Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaking to a crowd during a fund-raising event. Shutterstock/arindambanerjee
An independent panel has determined that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s deployment of an emergency measure to disperse anti-vaccine protestors who had overtaken downtown Ottawa and stopped border crossings was justified.
The Public Order Emergency Commission’s report on the government’s decision to use the Emergencies Act in response to the so-called “Freedom Convoy” movement in February 2022 was presented to the Canadian parliament on Friday.
During a press conference in the nation’s capital, Paul Rouleau, a former justice of the Ontario appeals court and the panel’s commissioner, stated, “After careful reflection, I have found that the very high threshold required for the invocation of the Act was met.”
However, Rouleau claimed that he arrived at his decision “with hesitation”.
In the much-awaited report, which was more than 2,000 pages long and detailed a number of policing and administrative failures, he stated that “the state should normally be able to respond to conditions of urgency without the employment of emergency powers.”
Participants in the “Freedom Convoy” gathered in Ottawa in late January 2022 to protest a vaccination requirement for truckers traveling across the US-Canada border. Additionally, the truckers and their supporters demanded that Trudeau resign and that all COVID-19 limitations be lifted.
For several weeks, protesters camped out in the city’s central business district, honking their horns and causing disruptions to daily life while others-builtblockades at Ontario and Alberta border crossings.
On February 14, 2022, days after Trudeau used the Emergencies Act, federal and provincial lawenforcement authorities intervened to put an end to the blockades and the takeover of Ottawa. They detained numerous participants.
Late last year, the Public Order Emergency Commission heard testimony from dozens of witnesses during several days of open hearings. These witnesses included protest organizers, police officers, Trudeau and other top government figures.
The War Measures Act received a lot of flak for violating people’s civil freedoms.
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