Will Trudeau’s “Emergencies Act” Stunt Make it Through Parliament or Court?
We will see in a week if the advice Biden gave to Trudeau was sound or senseless.
It appears that Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau took Biden’s dreadful advice and used the full force of the Canadian federal government to quell the very popular and expanding Freedom Convoy demonstrations.
How will that work out for him?
To begin with, let’s recall that Trudeau didn’t exactly get a “mandate of the people” in September’s election. In fact, under the Canadian parliamentary system, he leads a “minority government.”
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party has won a minority government, the country’s public broadcaster projected, after a close election battle against the opposition Conservatives.
CBC News reported late on Monday that the Liberals would get the most seats in Canada’s 44th Parliament but would fall short of the 170-seat threshold needed for a majority.
This means that he will need the backing of other parties. Current press reports indicate there is support…for now.
The Canadian Parliament has to approve the use of the act within seven days of the government invoking the emergency measures. Parliament also has the power to revoke its approval.
Trudeau’s Liberal minority government needs help from the opposition to pass his use of the act in Parliament. On Monday, New Democrat leader Jagmeet Singh said his left-leaning party would be willing to back the move if it means ending the protests.
However, as Canadians consider the scope of powers directed at men and women engaged in protests involving Canadian flags, bouncy houses, and hot tubs, I suspect many Members of Parliament will be contacted with complaints, concerns…and outrage. It is impressive how voter anger can focus the mind.
And there may be members of Trudeau’s Liberal Party who will break ranks in light of the dictatorial scheme that smears average citizens who want to petition their government for a redress of vaccine-mandate grievances. One already has, and others may be inspired to join in.
Joël Lightbound delivered the stunning, scathing assessment Tuesday in Ottawa with the big rigs of the so-called Freedom Convoy just outside the door. The convoy protests against Covid measures have grabbed global attention and paralyzed the Canada’s capital city for more than a week.
“Both the tone and the policies of my government changed drastically on the eve and during the last election campaign,” said Lightbound, who convened a press conference to deliver his message. “A decision was made to wedge, to divide and to stigmatize. I fear that this politicization of the pandemic risks undermining the public’s trust in our public health institutions.”
Publicly breaking ranks with one’s own party on such a major issue is a rarity in Canadian politics, especially when the party is in power.
Furthermore, Trudeau’s “Emergencies Act” may not stand up in court, either.
Any temporary laws made under the act are subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. That means any attempt by the government to suspend the civil rights of Canadians, even in an emergency, can be challenged in court.
The Freedom Convoy has its cadre of lawyers: Truckers Law. I suspect that plans are being made to take the “Emergencies Act” to court, where the truth about the nature of COVID-19, the mandates, and the heart of the protests will be more robustly explored than they have been in the compliant, Trudeau-supporting Canadian press.
I look forward to seeing how Team Trudeau explains its use of terrorism finance laws to target the small donations from middle-class Canadians who support the truckers’ goals. It will be fascinating to see how the current Canadian political leadership defines “Emergencies” under this powerful act befits the response to a virus that now causes health effects that are hard to distinguish from colds, allergies, or the flu in the vast majority of people.
The federal government has not met the threshold necessary to invoke the Emergencies Act. This law creates a high and clear standard for good reason: the Act allows government to bypass ordinary democratic processes. This standard has not been met. 1/3
— Canadian Civil Liberties Association (@cancivlib) February 15, 2022
Governments regularly deal with difficult situations, and do so using powers granted to them by democratically elected representatives. Emergency legislation should not be normalized. It threatens our democracy and our civil liberties. #cdnpoli
— Canadian Civil Liberties Association (@cancivlib) February 15, 2022
We will see in a week if the advice Biden gave to Trudeau was sound or senseless. I know which way I would bet.
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Comments
Do you think Trudeau has been trained in this?
https://beingfree.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/4-CHART-OF-COERCION.pdf
I m hoping that both Parliament and Court B slap Trudeau.
