THE WEST BLOCK
Episode 5, Season 12
Sunday, October 16, 2022
Host: Mercedes Stephenson
Guests:
Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail
Justin Ling, Freelance Investigative Journalist
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO
Location: Ottawa, ON
Mercedes Stephenson: Unconstitutional power grab or necessary for national security? The inquiry into the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act kicks off.
And the West warns Putin against going nuclear.
I’m Mercedes Stephenson. Welcome to The West Block.
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Justin Trudeau is defending his government’s unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act to clear the convoy protestors in Ottawa and at the border. Did he overstep his bounds, or do what had to be done? The issue has been a political lightening rod. Now the inquiry will look at the facts.
Russian missile strikes are again terrorizing Ukrainian civilians. On the heels of a Nato meeting, concerned about a potential nuclear strike, Ukraine prepares for a winter of war. What is the West doing to stop it? I’ll ask former U.S. ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker.
The Public Order Emergency Commission held its first public hearing on Thursday, looking into Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s controversial use of the Emergencies Act last February.
The Act gave the federal government sweeping powers to crack down on the so-called Freedom Convoy protests, including those that gridlocked border crossings and right here in Ottawa, our downtown, for weeks.
The high profile witness list includes: protest organizers, police and intelligence officials, cabinet ministers, and even the prime minister himself.
Joining me now with more on what to watch and what’s at stake are Bob Fife, Ottawa Bureau Chief for The Globe and Mail; and freelance investigative journalist, Justin Ling.
Thank you both very much for joining us today. You know it’s not often we get these big commissions in Ottawa. It’s something the government knew was coming from the day that they invoked the Emergencies Act. This is something that they have to do to justify it. It’s been an absolute political lightening rod. Bob, what are you expecting to see as these hearings unfold?
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Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: Well, for me there’s three things. One is was it justified in bringing in this draconian Emergency Act, which should only be used when there’s a real threat to civil liberties in the country or a real threat to the country. I don’t think it was justified to bring in that act. I think the police had legal authority—had enough legal authorities to be able to deal with it as they did in Windsor. We just had a police chief here, who was incompetent and didn’t enforce the law.
Second of all, I want to learn what kind of foreign interference and where the money came for some of the organizers of this. I think that is, to me, probably very significant because we have to understand the rise of the right and how they raise money and how they can have a real impact in terms of upsetting the apple cart and in future civil disobedience.
And thirdly, I want to know about the role of the—how the Conservative Opposition, the law and order party, threw in their lot. A lot of these MPs threw in their lot with people who were breaking the law.
Mercedes Stephenson: Including the current leader of the party.
Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: Including the current leader, who was out there egging these people on and I think there are implications for that. So those are the three things that I’m looking at.
Mercedes Stephenson: Justin, what are you going to be looking for?
Justin Ling, Freelance Investigative Journalist: You know putting aside all of the acrimony, all the politics of this just for a second, I’m actually looking forward to the final report that comes out of this, because Bob is, of course, right. You know this is an extraordinary piece of legislation. But it was also a piece of legislation that was drawn up and at least to some degree, with civil liberties in mind. It was a bill that was drawn up to reject the sweeping powers of the War Measures Act, right? So we actually desperately need a roadmap for how and when and why this act should be invoked. And I’m hoping the report at the end of this, gives us that roadmap, right? Because I actually tend to think that invoking of the act was a necessary move. I however, think, the way the government did it, the orders they wrote up, were far too broad and were, in fact, a threat to civil liberties. So there’s a lot of nuances, a lot of space here, to figure out exactly what we should do next time, what we shouldn’t do.
Now when it comes to the sort of nitty-gritty of what actually happened in Ottawa over those three and some weeks, you know I still think there’s a lot of things to learn here. I tend to think, you know some of that money did get dispersed. I am curious to know where it went. We know a lot of it ended up never making it to the hands of these protesters, but a lot of cash did. I’m curious to learn what we can find there.
