Senator Simons: Thank you very much, Senator Tannas. Like you, I find myself envious of the certainty of some of our colleagues. Like you, I am deeply troubled about the precedent set by the invocation of the Emergencies Act. Like you, I am still making up my mind. But I do have a question I wanted to ask about your assertion that you saw no White supremacists involved in the occupation in Ottawa and your comment yesterday that no one had been hurt as a result of this.

The Coutts border arrests which happened south of where you live but in your larger backyard certainly gave me pause. The police seizure of that many firearms, that much ammunition, the markings of the Diagolon White supremacist group with those weapons. I’m wondering whether we aren’t being a bit naive when we say, “Well, no one got hurt. There were just a few wackos who attached themselves to this.” It seems to me that the base of this protest was a very dark, very ugly and very worrisome trend in this country that we need to be paying much more attention to.