Acts of Attainder/Bill of Pains (defined as an attainder without a death penalty by our constitution) are both explicitly banned in all circumstances in our constitution, and we need to be grateful for every non-leftist supreme court justice including John Roberts the Wobbly because non of them would ever agree to any of this nonsense in this country.
Next senate election anyone is considering skipping (even if you know your senate candidate has no chance or you don’t like him/her) just remember that this could happen here if the supreme court flips.
Have you heard of civil asset forfeiture? That seems much more analogous than attainment.
I have, what happens with civil asset forfeiture is there is a proceeding where a court has to be shown there is a preponderance of evidence the property falls under a dirty/illicit category defined in 18 U.S.C. § 981.
While preponderance of evidence is in my opinion a horrible standard for taking somebody’s property it is a standard and the court does hear the evidence.
What you have here at least from the article is that the government says so therefore it could freeze all of your assets.
Furthermore while it is bad law there is law around what could be subject to civil asset forfeiture.
In Canada it seems the government need only say emergency and it has unlimited power, not just no need for beyond a reasonable doubt but no need for a preponderance of evidence of a previously defined crime being involved in procuring the property (because a peaceful protest is not a crime, the truckers haven’t hurt or killed or even threatened anyone)
While Civil Asset Forfeiture is bad law and in my opinion had a horrible supreme court ruling it does have legal limits law enforcement needs to work in, and at least in theory can’t be done on any clean property, while Canada is going after clean property as punishment for supporting a protest which in my opinion does make it more like Bill of Pains/Attainder.
Sorry about the wall of text by the way.
Danny,
The point is that the asset is tainted in effect when the LEO/State make that declaration which is exactly what Canada is doing here; declaring that anything used to support the truckers is tainted and subject to seizure. Simplistic but effectively true.
Also the assets can be seized under US law by LEO on the spot in civil asset forfeiture. Guy gets pulled over for speeding, LEO runs a canine and he alerts, opens trunk and there’s $500K in cash which is 100% legal to have (but all cash has drug residue). Govt impounds vehicle and cash. Driver must go to CT to get it back. All on the whim of LEO.
But the government does have to prove a preponderance of evidence to a judge after they take the property (not true in Canada) and 18 U.S.C. § 981 was an act of congress that covered property tainted by actual illegal activity not tainted by participation in a peaceful protest the leader doesn’t like, and while nobody likes needing to go to court to get their property back a lawful citizen could go to a judge and get their property back while in Canada the decision to freeze is final, and unlike the United States where CAF law was made to combat actual crimes in Canada it is there to crack down on a peaceful protest that was banned for being a protest in favor of the wrong cause (and I may add not banned by order of parliament but order of Der Trudeau)
I agree civil asset forfeiture is bad law, and we do need to fight it, but it isn’t on the same level of Canada.
To put it this way would you prefer to be in front of a judge asking for your property back and refuting the states case, or the state is the judge, jury and executioner (situation in Canada)?
A risk they are assessing is that even a bully can push to the point where the bully gets punched. Bullies are cowards who depend on submission and surrender. Somebody behind Trudeau is calling the shots. The politicians are calculating. Does LV have odds yet?
But, a lot of people will be stopped dead when they start seeing people having their bank accounts frozen for posting in support of the Truckers on social media. And, they may bet an apology six months from now. But, right now, they can’t buy food or pay their car insurance.
How quaint. You’re speaking as if Justine Turdeau actually gives a rip about the law.
Just like any good little petty tyrant, he IS the law. Don’t need this stinking “consent of the governed” stuff.
He may not give a rip about the law but the final decision will be decided by those who do.
I wish I was confident in that
I follow a lot of tech journalists/business leaders on Twitter. A surprising number of them are Canadian. Throughout 2020, my twitter feed from these people was heavily populated with comments about Trump’s ‘dangerously authoritarian’ response to the BLM riots….actual RIOTS. And yet, I haven’t seen a single one of them comment about what Trudeau is doing.
Imagine it Trump unilaterally moved to not only confiscate BLM assets but also moved to freeze assets of everyone who only donated to BLM. The media would have lost their mind. Clearly, it would have been his third Impeachment…and it very well may have been successful.
