There is a long term rebuilding plan for the so-called Precincts of Parliament which almost cry out for a pedestrian mall/occasional-use ceremonial route. The PPS is, in my opinion - but I'll likely agree whatever Brihard says, long overdue. I think that the City of Ottawa's responsibility ought to end in the South-East at about the point where Sparks Street joins the National War Memorial, and in the South West at the corner of Banks and Sparks Streets. The enlarged Precincts of Parliament should have very, very, very limited vehicle access (bicycles are vehicles) but free and easy access for pedestrians and should be policed by well armed, well trained Parliamentary Protective Service members backed up by the RCMP.
This gets a bit tricky. PPS are best understood as security, not police. Some of them do totally routine screening work at entrances to Parliamentary buildings- as you know and others may not, Parliament’s facilities extend well beyond the hill. PPS also has a well trained and equipped response capability for something like an active shooter. If the bad day were to happen again, I’d be comfortable stacking up with them to hunt the threat. They do
not have conventional peace officer status, however, and have no mandate to investigate or charge for offences. That’s an Ottawa Police problem. Say a normal assault happened on Parliament Hill- like anyone, they can intervene, but Ottawa Police would take the file.
I agree about Wellington going pedestrian/ceremonial between, say, Bank and Elgin, and down to Sparks. But unless RCMP were handed responsibility for conventional
policing within that area, it would keep Ottawa as the police of jurisdiction. To me it makes no sense to revert to RCMP
policing Parliament, and slightly expanded environs. They have different mandates, are on different and incompatible radios from OPS, have a different dispatch centre… An evolving criminal situation can move too fast across that patch of ground for it to be logical to create that divide for just a couple blocks. The US has major issues with jurisdictional balkanization. The problems we saw at convoy would not be fixed by giving RCMP responsibility for police of jurisdiction over a couple blocks. Any major public order event would stretch far beyond that anyway, and would still be (appropriately) an OPS problem.
What needs to happen is OPS needs to gets its shit together. The communication, intelligence sharing, and cooperation between OPS, OPP, and finally RCMP should all be relatively easily remediable. The necessary mechanisms already exist to swap intelligence and plan for events. This was, IMHO and based on what’s come out so far, primarily a command failure on the part of the police of jurisdiction. Maybe the swift change in posture and response after Sloly took his ball and went home is a positive indicator that, with competent command, OPS
could recognize a threat and engage partners in a timely manner.
We’ll see. I don’t think the days of large crowds pissed at Trudeau and willing to be really dumb about it are over.
