As the trucker protests descended into chaos, questions arose about who was in charge of keeping the peace.
That question centred most notably on Ottawa, as the city’s chief of police, Peter Sloly, resigned in the face of mounting criticism that he had moved too slowly to restore order.
By far his most outspoken critic was the chair of Ottawa’s Police Services Board, Diane Deans, to whom Sloly reported.
He had been, she said in a widely reported teleconference, “ineffective” and “unable to enforce the law.”
And she went so far as to fantasize in a media interview: “[The truckers have] a bouncy castle and a hot tub. I wanted to go up there and poke that hot tub myself and let the water flow out of it and unplug that damn bouncy castle.”
Ah yes. That well-known weapon of mass destruction, a children’s “bouncy castle.”
But here’s the question. What exactly are the powers of a municipal police board?
Ottawa’s Police Services Board defines its responsibilities thus: “The primary role of the board is to establish … the overall objectives and priorities for the provision of police services and the safety and security of citizens.”
However, notably, “The Board cannot direct the Chief with respect to specific operational decisions or day-to-day operations of the Service.”
But if so, by what authority did Deans assail Sloly? Wasn’t he just making “specific operational decisions”?
The situation then descended into farce, as the police board voted to remove Deans as chair. So he’s gone, she’s gone. Who’s in charge?
Not the Ontario government. Like most other provinces, B.C. included, Ontario takes the position that policing decisions must be kept free of government interference.
So if the police board isn’t in charge, and the Ontario government isn’t in charge, same question: Who’s in charge?
We learned the answer to that question the hard way, when the prime minister invoked the Emergencies Act. Law-enforcement officers were given the power to freeze truckers’ bank accounts, invalidate their drivers’ licences and, in extreme cases, seize their children.
So all of a sudden we go from no one’s in charge to something approaching martial law. We had mounted officers charging crowds, smashing truck windows, guns drawn, and dragging the drivers outside.
This is a disastrous state of affairs, completely foreign to who we are as a country.
Of course, the blame is shared. The truckers went far beyond the acceptable in making their protest.
But now where are we? By refusing to sit down and talk, and instead escalating an already volatile situation, our political leaders wrecked every understanding we had about how protests should be subdued and policed.
Almost overnight we’ve gone from doing nothing about street protests to calling out the riot squad.
We can’t go on like this. We can’t have a system where it is unclear who is responsible for keeping the peace.
We need a chain of command that is transparent and clearly laid out, with provision for appropriate civilian oversight.
We need failsafe points to prevent things getting out of hand.
And most important, we need a crowd-control system where police actions are consistent over time and calibrated to the needs of the moment.
What happened in Ottawa and at several border crossings was incompatible with peace and good order.
But it revealed a deeper disorder — policing actions that were unco-ordinated, capricious, frequently too little too late, and adrift from any measure of responsible oversight.
