opinionBrenda Lucki is untroubled, even in hindsightShannon ProudfootNovember 15, 2022

The Public Order Emergency Fee is unfolding in a room and constructing as aggressively bureaucratic as you will discover in downtown Ottawa, the place you need to grade on a curve for this stuff.

However regardless of their bland setting and cold identify, the hearings have been the positioning of intense moments of human emotion over the previous month.

Downtown residents portrayed their tormented life amid the air horns. Convoy organizers testified, eyes glassy and voices breaking, in regards to the divisions sown by COVID mandates, the loving embrace of the protest itself and the deprivations they’ve endured since their arrests. The previous police chief wept as he recounted how arduous his officers labored to prevail in frigid winter circumstances and the misinformed courtroom of public opinion.

Most of the individuals who witnessed, whipped up or tried to close down the protest have introduced it as one of the crucial irritating and intense experiences they’ve ever lived by means of.

After which into this maelstrom got here RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki on Tuesday, carrying some kind of invisibility cloak of bland calm. She was well mannered, placid, neither particularly blessed of reminiscence nor apparently troubled by its gaps, smitten by sure subtleties of her job, however resolutely incurious about others.

Commissioner Lucki was, by her personal description, sitting on the fulcrum of all of the stress and uncertainty throughout the Ottawa protests, answerable for conveying important details about the operations of varied police companies to federal officers and politicians in a number of high-level day by day briefings.

“We all the time received the identical query every day: ‘When is that this going to finish? How is it going to finish?’ ” she instructed the inquiry.

At one level, a fee lawyer requested a few textual content trade through which she expressed concern in regards to the RCMP or Ontario Provincial Police being pressured to take over jurisdiction from the Ottawa Police Service. “Very early on after they talked about Emergencies Act, I had no thought what precisely that meant,” she stated. There was no unhappy curiosity implied by the assertion.

Time and again the identical sample performed out: A lawyer would probe in a couple of alternative ways to get at a bit of knowledge, and Commissioner Lucki would repeatedly reply a query simply off-centre of what was really being requested. It was unimaginable to inform whether or not it was obfuscation or real confusion, and she or he was affably apologetic after every clarification.

She couldn’t bear in mind a lot of conversations or occasions introduced to her, and what she may very well be induced to recollect usually appeared to haven’t any explicit import for her. Introduced with chat transcripts from a second when she and her colleagues have been clearly watching somebody have a tantrum in a gathering of federal officers, Commissioner Lucki stated she merely couldn’t recall what was occurring. “I truthfully I want I may provide help to with this,” she instructed a lawyer. “I do not know what the reference was to this.”

At one level, fee lawyer Gordon Cameron walked Commissioner Lucki by means of an prolonged sequence of questions on a unique chat transcript that appeared to supply play-by-play of a pivotal assembly. Ultimately, it grew to become clear what he was attempting to ascertain: With the federal authorities on the verge of invoking the Emergencies Act for the primary time in its 34-year existence, it appeared that the commissioner didn’t inform federal officers that the Ottawa Police Service had a plan to aim to clear the protests utilizing powers they already had in hand.

Is it potential, Mr. Cameron requested, that someway the assembly agenda didn’t get to you in order that you may lay this out?

“Something’s potential,” Commissioner Lucki stated with a verbal shrug. It wasn’t simply that she couldn’t recall the reply, it’s that it didn’t appear to happen to her that the reply mattered.

Mr. Cameron tried once more, laying the planks of his thesis facet by facet very neatly to make slightly factual boardwalk down which the commissioner may stroll. Cupboard was about to invoke the Emergencies Act. You have been “their window on legislation enforcement,” and the data you needed to share was that police now had a plan to take care of the factor they’d appeared for 2 weeks to haven’t any plan for coping with. You, as RCMP commissioner, thought-about that plan to be workable and it didn’t require the Emergencies Act.

“And that doesn’t get delivered. Your messages don’t get delivered to cupboard after they then deliberate on the invocation of the act,” Mr. Cameron stated. “You recognize the importance of that situation?”

“Sure and no,” Commissioner Lucki replied, earlier than delving right into a bunch of subtleties in regards to the policing plan and who knew what.

Mr. Cameron tried another time: “Did it happen to you that you must make it possible for authorities was conscious of your views on these factors earlier than it got here to land on the invocation of the Emergencies Act?”

“I assume in hindsight, yeah, that may have been one thing important,” Commissioner Lucki conceded finally.

Hindsight is simply the darnedest factor.