Very Uncomfortable

Susan Delacourt writes that the Freedom Convoy was a big deal:

Witnesses at the public inquiry into last winter’s convoy protest in Canada may already be running out of ways to describe how massive, weird and yes, frightening it was.

“Unprecedented” is a word that’s been thrown around a lot in the first week of hearings. “Nothing of this magnitude has ever been seen, quite frankly, in any city that I’m aware of in Canada in the last 25 years,” Ottawa Mayor Jim Watson testified.

Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly, according to one of his deputies, called it a “hydra” — a creature with many heads that needed to be “cut off and cauterized.”

Acting Deputy Police Chief Patricia Ferguson, who said she had to look up what the word meant when Sloly created “Mission Hydra,” definitely agreed Ottawa was dealing with some kind of strange new beast last January when the so-called “Freedom Convoy” rolled into the capital.

“This was obviously unprecedented in terms of its size and the type of thing we were dealing with,” Ferguson said during her testimony last week.

Until we know what this multi-headed creature was, no one will know how to make sure it doesn’t return — or, more importantly, whether it remains an ongoing concern for peace, order and good government in this country.

So what have we learned about the convoy?

First of all, most obviously perhaps, this thing was clearly more than a protest. Police stopped calling it that, we learned, when the “protesters” failed to pack up and leave town after the first weekend — when the hot tubs, stages and jerry cans of gasoline started arriving. That fact was established in the testimony of acting deputy chief Ferguson and some of the documents explored when she took the stand.

Police were pretty unanimous that Ottawa was dealing with a full-fledged occupation within days of the convoy’s arrival.

We also know it was national in scope and on the radar screen of police intelligence at least a couple of weeks before Ottawa was occupied.

There have been lots of moments of high-level intrigue during the past week, but it was Ontario Provincial Police Supt. Patrick Morris who provided the content most likely to be turned into a spy novel.

Since about 2019 or so, Morris testified, police, security and intelligence agencies at all levels across Canada have been keeping their eyes on a “significant amount of protest, dissent, some of which caused us reasonable grounds to suspect or believe that those issues would engage in criminal activity or illegal activity that would have a public safety impact.”

What they’re monitoring are brush fires of dissent that can explode into larger conflagrations, such as the rail blockades of early 2020 that started as an Indigenous land protest in B.C. No doubt Hendon was also keeping an eye on the 2021 election protests that dogged Justin Trudeau, which seemed to be a sneak preview of the convoy.

All of their intelligence is amassed, Morris said, in something called a “Hendon Strategic Intelligence Report,” which is distributed widely across the country to police and other security agencies. (Whenever the spy movie is made, it might be called the Hendon Report.)

The Hendon reports, he went on, were honing in on loose, vague protests such as “Shut Down Canada” and something police called the “Patriot Movement.” They were also picking up on increases in hate crimes and illegal activity associated with dissent.

COVID fatigue definitely played a role as these protest flames were fanned into the convoy fire, Morris said. “This is not one monolithic entity. These are grassroots, what I refer to as affinity groups, that share grievances. They acted locally, and also tried to coalesce, and I would say that this was the first successful coalescence.”

The convoy, as we are learning through week one of the hearings, was frustratingly difficult to contain because it had no one leader, no one cause and no clear demands. Demands they did have, Morris said, were already recognized to be impossible to meet (end COVID mandates now, etc.).

Money is a huge issue, simply because there was lots of it being raised online. The Star reported earlier this week that foreign money was not a major factor in the protest, according to intelligence documents deposited with the commission. But we also know the convoy was getting big shout-outs on Fox News in the U.S. and Ontario Premier Doug Ford said earlier this week that U.S. governors were highly attuned to the convoy protest.

And there was American influence behind the occupation:

At least a couple of witnesses have testified, too, that what was going on in Ottawa felt a little too similar to what happened on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021. The commission, one presumes, is going to probe those connections more deeply, whether they are figurative (inspiration for some) or literal (actual ties to the insurrectionists in the U.S.).

I suspect that what the inquiry uncovers will make us very uncomfortable.

Image: The BBC