Inquiry showed us just how much Justin Trudeau has learned from battling with Donald Trump and COVID-19


Justin Trudeau’s crises have been anything but ordinary in his seven years as prime minister. It was Donald Trump in his first term, a global pandemic in his second term and then, as if that wasn’t enough, a massive “Freedom Convoy” protest to kick off his third mandate.

Trudeau is, in effect, the prime minister of unprecedented events. And there he was on Friday, taking the witness stand to explain why this third crisis was the one that took the country into the uncharted territory of the Emergencies Act.

“It’s not something that had ever been done in Canada before,” Trudeau said. Another day at the office for this prime minister, it seems.

Trudeau’s appearance before Justice Paul Rouleau on Friday capped six weeks of public hearings that were remarkable in themselves for the glimpses they offered into crisis management at the highest levels of government in Canada.

What stands out amid the flood of revelations over the past couple of months is how the first two crises, Trump and COVID-19, created the battle scars — and the battle-hardened lessons — Trudeau and his team carried into the convoy confrontation.

On one level, that’s no surprise — the convoy often felt like what would happen if a mad scientist tried to bottle two years of COVID-19 exasperation with Trump’s unique brand of crowd-fuelled outrage and populism.

All of those existential dramas with Trump, we’ve learned, were never far from the minds of Trudeau’s team during those tense few weeks in January and February.

Brian Clow, deputy chief of staff to the prime minister, talked during his testimony of how the Prime Minister’s Office homed in early on the chatter from the convoy about how the demonstration in our capital would be Canada’s version of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection on Capitol Hill in Washington.

They were watching as Fox News — not to mention Trump and his allies in the United States — was cheering on the convoy. They were getting worried about how many dollars were pouring in from the U.S. to support the protest and Americans blocking 911 phone lines with a flood of calls.

Trudeau said on Friday he spoke directly to President Joe Biden in the midst of the convoy about what he called “a significant amount of amplification from certain sectors of the American political sphere.” That’s Trudeau’s diplomatic way of saying he saw the hand of Trumpism in the convoy.

He also brought the lessons of COVID-19 into that conversation when it came to border blockades. “We knew from the pandemic that thousands of health-care workers cross the Ambassador Bridge every day from Canada to go to work in Detroit in their hospitals, (that) there are real, meaningful connections across that crossing, that were being disrupted in meaningful ways.”

Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland spoke at length in her testimony on Thursday about how her fight to save the North American Free Trade Agreement during the Trump years made her hyperaware of the threat the convoy posed to Canada’s economy. She said she was on her phone constantly with business leaders across the country, trying to assure them the situation was under control.

“We didn’t save NAFTA only to have it undermined,” Freeland said in a text to Flavio Volpe, president of the Automotive Parts Manufacturers’ Association.

All of this was happening in the shadow of a COVID-19 pandemic that wouldn’t go away — that in fact, like the convoy itself, seemed designed to test Canada’s collective endurance.

The emergency legislation that triggered this inquiry hadn’t been used in its nearly 30 years of existence, but it had been contemplated — again, thanks to COVID-19. There had been plenty of talk during the pandemic about whether things were escalating to an emergency, the prime minister said.

“So we were somewhat versed in this legislation that had never been used,” Trudeau explained on Friday.

It is one of the many ironies of this government that it wasn’t COVID-19 that eventually set off the emergency, but the measures being used to contain it. For most of one week in these public hearings, convoy organizers got to vent the rage and frustration that prompted them to paralyze Ottawa. They didn’t hate COVID-19; they hated the masks and vaccinations and politicians forcing pandemic protection on them.

It should be said that one other big crisis has been exposed during these hearings, and that is what looks like a crisis of confidence by the government in a lot of police leadership.

“Sloly is incompetent,” Justice Minister David Lametti bluntly confided in a text to Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino about the beleaguered Ottawa police chief, Peter Sloly, who paid the price of his job for the mismanagement of the convoy.

But he’s not the only cop who comes under the grim gaze of the Trudeau government. RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki did herself no favours with her amnesia-tinged testimony and earned a stern, public reprimand from Jody Thomas, Trudeau’s top national security adviser, for being less than forthcoming with cabinet at a crucial point in its deliberations.

So many members of Trudeau’s team, right up to the prime minister on Friday, talked with barely concealed frustration about the lack of a police plan to grapple with the convoy — frustration that was close to boiling over by Feb. 13, Trudeau testified. There “was not even, in the most generous of characterizations, a plan for how they were going to end the occupation in Ottawa,” the prime minister said.

There have been other public inquiries into big things in Ottawa over the years, but it’s difficult to recall any that have offered so much gritty detail of how government works — and where it doesn’t.

We know a lot more about how political people talk to each other when they think no one is looking, for instance. Former Alberta premier Jason Kenney said in a text message that the prime minister had “screwed the pooch”; Ontario Premier Doug Ford colourfully said he’d be getting down to business with law enforcement in his province by being “up their a- with a wire brush.” Federal-provincial relations are apparently a little more spicy than those dry communiques issued after first ministers’ meetings.

In effect, all of this transparency has spoiled us for business as usual in the boring, bureaucratic message-managed universe that is often Ottawa. As The Globe and Mail’s Shannon Proudfoot told a local radio interviewer this week, it’s going to be hard to listen to Liberal cabinet ministers saying nothing again.

Saying nothing, incidentally, is very consuming work, according to the reams of communications-management conversations deposited amid the inquiry evidence. Everyone is looking for “framing” and “narrative” in Trudeau’s government.

We saw in one exchange how Emergency Minister Bill Blair was looking for ways to publicize Alberta’s pleas for help and how Mendicino was eager for a photo opportunity at the Ambassador Bridge if the police operation to clear the blockade went well. (That didn’t happen after police warned it was a bad idea.)

In a government constantly besieged with things that haven’t happened before, marketing and messaging may be the closest comforting, familiar routine.

But the past six weeks of openness and disclosure into the heart of this government and its crisis management operation has been a refreshing change. You might call it unprecedented — like so many of the developments and crises that gave rise to the convoy and the inquiry into it.

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