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I’m curious to know exactly how the Ottawa Police came to the conclusion that this would be just a one weekend protest, given that intelligence briefings I’ve seen, told the Ottawa Police Service there was a real risk that these protesters are going to stay indefinitely.
Mercedes Stephenson: You know Bob you’ve been covering Ottawa for a long time. You’ve seen other commissions. Cabinet confidence has only been waived, like literally we can count it on one hand the number of times. The government has done that. Does that mean, are Canadians, you, me, Justin, our viewers are going to be able to see these documents? Are they going to be completely redacted? What are we expecting in terms of the level of public transparency in this commission?
Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: Well we’re not going to get public transparency in terms of cabinet documents. Cabinet confidence has been waived so the judge can look at various documents that led the government to have its decision to invoke the emergency measures—the Emergencies Act. But, so we have to rely on Justice Rouleau, to tell us whether the information he saw from cabinet, justified it.
So, you know—and the other thing I think that we’ve all witnessed when we were watching what unfolded last February, was the inability of the Ottawa Police to deal with this, was undermining everybody’s confidence in the police. I mean the citizens of this city were beginning to take action into their own hands because the police weren’t doing anything. You and I watched the guys bringing stuff up and the cops were just watching them or they were having a chat with them when they were doing their bouncy ball stuff and the partying on Parliament Hill. I mean it was ridiculous. It was only when the protesters went to the Windsor Bridge and the Americans said hey, wait a minute. If you don’t clear these guys, we’re going to clear them because we need to be able to run our car factories and our other plants because it’s same-day supply chain, right? And that’s when the government acted. And they didn’t need the war—sorry, the Emergency Act to do it. They simply did—they enforced the law. And that’s what should have happened here.
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Mercedes Stephenson: And that’s what Alberta and Saskatchewan are saying as provinces. They’re like look; we had the power to do it. You just had to act. And they certainly started to act outside of Ottawa before the Emergencies Act was brought in. You know Justin, you did a lot of investigative reporting on the actual national security situation and this has been a source of huge controversy. I live in Ottawa. I’m from Calgary. Often when I go home, people say this was a peaceful protest. There was not a national security threat. That’s a political characterization. What did you find in your reporting, because obviously you believe there must have been something there and you support the use of act? What did you find in terms of national security?
Justin Ling, Freelance Investigative Reporter: It’s funny, there was an interesting moment at the first day of the commission yesterday, when the lawyer for the Freedom Corp., the registered corporation that represents the organizers, Brendon Miller got and up and said you know you’re going to hear the other side tell you that there was a threat to national security. You’re going to hear them say that there was a plan or a desire to remove the government. You’ll hear no evidence of that. I’m sitting at home thinking, yes we will. There’s actually a significant amount of evidence for both of those things. I mean, you know let’s look at the Coutts Alberta border crossing. I mean, it was a very thorny situation because according to the RCMP and charges filed in court now, a number—more than a half dozen of those individuals had a cache of weapons and a plan to kill RCMP officers. The leader of that movement, which was a Diagolon movement, Jeremy Mackenzie, was sitting in a farmhouse somewhere outside the City of Ottawa. CSIS genuinely believed that, you know the likelihood of an organized attack was quite low, but the possibility of a lone wolf attack or of someone just sort of losing their mind or committing an act of violence was present. They also believed that the likelihood of radical groups or extremist organizations recruiting in the ranks of this convoy was quite likely. You know, this was a threat that we’ve never really seen before. You know, I don’t believe the organizers of the convoy had any plans to storm Parliament, or had any plans to cause actual harm, but they had no concept of who was actually joining them, right? There was no vetting of people who joined the convoy. There was no vetting of people who parked their trucks on Parliament Hill. There was no—even visibility at all about the people who came to join this movement and evidenced by, you know, that blockade in Coutts. And I think, to this day, we still don’t 100 per cent know who was present. But, you know through my research, we have absolutely identified white supremacists, neo-Nazi individuals, individuals who have ties to extremism, individuals who have been photographed doing training camps, right, which is not to say that every single person who came out is an extremist. That’s not the case, but there were certainly extremists in those ranks.
