The head of Ontario Provincial Police’s intelligence unit says he was concerned with false allegations of extremism against convoy protesters by politicians and the media.
“I was concerned by comments made publicly by public figures and in the media that I believed were not premised in fact,” Supt. Pat Morris, head of OPP’s Provincial Operations Intelligence Bureau, told the public inquiry into the federal government’s use of the Emergencies Act on Oct. 19.
Morris said his views weren’t just a subjective perspective, because he was leading the charge on collecting intelligence on the convoy protest.
“I believed I was in a unique situation, to understand what was transpiring,” he said.
“So when I read accounts that the state of Russia had something to do with it, or that this was a result of American influence, either financially or ideologically, or that Donald Trump was behind it, or that it was un-Canadian, or that the people participating were un-Canadian and that they were not Canadian views and they were extremists, I found it to be problematic.”
Just ahead of the trucker protest arriving in Ottawa on Jan. 29, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau berated the protesters for their opposition to COVID-19 vaccine mandates.
“The small, fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa, who are holding unacceptable views that they are expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other,” Trudeau said on Jan. 27.
The prime minister and his...
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