Alden Nowlan, the celebrated New Brunswick poet, got it right when he wrote about the nation’s capital:
The first thing that you learn here
Is that the country
Bears the same relationship
To the government
That outer space
Bears to the earth.
Nowlan, who died young (at 50 in 1983) understood that the governed and their governors are on different wave lengths, that voters do not see the government in Ottawa as their government, that the public lives with the challenges of the real world, while the politicians isolate themselves in an “Ottawa Bubble.”
This distance between the real world and the political world has seldom seemed as great as it does today. The belief that the leaders in the bubble don’t pay attention to the voices of the real world congeals into the indiscriminate anger that pervades the country this summer.
According to last week’s Nanos Research poll, the issue uppermost in Canadians’ minds is the state of the nation’s health care system, followed closely by inflation and the post-pandemic economy. But what was the big issue on Parliament Hill last week? Health care, you say? Not even close. It was an issue that doesn’t register in the polls. It was an inquest into the Liberal government’s use of the Emergencies Act back in February to end the occupation of Ottawa and the blockades of border points by “Freedom Convoy” truckers.
Was this exercise of emergency authority necessary or unnecessary? Was the extent to which the act’s emergency powers were employed appropriate or excessive? Did the government move against the protests too soon or too late? Was it, as the opposition Conservatives have been claiming for months, a blatant Liberal power grab? Was it, as conspiracy theorists contend, insist, Justin Trudeau’s opening move to turn Canada a one-party state with himself as dictator?
When Parliament passed C-77 in 1988 to create the Emergencies Act, it built in a safeguard to protect against abuse by the government, a safeguard absent from the old War Measures Act, which Justin’s father had used to crush the Front de Libération du Québec in 1970.
The new act authorizes the cabinet to augment the powers of law enforcement to deal with peacetime emergencies, national or regional. But it also stipulates that Parliament appoint a joint House-Senate committee to review, retroactively, the evidence considered, and decisions made in declaring an emergency, to assess how the enhanced powers had been used, and to recommend improvements for next time.
It being the first occasion that the 34-year-old law had been used, the all-party review committee felt its way, moving slowly, even by Ottawa standards. It held meetings that stretched from March to June. It examined cabinet minutes and other classified documents provided by the government – after a diligent redaction of sensitive bits – and heard testimony from senior officials whom the government agreed to permit to appear.
Although the committee has yet to present its report, the exercise is proving a waste of time.
The Liberals proceeded as Liberals do – with a minimum of transparency, and a maximum effort to avoid disclosing anything that might infer they had acted too quickly or slowly, had made mistakes or been careless in any way. The Conservatives behaved as they have been behaving since they lost power in 2015 – accentuating the negative, blaming the Liberals for inciting an insurrection, for allowing violent demonstrators to intimidate the people of Ottawa, for refusing to meet and reason with the extremist leaders of the occupation, and for using a sledgehammer to smash an honest protest by democracy-loving citizens who didn’t want to have to be vaccinated against COVID.
It is important that there be safeguards, some means of oversight, when a statute like the Emergencies Act, which impowers the government to override other statutes without seeking the prior approval of Parliament, is invoked. But a review committee dominated by Liberal partisans who will never admit to error and by Conservative partisans incapable of seeing anything but error in Liberals? The problem is to find a watch dog that can separate itself from the partisan smog that continues to smother Parliament Hill.
Common sense suggests a review process independent of party ties, a committee or panel that could deliver a dispassionate assessment of what boils down, not to a clash of virtue and evil, but to a question of judgment. Did the government employ the good judgment it was elected to exercise when it used the Emergencies Act to end the occupation of the capital and the border blockades?
Common sense also suggests that a panel of non-politicos (drawn from the real world?) might well find that there was a serious policing problem last February and that government, exercising its judgment, deemed that problem could best be resolved by using the Emergencies Act. The police got the reinforcements they needed, the siege of the capital ended, the border was opened, and the government promptly withdrew the Emergencies Act.
In the real world, the bottom line would be: All’s well that ended well, no harm was done, and now please get moving on health care.
Cambridge resident Geoffrey Stevens is an author and former Ottawa columnist and managing editor of the Globe and Mail and Maclean’s. He welcomes comments at geoffstevens40@gmail.com