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Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: Look, he’s—Justin’s absolutely right. We all ran into some of these violent people, particularly those around Pat King. And you know yourself because you were out there on the streets, Mercedes, and you know how people were—some of these people were going after you and saying terrible things and you had to have security with you.
Mercedes Stephenson: Yes. Yeah.
Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: But I will say that the vast majority of people that I talked to, own trucks, well they were completely misinformed about vaccines and they believed these conspiracy theories. The—what we have to understand, and hopefully this inquiry will help to understand, is that these were independent truckers who pay their taxes, are generally law abiding and something triggered these people to go and bring their rigs and risk their rigs being taken on Parliament Hill because they felt that the government overstepped itself. And they were deeply offended because of Prime Minister Trudeau saying that they were all white supremacists and neo-fascists when they—these people were not. They only had to speak to them to realize they’re—you know they’re farmers and they’re truckers and they’re—you know they’re your next door neighbours. They’re individualists for sure because they’re truckers, but they’re not—they’re not threats to Canadian society.
Mercedes Stephenson: I think that’s where so many of these questions about the money that was coming in and who was there, and those of us who were out in it, there was a real difference between who you encountered often on the weekends, which was much friendlier and people coming in were frustrated with vaccine mandates, or who frankly just didn’t like Justin Trudeau and the Liberal government and some of those harder elements that were involved with very significant and very concerning agendas. That being—brings me to the issue of political risk. There’s political risk here, both the Trudeau government and the Poilievre Conservatives. Bob, what do you see that as being?
Robert Fife, The Globe and Mail: Look—look, if the end of the day the judge says that Trudeau overstepped—the Trudeau government overstepped the mandate by invoking the Emergency Measures Act, I don’t think it’s going to have a negative impact on the prime minister because in the end of the day, order was restored. And Canadians, I think, want to have their society ruled by the rule of law. I think it’s far more—a far greater impact will be on Pierre Poilievre. And many members of the Conservative caucus who were out there egging these people on and lending their support to people who were breaking the law, and people have to understand, your listeners, downtown Ottawa was occupied by truckers who were blowing their horns all day, all night. And people living in apartment buildings couldn’t sleep, and people who had businesses went under. So this was—there were real repercussions here.
Mercedes Stephenson: Final word to you, Justin.
Justin Ling, Freelance Investigative Journalist: Yeah, I mean Bob has it exactly right. And you know, I will say, you know there was a ton of people who came out, who were, I think, had genuine beliefs, who had no interest in violence, who maybe were misinformed about vaccines, who also at the same time, believed that the prime minister should be arrested and tried for treason. It was a premise I heard time and time again. It was on signs. You know there were paintings of gallows with the prime minister’s head around a noose, right? You know the people are allowed to hold those beliefs in private, sure. But you’re not allowed, as I think most Canadians would agree, you’re not allowed to occupy the capital, to basically blockade our seat of democracy and sit there and say we need to roundup the premiers and the public health officials and the ministers of health and the prime minister and put them on trial, under a new Nuremberg style, you know public hearing and sentence them for treason and crimes against humanity. That was an idea you heard time and time and time again. And Pierre Poilievre made the decision to affiliate with them, like Erin O’Toole did before him, like Andrew Scheer did on the streets every single day, like a whole bunch of other Conservative MPs did. They invited them into Parliament to testify and to espouse all this nonsense and to espouse all this disinformation about vaccines and they should have to wear it. And they can complain all they want, the media’s being so mean to them. But at the end of the day, this was their decision. They chose to throw their lot in with these people. They chose not to admonish this ridiculous rhetoric. And I think they should have to wear that.
Mercedes Stephenson: Well I think we’ll have a close eye on this commission as we discover whether the Liberals met the bar for a very significant infringement on civil liberties and whether the Conservatives may have affiliated with people who they will regret identifying with. Thank you so much to both Bob and Justin for joining us today. We’ll have more on the commission in weeks to come.
