OTTAWA -- Documents submitted to the Public Order Emergency Commission show RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki did not believe officials had employed "all available tools" to dismantle the anti-mandate protests in Ottawa, prior to the Emergencies Act being invoked.
In an email to Mike Jones, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino's chief of staff, dated just after midnight on Feb. 14, the day the government invoked the Act, Lucki wrote officials had other tools that had already been factored into plans to end the protests.
While Lucki has yet to testify at the commission — she's slated to appear before it in the coming weeks — she previously told the special parliamentary committee looking into the Act that she never heard police explicitly request use of the Act.
In the email, Lucki listed the "useful" powers the Act would give law enforcement, including prohibiting public assembly in a wider range of designated spaces, outlawing protesters from bringing gas and diesel into the protest zone, cellphone disruption, and giving police the power to get tow trucks into the demonstration.
The RCMP commissioner also wrote law enforcement could prohibit travel to the protest zone and keep minors away from the demonstrations, if the Emergencies Act was invoked. But Lucki added there were still untapped powers without the emergency measures.
"That said, I am of the view that we have not yet exhausted all available tools that are already available through the existing legislation," Lucki wrote in her email to Jones.
She said some charges could still be laid under the Criminal Code, and Ontario declaring a state of emergency just days prior also helped law enforcement "in providing additional deterrent tools to our existing toolbox."
"These existing tools are considered in our existing plans and will be used in due course as necessary," Lucki added.
Mendicino said Lucki's email doesn't change his assessment that the Emergencies Act was necessary, and it doesn't negate her earlier comments that the Act was helpful to end the protests.
"None of that, of course changes her testimony before the Standing Committee of Public Safety last spring, where she said very clearly that the Emergencies Act was needed to resolve the situation on the ground, not only in Ottawa, but across the country, both peacefully and swiftly," Mendicino told reporters Tuesday.
"This was a government decision," he added. We listened carefully to the advice that we were getting at the time, we consulted with various partners provincially, territorially, etcetera, but we took the decision because it was necessary … and it worked."
Interim Ottawa Police Chief Steve Bell was questioned about the communication between Lucki and Jones during his testimony before the commission on Monday.
Bell had also previously said he did not request use of the Act, but that the tools it gave law enforcement were useful to clear Ottawa's downtown core of trucks.
Lawyer Brendan Miller, who's representing the "Freedom Convoy" protestors, asked Bell whether he agreed with Lucki's assessment there were existing unused tools at the disposal of law enforcement prior to the invocation of the Act, to which Bell responded that's a "perspective" Lucki should be questioned on.
"I've been very clear about how we utilize the provisions under the Emergency Act to actually execute our plan and create stability around the execution of our plan," Bell said.
"I do believe … there could have been other opportunities," he also said. "What I have said, and I say again, is we leveraged the Emergency Act as it came out to create a very stable platform, to be able to access tow-trucks, to be able to do the four or five different [things] that I identified. So while these abilities do exist, absolutely, in what Commissioner Lucki has identified, the Emergency Act created a very stable platform, a stable environment for us to execute our plan."
