During the fall of 2022, the Public Order Emergency Commission looked into the federal government’s handling of the Freedom Convoy protests earlier that year. It heard multiple witnesses, including police and intelligence service personnel, Freedom Convoy organizers, Ottawa residents, and city officials. The narrative unfolding before Justice Paul Rouleau betrayed a gross lack of preparation by the Ottawa Police Service. It also revealed the ineffectiveness of communication channels between intelligence brokers at the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, the Privy Council Office, the Ontario Provincial Police, and the Ottawa Police Service. To put it simply, the threat represented by the protest had been severely underestimated.

Such hearings are required whenever the government activates the temporary additional powers afforded by the Emergencies Act. The hearings are meant to ascertain the legitimacy of the government’s decision as well as the way it was implemented by various agencies. It is telling that the act, like the 1914 War Measures Act, which it replaced in 1988, has been invoked only once in peacetime. The original act was used to respond to the Front de libération du Québec—FLQ—crisis in October 1970 and caused a historically momentous scandal. Its replacement has been invoked only once, and that was in February 2022, during the Freedom Convoy occupation, combined with border crossing blockades in Coutts (Alberta) and Windsor.

The FLQ crisis and the Freedom Convoy occupation have almost nothing in common other than the government’s call for emergency powers. Yet a few important teachings can be derived from a comparison between the two events. The two crises were significant, both in terms of objective public safety and for the maintenance of Canadians’ confidence in their state institutions. The FLQ had kidnapped a British diplomat and the deputy premier of Quebec, eventually killing the latter. The Freedom Convoy arrived not only with trucks but with an army of sympathizers, colonized by cliques of various far-right anti-government extremist groups, with money and with plans to stay until their demands were met, and with no alternative path to resolution. Constant minor clashes and harassment caused the exasperation of residents and created a highly volatile context with a high potential for violence.

Though of a different nature, implications, and........

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