A Canadian Federal Court Judge found Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of a counter-terrorism law to shut down the Freedom Convoy trucker protests against vaccine mandates and other lockdown measures in 2022 unconstitutional.
Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the use of the Emergencies Act by the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau to shut down a series of trucker-led protests in February of 2022 was “unreasonable”, CBC reports.
The ruling came in response to a legal case brought forward by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, the Canadian Constitution Foundation, and other individuals who argued that the protests did not meet the legal threshold for the government to use the powers granted under the act, which had never been used and was originally intended as a means of combatting terrorists.
The protests, which began in January of 2022, were almost entirely peaceful and featured truckers using their vehicles to block roads in Ottawa and along the U.S. border in opposition to vaccine mandates and other lockdown diktats, for which they were falsely branded as “racists” by the Trudeau government.
The triggering of the Emergencies Act by Trudeau — reportedly at the urging of the Biden administration in the United States — allowed the government to arrest the leaders of the Freedom Convoy, freeze bank accounts of protesters, and seise donations intended for the protest.
The Act states that, for the government to declare a public emergency, there must be “threats to the security of Canada that are so serious as to be a national emergency.” The law defers to the definition of a threat from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, which lists espionage, serious violence, foreign interference, or intent to overthrow the government as examples that would meet the threshold.
Trudeau Ministers Discussed Deploying Army Tanks During Freedom Convoy Protestshttps://t.co/KQV4Z0lJTt
— Breitbart London (@BreitbartLondon) November 24, 2022
In his ruling, Judge Mosley said:
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.
“The potential for serious violence, or being unable to say that there was no potential for serious violence was, of course, a valid reason for concern,” he added. “But in my view, it did not satisfy the test required to invoke the Act.”
The judge went on to say that the actions from the government also “infringed” upon the rights guaranteed to citizens under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms: “It is declared that the Regulations infringed section 2(b) of the Charter and declared that the Order infringed section 8 of the Charter and that neither infringement was justified under section 1.”
The ruling of the judge contradicts findings from an inquiry led mostly by Trudeau government officials that found that the government had met the threshold. According to public broadcaster CBC, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland said during a cabinet meeting in Montreal that the government intends to appeal the ruling from Judge Mosely.
In response to the ruling, Rebel News founder and ardent supporter of the Freedom Convoy protests, Ezra Levant said: “For two years Trudeau and the regime media called the truckers illegal. Today the Federal Court ruled that Trudeau’s violent response was illegal. Shame on every #JustinJourno who parroted his line. Today’s ruling was a judgment of them, too.”
Exclusive — Ezra Levant: Dark Times in Canada Are a Warning to America https://t.co/l4w2PgWdbn via @BreitbartNews
— Joel Pollak (@joelpollak) February 22, 2023