Senator Gold: Thank you for your question. By the time the convoy arrived in Ottawa, circumstances made it clear that existing measures could not be effectively applied. The convoy that arrived in Ottawa was not an isolated convoy, independent of that which shut down Coutts, Emerson or, indeed, has found its way, with different degrees of impact, to many other cities.

The government took the decision when it was clear that not only could the situation in Ottawa not be handled in the way in which it was handled in Coutts or elsewhere, but also out of an understanding and recognition that these were not isolated, disconnected phenomena and that unless and until the situation in Ottawa was resolved — properly, peacefully, but effectively — there was a likelihood that the movement, inspired and emboldened by its success in literally taking over control of the streets here, would simply continue to disrupt Canada, the lives of citizens, our economy and our national security.

Hon. Paula Simons: Honourable senators, last week, RCMP arrested 13 members of a blockade who had helped to paralyze the Coutts border crossing, the main point of entry from the United States to my province of Alberta. Those blockades were devastating for ordinary citizens held captive for days, unable to get to the hospital or to the grocery store; for local farming and ranching communities who depend on that border crossing every single day; for the real professional truck drivers, many of them Sikh Canadians, effectively held hostage at the border by those who claim to speak for them. Those blockades cost the Alberta economy an estimated $864 million.

The situation was so dire that by February 5, Alberta sent an urgent request for assistance to the federal government, saying police had exhausted all options and needed emergency federal assistance to “mitigate risks of potential conflict.”

And those risks were real enough. RCMP also found three trailers filled with weapons: handguns; a machete; 13 long guns — not just your typical farm rifles but semi-automatic military-style rifles — multiple sets of body armour; a large cache of ammunition along with high-capacity magazines; and, amongst it all, the insignia of Diagolon, a so-called “accelerationist” group that aims to accelerate racial conflict to lead to the eventual creation of a White ethnostate.

Of the 13 people arrested last week, 4 are charged with conspiracy to commit murder.

Politicians and pundits expressed shock and surprise. I was not surprised. This is not my first rodeo. I cut my teeth as a journalist covering White supremacists in the late 1980s back when Terry Long and Aryan Nations were burning crosses in Provost and when the Ku Klux Klan tried to blow up the Jewish Community Centre in Calgary.

Much more recently, I covered the death of Daniel Woodall, a brave officer with the Edmonton police hate crime unit, murdered by an anti-Semitic hate-monger linked to the Freemen on the Land movement.

Last week’s arrests shouldn’t have shocked anyone, at least not anyone who had been paying attention. Far-right hate groups have been on the rise in Canada since 2016, first turbo charged by imported American right-wing rhetoric, incited further by the delusional paranoia of the QAnon conspiracy. In Canada, these groups fed on xenophobia in general and Islamophobia in particular.

Now, once upon a time, small groups of angry malcontents might have blown off steam with a few buddies in the bar. Today, the angry and the alienated are radicalized online by social media platforms — Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, 4chan,Telegram — where people can connect and form virtual communities, where they can marinate in a lethal cocktail of disinformation, bravado and paranoia; where they can cross‑pollinate their various obsessions and hobby horses and weave together their conspiracy narratives of choice.

Media platforms as diverse as FOX News, InfoWars, Breitbart, Rebel News and RT allow people to inhabit a parallel world — not just a world of alternate facts but of alternate realities. In this shadow world, lone wolves find their packs.

For the last five or six years, brave journalists, including Mack Lamoureux, Justin Ling, Caroline Orr and Evan Balgord have been reporting on extremist groups such as the Proud Boys, Sons of Odin, the Three Percenters, the Freemen on the Land, the Yellow Vesters and Diagolon.

Watchdogs like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network and the Institute for Strategic Dialogue have tracked their activities. But not everyone has paid attention. The evidence of the last three weeks suggests Canadian policing and intelligence services may also have underestimated the risks of domestic terrorism and the likelihood and probability of foreign interference.

Well before COVID-19 arrived in Canada, far-right actors were actively preying on people’s frustrations and fears. In 2019, the United We Roll Yellow Vester convoy, organized by many of the same people who organized this one, took over the streets of Ottawa, mixing pro-pipeline slogans with an ugly blend of anti‑Semitism, anti-Muslim rhetoric and propaganda attacks on Indigenous Canadians. It was not a good-faith demonstration in support of Alberta’s vital oil and gas sector. It was a travelling hate circus. And United We Roll was just a dress rehearsal for what we’ve seen in Ottawa and across the country these last few weeks.

This event was not infiltrated or appropriated by racists. It was organized by them. Those bouncy castles, barbecues and hot tubs — those were stunts designed to distract, delude and troll us. This was not a street party nor a festival; it was not Canada Day — people waving Confederate flags, symbols of slavery and racist oppression, all the while mouthing slogans about freedom; people screaming about free speech while they attacked journalists in the street over and over again; anti-Semites with the grotesque audacity to desecrate our Canadian flag with swastikas and to then pin yellow stars to their chests and equate the inconvenience of wearing a mask with the horrors of the Holocaust; homophobes and transphobes waving nasty signs, vandalizing in the most grotesque ways homes that dared to display pride flags; thugs and drunks stealing food from the homeless, attacking and harassing women and people of colour on the street.

