FIRST READING: Trudeau cabinet casually discussed crushing Freedom Convoy with tanks

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TOP STORY

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Only days after Freedom Convoy first set up shop in the Ottawa core, federal ministers were casually discussing whether they should order the demonstration to be crushed with tanks.

The exchange was revealed in text messages tabled before the Emergencies Act inquiry. On Feb. 2 – just five days after anti-mandate protesters set up blockades in the national capital — Justice Minister David Lametti sent a text to Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino urging him to call in the Canadian Armed Forces.

“You need to get the police to move. And the CAF if necessary. Too many people are being seriously adversely impacted by what is an occupation,” Lametti texted to Mendicino.

“How many tanks are you asking for. I just wanna ask (Defence Minister) Anita (Anand) how many we’ve got on hand,” was the reply.

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To which Lametti wrote back “I reckon one will do!!”

The texts were shown to Lametti during his Wednesday testimony. Commissioners did not specifically ask the justice minister whether he was seriously considering the deployment of tanks, and Lametti implied that it was a joke.

“In these kinds of interactions I’m interacting with a colleague and a friend, so there will be banter, there will be occasional attempts at bad humour on both of our parts,” he said. 

Using heavy armour to dislodge an intransigent protest would mark a precedent never before seen in even the most violent examples of civil unrest from Canada’s past.

The 1919 Winnipeg General Strike was infamously put down with gunfire and cavalry charges, but without heavy armour.

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While there are scattered witness reports of tanks being deployed to the streets of Montreal during the 1970 October Crisis, the dearth of any photo evidence suggests that witnesses may have in fact been seeing armoured scout cars. CBC reports from the time were careful to note that soldiers dispatched into the city to round up suspected extremists were carrying only “light arms.”

Tanks – at least the ones that Canada uses – are uniquely ill-suited for non-lethal crowd control, particularly in an urban environment.

The only tank employed by the Canadian Armed Forces is the Leopard 2, a German-made tank designed explicitly to go up against Russian heavy armour in the plains of Eastern Europe.

The vehicle can knock out enemy armour with 120-mm shells, it can cut down personnel with a pair of 7.62-mm machine guns and – in a pinch – it can launch grenades and be used to clear mines. But the Leopard is generally quite bad at any activities that don’t involve the violent destruction of people or vehicles. 

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There are other armoured vehicles within the Canadian Army’s fleet that could potentially be better suited for clearing a protest without killing anybody, but none of them are considered “tanks.”

The military was ultimately not employed in the Feb. 18 crackdown to clear anti-mandate protesters from the Ottawa core. The entire operation was led by the Ottawa Police, with reinforcement by police officers brought in from all across Canada.

But if the federal cabinet had decided to try and fix the problem with soldiers, it wouldn’t even have required the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Canada’s National Defence Act makes clear that the military can be called out to quell any civil unrest “beyond the powers of the civil authorities to suppress, prevent or deal with.” Most famously, this was the clause used to summon troops to stand guard during the 1990 Oka Crisis.

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And, unlike with invocations of the Emergencies Act, invoking the National Defence Act doesn’t trigger a mandatory public inquiry.

However, when asked whether the military would eventually be employed to clear Freedom Convoy, the Trudeau government was pretty consistent in saying that it wasn’t on the table.

Just one day after the Mendicino/Lametti text exchange, Defence Minister Anita Anand issued a statement saying, “The Canadian Forces are not a police force. As such, there are no plans for the Canadian Armed Forces to be involved in the current situation in Ottawa in a law enforcement capacity.”

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IN OTHER NEWS

Cabinet officials joking about sending tanks to their own capital wasn’t the only eyebrow-raising text revealed this week at the Emergencies Act inquiry. In a text to Health Minister Dominic LeBlanc, then Alberta premier Jason Kenney accused the federal government of having “screwed the pooch” in requiring mandatory vaccinations for cross-border truckers. Although Freedom Convoy eventually grew into a movement demanding an end to all COVID mandates, it did originate specifically to oppose a Trudeau government order requiring vaccine mandates for truckers. The health benefits of forcing vaccines on truckers were always incredibly dubious, and there is a compelling case to be made that this whole fiasco could have been avoided if LeBlanc had simply dropped it. 

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A frequent topic of this newsletter is that one of the worst ways to combat inflation is to randomly send out government cheques. Money loses value if there’s too much of it in circulation, and a surefire way to increase the money supply is for governments to throw it at people. So, despite her frequent complaints that inflation is a creation of the Trudeau government’s irresponsible spending, this week Alberta Premier Danielle Smith unveiled a similar firehosing of government cash. Albertans shall henceforth be receiving $100 per child, per month in order to help “solve this inflation crisis.” Only low-income families will be eligible, which in Alberta means any household earning less than $180,000 per year.

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University of Calgary economist Trevor Tombe isn’t quite as confident that the $600 cheques are the equivalent of pouring gasoline on the inflation fire, however. In a tweet, Tombe said that most Canadian inflation is being driven by items whose prices are set globally, like wheat, oil and consumer goods. Alberta spending an extra $2 billion “doesn’t matter,” he said. Tombe did acknowledge that it’s a little hypocritical for Smith to constantly rail against federal spending while simultaneously mailing out $100 cheques to everyone.

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Remember Mary Ellen Turpel-Lafond, the celebrated lawyer and one-time Supreme Court favourite whose claims to Cree ancestry didn’t hold up to a genealogical investigation by the CBC? After Turpel-Lafond issued a lengthy denial of the claims, the CBC also found issues in the denial. Turpel-Lafond claimed that her father William Turpel was a Cree child adopted by white parents – an assertion that was quickly contradicted by CBC’s unearthing of a 1929 birth certificate showing that a man by the same name was actually born to British parents in Victoria, B.C.

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