He may not have seen the potential threat when truckers rolled toward Ottawa last January, but Prime Minister Justin Trudeau cannot miss the risk of Freedom Convoy fallout he now faces.
Under the no-nonsense watch of Justice Paul Rouleau with a lineup of inquisitive lawyers representing all sides of the protest, the Public Order Emergency Commission may well deliver a daily dose of bad news for the government as Trudeau and his seven cabinet ministers parade across the stand.
Unlike Question Period, where the justification for invoking the Emergency Act is usually swept aside in a barrage of rehearsed banalities from ministers pretending they didn't hear the questions, this will not be a back-and-forth formula under strict Speaker time limits.
There will be an avalanche of rarely released cabinet documents to explore and inconsistencies between minister testimony to cross-examine culminating in the appearance of a prime minister who struggles at delivering clear unscripted responses to detailed questions.
It's early in the finger-pointing, of course, but the political risk to Trudeau of Emergencies Act backlash would seem greater than even to convoy-coddling Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre.
Already at day two of witness testimony, the prime minister came across as strangely hesitant in the readout of a conversation with Ottawa’s mayor, repeatedly shrugging aside Jim Watson's plea for the Mounties to ride to the rescue by insisting the Ontario police should be there first. This coming just two weeks before Trudeau invoked the most extreme and unfettered police powers any government can unleash.
Things will probably get worse as a prime minister who initially denigrated the convoy as a fringe movement faces intense scrutiny on his government’s sudden use of a political howitzer to take out a hornets' nest.
In a brief, slightly-desperate-sounding scrum Wednesday, the prime minister defending his actions by declaring his solidarity on the Emergencies Act with Ontario Premier Doug Ford, perhaps not the best partner given Trudeau was quoted as saying Ford was "hiding from his responsibilities" as the occupation worsened.
In the end, the decision to take such an uncharted path may go down as classic Trudeau. He leads a government that values the public perception of being taken seriously far more than taking serious action.
I'm not sure if the release of cabinet documents will include transcripts of the secret decision-making process, but my bet is that at some point a frustrated Trudeau, mindful of his father's defining tough-guy image in invoking the War Measures Act, took off his shoe, banged it on the cabinet table and demanded his ministers DO SOMETHING NOW.
Enter the Emergencies Act, a step never contemplated by a prime minister before because the bar for its legitimate use is set extremely high – basically a national emergency security threat that no regular laws could handle – and because enacting it triggers what could be an embarrassingly detailed examination of the decision.
It will be fascinating to see if the prime minister testifies he was aware the occupation and border barricades were easing by the time his government invoked the Act and what other options were explored before introducing such a radical measure.
And he'd better do better in his testimony than parrot his Public Safety minister, who nose-stretched his justification by saying police forces asked for the Act, when they did no such thing.
There could be serious security revelations to come that underline the Emergency Act's necessity or indications the protesters were indeed flirting with sedition instead of merely venting vaccine-mandate frustration.
But with CSIS reporting no sign of espionage, foreign actors on the stage or financing from outside Canada coupled with little evidence of physical violence or harassment beyond a lot of blaring horns, it will take a vivid imagination for the commission to find Trudeau's unprecedented and heavy-handed reaction was justified against a rapidly easing emergency.
That’s the bottom line…