They have us all coward
They sit safely in Canada and enjoy the world-wide sport of poking fun and criticism at the US. They jab and poke at Trump, and are strangely silent about Trudeau. Both Trudeaux.
And if you continue to resist, we will raise the alert to defcon 20 and put you on double secret probation!
I think there was something I read somewhere about consent of the governed …
But, there is nothing about consent of the ruled. Trudeau is telling everyone how he sees Canadian citizens.
Canadian subjects.
FIFY.
How is all this totalitarianism helping the sacred Canadian democracy we keep hearing about?
If Justin Castro manages to make himself “temporary” dictator by a slim majority coalition with a minority party even further to the left of him he may rue the day.
What he set in motion will come back to bite him and his party in the back unless he can manage to make himself permanent dictator. I have no doubt that is his goal. But the extremist radical lefties to the left of him likely have other plans.
Hard to become dictator for life when your support is a fragmented coalition. Life as a dictator is hard. A dictator must be absolutely ruthless. Justin isn’t the dictator Fidel was and never will be. Soy boys do not last long as dictators. If he tries he’ll quickly end up like Ceausescu. Either at the hands of the radical left extremists he is currently allied with or at the hands of the Right taking their country back.
Can any readers reference a political analysis of trudeau’s support structure other than NWO Europeans ? Who are the money interests and factions supporting his continued presence as the “face of the Canadian government” ? … Is he protected by England and the “Five I’s” ? Or the wealthiest of Canada’s dual citizens ?
Truckers need to find a bunch of elderly black women and put them in the cab of big rigs and honk like crazy. Then get the cameras out when they resist.
Rosa Parks 2022.
When ask by an advisor, “My lord, is that… legal?”, Prime Minister Trudeau was heard to reply, “I will make it legal.” A source who wished to remain anonymous remarked, “Meesa think we in big doo doo.”
1) There is no equivalent I know of in Canadian law to Marbury -v- Madison that creates judicial review. I could be wrong, but I do not think that Canadian courts have the power to make Castreau stand down. In Parliamentary democracies, Parliament itself is usually the court of final appeal.
2) Joël Lightbound made his comments a week ago, well before Castreau seized power. I find it absolutely telling that in the time since NOT ONE SINGLE MEMBER OF PARLIAMENT, Opposition or otherwise, has raised the slightest objection to the coup, That can be taken to mean that they either agree with what was done, or that they are intimidated and will not resist.
3) I don’t think that there is a conventional political route out of this.
Subotai Bahadur
Justin Castro will be dictator until he is no longer useful to the radical left extremists. Then he’ll be “discarded”, one way or another. By one political faction or another.
He could have avoided this situation by engaging with the truckers/protestors. And/or by declaring the pandemic is over and the mandates are no longer needed. Instead he decided to play tough guy strong man my-way-or-the-highway dictator.
The overgrown adolescent wannabe dictator is in way over his head. However it works out for Canada, it will not end well for him personally.
As I understand it there is a vote by parliament in seven days to sustain or end the emergency powers declaration. If sustained it continues until 30 days from enactment. If not it ends immediately.
Actually thanks to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, incorporated into the Canadian constitution in 1982 when for the fist time in Canadian history Canada codified its constitution in writing, Canada does have a system of judicial primacy. Before that Canada had a Bill of Rights first passed in 1960. But that was only a federal law. Under older constitutions the Canadian system was modeled after the British Westminster system. The UK certainly doesn’t have a written constitution, and can’t even be said to have an unwritten constitution. Instead it has a system of Parliamentary supremacy. In other words the government can’t take an action like invoking this Emergency Act unless it has the approval of Parliament. But as long as Parliament approves the government can pretty much do what it wants.
This was exactly the case when the Canadian Bill of Rights (CBR) was in force. As a law passed by Parliament it only applied to the federal government, and Parliament could amend it by simple majority. The judiciary kept out of constitutional issues and only rarely ruled that a law passed by Parliament violated the CBR. And all Parliament had to do was amend the CBR to overrule the judiciary (which is why the judiciary was loath to take up constitutional issues related to the CBR).
