In late April, municipalities in Bruce and Huron counties – about 190 kilometers northeast of Toronto – announced that the area would be the scene of a military training exercise called Trillium. Company (archived here, here and here).
According to the press releases, Canadian Armed Forces (CAF) soldiers planned to conduct welfare checks “to simulate what would happen if they were asked to check on the welfare of residents during an actual emergency” (archived here).
The AThe announcements caused consternation online, with one social media user circulating an open letter warning that the welfare checks could infringe on residents’ privacy. Others have posted videos of soldiers walking through residential streets, which are seen in the People’s Voice clip.
But Trillium Venture wasn’t focused on closing citizens. Canada’s Department of National Defense said the May 3-5 exercise trained soldiers in responses to natural disasters.
“The welfare checks during this training do not collect information, and soldiers do not ask private questions about their health,” spokeswoman Andrée-Anne Poulin said in a May 14 email.
“This is completely voluntary and is more of an opportunity for the residents to meet the soldiers and for us to provide the information that the county wants them to have.”
Poulin said Trillium Venture was conducting a domestic response to natural disasters that would fall into the hands of the CAF when provincial or territorial authorities requested assistance (archived here).
As the CAF prepares for many different crisis scenarios, including floods and ice storms, she said this exercise simulated the response to an extreme heat wave in anticipation of possible wildfires this summer. Because it was a domestic exercise, Poulin said the soldiers were not carrying weapons.
Right to refuse
Brian Hurley, a partner at Liberty Law in Edmonton, Alberta (archived here), said on May 21 that when the military or police come to someone’s door, the resident has the right to refuse to speak to him or her, unless he or she has a warrant.
“With the army and the police you have the same rights as with the vacuum cleaner salesman,” he says said. “You can’t open the door, you can open your door and say, ‘Thank you very much, please go away.'”
He said certain emergency evacuation orders could give different governments the authority to forcibly remove people from their homes, but this is usually not the case (archived here) – and that the military would not typically be given this authority during an exercise like Trillium Company.
Hurley added that the last time Canadians were arrested by the army was during the internment of Residents, largely of Japanese descent, during World War II (archived here). He said such actions typically require the declaration of emergency measures, which they do not federally or provincially in force in Ontario (archived here and here).
The Canadian government has invoked the Emergencies Act and its predecessor, the War Measures Act (archived here and here) four times: the First and Second World Wars, the 1970 October Crisis, and the 2022 Ottawa truck convoy (archived here). A federal judge ruled in January that the latest instance was an overreach.
Canada is also reckoning with the legacy of residential schools, which involved the forced removal of Indigenous children from their families (archived here).
Read more of AFP’s reporting on disinformation in Canada here.
