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OTTAWA (LifeSiteNews) – A bipartisan group of Canadian MPs investigating the use of the Emergencies Act (EA) to crush the Freedom Convoy in February says such a crackdown should never happen again.
According to Blacklock’s Reporter, the House of Commons finance committee concluded that the use of the EA must not be a “template for dealing with the public.”
In a report titled Invocation Of The Emergencies Act And Related Measures, Liberal and NDP members of the committee wrote that there should be “caution before invoking the Emergencies Act.”
The committee added that the government should also “refrain from using the precedent set by invoking the Act to end the trucker crisis as a template for dealing with the public.”
Conservative Party of Canada (CPC) MPs wrote in a dissenting report that the use of the EA “is a dangerous precedent and should trouble all Canadians.”
“Neither government, law enforcement nor witnesses made a compelling case the situation in Ottawa required the holus-bolus overriding of Canadians’ charter rights from unreasonable search and seizure,” the CPC MPs noted.
MPs from the Bloc Québécois wrote their own dissenting report that using the EA was a “legislative atomic bomb” that was not required, adding that the Act itself states that “it is not sufficient that there be an emergency.”
“The emergency must also ‘exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it’ and must be such that it ‘cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law in Canada.’”
“We hope that following this report the government will justify its use,” Bloc Québécois MPs added.
MPs from the committee have asked that the cabinet of the government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau respond to their recommendations.
Canada’s draconian COVID measures were the catalyst for the Freedom Convoy, which took to the streets of Ottawa to demand an end to all COVID mandates for three weeks in February. As a result, Trudeau on February 14 enacted the Emergencies Act to shut down the Freedom Convoy.
Trudeau revoked the EA on February 23 after protesters had been cleared out.
Trudeau’s use of EA to quash the Freedom Convoy resulted in multiple lawsuits against the government for what civil liberty lawyers and opposition politicians say was an “excessive” abuse of power.
Indeed, over 230 people were arrested during the Freedom Convoy crackdown. Also, the Trudeau government took the unprecedented step of freezing the bank accounts of hundreds who donated to and sympathized with the truckers to the tune of almost $8 million.