Up next, I’ll speak with former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker on how the West should respond to Russia’s latest escalation in Ukraine.
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Mercedes Stephenson: Russia unleashed a brutal barrage of missile and drone strikes on Kyiv and other Ukrainian cities last week.
The air assault is widely seen as Moscow’s retaliation for an explosion that severely damaged a key bridge linking Russia to the Crimean Peninsula.
Russia’s strikes targeted critical infrastructure but also civilians again: Buildings, parks and playgrounds all had bombs raining down on them.
NATO is pledging more air defence support and pushing back against Putin’s nuclear threats.
The EU’s foreign policy chief warned that the West would annihilate Russia’s army if Putin launches a nuclear attack on Ukraine, quite a change in rhetoric.
For more on what this means and for the war, as we head into yet another winter of it, I’m joined by former U.S. Ambassador to NATO Kurt Volker. Thank you so much for joining us, Ambassador Volker. Nice to see you.
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Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Nice to see you, Mercedes. Thanks for having me.
Mercedes Stephenson: You know I was really struck by the rhetoric this week and it’s been very serious since the beginning of the war, but I don’t—I’ve never heard the EU say they were going to annihilate anyone, much less the Russian army. So that really stood out to me. You have the Russians saying it’s going to World War III if Ukraine joins NATO. What do you make of all this rhetoric? How serious is it?
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Well, I think first off, Putin is the one who has raised the prospect of possibly using a nuclear weapon, which is an absolutely irresponsible, unfounded, unwarranted threat to bring up. No one is attacking Russia. No one’s killing Russians in their cities. There’s no bombs raining down on Moscow. The idea that Putin would feel that he could use a nuclear weapon is completely unwarranted and unjustified. So here, I’m actually quite happy to see the remarks by Joseph Borrell, the EU high representative for foreign and security policy, because somebody needs to call out Putin and say no. First off, it’s not warranted.
Secondly, if you were to do it, there would be a massive response. We can’t live in a world where anyone who has a nuclear weapon thinks it’s okay to use them. So that’s useful.
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Now on Putin’s comment about Ukraine joining NATO and that would, you know cause World War III. Remember that he attacked Ukraine when Ukraine was not joining NATO. NATO back in 2008 said, oh yes, some day you can be a member. For 14 years, nothing happened. And no one was making progress towards Ukraine joining NATO and Putin attacks them anyway. So, he is using this NATO argument as a pretext, when really what he’s doing is attacking Ukraine, as he said himself, to eliminate Ukraine as a nation and as an identity and to bring it back into a Russian empire, like Peter the Great.
Mercedes Stephenson: There’s been speculation that we are potentially closer to a nuclear even than we have been since the Cuban missile crisis. Do you think that that’s true?
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Well it may be true because we’ve been thankfully very, very far away from any nuclear event. I still think now it is very unlikely, but you can’t say the risk is zero because Putin has been acting irrationally. A rational decision would be looking first strategically. He knows that Russia would be annihilated if he used strategic nuclear weapons.
Second, at a tactical level, it doesn’t achieve anything on the battlefield. He’s trying to take and hold territory that belongs to Ukraine. If he uses nuclear weapons, that territory becomes uninhabitable and therefore unconquerable. It’s just a wasteland at that point.
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In addition, his forces are not prepared for this and he’d be destroying his own military as much as he destroys the Ukrainian military.
And then finally, he’s been told very clearly by the United States, by NATO, that any use of nuclear weapons, any use, would be met with a devastating response. The military knows that and believes it. And I think it’s questionable whether even if they were given the order, they would decide to deploy a tactical nuclear weapon because they know the consequences on themselves. And if they know that, then Putin probably knows that, too, and might be cautious about giving an order that’s not followed.
Mercedes Stephenson: Well and I think that’s fascinating because I hear people ask this all the time: Why is Putin still in power? And is that something that’s going to continue, and does the war continue as long as he is the president of Russia?
