'Bad humour' and short fuses: How politicians' texts played out at the Emergencies Act inquiry

The public inquiry investigating the federal government's unprecedented use of the Emergencies Act in February has seen a huge number of documents that otherwise would never see the light of day — including politicians' private texts exposing some embarrassing, and enlightening, conversations.

Politics is a profession prone to carefully crafted statements and rhetoric, so the text messages offered rare insights into the thought process of many key politicians — and a glimpse at tensions between governments.

Here are some of the stand-out text exchanges from the past few weeks. 

According to text messages that Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc said Jason Kenney wrote, the then-premier of Alberta accused the federal government of not caring about the Canada-United States border closure in Coutts, Alta. 

Around dawn on Feb. 14, the RCMP arrested more than a dozen Coutts protesters and seized a cache of weapons, body armour and ammunition — just hours before the Emergencies Act was invoked.

According to the messages LeBlanc shared with Transport Minister Omar Alghabra and Public Safety Minister Marco Mendicino three days earlier, Kenney accused the federal government of leaving the provinces holding the bag on protest enforcement.

The texts were brought up during Mendicino's testimony and were in documents released by the inquiry this week.

In the texts attributed to Kenney, he also complained about the federal decision to decline Alberta's request for military equipment that could help remove protesters' vehicles.

One message said — in an apparent reference to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau — that "your guy has really screwed the pooch."

"Speaking of bonkers," Alghabra wrote in his text exchange with LeBlanc and Mendicino, apparently in reference to some of Kenney's texts.

"Totally," LeBlanc replied.

The commission also got a glimpse of a testy call between Mendicino and Ontario's solicitor general at the time, Sylvia Jones, about how to handle last winter's convoy protests. Their conversation apparently included some colourful language.

Mendicino's chief of staff Mike Jones and Samantha Khalil, director of issues management at the Prime Minister's Office, discussed wanting Jones at the table during trilateral meetings.

"Can have my boss reach out again [to Sylvia Jones] but last call got pretty frosty at the end when [Mendicino] was saying we need the province to get back to us with their plan," wrote Jones.