A member of the public wearing a Confederate flag hat looks on as Prime Minister Justin Trudeau testifies before the Public Order Commission in Ottawa on Nov. 25. Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
Convoy den’s mother Tamara Leach sat where she always did, in the front row of public seating right behind the lawyers, arranged three tables deep.
Two places up was convoy lawyer Keith Wilson. When the trucks rolled into Ottawa last winter, he was the one who introduced Ms. Leach to Canadians at a press conference, describing her as “the spark that lit this fire.”
On Friday morning, everyone in the packed hall behind them waited for the man they believed doused the flames with gasoline. It was the final day of the inquiry into his government’s use of the Emergency Act, and it was Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s turn to testify.
Outside the building where the public order emergency committee is being held, protesters waved flags at the convoy and placards calling Mr. Trudeau and his finance minister, Chrystia Freeland, “psychopaths” as latecomers queued for security checks to occupy the last few free seats. Inside, if it were possible for the mood to vibrate between the last day of school and a bar fight, the hearing room crackled on that frequency.
When the proceedings ended and a committee lawyer announced Mr. Trudeau as the first witness, most people turned expectantly toward the double doors at the back where the other witnesses had entered.
Nothing has happened. Ten seconds passed, then half a minute.
“It’s maybe a little anticlimactic,” Commissioner Paul Rouleau said dryly. The awkward tension in the room melted into a burst of laughter.
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But there is still no prime minister. “I think we’ll get five minutes then,” Judge Rouleau decided. Then, the moment an official called recess, Mr. Trudeau materialized through the side door like some kind of unassuming magician.
There was a strange weight to the day, and only a small part of it was about the government’s last chance to explain itself. It was as if the animosity and mistrust between Mr. Trudeau and the protesters had been simmering, but now that they were all in the same room, that resentment was combustible.
As Mr. Trudeau’s testimony continued, the watchful silence of the early crowd began to break into tense audience participation.
At one point, addressing concerns that invoking the act could further inflame tensions, Mr. Trudeau said it was not martial law and did not suspend fundamental rights. The crowd cheered and murmured, and a few people rolled their eyes at each other in disbelief.
The crescendo of Mr. Trudeau’s policy argument was an alternate-reality scenario: What if he had said no or decided to wait a few days and the worst had happened?
“How do I explain it to the family of a police officer killed or a grandmother run over trying to stop a truck?” he said, referencing a moment of civil resistance that has become well-known in Ottawa. A low rumble of disgust echoed around the room and several people raised their hands as if demanding a decision from the referee.
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Later, when a lawyer for the commission asked Mr. Trudeau about the frustrations and concerns the protesters wanted to be heard, he replied: “It was clear that they didn’t just want to be heard. They wanted to obey them.” This was also hated by the crowd.
Judge Rouleau had to issue several warnings, but the room never fully erupted into the angry electricity that ran just below the surface.
Late in Mr. Trudeau’s cross-examination, a lawyer representing the convoy’s organizers subpoenaed a voluminous document of testimony from protest supporters describing how the pandemic rules had harmed them and how the convoy looked like distilled hope. None of this would be new to anyone who had been paying attention in the past year, and the lawyer wasn’t trying to do anything particularly clever with it, but it was strange, sharp, enlightening.
Mr. Trudeau and any of the people who wrote these statements could sit in a quiet room and talk for a week and at no point would they be on the same footing: One side sees vaccines as safe and necessary, the other as dangerous and forced upon the citizens; people can have real concerns that you don’t understand and feel judged to the point of exploding, or the only people who explode on a national scale are hateful villagers; the government is here to protect you and help you prosper, or it hates you and will snatch everything away the moment your head turns.
When the committee broke for lunch, Mr. Trudeau again exited through a side door, leaving the audience to mill about.
“Is that your human shield?” one convoy supporter said to another with a child in hand, apparently making a pointed joke about one of the most inflammatory justifications for breaking up protests. He then introduced his own child, “This is my human shield.”
The man talks to his friend about how it is good to bring the next generation to see this. Then he turned to the children: This is your country, he told them, and you must protect it.
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