New court documents from the province reveal some observation into questions the Emergencies Act inquiry has for Premier Doug Ford.
The documents, obtained Tuesday evening by CTV News, define the argument Ford and cupboard minister Sylvia Jones intend to carry earlier than the courts to quash an try and compel then to testify earlier than the Public Order Emergency Commission.
However, the documents additionally embrace an inventory of questions the POEC has for the premier and Jones, who was the Solicitor General on the time of the occupation in February. The questions are raised in a prolonged e-mail correspondence between senior counsel for the POEC Gabriel Poliquin and the Ministry of the Attorney General.
“To be clear, these are questions the Commission wants to put to Premier Ford and Minister Jones directly; they are by no means exhaustive and they are not meant to be a written interrogatory to be answered in writing,” Poliquin wrote in an e-mail dated Sept. 30.
Among the questions are, “What were the Premier’s intentions with respect to solving the Ottawa occupation prior to the blockade in Windsor occurring? What solutions did he have in mind?” and “Why did he decline to participate in at least 2 of the 3 tripartite meetings with the City of Ottawa and the federal government?”
Poliquin says the fee additionally needs to ask whether or not Ford believes Ontario may have handled the occupation with out the federal authorities’s invocation of the Emergencies Act.
The authorities identified that the POEC interviewed Ontario Deputy Solicitor General Mario Di Tommaso and the Ministry of Transportation’s former Assistant Deputy Minister of Integrated Policy and Planning Division Ian Freeman, each of whom are scheduled to testify. The fee, nevertheless, famous that Di Tommaso stated he couldn’t communicate for the politicians on sure factors, and he couldn’t communicate to Ford’s or Jones’s frame of mind.
The authorities is citing Parliamentary privilege in its case to maintain Ford and Jones from being compelled to testify, highlighting that the legislature is in session, however correspondence from the Ministry of the Attorney General additionally exhibits that the federal government didn’t imagine Ford ought to have to testify.
“As discussed, we do not share your view at the moment that it is necessary or helpful to the Commission to have an interview with Premier Ford at this time,” Darrell Kloeze, a lawyer for the ministry, wrote on Sept. 21. “Any evidence about the allocation of resources and support provided by Ontario to municipalities in response to the protests, or about the actions taken by Ontario in its declaration of emergency made on February 11, 2022, will come out of your meetings with the two senior provincial officials who have already agreed to provide information to the Commission through their interviews.”
Several cops are testifying earlier than the POEC this week. Interim Ottawa police chief Steve Bell spoke Monday and former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly is scheduled to look.
The fee is analyzing the federal authorities’s use of the Emergencies Act, which helped to clear the three-week occupation of Ottawa’s downtown by massive vehicles and protesters. Testimony is scheduled to proceed into November, with findings anticipated by February.