The Councillor Who Wouldn't Negotiate

During our debate, I put a direct question to Councillor King about the 2022 occupation: should the city have tried harder, sooner, to negotiate an end to it? His answer was no. He wasn't interested in talking to convoy leadership. He wanted enforcement, not a table.

That's a defensible position. It's also worth checking against what actually happened when negotiation was tried — and against how those same convoy leaders are being treated four years later.

What King's record shows

King's posture through the crisis was consistently pro-enforcement. He was on the Ottawa Police Services Board at the time, and he resigned from it in protest when the board removed chair Diane Deans — the member pushing for stronger police accountability during the occupation. In his own public statement after the occupation ended, King said he'd "strongly indicated" from the outset that protesters needed to leave the city, and that as a board member he'd pressed police command directly about the inadequate response and the possibility of police complicity.

That's a coherent record: hard line on enforcement, resignation over a perceived retreat from accountability, no visible appetite for negotiating with the people organizing the blockade.

What negotiation actually looked like, when it happened

Mayor Jim Watson did eventually strike a deal — but not until day 17 of the occupation, and not through council. It was a backchannel arrangement, negotiated directly with Tamara Lich, that asked trucks to leave residential streets in exchange for consolidating on Wellington Street. It didn't cover Overbrook or Vanier, where the Coventry Road encampment sat. It was negotiated without consulting the ward councillors whose residents were most affected, or Indigenous stakeholders.

It also mostly failed. Only a handful of trucks moved by the deadline. Residents and civic groups called it a legitimization of the occupation rather than a resolution of it. It took the Emergencies Act and a coordinated police operation about a week later to actually clear the streets — not the deal.

So the negotiation that did happen wasn't a clean test of the idea. It was late, narrow, and unilateral. Whether earlier and broader negotiation — brought to the table in week one instead of week three, with council and affected residents actually in the room — could have ended things faster is a fair question. It's one King, by his own account, wasn't interested in asking.

Where the convoy leaders are now

On July 4, 2026, Tamara Lich — now serving 12 months of house arrest following her mischief conviction — was a guest of honour at U.S. Ambassador Pete Hoekstra's Independence Day celebration at his official residence in Rockcliffe Park. She was accredited as "media," photographed with the ambassador, and thanked him personally for what she called years of American support for the Freedom Convoy. Conservative MP Jamil Jivani posed for a photo with her too, captioning it "he's a gem." Rebel News, where Lich is now a paid "Community Ambassador," covered the event as vindication.

None of that changes what a court found about her conduct in 2022. But it says something about how far the political and media rehabilitation of convoy leadership has travelled in four years — treated by a sitting foreign ambassador and a federal MP as an honoured guest, not a controversy.

The point

King chose enforcement over negotiation and never wavered from it, including in our debate. The one negotiation attempt the city did make was too late and too narrow to be a real test of the alternative. And today, the people that approach was built to hold the line against are being welcomed into rooms with ambassadors and MPs.

Residents can decide for themselves whether "no negotiation, ever" was the right call, or whether it just meant Ottawa waited three weeks longer than it needed to for a resolution that arrived anyway — just at a much higher cost to residents, businesses, and the city's finances. What's not really in dispute is that the political consequences King's position assumed would stick to convoy leadership haven't, in the case of at least some of the most prominent ones.

My position? I would have pushed for more negotiation. The role of law is critical but negotiation with reasonable protest is also critical.

Choose your leadership wisely.

I'm not running because I think every decision made in the last term was wrong. I'm running because I think every decision deserves to be asked about — and in a ward without a real contest, too many of them haven't been.

Vote for Peter Karwacki.