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Well that’s a great question because first off, he has made it clear he is going to fight ‘til the end. He is determined to attack and take over Ukraine. And, we know he doesn’t have the means to do it. So he is putting increasing strains on the system. Their military is losing on the battlefield. They’re having to retreat. They are pressing people into military service who don’t want to go. They—when they announced this mobilization, more people left the country than were mobilized. They have tremendous economic problems now because of the global sanctions that have been put in place. They don’t have the equipment. They don’t have the spare parts, even to give to the soldiers that they’re mobilizing. So this is just getting worse and worse. And the more he tries to keep going, the worse it is for Russia. And clearly, people in Russia know this. Why else would they be heading for the borders? And they know that he is driving the country into a disaster.
So, if we’re sitting here again on October 14th, 2023, talking about this, I think we’ll be talking about a different leadership in Russia because there are so many strains in the system right now, it’s not sustainable the way it is. Somehow, the Russians will find a way to pull Putin back when he changed the leadership.
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Mercedes Stephenson: You know that dynamics of NATO incredibly well. You were the ambassador there. There’s a line NATO is trying to walk between supplying the Ukrainians, and lots of folks who are saying special operations forces from NATO countries are helping with intelligence to call in air strikes, which has helped with the effectiveness of the Ukrainian offensive. Is NATO doing enough and what more could they do?
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Well first off, we have to be clear that NATO is not doing very much at all. It is individual NATO countries that are doing things, the United States doing an awful lot. The U.K., Poland. Canada, some, so all of this is individual allies. And NATO as an organization, they have capabilities. They could do more, but they’ve deliberately held back because they don’t want to create the dynamic of NATO being in a war with Russia, even creating that perception. Now that being said, what else could be done by allies or by NATO? Number one right now is better air defence systems for Ukraine. Putin cannot take and hold territory on the ground anymore. He is—his forces are being pushed back. So the only thing he can do is lob bombs and missiles at Ukrainian cities, largely unguided, largely dumb bombs that are killing civilians. So that’s why it’s so important that we do everything we can to help the Ukrainians get modern capable air defence systems, to protect against that kind of just dumb bomb attacks against civilians. But Ukraine definitely needs to break up that Kerch Strait Bridge, which is used for military supplies, getting into Crimea. And they need to knock out the naval base at Sevastopol, which the Russians use to threaten Black Sea shipping. And to do that, they need longer range ammunitions than what we’re giving them. They also need more armour. They also need more fighter aircraft, although the armour need has diminished somewhat since they’ve taken so much Russian armour in the past month.
Mercedes Stephenson: Fascinating and certainly deeply concerning. Thank you so much for joining us today, Ambassador Volker.
Kurt Volker, Former U.S. Ambassador to NATO: Pleasure to be with you. Thank you.
Mercedes Stephenson: Up next, what to expect in the coming week at the high profile public order emergency commission in Ottawa.
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Mercedes Stephenson: The inquiry looking into the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act will resume its public hearings tomorrow.
Ottawa city councillors, business leaders and residents spoke last week about their experiences of the convoy blockades.
Residents told the inquiry they were terrified during the occupation and felt they had no escape from the diesel fumes, blaring horns and fireworks pinging off of their windows.
Zexi Li, Lead Class Action Plaintiff, Ottawa: “They would blast their horns at me with a smile on their faces and then they would cheer in unison and almost take joy in the …in my flinching in my recoiling from the noise.”
Nathalie Carrier, Vanier Business Improvement Area, Ottawa: “I remember being scared, personally—I’m sorry—because I remember the chief saying at one point, ‘You guys are scared. I get it. I’m scared, too.’ And I thought if the chief of police is scared, something much bigger is happening here than a protest.”
The commission will hear this week from the mayor of Ottawa and members of the Ottawa Police Service and Ontario Provincial Police. Justice Rouleau will have until February 20th, to deliver his report.
That’s our show for this week. Thank you so much for watching. For The West Block, I’m Mercedes Stephenson, and I’ll see you next Sunday.
