If Commissioner Paul Rouleau had applied his intellect to the culinary arts he would be touted as being the first cook to boil the perfect egg, producing a yolk that was both perfectly hard-boiled and runny at the same time.
This is the aptitude and ingenuity of the mind applied to the mandatory review of the use of the Emergency Act. On one hand Rouleau notes that “the very high threshold required for the invocation of the act was met,” and on the other hand notes that “many and perhaps most of the protesters sought to engage in legitimate and lawful protests.”
The hard and the soft of it is that the Liberal government is vindicated for deploying militarized police in riot gear without name tags, while also validating the Canadian population that fits into the “perhaps most” bit—those who either supported or participated in the Freedom Convoy and the protests in Ottawa—so that (perhaps) most Canadians are not shamed or rankled by the judgement.
Assuaged, Canadians will appreciate the thoughtful, reluctant tone within the judgement and all the recommendations will ensure this doesn’t happen again. We can all then revert to coexisting politeness and not reflect deeply on whether the precision of our legal language is becoming so elasticated it is harmfully meaningless, and so that we don’t fret about the portion of Canadians who feel alienated, with a sense of having lost their place in Canadian society.
The challenge for us is that both of these likely reversions inch us toward fragmentation in this nation, affirming the fear by many that unless one aligns with what increasingly looks like a myopic group of ideologues cloistered as rentiers around the Liberal Laurentians, we no longer fit into Trudeau’s “reset” Canada.
The real challenge for this myopic group, in case they don’t realize it yet, is that the “small fringe minority” that seems to be so despised is much, if not all, of the silent majority in this country. This silent majority are waking up to the fact that Canada is becoming increasingly difficult to understand, with real value dissonance across many issues such as digital identity, the sexualization of our children, regionalism, the cost of living, and a smothering national debt that we hope doesn’t become intertwined with matters of our sovereignty as a nation—especially given the many concerns about foreign interference recently.
The dilution of legal certainty is one more bus stop on the ride from the “rule of law” to the “rule by law,” which is to say, “fiat rule” in Canada. This is where the law is used to validate the dictats of the governors rather than bind the state to ensure the citizen is protected.
For example, take the requirement for the threat of or use of “serious violence” to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act. “Serious violence” now seems to also include economic violence to our nation, as per our Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.
As well, Commissioner Rouleau expands it even further to suggest that it may also mean “substantial interference with someone’s physical or psychological integrity, health and well-being.” The legal implications of this for most people is too boring to comment on here, but suffice it to say that one may now assert serious violence upon someone else without even realizing it—as long as another person feels their “well-being” is interfered with.
Many Canadians have profound concerns about the trampling of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and civil liberties, but the following comment by Rouleau is especially worthy of note because it infers that they naively still hold nostalgia for a nation and a way of life that “used” to exist.
“Many of the protesters’ concerns long predated the Covid-19 pandemic,” he said. “They were rooted in feelings of loss of place within Canadian society, alienation, economic anxieties and loss of faith in government.”
It is definitely time for much deeper reform so that implicit questions like these are asked much more intentionally within the federal framework. They are already being asked in Western Canada.
We must remember that this “transition” of Canada has only happened in the minds of this minority government, those who benefit from it, or those who directly get paid to live within and amplify the projection of this “reset” Canada (i.e., the media). This attempt to sever Canada from its foundational values may be much harder than anticipated, as Canadians across the country are galvanizing against this myth masquerading as reality. This fight has now started.
New groups of Canadians are mobilizing around health and civil liberties in search of truth, accountability, and justice on topics currently not palatable to our mainstream media. The tide has turned, and perhaps the CBC should send a reporter to Thailand to respectfully see what the royal family and the Thai government are thinking about with regard to the legal indemnification of Big Pharma there.
Canadians have never agreed to a reset, and I am quite sure they do not wish to be a prototype for the transition of this nation state to global governance.
