A movement by MPs and senators was underway to have the public order emergency to end the trucker protest repealed before the Liberal government revoked it on Feb. 23, says Sen. Marilou McPhedran.
“Just to point out that the day on which the declaration was ended by the government, there was already a movement among a significant number of senators and MPs, including some Liberals, to come up with the requisite signatures to begin the process of ending the declarations and that we didn’t end up having to do that,” McPhedran said on April 14.
“The government was well aware that we were fairly far along in creating that joint letter that was required under the particular section, and instead there was the decision to suspend.”
Under section 59 of the Emergencies Act, a motion signed by at least 10 senators or 20 MPs can be brought before Parliament and, if adopted, the emergency is revoked.
The Senate was in the midst of debates on the invocation of the act after the motion was adopted with NDP support in the House of Commons on Feb 21, in what was essentially a vote of confidence for the government.
McPhedran, who was appointed by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau in 2016, made the remarks at the end of a panel discussion with human rights activists and experts on Parliament Hill marking the 40th anniversary of adoption of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
The Liberal government used the Emergencies Act to clear the Ottawa protest demanding the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions, with the result that some charter rights were violated, including the right to be secure against unreasonable search or seizure due to the unprecedented freezing of financial accounts of protesters without a court order.
McPhedran commented on the government’s Feb. 14 invocation of the Emergencies Act after one of the panelists addressed a reporter’s question as to why none of the panelists had raised the issue of the first-time use of the act, especially given that a civil liberties group is taking the government to court.
“It did strike me as a kind of extraordinary thing to occur that it was not invoked in circumstances that may have merited ... and then was invoked,” law professor John Packer, director of the Human Rights Research and Education Centre at the University of Ottawa, said during the panel discussion.
“I would characterize it more as a kind of political reaction at a very last moment circumstance, and then as you know, actually withdrawn even before it was properly debated in Parliament.”
Packer said he welcomes the invocation of the act being challenged in court by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, noting that Canadians need a better understanding of their charter rights.
“It’s very core in human rights to rebel against excessive abuse of authority ... as a result, or a combination of a number of freedoms—freedom of association, freedom of assembly, freedom of expression, freedom of movement—and understanding the relation of these and the very notion of freedom is something that clearly not enough Canadians understand, neither in our government nor in the public square,” he said.
“I do welcome if there is more specific articulation from the judiciary on this.”
By the time the government invoked the act on Feb. 14, the border blockades in Surrey, B.C. and Windsor, Ont. had already been cleared by police or dispersed without police action shortly afterward, as in the case of Coutts, Alta., and Emerson, Man.
The powers obtained through the invocation of the act were only used on the weekend of Feb. 18 to clear the civil disobedience protest involving hundreds of trucks parked in downtown Ottawa when the government compelled reluctant towing companies to remove vehicles, swore police in en masse, and designated some areas as no-go zones.
By the end of the weekend, downtown Ottawa was cleared. At a press conference on Feb. 21, Trudeau was asked why he was maintaining the emergency.
“We don’t want to keep it in place a single day longer than necessary. But even though the blockades are lifted across border openings right now, even though things seem to be resolving very well in Ottawa, this state of emergency is not over. There continues to be real concerns about the coming days,” he said.
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