There was no legal justification for using Emergencies Act against the Freedom Convoy
The Trudeau government’s use of this law is controversial and may be the most severe example of overreach and violations of civil liberties that was seen during the pandemic. It constituted an unauthorized use of a powerful law because the legal threshold to use the law was not met.
The Emergencies Act also has another internal threshold that must be met to be invoked. In this case, the prime minister had declared a public order emergency, which is defined in the act as “an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada and that is so serious as to be a national emergency. ‘Threats to the security of Canada’ has the “meaning assigned to by section 2 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Act.
It is not uncommon for legislation to incorporate definitions from other statutes by reference this way. And in this case, we know from reviewing 1987 transcripts from Hansard that the choice to make reference to the CSIS Act was an intentional one by the law’s authors, designed as a check and balance on this powerful legislation. We also learned during the course of the public inquiry that CSIS did not believe that a “threat to the security of Canada” existed.
Canada’s past teaches us that emergency powers should never be used except as a last resort, and indeed, being a power of last resort is built into the language and threshold of the act. Review through the courts is now the last remaining guardrail of accountability.Share this article in your social network