Former Ottawa police chief Peter Sloly denied, deflected or debated most negative assertions about his performance during the Freedom Convoy protests made by the force’s lawyer during a very testy cross-examination at the Emergencies Act inquiry.
Sparks flew between Sloly and Ottawa Police Service (OPS) lawyer David Migicovsky as of the first minutes of the Public Order Emergencies Commission hearings Monday morning.
Sloly argued that he did his very best to clear the Ottawa streets of the convoy “occupation” and that he was misunderstood every time someone — often his then deputy chief’s but sometimes City of Ottawa or other police service officials — quoted him negatively in their meeting notes.
“Everything asserted about me has come through a rumour or something that went around the station,” Sloly declared.
Migicovsky tried to show that Sloly was an obstacle to the force’s response to the convoy and micromanaged operations well beyond the requirements of his job.
That led to constant arguing between Sloly and Migicovsky during a one-and-a-half-hour cross-examination Monday.
They argued about OPS command structures during the protests, Sloly’s statements in meetings as recorded in notes by his colleagues, about who hired crisis communication firm Navigator, and almost everything else Migicovsky brought up during the morning.
“Again, you’re putting words in my mouth and I don’t appreciate it,” Sloly told Migicovsky at one point.
Sloly also repeatedly disagreed with Migicovsky’s assessment of his previous testimony, often pled he could not remember events referenced by the OPS lawyer and consistently demanded that the police representative show him proof of statements he made in meetings or publicly.
“I’m not going to do that because I’m running out of time,” Migicovsky responded at one point.
Even commissioner Paul Rouleau occasionally had to interfere between Migicovsky and Sloly, at one point asking the latter to “let me control the proceedings” during another heated moment between the OPS lawyer and the former chief.
The commission’s manadate is to determine if the federal government met the legal threshold when it invoked the exceptional powers of the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14 in response to ongoing Freedom Convoy protests.
An invoice tabled at the commission Monday revealed that the OPS paid nearly $200,000 to crisis communication firm Navigator for its controversial services during the convoy.
Sloly said the OPS hired Navigator to assist its fledging communications team, but his then-deputy chief Patricia Ferguson and Steve Bell said they were very uncomfortable with the company seemingly making operational suggestions.
One Navigator report shows OPS paid for a complete analysis of Sloly’s reputation and the extent of calls online for his resignation as of Feb. 6.
The OPS lawyer also pulled up meeting notes that quoted Sloly as saying he would “cut off Dave Springer’s nuts… and use them as bookends,” referring to an OPP inspector who was part of the police liaison team negotiating with protesters.
Sloly denied ever saying that.
He accused his former deputy chief Ferguson of taking “great liberties” with her interpretation of events that transpired during meetings and calls “on a regular basis”.
One example of that was when Sloly allegedly accused the OPP of not helping the OPS put an end to the crisis but rather serving their political masters, something Ferguson described as a type of “conspiracy”.
“I’m just amazed at the amount of liberties that an Acting Deputy Chief Superintendent, a relatively newly promoted superintendent, would take in terms of interpreting my intentions, but none of this is accurate,” said Sloly.
The former chief did, however, admit saying during a tense meeting he would “crush” anyone who undermined the police’s response — something Ferguson also recalled in her notes.
“That was an inappropriate term in a very stressful meeting,” he said.
More to come
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