It’s Trudeau’s show and Friday he will have to answer for it

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In true headliner fashion, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is up last at the inquiry examining his government’s use of the Emergencies Act to quell the protests that roiled the country last winter.

By this point, the weeks of testimony from cabinet ministers, police and government officials, bureaucrats, municipal leaders, furious citizens and aggrieved convoy leaders has formed an ever-narrowing corridor. Most of the thousands of questions that might have been asked about what happened and why have either been answered or batted aside.

Now, what’s left is one point on which the whole thing rests: The protests that gridlocked sites across Canada didn’t meet the test set out in the law that Ottawa brought into force for the first time ever, but the government maintains it was correct to invoke that law.

The legal justification for that assertion is locked behind the solicitor-client privilege that Mr. Trudeau and his government refuse to waive, leaving them pointing primly at an opaque container with “Just trust us” stamped on the lid.

So in one sense, there is little left for Mr. Trudeau to explain to the Public Order Emergency Commission on Friday.

But in truth, everything the inquiry has unearthed so far – the societal tension that spiralled into contempt blanketing the country; politicians and staffers snuffling through still-smoking debris looking for pretty storylines; diligent responsibility dodging; the sense that someone pushed the panic button early on and just kept mashing it until they arrived at the solution they may have already decided was necessary – lands at Mr. Trudeau’s feet because, well, it’s his show.

It’s difficult to overstate what a firehose of information the inquiry has been, and how starkly it contrasts with the normally parched state of affairs. Over hundreds of hours of testimony, dozens of key players normally hidden behind their respective curtains have explained the intricacies of their jobs, how the events of last January and February unfolded hour by hour and how they and everyone around them reacted to it.

But documents can’t wriggle the way people in a witness chair can, and many of the most vivid revelations arrived in the hundreds of e-mails, text messages, memos, meeting minutes and personal scrawls presented as exhibits. Even with all the sullen black squares of redacted text, the document dump that accompanied the hearings provided a mesmerizing look at how governing gets done, how the people behind the scenes talk to (and about) each other and what they see when they peer out from their respective bunkers at the world beyond.

Behind the smooth assurances that everyone was working beautifully together, Ontario’s Solicitor-General was hollering profanely that the federal government is not the boss of her. There was the federal Justice Minister calling the chief of police in Ottawa “incompetent” and maybe joking with a colleague about how many tanks they needed to clear the streets. The RCMP Commissioner went to two different meetings with really important information in her back pocket that somehow never got shared with the class.

Lawrence Martin: Don’t bet on the Emergencies Act inquiry hurting Trudeau

Sunlight is the best disinfectant, but the radical disclosure of this inquiry leaves most of the parties involved burnt to a crisp.

First, the shutters are about to slam down on this window of transparency. One week, everyone can see the gears turning and who was cranking them, and the next, it’s back to government officials treating Canadians like delicate children who can’t handle a straight answer on anything.

“Transparent by default” long ago went from being a mission statement of this federal government to a snide indictment of it, but the blasted-wide-open nature of the inquiry will only highlight how little anyone gets to know about anything on a normal day.

But the nastier side effect that Mr. Trudeau will have to answer for on Friday, and far beyond, is that once the inquiry flipped over this big, damp rock, what scuttled out from under it into the light of day made it obvious why no one in government wants the public to see them at work in the first place.

There was petty backbiting that would make a pack of particularly passive-aggressive teenagers take approving notes. Various officials, organizations and levels of government hurled responsibility at each other like the music was about to stop and all they wanted was not to be the loser left holding the hot potato.

Politicians and staffers toggled between clutching their pearls over this pernicious crisis and breezily grinding it through a political sausage-making machine as they looked for flattering angles and stirring photo-ops.

Layered over top of all of this was the drumbeat of frustration, blame and anxiety that everyone felt in different combinations, and which seemed to accelerate on a daily or even hourly basis. That seemed to take human form in Mr. Trudeau’s Justice Minister, David Lametti, who normally comes across as a spokesman for the congenitally mild-mannered.

On Jan. 30, the third day of the protests in Ottawa, he was already raising the possibility of the Emergencies Act in a text with his chief of staff, which he explained in testimony was only just-in-case prudence. Three days later, he texted Marco Mendicino, the Minister of Public Safety: “You need to get the police to move. And the CAF if necessary,” referring to the Canadian Armed Forces.

A few days after that on Feb. 5, RCMP Commissioner Brenda Lucki was in a meeting when she sent her colleagues a note, apparently in reference to Mr. Lametti, saying she needed to calm him down. A short time later she followed up: “ok so calm is not in the cards.”

All of this, taken together with the escalating sense of pressure that was clear in virtually every person’s testimony, suggests a certain momentum to the invocation of the Emergencies Act, in the face of what was, fairly, a volatile and stressful situation. Mr. Trudeau will surely be at pains to present it as a sober, deliberate and reluctant process, but it will be all but impossible for him to walk out that argument given the limits his government has set on the discussion.

In the days before Mr. Trudeau’s appearance, a picture of the circumstances of the invocation of the act emerged that was as clear and consistent as it was paradoxical.

The flow chart went like this: The protests that blockaded Ottawa and various border crossings across Canada did not meet the definition of a threat to national security as set out in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act. On this point, multiple security and government officials publicly agreed. The Emergencies Act points to the CSIS definition of a national-security threat as the litmus test for invoking the act.

And yet the government invoked the act and maintained that this was appropriate, and it won’t explain further because it says the rest is protected by solicitor-client privilege.

What it amounts to is that the entire purpose of the commission – examining whether the government was justified – hinges on invisible legal advice. The most obvious question for Mr. Trudeau is why his government will not pop open the lid of that “Just trust us” box and show its work.

But that’s only the most obvious pragmatic question for the Prime Minister. Everything else that’s surfaced over the past weeks and months suggests much heavier, messier questions that are his to answer, too.

Is there any way now to have confidence in the people supposed to lead us and keep us safe, or is there only withering contempt for the ugly cravenness that’s been exposed? Does Mr. Trudeau regret anything he did or said that might have made all of this worse? How much of this belongs to him? Who should own the rest? If this was all such an awful thing on a scale of terrible things never before seen in Canada, what can any of us learn from it?

They’re all variations on the same question, really: Where do we go from here?

When you’re the headliner and you keep everyone waiting long past the point when the crowd has gone surly and bleary-eyed, you’d better have something good when you finally take the stage.