Justice Paul Rouleau delivered his report yesterday. Susan Delacourt writes:

“Freedom” became a highly charged political word in Canada one year ago, shouted from trucks blockading border points, bouncing off the walls of buildings in an occupied capital city.

In his official commission report on that so-called “Freedom Convoy” protest last February, Justice Paul Rouleau has done something politically significant — he has said what freedom looks like, and the convoy was not it.

“Freedom cannot exist without order,” Rouleau writes in the executive summary of his report, which endorsed — if “reluctantly” — the declaration of emergency by Justin Trudeau’s government that brought some order back to a convoy-besieged country.

The finding justifies what was done to clean up the mess, but not what caused the mess itself — the toxic partisanship, a failure of policing and federalism and yes, a warped idea of freedom, caused by the pandemic, populism and rampant misinformation being sprayed over social media.

Rouleau spent a lot of time delineating what went wrong:

And much of it is still wrong. Rouleau, for instance, suggests that more work needs to be done in the realm of misinformation and the power it has to disrupt democracy.

Trudeau appeared to understand on Friday that while he was vindicated in invoking the emergency legislation last February, it was no time to be triumphant, and the prime minister took some blame for how he had lashed out at the convoy protesters last year.

“I wish I had phrased it differently,” Trudeau said, agreeing with Rouleau that he may have fed the rage by describing the protesters as a fringe minority.

Mr. Poilievre, however, ignored Rouleau's report:

Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, who’s travelled a long way in one year on the strength of those convoy cries for freedom — it’s a regular part of his slogans — showed far less contrition on Friday, blaming Trudeau for all the divisiveness that caused the protest.

“This was an emergency that Justin Trudeau created,” he said. “He is the division.”

Rouleau did not pronounce on whether Poilievre was wise to encourage the protests as he did last February, along with many other Conservative MPs. The commission report steered well clear of the political fray in that respect. Poilievre was also asked at his news conference in Calgary whether he regretted associating with the protest, which Rouleau made clear went well beyond a freedom-of-expression party.

Yes, the commissioner wrote, most of the protesters were peaceful, but that doesn’t erase the fact that it was menacing, traumatizing and quite possibly destabilizing to peace, order and good government.

Rouleau also disagreed with the Conservative leader’s oft-expressed contention that Trudeau should have met with the convoy demonstrators when they rolled into town.

“I accept that meeting with an undefined group of organizers with no clear leadership, when in any event there was little likelihood of predicting, let alone controlling the protesters’ actions, was unlikely to resolve matters,” Rouleau wrote.

What was wrong a year ago remains wrong today. And Pierre Poilievre continues to spout what is wrong.

Image: Epoch Times