Hot Wheels: The one question the Emergencies Act Inquiry won’t answer about Canada’s response to the 2022 trucker convoy

The Emergencies Act Inquiry doesn’t have the scope or the mandate to address the broader issues the convoy confronts every Canadian with.

In mid-January, I had a meeting with my staff. As we were about to wrap, one of them pulled out their phone and said, “oh by the way, have you seen this? What do you think our response should be?”. They pulled out a post about what would become the catalyst for the federal government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act; the 2022 trucker convoy.

Writing this ten months later, while watching the testimony of the Emergencies Act Inquiry, I feel that no one was prepared to deliver a just answer to that question.

But the most critical question now is, what happens next?

To begin to answer that, we have to rewind the clock to early 2019 and answer the question, why did the convoy happen in the first place?

Unemployment was on a rapid uptick in parts of the country reliant on the energy industry, and the Trudeau Liberals were getting in campaign mode as they headed into the final months of a four year majority government. It was then that the “United We Roll” convoy made its way into Ottawa. 

Many forget this convoy was the father convoy of the big daddy that happened in 2022. Most participants who joined the 2019 protest espoused frustrations with the Liberal’s policies that were resulting in the loss of energy sector jobs, particularly the passage of bills C-69 and C-48. However, other groups, such as the yellow-vest movement, attached themselves to the protest and muddied the original pro-energy sector message with alt-rightness. 

Before I go any further, I firmly, and clearly denounce any movement or protest that espouses anything remotely that smacks of antisemitism, racism, or bigotry. I also condemn movements that allow their message to be co-opted by actors that espouse any of those views. It’s important to recognize that as much as we all have the right to speak out on issues that move us, that comes with the responsibility to stop hate. 

So at the peak of United We Roll in 2019, Liberal leader Justin Trudeau also had a choice to make. 

He could have addressed that protest by resolutely condemning anything that smacked of racism, reminding protestors of their own responsibility to denounce bigotry. Then he should have separately, but simultaneously addressed how he was going to support energy sector workers. 

Instead, Trudeau largely chose to ignore those concerns entirely while insinuating that energy sector workers were racist because of the composition of the protest, and set an “us vs. them” tone for the upcoming general election campaign. In doing so, he put the wedge in a fissure that would widen during the course of the pandemic and its aftermath, and be used by political actors for their gain.

Skip ahead to summer 2021. The 2019 federal general election had resulted in the Trudeau Liberals being reduced to minority government status. Canada had just gone through two years of trauma - unemployment, crushing impacts from school closures, a collapsing healthcare system, and more. Canadians wanted an end to pandemic restrictions and hoped that life was going to get back to normal. COVID vaccines were seen by many as a way out of the feedback loop of business and school openings and closures.

However, in April 2021 the Royal Society of Canada published a thorough, data-driven warning that COVID vaccine acceptance was going to be met with resistance. The report, however, suggested multiple constructive ways legislators and health authorities could address vaccine hesitancy in the context of the myriad of concerns that it had identified.

But by then, the Trudeau Liberals wanted their majority back and saw an opportunity to make a move. Federal Conservatives had replaced former leader Andrew Scheer with Erin O’Toole after an eight month long leadership race that due to pandemic restrictions had happened largely over zoom. O’Toole was leading a caucus that had largely not met in person after the 2019 election due to pandemic restrictions and had thus far failed to find a cohesive narrative that resonated with voters. Heading into summer 2021, Trudeau had a seven-point lead over the O’Toole-led party, and it looked like a majority was on the table for the Liberals. 

So Trudeau pulled the trigger on an election.

However, things didn’t go according to the Liberal’s plan. Trudeau did not have longtime advisor and campaign advisor Gerald Butts by his side during this campaign. The Liberals fumbled their response to the fall of Afghanistan to the Taliban. Canadians began to question why Trudeau called an election in the middle of this issue and the Delta wave of the pandemic, with reports indicating that this would be the most costly election in Canadian history. With mere weeks left until election day, Trudeau needed something to change the channel, and fast. 

With an alt-right party attempting to siphon votes from the Conservatives, Trudeau needed an issue that would both galvanize his base to come out and vote against O’Toole, and push traditionally Conservative voters who felt O’Toole’s platform didn’t go far enough to vote for a different party.

Thankfully for him, Trudeau had loaded the political cannon before dropping the writ.

Prior to the 2021 federal election, the federal Conservatives had largely focused their criticism of the Liberal government’s vaccine roll out on the lack of availability of vaccines. (Full disclosure, it was me doing the criticizing). However, when Justin Trudeau announced during the election campaign that he was going to lean into mandating that all federal and federally regulated employees get vaccines - including truckers - the shit hit the fan. 

