Did Justin Trudeau need the controversial Emergencies Act to stop the ‘Freedom Convoy’? A judge will hear the arguments for and against this week

OTTAWA - The shock waves - political, legal and historical - from the self-styled Freedom Convoy" have crashed through Canadian society for more than eight months.

And they're about to surge again.

On Thursday, long-anticipated - and delayed - public hearings are set to begin for the independent judicial inquiry tasked with probing what happened during those weeks last winter, when anti-government protests occupied the streets around Parliament Hill, blockaded key border crossings, and peppered Canadian politics with frustration, conspiracy theories and COVID-19 misinformation.

Under the direction of Ontario Court of Appeal Justice Paul Rouleau, the inquiry will examine why Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government reached for the Emergencies Act to quash the protests, a law that replaced the War Measures Act in 1988 and had never been used before.

Rouleau's inquiry is legally required under the Emergences Act itself, and will also look at the special powers created in the process. Those included allowing police officers to declare no-go zones on penalty of arrest and fines, compel tow-truck drivers to drag away protesters' trucks, and force financial institutions to freeze the bank accounts of protest participants.

The situation spawned pointed criticism of police, particularly in Ottawa, where convoy truckers camped out for three weeks in the downtown core, with cooking stations and fuel suppliers travelling with seeming impunity amid a local backlash at the disruption and chaos.

It also sparked concerns of extremism, after more than a dozen people were arrested when RCMP seized a cache of guns and body armour near a convoy blockade in southern Alberta, alleging a conspiracy to kill police officers if they attempted to clear the protesters.

At the political level, the federal government has had to defend its controversial use of the Emergencies Act against charges from the opposition Conservatives and civil liberties groups that it was an unnecessary overreach.

The public hearings will dredge through all of this, and perhaps more, over six weeks of televised testimony. The witness list - which, as of Friday afternoon remained officially confidential" - is expected to include Trudeau and possibly other cabinet ministers, as well as local politicians and police leaders involved in the response to the protests.

Key protest organizers could also testify, despite some of them facing criminal charges for their roles in the protests and bail conditions that bar them from Ottawa, their lawyer Keith Wilson told the Star. They include Tamara Lich and Chris Barber, along with other protesters who allege they were injured by police when they cleared the protests in Ottawa, Wilson said.

This is a black mark on Canadian history," Wilson said.

The Liberals, meanwhile, have expressed confidence their case for using the Emergencies Act will be vindicated.

Speaking to reporters on Parliament Hill this week, Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino insisted that invoking the act was necessary, and welcomed any lessons learned" or recommendations that might come from Rouleau's inquiry.

It restored public safety and order across the country. It certainly helped to restore public order on Wellington Street, where for three weeks the situation was virtually ungovernable," Mendicino said.

Matthew Green, a New Democrat MP who is co-chair of a parliamentary committee also studying the use of the Emergencies Act, told the Star the government needs a verified" timeline that shows why using the law was its only option.

According to the act, the federal emergencies legislation should only be used in a crisis of national scope that cannot be addressed by any other existing law.

The government argues that threshold was met. In triggering the act last February, it said the so-called Freedom Convoy" protests were causing economic harm, challenging Canada's sovereign territory with border blockades, and included the threat of serious violence" perpetrated for a political cause.

The NDP supported the invocation of the Emergencies Act eight months ago, but Green said the Liberals still haven't made the case why its use was necessary.

It's the government's responsibility to provide the facts that justify the measures they invoked," he said.

We wanted to know what the preconditions were leading up to the invocation of the act," he added. We need to know that in order to have an opinion on whether or not it met the threshold."

The hearings were slated to start in September, but were delayed because Rouleau had an unspecified surgical procedure. Earlier this year, Rouleau had flagged how challenging it will be to complete his report and submit it to Parliament ahead of a February deadline set out in the act.

It's a major undertaking. Under pressure from opposition parties, the government agreed this summer to provide the inquiry with documents that would normally be secret as cabinet confidences. An inquiry spokesperson at the time said that would include all of the documentary inputs" the government had when it invoked the Emergencies Act, and the commission has already received thousands of them.

Rouleau has also commissioned research papers from experts on topics related to the inquiry's work, several of which were posted online last week. Among them are papers on the freedoms of expression and assembly, the difficulties of governing emergencies in areas of overlapping jurisdiction, the role of social media in propagating misinformation around the protests, and the protest's links to Alberta separatism.

Significant media interest will see reporters and other observers vying for sparse space in the hearing room at the Library and Archives Canada building near Parliament Hill. With scores of journalists applying to attend, the inquiry plans to assign just eight seats in the room to media each day.

The hearings will be livestreamed on the inquiry website, starting with an opening statement from Rouleau on Thursday morning.

Alex Ballingall is an Ottawa-based reporter covering federal politics for the Star. Follow him on Twitter: @aballinga