After ten months of sifting through evidence, the Liberal government’s investigation of itself has, to the surprise of nobody, concluded that its invocation of the Emergencies Act in February 2022 was justified.
In his whopping 2000+ page, five-volume Report of the Public Inquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency, Justice Paul Rouleau states that the “very high threshold for invocation was met” because the state could not “otherwise fulfill its fundamental obligation to ensure the safety and security of people and property”.1
In his next breath, Rouleau laments that the EA needed to be invoked because the situation “could have been avoided” were it not for a “series of policing failures” and a “failure of federalism”.2
It’s not clear where Rouleau acquired his belief that it is a fundamental obligation of the federal government to ensure the safety and security of people and property.3 Which people? Whose property? Certainly not the protestors’s. Canada already has a Criminal Code, so where are the masses of Freedom Convoy protestor convictions? Would it not make more sense to suggest that the federal government has a fundamental obligation to respect its own laws?
What is clear from the Report is that the Commission was never mandated to justify the invocation of the Emergencies Act. As I wrote in December, the wording of the Emergencies Act and the Order in Council always took the presence of an actual emergency for granted. Rouleau’s explanation as to why so much energy was focused on this issue is worth quoting at length:
“The Emergencies Act provides relatively little legislative guidance on the mandate of an inquiry such as this. Subsection 63(1) provides only that the inquiry be held “into the circumstances that led to the declaration being issued and the measures taken for dealing with the emergency.” There was, however, broad consensus among the parties, including the Federal Government, that one of the objectives of this Inquiry was to assess whether Cabinet acted appropriately when it declared a Public Order Emergency. At the outset of my mandate, and throughout the Inquiry, I indicated that I intended to examine and assess the basis for the declaration and the measures imposed. This constituted an important objective and a critical component of my mandate. It would be preferable if the Act explicitly identified the objectives of the inquiry, consistent with the approach taken here.
On this point, a question that has been raised in this Inquiry is whether the invocation of the Act was “lawful,” in the sense of having met the legal requirements for the declaration of a public order emergency. That question is not expressly posed by the Act, or by the Order in Council establishing this Inquiry. The fact is that this Inquiry is not a court and does not have a mandate to sit in review of the Federal Government’s decision, nor should it. In this particular case, the very question of the legality of the declaration is the subject of applications for judicial review in the Federal Court.”4
So, while the Act did not call for it nor does Rouleau feel that it should, the Commissioner devoted considerable time and resources to the questions of “justification” and “lawfulness” due to “broad consensus” among everyone including the federal government that he do so. Even though the Inquiry was not a court and nothing in its Report is legally conclusive.
And yet, the bulk of media attention on the Inquiry and its Report is focused on this issue. Whether the slant of the stories fall in favour or critique of Rouleau’s decision, the decision itself is essentially meaningless.
With that caveat in mind, interesting observations can nevertheless be made regarding Rouleau’s reasoning. As Jamie Sarkonak rightly points out in the National Post, “incompetence as an excuse for emergency powers is a terrible example to set”.5 Rewarding governments for managing the country poorly with the power to freeze the accounts of their opponents essentially makes government competence a liability.
In true problem-reaction-solution fashion, this is exactly what Rouleau’s Report sets out to do. Not in its un-mandated opinion on the legality of invoking the EA in the first place, but in the Report’s recommendations.
Of the 56 recommendations in the Report, one of the most striking is the suggestion to sever the CSIS Act definition of a national emergency from the Emergencies Act:
“The incorporation of the CSIS Act definition means that “threats to the security of Canada” has the same meaning in the two Acts. The definition was nonetheless the source of much controversy and misunderstanding in the course of the Inquiry. This was, in part, because CSIS had not assessed that the Freedom Convoy posed a threat to the security of Canada for the purposes of its mandate. The link between the Emergencies Act and the CSIS Act should be eliminated.”6
The logic of avoiding confusion around the rule of law by simply erasing the rule of law is flawless, if you’re the government. Rouleau does suggest replacing the CSIS Act definition with a new, modernized one to be determined by, of course, Parliament.7
Governments changing the rules to suit the government is nothing new, they just don’t usually come out and say so in such plain language. Alarming as this is, it doesn’t really matter what the law is if the government is not going to abide by it anyway.
