The Canadian National Archives is located among hulking concrete bureaucratic buildings at the fringe of downtown Ottawa. It’s a severe-looking building in Ottawa’s already severe November ambience. However, the Archives is where for six weeks a showdown took place between lawyers, police, previously faceless senior government officials, and Cabinet Ministers all the way up to the Prime Minister of Canada himself. The Archives was the venue of the Public Order Emergency Commission, the public inquiry looking into the Trudeau government’s decision to declare a national emergency in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy.
Bleakness aside, the setting is apropos. The Archives is the bookend of Wellington Street, it is mere steps away from the Supreme Court, and it is the very same location that found itself gridlocked by the Freedom Convoy’s big rigs and tractor-trailers in January 2022
On the last week of hearings, Commissioner Paul Rouleau—ordinarily a sitting judge on Ontario’s powerful Court of Appeal—was questioning the federal Attorney General and Minister of Justice David Lametti. Lametti, a former law professor, had balked at answering questions about the basis for the legality of invoking the federal Emergencies Act, claiming this information infringed upon solicitor-client privilege.
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