Trudeau’s use of emergency powers to end convoy justified: Panel
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s use of an emergency measure to disperse anti-vaccine protesters who had blocked border crossings and occupied downtown Ottawa was justified, an independent panel has found.
On Friday, the Public Order Emergency Commission submitted its report to Canada’s parliament on the government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in February 2022 in response to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” movement.
The decision gave the government sweeping powers, including the ability to bar any public assembly “that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace” and restrict access to specific areas, to disperse the protests.
“After careful reflection, I have concluded that the very high threshold required for the invocation of the Act was met,” Paul Rouleau, a former Ontario appeals court justice and the panel’s commissioner, said during a news conference in the Canadian capital.
But Rouleau said he came to his conclusion “with reluctance”.
“The state should generally be able to respond to circumstances of urgency without the use of emergency powers,” he wrote in the highly-anticipated report (PDF), which totalled more than 2,000 pages and outlined a series of policing and governmental failures.
“Some of the missteps may have been small, but others were significant, and taken together, they contributed to a situation that spun out of control. Lawful protest descended into lawlessness, culminating in a national emergency,” the report reads.
Trudeau’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time since it came into force in 1988 had drawn criticism from civil rights advocates who questioned whether Canada had met its strict legal requirements.
But Rouleau told reporters on Friday that when the measure was used, “Cabinet had reasonable grounds to believe that there existed a national emergency arising from threats to the security of Canada that necessitated the taking of special, temporary measures”.
The “Freedom Convoy” participants converged on Ottawa in late January 2022 to protest a vaccine mandate for truckers crossing the Canada-US border. The truckers and their supporters also called for an end to all COVID-19 restrictions and for Trudeau to step down.