Many of Rouleau’s other recommendations concern “modernizing” government control by centralizing or consolidating intelligence gathering and sharing. The creation of major event management units (Recommendations 10-12) aligns with the globalist approach of regionalization, whereby localized power structures are set up to then be absorbed into a larger power structure of the same model. He seems particularly partial to the idea of engaging the RCMP to act as an intermediary between other police agencies:
“Recommendation 15: The RCMP should consider leading an initiative, working with other police agencies, for police services across the country to adopt a single command and control model, with shared nomenclature to facilitate integrated operations in appropriate situations.”8
Considering the RCMP’s recent history of not being capable of coordinating even among themselves to prevent Gabriel Wortman from murdering 22 Nova Scotians in Portapique, an actual emergency, it’s an interesting choice.
Finally, Rouleau recommends that all levels of government continue to study the impact of social media on Canadian society in a co-ordinated manner, with an eye on “misinformation and disinformation” (which is whatever the government says it is). Furthermore, government should continue to monitor cryptocurrencies in a similar fashion.9 For anyone who is still under the illusion that monitoring Canadians is a strictly Liberal pastime, note that it was the Harper government that passed Bill C-51 (the “Anti-Terrorism Act”) in 2015.10
If anything is clear from this Report, it’s that the federal government is preparing to declare many more “public order emergencies” in the future. Virtually all of the recommendations in this Report concern expanding existing or building new power structures.
Be that as it may, the fact remains that a claim to authority is not the same thing as actual authority. No matter what “emergency” the government declares, be it for protests, climate, or anything else, no human being that you have not harmed has the right to restrict your movements. Nor do they have the right to harm your person or take your property, which includes freezing your bank account. This is not “order”; this is tyranny.
Can they do these things? Of course. They’ve already done it. They absolutely will try to do it again. That doesn’t mean they have the right to do it.
The less we understand this very simple principle, the more likely we are to take dog and pony shows without the necessary grain(s) of salt. We overlook the real value of things like the POEC, bringing truth to light, and take too much to heart of what appears in the headlines. When we’re distracted in a mindset of fear, we do the government’s work ourselves in removing the roadblocks to total tyranny.
The more we understand what rights are and are not and stay focused on first principles, the better we’ll become at defending our rights as human beings. Hopefully, this defence can be successfully accomplished by Canadians simply ignoring dumb government directives en masse. United non-compliance.
We governed ourselves just fine for three weeks last year in Ottawa, despite being total strangers in the dead of Canadian winter. The streets were clean, the food was abundant, conflicts were resolved without injury, and the dancing helped. I have no doubt that we need the federal government less and less with each passing Bill.
Rouleau, P. (2023). Report of the Public Enquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency. Public Order Emergency Commission. Volume III, pg. 272
Ibid.
According to Britannica, the main responsibilities of the federal government of Canada are defence, trade and commerce, banking, credit, currency and bankruptcy, criminal law, citizenship, taxation, postal services, fisheries, transportation, and telecommunications. https://www.britannica.com/place/Canada/Government-and-society
Rouleau, P. (2023). Report of the Public Enquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency. Public Order Emergency Commission. Volume III, pg. 321
Sarkonak, J. (2023, February 19). Freedom Convoy Report Sets dark precedent on freezing bank accounts. The National Post. https://nationalpost.com/opinion/freedom-convoy-report-sets-dark-precedent-on-freezing-bank-accounts
Rouleau, P. (2023). Report of the Public Enquiry into the 2022 Public Order Emergency. Public Order Emergency Commission. Volume III, pg. 314
Ibid., pg. 315
Ibid., pg. 295
Ibid., pg. 333-334
Canadian Civil Liberties Association (2015, May 19). Understanding Bill C-51 in Canada: The Anti-Terrorism Act, 2015