'Quite troubled': MPs demand explanation from OPP over 'wild

If the drift of Canada towards a police state has not yet affected you directly, you would do well to recall the words of Pastor Martin Niemoller, writing in Germany before his arrest in the 1930s: "The Nazis came for the Communists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a Communist. Then they came for the Jews, and I didn't speak up because I was not a Jew. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I didn't speak up because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Catholics and I was a Protestant, so I didn't speak up....by that time there was nobody left to speak up for anyone."

'Quite troubled': MPs demand explanation from OPP over 'wild

Postby Thomas » Wed Oct 26, 2022 5:35 pm

'Quite troubled': MPs demand explanation from OPP over 'wildly different' statements on Freedom Convoy

OPP commissioner told a Commons committee last spring that the intelligence unit had identified the protest as a 'threat to national security'

OTTAWA — MPs unanimously voted to demand answers from the Ontario Provincial Police on its “wildly different” testimony about the security threat posed by the Freedom Convoy protests.

In a rare show of parliamentary unity, members of all parties on the Commons public safety and national security committee approved a motion requiring an “immediate response” from the OPP regarding an apparent “contradiction” between what its commissioner told the committee in March about the protests and what its head of intelligence said to the Emergencies Act inquiry last week.

The motion was brought by NDP MP Alistair MacGregor, who told his colleagues he was “quite troubled” by seemingly conflicting statements first reported by the National Post last week.

During a March 24 committee meeting, OPP commissioner Thomas Carrique declared twice that the service’s intelligence unit, the Provincial Operational Intelligence Bureau (POIB), identified the Freedom Convoy as a “threat to national security” on Feb. 7.

He said his force was able to use the “tools” contained in the federal Emergencies Act after the Trudeau government invoked it on Feb. 14 to shut down the weeks-long protest on Parliament Hill and at the border and address the national security “threat.”

But testimony and documents from the head of the POIB made public last week at the Public Order Emergency Commission appear to directly contradict Carrique’s statements.

The commission is tasked with determining whether the Trudeau government met the legal threshold to invoke the exceptional powers contained in the Emergencies Act.

POIB leader Supt. Pat Morris told the commission his team never received “credible” information that the Freedom Convoy posed a direct threat to national security.

Other intelligence partners, such as the Canadian Security Intelligence Service and the RCMP’s Integrated National Security Enforcement Teams, never shared any either.

On the day Carrique told the committee that the OPP had determined the Freedom Convoy across Canada became a “threat to national security,” a POIB report noted for the first time that the protests had the “potential” to become such a threat.

But Morris told the commission the Freedom Convoy would have only become a real threat to national security if a series of hypothetical events occurred across Canada. They never did.

An email from Morris to his staff on Feb. 7 tabled at the commission also reveals that CSIS and INSET did not share POIB’s view that the protests had even hit the threshold of “potential” national security threat at that point.

The OPP declined to comment on the discrepancies last week but noted Carrique is expected to testify at the Emergencies Act inquiry in the coming weeks.

MacGregor’s motion also forces the OPP to provide a written response to the public safety and national security committee about Carrique’s testimony.

“I’m quite troubled that the very same police force is giving one answer to the Public Order commission, but a completely different answer earlier in the year to a committee of the House of Commons,” MacGregor told his committee colleagues on Monday.

“Mr. Chair, this committee has to empower you to seek clarification on why those two wildly different testimonies were given,” he added to committee chair Ron McKinnon.

https://www.hannaherald.com/news/politi ... dom-convoy
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