Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s unjustified invoking of the Emergencies Act is deeply problematic and will have long-lasting consequences for the country.
Ever since the freedom convoy first touched base in Ottawa a couple of weeks ago, the PM has gone out of his way to increase the tensions.
The Liberal government appeared to be hoping for some sort of Jan. 6 style event as happened in the United States last year. All of their rhetoric indicated they were keen to see such an event go down.
It never did. The convoy has been peaceful throughout.
The only real violence so far has been a vehicular ramming conducted against protesters, which sent four people to hospital. You don’t hear much about that though. Trudeau never condemned it.
Instead, Trudeau has called protesters every name in the book even though they are a diverse crowd in every sense of the word.
Now he is giving himself extraordinary powers to deal with these protests. One of the most disturbing parts is how they can now dictate that banks freeze people’s accounts without a court order.
People like Canadian hero Kevin Vickers — the Sargeant-at-Arms who personally thwarted the 2014 terrorist attack on Parliament Hill — have called for calm and dialogue. Trudeau doesn’t want that though. He just wants division and more hostility.
It appears to be in this spirit that the PM has decided to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history. At least four Premiers opposed him.
“We have all of the legal tools and operational resources required to maintain order,” Alberta Premier Jason Kenney wrote, in explaining his opposition. “The Act would add no relevant additional powers of resources.”
Kenney added that this decision may only “escalate a tense situation” and that Trudeau needs to “end the cross border trucker vaccine mandate, as it serves no useful public health purpose.”
The controversial blockade of the Ambassador Bridge was already resolved. The grounds for invoking this act are, according to Joanna Baron of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, “extremely thin”. The protests may be a nuisance and many people may disagree with them, but that doesn’t justify this decision.
The only thing that can be said in defence of Trudeau’s invoking of the Emergencies Act is that it was his incompetence that made such an extreme measure necessary.
Culled from Toronto Sun