Commentary
Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland tried to make Freedom Convoy participants into villains. Whenever they spoke about the convoy during those fateful days in January 2022, they did their best to twist the facts and make the protesters look terrible. But by invoking the heavy-handed Emergencies Act, they instead made the convoy members the victims of government overreach.
Now, courtesy of a Federal Court ruling released Jan. 23 by Justice Richard Mosley, it’s the Prime Minister and his deputy PM that look like the villains. They’re the ones who—as the court ruling basically puts it—engineered the violation of charter rights of the peaceful protesters who took to Ottawa to object to pandemic mandates.
This ruling makes clear that the Freedom Convoy participants always were—to use a line from King Lear—more sinned against than sinning. Sure, maybe they honked their horns too much. Sure, there were many people who disagreed with their views and methods. But, ultimately, none of that justified the violation of rights that unfolded due to the unjustified usage of the Emergencies Act.
“The record does not support a conclusion that the Convoy had created a critical, urgent and temporary situation that was national in scope and could not effectively be dealt with under any other law of Canada,” Mosley wrote.
The judge was particularly concerned with the freezing of the bank accounts of more than 200 people.
“Someone who had nothing to do with the protests could find themselves without the means to access necessaries for household and other family purposes while the accounts were suspended,” reads the ruling. “There appears to have been no effort made to find a solution to that problem while the measures were in effect.”
The freezing of the accounts had no direct bearing on whether or not people chose to remain involved with the convoy. It’s not like they were seizing illegally obtained assets or the proceeds of crimes. It was just one way to mess with them, to hurt them, and to assert authority. It was thuggish authoritarianism and the courts apparently agree.
That invoking the act was a misstep was apparent in the moment to a lot of level-headed people and organizations who argued against it at the time, including the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which brought the issue to the court that made this recent ruling.
The Emergencies Act is an updated version of the War Measures Act. As the name of the latter suggests, it’s only to be used in times of war. But Trudeau’s father—Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau—used it during the FLQ crisis. Now that was a real crisis: a cabinet minister was assassinated. But even that was still deemed an overreach and so the act was rewritten to prevent future abuses. So much for that, though. Justin Trudeau came along to one-up his father. Whatever your thoughts on the Freedom Convoy, war it was not.
What happens next then? That a government could wrongly give itself a semblance of absolute power, no matter how short a period and however exercised, is not something that can be left to stand.
There will surely be political consequences. But so what? It’s hard to see Trudeau getting any less popular in the polls. This news does slightly increase the chances of more Liberal MPs publicly calling for a leadership review, however. That would be the main mechanism that would see Trudeau removed as prime minister before an election.
Perhaps the most meaningful form of redress will come from convoy participants receiving damages. Now that a court has ruled that their rights were violated, they may wish to seek compensation for that violation. If the government has to cut them a cheque, it becomes a formal recognition that Ottawa was not right to do what it did and that convoy participants were wronged.
Freeland for now remains adamant that the Liberals did the right thing and she says the government will appeal the decision. It doesn’t look good for them, though.
This court ruling will set the tone for how we will look back on what happened. The history books will say that protesters came to Ottawa to have their say and the Trudeau government abused their charter rights in response.
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.
