'The plan needs to be urgent': Windsor council wants feds to act on emergency commission recommendations

It’s been a little more than a year since the week-long protests that blocked the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, Ont.

What followed was a public order emergency commission into the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act, and the resulting 2,000 page report with dozens of recommendations.

A special report was presented to council Monday night by Jennifer King, the lawyer who represented the city at the commission.

“The commissioner took the time to comprehensively analyze a huge volume of evidence and testimony of a number of witnesses to make findings of fact about what happened last year during the protests,” said King, whose most recent task was to look at those recommendations and give council some takeaways.

The big ones, she said is the recommendation for improved inter-jurisdictional communication, as well as clearer guidelines with respect to requests for policing resources.

She said Windsor was heralded at the commission for their communication with the public during the blockade, coordinating responses between the city and police to ensure policing operations were not compromised.

“Windsor was seen as an example of a response that went well, and so was used in the report to show how to communicate during an emergency,” King said.

She also points out some short-comings in the public order report, such as the absence of municipalities in federal-provincial emergency management coordination and the downloading of policing and emergency response costs to municipalities.

“You have to have everybody at the table, all levels of government at the table to make sure that there's a coordinated response,” she told council.

It’s been more than a month now since the report was published and according to the city, there has been no correspondence from the federal government on next steps.

As King articulated to council Windsor’s border crossing is somewhat unique in that a provincial road and an international, federally regulated bridge are connected by local roads that served as the epicentre of the week-long blockade.

Council agreed it would like to hear from the federal government to develop a clear framework to be prepared for any potential future crisis.

”As I understand it, there hasn't been any clear indication of what steps the other levels of government are taking to ensure that that everybody sits down at the table, and certainly not in the last month,” she said.

She added, “There needs to be a plan and the plan needs to be urgent.”