Parliamentary report on Emergencies Act decision is long past due — with no clear delivery date

For a committee struck to review an emergency, the approach to reporting back to Canadians has been less than urgent.

The erstwhile group of senators and MPs studying the federal government's invocation of the Emergencies Act over the «Freedom Convoy» was supposed to present its findings in December.

December of 2022, that is.

A massive pile of documents that had to be translated into both official languages before they could be considered held up their work, and as one senator remarked this week, waiting for that bottleneck to ease could take a very long time.

«I don't think people are waiting with bated breath for our work,» Sen. Peter Harder said.

«But they will be long asleep by the time we work in that sequence.»

Now that an index of the documents has been compiled in both official languages — which itself is hundreds of pages long — the committee members have agreed that the arduous journey toward putting pen to paper will finally continue on May 21.

The committee has had more than its share of starts and stops.

It first extended its original report deadline to receive more written submissions.

Then came the fateful June 2023 decision that all documents produced for the Public Order Emergency Commission, which had months earlier released its own final report, should be available in both English and French.

For expediency's sake, the commission itself had opted against that approach, with some documents only available in one language. Led by Justice Paul Rouleau, it had ultimately concluded that the government's use of the act was justified.

Translating the thousands of documents was expected to cost hundreds of millions of dollars and take several years.

The CEO of the Translation Bureau told the committee at a meeting in