The Federal Court has ruled the Trudeau government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act during the trucker convoy that descended on Ottawa in 2022 violated the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
In his ruling, Justice Richard G. Mosley said the move was “unreasonable” and outside the scope of the law.
The case was brought forward by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.
Mosley wrote, “I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness — justification, transparency and intelligibility — and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland says that Ottawa will appeal the ruling.
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“We respect very much Canada’s independent judiciary, however we do not agree with this decision, and respectfully we will be appealing it,” Freeland said at the cabinet retreat in Montreal.
Freeland, flanked by Attorney General Arif Virani and Public Safety Minister Dominic LeBlanc, said that in the opinion of the government public, national and economic security was under threat during the protest, and said the decision to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time was a “hard decision.”
“We were convinced at the time – I was convinced at the time – it was the right thing to do. It was the necessary thing to do. I remain and we remain convinced of that,” Freeland said.
LeBlanc discussed how the situation expanded beyond Ottawa to the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor, a key trade route with the United States, and the Coutts border crossing in Alberta.
“It’s not banal when security services tell you that they found two pipe bombs and 36,000 rounds of ammunition and ended up laying criminal charges as serious as conspiracy to commit murder and assaulting peace officers. So the context is important,” LeBlanc said.
Four people were charged with conspiracy to commit murder that were associated with the border blockade in Coutts.
Much of the Coutts blockade was cleared prior to the February 14, 2022 declaration of a public order emergency, the first step in invoking the act.
During the Public Order Emergency Commission, Justice Paul Rouleau said that the decision to invoke the act met the “very high threshold” outlined in the legislation.
More to come…
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