Police “shocked” by the size of Freedom Convoy
Historic, unprecedented event
Page 27 of Thank You, Truckers! (Chapter 2) cites some important facts. So many Freedom Convoy trucks streamed into the city, the police traffic plan collapsed. They thought they were getting five Convoys, but a few days later the number had ballooned to thirteen.
Peter Sloly, the Ottawa police chief who resigned partway through the protest, made closing remarks to the Emergencies Act Inquiry later that year. On pages 36-37 of those remarks, he tells us this was a protest for the history books:
The first weekend flooded Ottawa with vehicles and protesters. The City was inundated, from all directions, with thousands of trucks from across the country…The OPS [Ottawa Police Service] tried to maintain its traffic plan, which had been developed following negotiations with protestors, but it collapsed under the pressure of thousands of trucks streaming into the core. [bold here and below added by me]
Two paragraphs later, Chief Sloly adds, “Around noon on Saturday, January 29, a convoy of around 1,000 vehicles was coming north up Highway 417; three convoys were coming south down Highway 50, totalling around 2,000 vehicles; and people were marching on foot across the Alexandria and Portage bridges. By around 2:00 pm…convoys from the west and east had arrived and were backed up 20 and 30 kilometres, respectively…”
Our second witness is Inspector Russell Lucas. He was the Ottawa police department’s Incident Commander responsible for the Freedom Convoy. Later, he testified that police had expected “upwards of 100 vehicles per province” on average, for a total of about 1,000 trucks (page 20 here).
In the aftermath of the protest, he was interviewed by lawyers working for the Emergencies Act Inquiry who then summarized his remarks. Page three of that summary says this:
“Inspector Lucas…observed that before January 28 OPS [Ottawa Police Service] was only anticipating 5 convoys, and during the week it evolved to 13 convoys heading to Ottawa. Inspector Lucas stated that he was shocked by how many trucks and vehicles arrived in Ottawa on January 28-29. He stated that if he had known that thousands of vehicles would be arriving in Ottawa, he would have requested larger numbers of reinforcements from police services across Canada in advance of the convoy’s arrival.”
Inspector Lucas…observed that before January 28 OPS [Ottawa Police Service] was only anticipating 5 convoys, and during the week it evolved to 13 convoys heading to Ottawa. Inspector Lucas stated that he was shocked by how many trucks and vehicles arrived in Ottawa on January 28-29. He stated that if he had known that thousands of vehicles would be arriving in Ottawa, he would have requested larger numbers of reinforcements from police services across Canada in advance of the convoy’s arrival.
More info appears on page eight of his summary. It says the Ontario Provincial Police, the Quebec provincial police, and Montreal police all ‘managed traffic’ in a manner that prevented thousands of additional trucks from reaching Ottawa:
OPP diverted a convoy onto the Sir John A. Macdonald Parkway. SQ and SPVM diverted a 1000-vehicle Ottawa-bound convoy into Gatineau by shutting down the interprovincial bridge the convoy was intending to cross.
Martin Roth, whose story is told in Chapter 15 of my newly published book, reports that he was part of a smaller Quebec Convoy that also got halted on the Quebec side of the river that first Saturday. (The second Saturday, he helped bring 150 tractors into downtown Ottawa. Quietly, in the middle of the night.)
When Inspector Lucas testified at the Emergencies Inquiry (see page 55), he estimated that five thousand trucks and other protest vehicles reached downtown Ottawa the first weekend, and that thousands more had been halted on the other side of the river:
“We ended up with, I would say, close to five thousand vehicles, of which we still diverted on the Saturday thousands…by keeping them on the Quebec side thanks to our great partners, Sûreté du Quebec and Gatineau.”
There was nothing fringe or marginal about this protest. This was historic and unprecedented.
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Donna Laframboise’ book “Thank You, Truckers” is now available on Amazon.
