Opinion: The long shadow of the Emergencies Act

Opinion: The long shadow of the Emergencies Act

Opinion by Special to National Post

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In a new book, Christine Van Geyn and Joanna Baron recount the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act to quell last year’s truckers’ convoy, and the threat it posed to civil liberties.

On Valentine’s Day of 2022, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau held a news conference where he announced that his government was invoking the extraordinarily powerful federal Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy. Standing with four masked senior cabinet ministers in front of a row of Canadian flags, the prime minister announced that, “The scope of these measures will be time limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address.… This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting jobs and restoring faith in our institutions.”

The Emergencies Act is an extraordinary law. It vests tremendous power with the federal cabinet, including the power to make new criminal law by executive order, without parliamentary debate or advance notice. In the decades since the Emergencies Act was passed in 1988, Canada has weathered terrorist attacks, economic hardship and an unprecedented global health pandemic, all without ever resorting to the incredible powers contained in the Emergencies Act. Such powers must be exercised with restraint in a liberal democracy. The prime minister’s Feb. 14 announcement ended those years of restraint. The law was invoked not in response to a natural disaster or the outbreak of war, but to a series of disruptive but largely peaceful protests.

Using the powers of the Emergencies Act, cabinet created two new categories of criminal prohibitions by regulation, in short, making it a crime to participate in or materially assist a public assembly that could reasonably lead to a breach of the peace. What is more, cabinet created new criminal powers related to financial matters that required banks to monitor bank accounts and freeze the accounts of anyone participating in or assisting the convoy, and also to report information about these accounts to the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) and the RCMP. Anyone who violated these prohibitions potentially faced up to five years of imprisonment.

Yet the context in which the Emergencies Act was invoked smacked of political motivation rather than a true national crisis. When the Emergencies Act was invoked, the border blockades had already been cleared. Windsor had been cleared on Feb. 13, and Coutts was being cleared as the Emergencies Act was being invoked. Although only the Ottawa protest site remained, and the prime minister had committed to the powers being geographically limited, the declaration of a public order emergency and the powers under it existed nationwide.

In the days following the invocation of the act, some 290 bank accounts were frozen. The RCMP has said that it only gave banks the names of people directly involved in the Ottawa protests for asset freezing, not the names of supporters who donated to the Freedom Convoy. But in a troubling statement about the political targeting of financial accounts, Justice Minister David Lametti told CTV’s “Power Play”: “If you are a member of a pro-Trump movement who is donating hundreds of thousands of dollars and millions of dollars to this kind of thing, then you ought to be worried.”

The push by heavily armoured police to clear the Ottawa blockades began in earnest on Feb. 18. The day before, convoy organizers Tamara Lich and Chris Barber were arrested. On Feb. 18, Pat King was arrested. And by Sunday, Feb. 20, downtown Ottawa was clear.

The Trudeau government’s use of the Emergencies Act is and was controversial and may be the most severe example of over-reach and violation of civil liberties that was seen during the pandemic. It was, in the view of civil liberties organizations like the Canadian Constitution Foundation, an unauthorized use of an extraordinarily powerful law because the legal threshold to use the law was not met. Accordingly, the powers to prohibit assembly and freeze bank accounts were unconstitutional. The normalization of this type of governing by emergency power has the potential to be the greatest and most dangerous threat to civil liberties arising out of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Copyright 2023. All right reserved. Excerpted with permission from “Pandemic Panic: How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever,” set to be released by Optimum Publishing International on Nov. 4 (Post readers can get 25 per cent off by using code NP).

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Source

https://www.msn.com/en-ca/news/canada/opinion-the-long-shadow-of-the-emergencies-act/ar-AA1hRX9J?ocid=msedgdhp&pc=U531&cvid=a7f3857b9d8b4c06871cb899b344b031&ei=16