Sloly talking sense when he averred there was nothing he could do to prevent additional truckers from invading the city a week after the occupation started – because of their supposed charter-guaranteed right to mobility.
The mobility rights the Canadian Charter of Rights refers to only cover the right of citizens to change their permanent residence from one province to another. The charter makes specific reference to Canadians’ right to pursue the gaining of a livelihood in any province.
Nowhere does the charter come close to suggesting that mobility rights trump the right of governments to enact reasonable traffic and safety regulations.
The Constitution does not in any way protect the rights of vehicles. Provinces and cities can direct and order traffic however they want. That is why there are roads, bridges and streets throughout Canada that do not permit heavy vehicles, and why local authorities have the untrammelled right to institute temporary restrictions on traffic whenever, wherever and for whatever reason they wish.
At one point, early in the crisis, Sloly seemed to go further and agree with the protesters that the noise and pollution created by their vehicles were protected by the Constitution’s guarantee of free speech.
People have the right to freedom of speech in this country; trucks don’t.
Sloly has changed his tune on all that, as have the politicians, of all stripes, who bent over backwards at the outset to pay obeisance to the protesters’ right to freedom of speech.
The truth is that what is happening in Ottawa was never a genuine exercise in freedom of speech or expression. It was, from the start, an aggressive invasion by hundreds of huge, fearsome and dangerous trucks, whose main aim was to bully and intimidate local residents and all political authorities.
Why go soft on the protesters?
In other circumstances – at the G20 in Toronto in 2010, during the Indigenous occupation of a park in Ipperwash in 1995 – the Ontario government and its municipal subalterns have acted fiercely to curtail mostly peaceful protesters, who were standing on two feet, not sitting in the cabs of monster trucks.
At the G20 police forces injured many through a tactic called kettling, which involves herding demonstrators into a small, closed area. At Ipperwash they killed one protester: Dudley George.
Why the kid gloves treatment for the Ottawa invaders? A just-released Leger Marketing opinion poll has the answer.
Leger asked Canadians their views on the truckers’ protest and found that while a large majority, 65 per cent, disapprove, a significant minority, over 30 per cent, side with the protesters.
Recent political polling in Ontario shows Ford’s Conservatives with between 30 and 35 per cent of the vote. Few of those who support the Ottawa invaders are likely to be supporters of the Ontario NDP, Liberals or Greens. The overwhelming majority of the protest sympathizers are very likely Doug Ford voters.
There will be an election in Ontario on June 2, less than four months from now. Ford does not want to annoy his own base of supporters so close to the vote. He has already tested their patience with the tough measures his government took to curtail the spread of the COVID-19 virus, heeding the advice of his medical and scientific advisers.
And so, the city of Ottawa can call for help all it wants.
The response from the Trudeau folks will be this federal government’s usual well-meaning befuddlement.
From the Ford government, Ottawa can expect even less. To paraphrase Winston Churchill, all Ford and his team have to offer are delay, deflection and denial.
All in all, it is a sad commentary on current Canadian leadership.
Editors note: The article originally stated : “In other circumstances – at the G7 in Toronto in 2010…” and “At the G7 police forces injured many through a tactic called kettling…” However, it should have read G20 – not G7. The story has since been updated.
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