Canadian investigation authorizes Trudeau to use emergency powers to stop protests

A Canadian commission of inquiry authorized Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of emergency powers to halt protests against his coronavirus vaccine mandates a year ago, despite objections from civil liberties groups.

The Public Order Emergency Commission’s final report was released on Friday. Judge Paul Rouleau concluded, “reluctantly,” that Trudeau’s actions met the high “threshold” for invoking emergency powers.

Last year, a ‘freedom convoy’ of truckers descended on Ottawa to protest the Trudeau administration’s imposition of vaccination mandates on long-distance truckers, many of whom barely interact with other people in their work.

The convoy disrupted traffic, clogged the streets of the capital and briefly blocked a border crossing to the United States. Trudeau, falsely claiming the protests were the work of extremist white supremacists, invoked emergency powers that not only allowed police to quell peaceful, non-disruptive protests, but also allowed the government to freeze the bank accounts of people linked to the protests.

President Joe Biden encouraged Trudeau to quell the protests, even though his actions included the use of emergency powers that would not have been authorized against protesters in the United States under the Constitution’s First Amendment.

The executive summary of the report exonerates Trudeau, although Rouleau points out some of the government’s failings:

I have concluded that in this case the very high threshold for reliance has been met. I did it reluctantly. The state should generally be able to respond to emergency circumstances without resorting to emergency powers. Only in rare cases, when the State cannot otherwise fulfill its fundamental obligation to ensure the safety and security of persons and property, will recourse to emergency measures be deemed appropriate. As to the measures Cabinet put in place in response to the emergency, I conclude that while most of the measures were appropriate and effective, others were insufficient.

…

The Freedom Convoy was a singular moment in history, in which simmering social, political and economic grievances were exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, shaped by a complex online landscape plagued by misinformation and misinformation, and unleashed in a torrent of political protest and social unrest. Although extraordinary, it was not entirely unpredictable. Historically, it is common for pandemics to be accompanied by a decline in social cohesion and an upsurge in civil unrest. This one was no exception.

It was the failure to anticipate such a moment and properly manage the legitimate protests that emerged, particularly the protest in Ottawa, that culminated in the law and order emergency of 2022. If various police forces and orders governments had prepared for and anticipated such events and acted differently in response to the situation, the emergency that Canada ultimately faced could probably have been avoided. Unfortunately, that was not the case.

The Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which is challenging the commission in court, disagrees with the report’s findings. Executive Director Noa Mendlesohn Aviv told reporters that Trudeau’s use of the Emergencies Act ‘was not justified last winter and is a dangerous power for any government present or future”.

Joel B. Pollak is editor of Breitbart News and host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot Sunday nights from 7-10 p.m. ET (4-7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the new biography, Rhoda: ‘Comrade Kadalie, You Are Out of Order’. He is also the author of the recent e-book Neither Free Nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellow. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.