A historic first, Trudeau invokes the "Emergency Act"
Canada has redefined "emergency" to mean "put the Prime Minister in a snit"
Canada’s Emergency Act was enacted into law in 1988 as an amendment to the then prevailing “War Measures Act” of 1914, to give the government the power to act quickly to deal with emergencies where its typical powers were insufficient. The Act defines “emergency” as follows:
“For the purposes of this Act, a national emergency is an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that
(a) seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
(b) seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”
This legislation contemplated giving government powers to deal immediately with natural disasters like earthquakes, fires, floods, disease, accidents or pollution. The Act requires passage in both the House of Commons and Senate and ceases to be in force immediately if it is not passed in either legislative body with 7 days of the declaration of the underlying emergency.
It will be interesting to see whether this use of the Emergency Act survives that vote in the next few days. The “emergency” giving rise to Trudeau’s invoking the Act was a protest of vaccine mandates by truckers who used their trucks to block traffic in Ottawa and other cities and across borders to the United States. The protests have involved no violence of any kind and have been not only peaceful but also typically respectful of the communities inconvenienced.
In short, the “emergency” seems to be putting the Prime Minister in a “snit” and rubbing his nose in his ill-conceived “vaccine mandates” that have been found by public health experts to have little ongoing value in protecting anyone from COVID (now that 90% of Canadians have been vaccinated) and impose medical treatments on citizens who have decided they neither want nor need the procedure. Provinces have already started to dismantle “vaccine mandates” in their jurisdictions as have some American states including Florida, Texas, Washington D.C. and the United Kingdom.
Vaccine mandates have been criticized as “constitutionally unlawful, financially corrupt, economically and socially disruptive, and scientifically irrelevant.”
But Justin Trudeau is unwilling to admit he is wrong about anything and on an “ego trip” that vilifies the same truckers who worked tirelessly to ensure Canadians were supplied with foods and goods when no vaccines existed, willingly putting their own health at risk for our benefit, but who are now threatened with jail time, loss of driving licenses, large fines and seizure of their bank accounts for protesting an unnecessary intrusion into their personal medical choices. Most of the protesters have been vaccinated and are not “anti-vaxxers” but simply against government overreach that imposes needless intrusions on personal freedoms for the political benefit of a Prime Minister incapable of applying common sense to policy.
The trucker protest was labeled the Freedom Convoy appropriately describing its goals, but Trudeau described these ordinary Canadians as a fringe element of extremists, racists, mysoginists and terrorists and labels them as “far right” terrorists. They are none of those things.
A sensible and objective Prime Minister would admit the vaccine mandates were no longer necessary and recognize the truckers as national heroes. He could have ended the protest by announcing a timetable to withdraw the mandates, just as Doug Ford has done in Ontario.
It seems in Canada, it is now illegal to expose the Prime Minister’s fragile ego and put him in a snit.