Actually having a written constitution with a Charter of Freedoms and Rights changed all that. The Canadian constitution including the Charter specifically expanded the power of the judiciary to interpret and defend the entire Constitution. The courts, not Parliament, specifically the Supreme Court of Canada are the ultimate authorities on what the constitution means and what the government can do. Until the 1982 under the old system the judiciary wasn’t anywhere near as activist as the U.S. judiciary. With its new powers after the adoption of a written constitution in 1982 it has quickly become as activist, at least when striking down laws passed by Parliament as unconstitutional.
There are several ironies here. For instance, there used to be a distinct nationality known as Canadian. But it was gradually extinguished by the liberals who equated having a national identity as acting American. The Canadian national identity then functionally became not being American. Justin Trudeau has bragged that Canada is a post-national country and instead is a transnational country.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jan/04/the-canada-experiment-is-this-the-worlds-first-postnational-country
“When Justin Trudeau said ‘there is no core identity, no mainstream in Canada’, he was articulating a uniquely Canadian philosophy that some find bewildering, even reckless – but could represent a radical new model of nationhood.”
Demolishing the “core identity” of Canadians, embracing what the liberals in the post WWII era claimed was ‘liberal universalism,” and simply claiming that Canadians simply had shared values. And they incorporated those shared values in their first ever written constitution which of course includes the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
So ironically in their pursuit to make themselves anything except American they adopted a constitution that establishes the very American system of judicial supremacy. And this American system means the Supreme Court of Canada may well rule that Justin Castreau is acting illegally and unconstitutionally.
And the ultimate irony? The greatest advocate for this “very American” system of judicial supremacy was Pierre Trudeau who pushed for and got the Canadian Constitution Act of 1982 while he was Prime Minister from 1980-1984.
I don’t know if Pierre ever spanked Justine to discipline him as a child. But it may well turn out that Pierre will now spank him as an adult years after he died.
Do not make the mistake of assuming the Canadian political/justice system is at all analogous to the American one. We have a Westminster parliamentary system with a fig leaf “Constitution” and “Charter of Rights and Freedoms” that are routinely ignored.
Trudeau will not lose any vote in the House or Senate. Like all minority coalition Parliament, power resides not with the party with a plurality of seats, but with the party who has the numbers to boost them to a majority of seats. In Canada, that’s the New Democratic Party (our Communist party). Those loons are hardcore and vote in absolute unison. This is the most power they’ve had federally ever and they will not give it up.
The Liberal-NDP coalition needs to lose 17 votes to lose a confidence vote in the House. The Liberals are nothing if not savvy political animals. Those “dissident” Liberal MPs? Nothing of the kind. They’re in vulnerable ridings and they’ve been allowed to break ranks because the Liberal-NDP coalition has a comfortable enough lead that they can afford to let them vote against the government to save the seats long-term.
It doesn’t matter that 50% of Canadians allegedly support the truckers, only 36% of voters voted anyway in the last federal election and electoral ridings are heavily skewed towards the large urban centers. That’s as it should be, numerically, as 50% of Canada’s population lives in just three cities; but that means that the cities absolutely dominate federal politics and the cities are absolutely dominated by the Liberal-NDP political axis and their various cultural Marxist enablers.
We’re not going to vote our way out of this one. My money, by a slim margin, is on Romania 1989 for the endgame when Trudeau orders the military to fire on Canadian citizens and the military and RCMP end up shooting at each other.
“50% of Canada’s population lives in just three cities”
Which is why the truckers should just stop trucking to three places.
Over in a week.
It is disgraceful that Biden’s advice which was rejected twice by SCOTUS was apparently what he gave Trudeau,namely push as far as you can and wait for the courts to set aside what you do
Project Veritas revealed a secret recording of the Biden team indicating that they will be pushing for annual COVID vaccines.
And there are articles with suspicious of genetically modifying vegetables to become vaccine carriers. I have no idea how true this is but given the last few years, anything is possible.