Over 400 complaints against Canadian police were filed by members of the public during the ‘Freedom Convoy’ truck protests last year. Almost all of these were dismissed or closed very quickly.
The massive ‘Freedom Convoy’ truck protests in Canada were organized in order to force the authorities to withdraw the country’s medical apartheid system. The peaceful protesters were met by the authorities with violence and by freezing their assets under hastily activated martial law. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau himself fled the capital Ottawa when the convoy arrived.
Over 400 complaints were filed against the police during the protests. Almost all of these were immediately dismissed, notes The Canadian Press, among others. The newspaper states that the number of complaints against the police from the public in 2022 almost doubled compared to the previous year, that the Provincial Office of Police Review received over 1,000 complaints related to the Ottawa police and 571 complaints regarding the actions and behavior of individual officers.
Notably, a whopping 38% of all complaints against the police in 2022 were also directly linked to the “Freedom Convoy” and the harsh repression used by the government to suppress the protests.
390 of the complaints were dismissed or closed very quickly. The majority of these, it says, were based on the testimony of people who themselves were not “directly affected by the incident or interaction with the police”.
Ottawa police have come under heavy domestic criticism for their handling of the protests, including during last fall’s public inquiry into the federal government’s use of Trudeau’s Emergency Act to crack down on protesters around the country’s parliament building.
Witnesses have also reported that there was infighting and conflict within the police force, and Police Chief Peter Sloly also resigned in the midst of the protests as public criticism grew. He has subsequently defended his decisions as police chief, claiming that the information he had at the time did not indicate that the situation would “escalate” as he describes it.
The public inquiry into the protests later concluded that a large number of police failures contributed to the deterioration of the situation, but that the use of the state of emergency law was justified, according to the commissioner of the inquiry.
