Food and other necessities donated to truckers are left beside trucks parked in front of Parliament Hill in Ottawa on Feb. 6, 2022. (Noé Chartier/The Epoch Times)
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A law professor says the real concern with the Emergencies Act lies not only in the measures used during the Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa, but also in the financial measures that give the government control over people’s life savings.
“What you have now is a government that has deputized financial institutions to essentially go into their customers’ accounts and make their own judgments, in their discretion, about whether or not those accounts should be frozen, without a court order and with a free hand,” Bruce Pardy from Queen’s University told EpochTV’s American Thought Leaders program on Feb. 22.
Bruce Pardy, law professor (Courtesy of Bruce Pardy)
“That’s not the way banking should work in a free and democratic country.”
Pardy’s comment was made a day before Prime Minister Justin Trudeau revoked the Emergencies Act, and a day after a majority of MPs in the House of Commons voted along party lines on the use of the act, with the Liberals and NDP voting to pass the motion to confirm the declaration of emergency.
Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act on Feb. 14 in response to the protests in recent weeks against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions by truckers and their supporters in Ottawa and across the country.
Joining Trudeau at a press conference that day, Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the financial measures under the act will give banks and other financial service providers the power to freeze the accounts of individuals and corporations involved in the Freedom Convoy movement without a court order.
“In doing so, [the financial institutions] will be protected against civil liability for actions taken in good faith,” Freeland said.
Pardy said the federal government’s actions undermine the rule of law and civil liberties.
“This is the suspension of certain liberties in the country, including control over your bank account,” said the law professor, who is also executive director of Rights Probe, an organization that seeks to defend individual rights and the rule of law and “inform and assist people to resist government coercion and mob rule.”
Pardy added that uncertainty remains around the overreach by the Liberal government. This is particularly so after the RCMP stated on Feb. 21 that only “influencers” in the protest and vehicle owners and drivers who had refused to leave the protest area had their relevant information provided to financial institutions, while also noting that “it remains the responsibility of the financial institutions to make the decision of freezing accounts.”
“However, there are lots of reports of people who say exactly that they did give 100 bucks and that their bank account is frozen,” he said.
‘Martial Law’
Pardy noted that the use of the Emergencies Act against protesters and their supporters was similar to the application of “martial law.”
“On the ground, it’s been used as an excuse, basically, to prohibit people entering into an area of downtown Ottawa, or if you’re already there, to check and see why you’re there, and where you live, and where you’re going and so on,” he said.
“So if you’re in that territory, it must seem very much like martial law.”
Pardy added that the proclamation issued by the government on Feb. 15 declaring a public order emergency suggested that the authority given to law enforcement to secure and block off an area was not limited to downtown Ottawa.
“In fact, they’ve gone out of their way to suggest it applies to the whole country with respect to this kind of activity,” he said.
The proclamation states that the emergency measures can be taken to “regulate or prohibit any public assembly—other than lawful advocacy, protest or dissent—that may reasonably be expected to lead to a breach of the peace, or the travel to, from or within any specified area.”
“So the question remains, to what extent are you now allowed to protest?” Pardy asked.
He said the Ottawa protests did impact residents in terms of noise nuisance and parking, for example, but pointed to already existing rules and laws covering those situations.
“If you park your rig on a street and don’t move it, and the effect is that you are double-parked and you block the street, then you are probably violating parking laws, and maybe [Ontario’s] Highway Traffic Act rules, no doubt,” he said.
There was also an application for an injunction to stop the coordinated honking taking place, and after it was granted by the courts, the honking came to an end, Pardy noted.
“The question still remains though, is the protesting unlawful?” he added.
Crowds of protesters demonstrate against COVID-19 mandates and restrictions in downtown Ottawa on Feb. 12, 2022. (Jonathan Ren/The Epoch Times)
“Let’s say you come to Ottawa and you’re standing on the sidewalk, you’re waving a Canadian flag, and you’re protesting for that position [of repealing the vaccine mandates]. Is that an illegal protest? Surely not,” he said.
Strict Criteria
As to whether invocation of the Emergencies Act was warranted, Pardy said the federal government didn’t meet the strict criteria required by the act to deem the movement a “national emergency.”
He said there was no violence at all by the protesters, and “so there was actually no danger to lives, health, or safety.”
The act defines a national emergency as “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.”
Pardy pointed out that the protest actions outside Ottawa, such as blockades at several Canada–U.S. borders, were resolved by the provinces and regular police forces. “So it suggests that the provinces did have the capacity to deal with these problems,” he said.
“And these problems were also resolved before the invocation of the Emergencies Act, and therefore it looked like they could have been resolved under other laws of Canada that existed.”
On Feb. 23, Trudeau revoked the act, saying it is no longer required because the situation is “no longer an emergency.”
Pardy likened the COVID-19 phenomenon to a progressive phenomenon in which the ideology dictates that the collective comes first and the government is the one that “shall lead us through.”
“We have a premise that experts and officials and politicians are there to tell us what to do and how to keep ourselves safe and how to keep our neighbours safe. And they are the ones who are knowledgeable and have the expertise, and to challenge them is to challenge science itself,” he said.
“In other words, ‘How dare you challenge vaccine mandates. We have told you they’re necessary.’”
Pardy said though Canadians are known for doing what they’re told, pushing them too far will reap different outcomes.
“If you push some Canadians far enough, they will eventually say ‘No, you’ve gone too far now. We actually don’t agree with this, and we don’t want this anymore,’” he said.
“In my opinion, that’s the real threat to the established powers.”