Why feds’ command centre nags unwilling bureaucrats to report protests

The Department of Agriculture is tired of being asked about nonexistent protests.

Since 2006, dozens of federal bureaucrats have received weekly emails asking them to enumerate all the protests they’ve had to deal with, documents released under access to information show.

The federal government’s Operation Centre, a national emergency command centre set up to deal with emergencies like pandemics or natural disasters, has created reports on hundreds of protests, large and small, across the country.

The Operation Centre’s records show 622 protests tracked in Canada since 2006. Over 43 per cent of these, or 268, were aboriginal protests. Protests outside Canada, like a demonstration against the Keystone XL pipeline in Chicago in November, 2013, were also recorded.

The list was released to Liberal MP Scott Brison in September.

Its weekly email includes the RCMP and National Defence as well as Fisheries and Oceans, Agriculture, Public Works and Transportation.

Most don’t bother replying, emails from May and June of this year suggest.

Week after week, the Coast Guard’s duty officer reported there was no protests to report. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency and the Department of Agriculture reported the same.

“Is there a reason as to why we keep getting this request?” an agriculture official wrote June 17.

Why do the feds track protests at all?

“The role of the Government Operations Centre is, on behalf of the Government of Canada, to lead and support the coordination of the federal response to events affecting the national interest,” Public Safety spokesperson Josée Sirois wrote in response to a Global News query this week.

”This requires that the (federal government) maintain awareness of a wide range of issues that could affect the safety and security of Canadians at home and abroad.”

A fisheries official in Newfoundland started cutting-and-pasting the same block of text week after week, saying there may be shrimp allocation protests at some point in the future, but didn’t seem to be any at the moment.

“Sorry to trouble you, but this is the 7th time we’ve received this request (we responded to the first). Why do you keep sending this?”, an Agriculture official wrote June 30.

Earlier in June, Health Canada said there were “no additional demonstrations to report since our last update on that same topic last week. As you know our mandate is rarely affected by demonstrations and we are not expecting significant changes. ”

(Since 2007, most demonstration reports have come from Public Safety, the RCMP and Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development. Agriculture and the Food Inspection Agency never reported a protest, although in May Fisheries and Oceans reported a shrimp allocation protest in Newfoundland.)

Agriculture and Transport Canada started responding with a concise “NIL,” while an air force major pulling a duty officer shift at National Defence managed a slightly more verbose “Nil rtn”. (Nothing to return.)

In July, Health reported the Jeux du Québec in Longueuil and an under-20 women’s soccer competition.