It was a veritable carnival of hate, endorsed and condoned and even cheered on by some Canadian politicians, craven cowards, people who knew better but chose to exploit this volatile and dangerous moment for their strategic advantage and to exploit these damaged and deluded people for petty personal political gain and, almost as disappointing, the naïveté and willful blindness of those who minimize this ugly campaign of intimidation as though it were some sort of authentic expression of working-class Canadian angst.

Some of the people at Coutts and Windsor and Ottawa were ordinary, ordinarily decent Canadians, many of them, it must be said, seduced and hoodwinked by those who manipulated their genuine frustrations and fears. And how many Canadians have a family member or friend broken by these last few years, someone who has fallen down the rabbit hole or sucked into a cult-like vortex of misinformation and paranoid fantasy? Perhaps you, too, know that sick feeling of watching someone you care about suddenly start posting conspiracy theories online, wild, sometimes delusional accusations that have become completely unmoored from reality — accusations, for example, that the COVID vaccine causes AIDS or that the Prime Minister has been replaced with a look-alike. And this isn’t a far-right phenomenon. It’s happening right across the socio-economic and political spectrum.

This is a scary, lonely time, and I understand it’s tempting to believe in a big, bad conspiracy, to believe that some mysterious cabal controls the world rather than to accept the random horror of COVID, a virus that continues to kill hundreds of Canadians every month and mutates into new varieties we cannot predict.

In the beginning, though, we pulled together. We helped our neighbours, felt a sense of community, solidarity and purpose, banged pots for our health workers instead of assaulting and threatening them. We praised our teachers instead of invading their schools in angry mobs.

But I think Omicron shattered something. We believed that if we got vaccinated, we would get our lives back. But the coronavirus did not get that memo. It evolved. And when our vaccines no longer seemed to work very well, the case to get everyone vaccinated seemed a lot less persuasive.

No wonder, then, that thousands of Canadians were vulnerable to the lure of extremist groups and flim-flam artists who preyed on their fears and mental exhaustion and offered them the deceptively simple dream that if they just got rid of the Prime Minister all of their problems would evaporate. Because let it be said that not everybody behind this slow-motion coup was motivated by ideology. Some of them were also seen to be motivated by good, old-fashioned greed. This has also been an organized grift, a giant con, a way to shake down people who were already desperate, to give them some sense of divine mission, all the while picking their pockets.

When the time comes, we must also investigate the role of foreign interference in all of this, the role of foreign funders, foreign actors and foreign governments who were all too happy to pour gasoline on this fire, all too gleeful to see Canadian democracy destabilized. We must especially investigate the way international agitators and con artists in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Vietnam and Bangladesh created a phalanx of fake Facebook pages, the better to create the illusion of widespread support for this toxic crusade.

That said, do we need the Emergencies Act to deal with this disgrace? Is the risk of invoking it one worth taking?

The convoy organizers were perfectly plain. They boasted of their plans on social media, live-streamed their dollar-store revolution in real time, shared out their seditious manifesto with pride.

I still cannot believe our capital was caught so flat-footed, especially after the Yellow Vest protest of 2019 and the attack on Parliament in 2014.

Where was the threat assessment, the strategic response? How and why were the people of Ottawa abandoned for so long? We should count ourselves blessed that most of these would-be rebels were, in the end, so disorganized and confused. The fact that their plot didn’t work says more about their incompetence than about our capacity to defend ourselves and our values. The next time we may not be so lucky.

It’s easy to write off alt-right hate groups as bullies who talk a big game but don’t carry through as cosplaying revolutionaries. Therefore, don’t look at Ottawa. Look at Coutts. Look how close we came to a massacre. We have to stop thinking it couldn’t happen here, because it almost did. Yes, the RCMP in Coutts made their arrests before the Emergencies Act came into place. However, the blockade itself didn’t fizzle out until the spectre of the act was in the air.

While the Emergencies Act has worked in the short term, I’m deeply troubled by the precedent. I worry about a future government that might weaponize these powers against environmental protesters, Indigenous activists or strikers. More philosophically, I worry about an erosion not just of our civil liberties but of our social contract. Because when Ottawa’s block party from hell is finally over and cleaned up, how many Canadians will have lost faith in their police, government, democracy and — worst of all — each other?

Lies are already spreading. Fox News, for one example, repeatedly reported that a female protester had been trampled to death by a horse. Even after Fox News retracted its outrageous story, it kept metastasizing online. So many people have embraced the false narrative that we have enacted martial law, robbed them of their civil liberties, frozen the bank accounts of people who bought T-shirts and upended democracy. I now fear confirmation of the act may poison our politics even further. If we deem its confirmation is now a necessary evil, let’s think hard about all the failures of public policy and political leadership that have led us to this place.

My friends, I want to live again in a country where we treat doctors, nurses, teachers, journalists and scientists like the champions they are. I want to live again in a country where we don’t make folk heroes out of people who throw rocks at ambulances or go to schoolyards in the Okanagan to scream racist abuse at schoolchildren. I want to live again in a country where we work together to fight this deadly pandemic, which is not over and that continues to kill Canadians — especially vulnerable Canadians — at an alarming rate — and to kill so many that we now seem to be numb to the rising death toll even as a new, more contagious and perhaps — I hate to say it — more dangerous variant, BA.2, starts to infect our nation.

My friends, are we really going to allow ourselves to be manipulated by hate-mongers, confidence tricksters, trolls and foreign actors into tearing our Canada apart? Or, instead, are we as senators going to help lead Canada back from the brink? We must do better and we must be better. We must be the Canada we want to see in the world. Thank you and hiy hiy.