#emergencies act

"The Accountability Project" - Canadians - Was your bank account frozen because you supported the Freedom Convoy ?

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first in time in Canada's history to give the federal government extra powers to handle ongoing protests against pandemic restrictions.

This is a breaking story. A previous version is below.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has told his caucus he will invoke the never-before-used Emergencies Act to give the federal government extra powers to handle anti-vaccine mandate protests, sources say.

Those sources, who were not authorized to speak publicly, said the prime minister informed the premiers of his decision this morning.

The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in the 1980s, defines a national emergency as a temporary "urgent and critical situation" that "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."

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Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says he's invoking the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada's history to give the federal government extra powers to handle ongoing blockades and protests against pandemic restrictions.

"It is now clear that there are serious challenges to law enforcement's ability to effectively enforce the law," Trudeau told a news conference Monday afternoon.

Trudeau said the measures will be geographically targeted and "reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address."

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Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland said that under the Emergencies Act, crowdfunding platforms and the payment service providers they use must register with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC), the national financial intelligence agency. They must also report large and suspicious transactions to FINTRAC.

"The illegal blockades have highlighted the fact that crowdfunding platforms, and some of the payment service providers they use, are not fully captured under the Proceeds of Crime and Terrorist Financing Act," she said.

23 Jan 2024 - MASSIVE VICTORY - CANADA

We won our legal challenge to the trudeau government's invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy.

Well done Canada.

Read the whole decision here: https://theccf.ca/wp-content/uploads/EA-challenge-fed-court-reasons-FINAL.pdf

On Monday, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced he was invoking the federal Emergencies Act to try to end the protest blockades that have entrapped downtown Ottawa and disrupted international border crossings across the country for weeks.

This is the first time the Act has ever been used, so Maclean’s spoke to Nomi Claire Lazar, a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and author of the book States of Emergency in Liberal Democracies about what this allows the government to do, why the law exists and what are the limitations on its power. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Q. When and why was the Emergencies Act created?

A. The Emergencies Act came into force in 1988. It took a lot of debate to design this piece of legislation because it was intended to fix problems in the previous emergency legislation, the War Measures Act, which had been prone to quite a lot of abuse over the years. The War Measures Act came into force in 1914 during the First World War, and it’s infamous for being used during the Second World War to intern Japanese-Canadians. So that abuse was very much in the background, alongside the abuses that took place after the first Prime Minister [Pierre] Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act during the October Crisis. At that time, the RCMP made mass arrests, confiscating property. There was an inquiry and it was generally felt that this legislation was too broad and not in line with the principles in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

So the purpose of the Emergencies Act was to have a piece of emergency legislation that was careful, that had more checks and balances and that could sit alongside the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

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I don’t often stray into the political realm, but there’s an issue here in Canada that has, well, motivated me to do so. A quick recap: In early 2022, Ottawa—the city in which I live—was occupied by the so-called Freedom Convoy protestors. Some three weeks later, the Federal Government invoked the Emergencies Act, providing law enforcers with the tools they needed to remove the protestors. Two…