Imposed vaccine mandates were not something the Canadian public had really been confronted with prior to the election, and it had been jumped to as a policy hammer before any of the Royal Society recommendations had really been considered as a viable alternative. But with this announcement, Trudeau managed to find an issue that would wedge people who wanted the pandemic restrictions to be over and would consider voting Liberal against people who were vaccine hesitant but would never vote Liberal if their life depended on it. 

Trudeau went on to imply that Canadians who were vaccine hesitant were “racist” and “misogynist”. It was divisive rhetoric that had the effect desired by the Liberals. The federal Conservatives failed to counter his wedge, and heading into the polls, the damage had been done.

So while the result wasn’t the majority Trudeau wanted, in late September 2021, voters re-elected Trudeau with a reduced minority government. This immediately plunged the federal Conservatives into another chapter of a war of succession. By January, the issue of vaccine mandates had become a nationally divisive issue that became a proxy flashpoint for any number of frustrations segments of the Canadian voting public had with the Trudeau Liberal government.

Knowing that the federal Conservatives were in internal turmoil, the Trudeau Liberals saw an opportunity to lean into vaccine-mandate created turmoil and give their party some political breathing room on rising inflation rates and an affordability crisis. As long as the federal Conservatives were fighting with each other and the Liberals could keep vaccine mandates at the forefront of political debate, it was easier for them to skate by with less scrutiny of their spending and missteps made during the pandemic. They made no attempt to tone down their rhetoric or acknowledge the findings in the Royal Society report.

So when the trucker convoy - ostensibly organized to protest ongoing COVID restrictions including vaccine requirements for truckers - began rolling, Trudeau once again had a choice to make.

This time the stakes were higher.

Like the United We Roll convoy, hundreds of thousands of people identified with a core political message that had nothing to do with racism (lifting vaccine mandates), but far-right elements attached themselves to the 2022 convoy nonetheless. But unlike the United We Roll convoy, the 2022 convoy settled in for extended protests, blocked critical public infrastructure, disrupted the lives of tens of thousands of people living in the downtown core of Canada’s capital, and elements sought to overthrow a democratically elected government. 

Facing the trucker convoy, Trudeau - as Prime Minister and a leader - could have stated that Canadians have a right to protest but not to blockade critical infrastructure, denounced racist elements and demanded that convoy organizers to do the same while presenting a plan to Canadians about how the federal government would work to life COVID restrictions, fix a broken health care system, address inflation, unemployment in the energy sector, fuel prices, and more. Instead, Trudeau allowed the convoy to spiral out of control, and then invoked the Emergencies Act. 

In this, Trudeau had hit a political jackpot, in the short term at least. The federal Conservatives were forced into their third leadership race in six years. Trudeau perpetuated a divisive narrative that suggested that anyone in Canada who had any concerns about vaccines was defective in some way - Royal Society report be damned. 

So today, as the Emergencies Act Inquiry is considering evidence that suggests - as columnists are describing - that while police failed in their response, the invocation of the Act was unnecessary. And while the Inquiry examines the question of whether or not the invocation of the Act was justified, it’s up to each of us to salt the fertile ground that gave root to the convoy happening in the first place.

I think the critical question for every Canadian now is whether we are comfortable with dismissing reasonable concerns - even concerns we might not agree with based solely on our political stripe or what we read on social media. Particularly in the case of the tough issues we’ve faced over the last few years - like reconciling the need for climate action while addressing fuel affordability and jobs in the emergency sector, how to actually address vaccine hesitancy while maintaining civil liberties, and how to address reconciliation and systemic racism - we need to ask ourselves if we are comfortable with just taking a calcified position without questioning the long term implications of ideological rigidity.

Many political actors depend on voters to not use critical thinking in these matters. Politicians get an easy ride when the electorate does that as opposed to holding them to account for real solutions that lift everyone up as opposed to dragging all of us down while they hold onto power. They also benefit when we fail to attempt to see all sides of an issue or to attempt to understand the context of a concern before immediately dismissing it as invalid. 

Much has been written about the Conservative Party’s response to these convoys - and, trust me, as a member of the Party I internalized just criticism. Now, Trudeau - the leader of the governing party - needs to be cognizant of how several of his decisions greatly contributed to where the state of our nation’s politics are today, and that Canadians see them for what they are - divisive and unhelpful.

A commonality that all the post-mortems and inquiries of the various levels of government’s responses to the convoy have is that no report - Emergencies Act Inquiry or otherwise - will force Trudeau to change. Unfortunately, I’m not optimistic on this front - I think he’s shown that he will only do so if he feels that his future fortunes are threatened.

So, that’s a likely question that will only find its answer at the polls in the next election, whenever it comes.

10-4, over and out.