The Emergencies Act & the CBC

Mere hours after the Act is invoked, state broadcaster runs a hit-piece on the police chief.

A photo from Ottawa. I’m taking photos of a perfectly respectable, middle-aged couple out on the street supporting the Freedom Convoy and the fella pulls this out of his pocket and smiles for the camera.

When Ottawa city councillor Diane Deans testified at the Commission examining the use of the Emergencies Act recently, she made a curious reference to the Candian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) - Canada’s government-aligned, government-funded news service. Independent journalist Andy Lee noticed this immediately, but the matter has attracted scant attention since.

OPS stand for Ottawa Police Service. Peter Sloly was police chief. Click image for source.

Councillor Deans - who was then head of the Ottawa Police Services Board, a civilian oversight body - says the CBC gave her a heads up. That’s how she describes it. She doesn’t say the CBC called her to double-check its facts. She doesn’t say the CBC invited her to comment prior to publication. Rather, this was a behind-the-scenes chat. The CBC let her know it was about to run a hit-piece on Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly. How sweet.

Andy raised a legitimate concern on Twitter, as seen above. That call makes it look like the CBC was attempting to manipulate internal police politics. Highly inappropriate.

But there’s another huge problem. This happened on February 14th. A few hours earlier, Canada’s Prime Minister had invoked the Emergencies Act - legislation that hadn’t ever been used in the 37 years since it became law.

That was the news story of the day. Unprecedented government action. Of immense historical significance. Every newsroom in the country should have been scrambling to explain this event, to interview a wide range of people about whether or not the circumstances justified this measure.

The focus of every newsroom should have been on the Prime Minister, and on Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland who, at the same press conference, had announced unprecedented-in-the-Western-world measures - the freezing of bank accounts of anti-government protesters without any kind of due process. Serious attention should have been paid to what this might mean for Canada’s reputation on the world stage, how this might undermine confidence in our banking system, and whether a bank run was imminent.

Yet the parliamentary bureau of the CBC chose that moment of all moments to undermine Chief Sloly. Because, you know, things weren’t chaotic enough. Hours later, Sloly resigned. The Ottawa police force, which had spent the past two weeks struggling to deal with the trucker protest, was now leaderless.

As I discuss below, the allegations against the chief were hardly earth shattering. He’d allegedly shouted at people. Lost his temper. Treated subordinates poorly. There’s no way anonymous accusations of this nature were more newsworthy than the Emergencies Act.

So why did the CBC run that story at that time?

I don’t know. But it’s highly suspect.

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BACKGROUND

Here’s how Diane Deans describes matters on pages 79-81 of the official transcript:

And so, in the midst of a big crisis like this…I was contacted by, I believe his name was Steven Hoff, a producer at CBC, and he told me that there was a story coming out about Chief [Peter] Sloly and his behavior inside police, and he offered to share with me the highlights of that story, and they were extremely damning.

…these kinds of serious accusations against our Chief, I mean if I describe them to you in broad strokes it's like, he's yelling at people, and is sort of a tyrannical dictator, I mean that was -- I might be overstating it slightly, but not too much. I mean it was that kind of accusations that clearly came from within the service.

…And that story, they gave me a heads up, CBC gave me a heads up that they were going to be breaking that story within hours. I believe that was the evening of the 14th, so I called Chief Sloly about 9:30 at night. I asked him -- I talked to him a little bit about the CBC story. I asked him if he was aware of it, which he was.

Councillor Deans says that, during their conversation, Chief Sloly told her he’d worked hard to get a grip on the trucker protest, that he intended to finish the job, and that “he wasn't going anywhere.” But

the next morning, I think it was about 8:30 in the morning, he called me, and he said, "I want to leave."

Somewhat later in Councillor Deans’ testimony, a lawyer representing Chief Sloly invited her to admit that, given the tense circumstances, rather a lot of people were doing rather a lot of shouting around that time. Here’s a portion of page 116 of the official transcript:

Stephen Hoff is described here as a “producer for CBC News Parliamentary bureau.”