John Carpay: Encouraging to Witness a Court Not Align with Government on Emergencies Act

Commentary

It was refreshing to see a Canadian court rule against the government, for a change.

The Federal Court of Canada on Jan. 23 ruled that the use of emergency powers to shut down the peaceful Freedom Convoy protest in Ottawa in February of 2022 was unreasonable and “not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints” required by the Emergencies Act.

This came after a spate of Canadian court rulings in 2022 and 2023 that affirmed government violations of Charter rights and freedoms, including the freedoms of expression, religion, conscience, association, mobility, and peaceful assembly.

This court ruling in Jost v. Canada (Attorney General) suggests that Justice Richard Mosley was not sympathetic to the truckers or their cause.

He made several references to the inconsequential (and possibly non-existent) “Diagolon” group, as though it was relevant and influential. He refers to Nazi swastika flags as though they represent the sentiments of a significant number of protesters, and does not inquire into whether the single display of such flag may have been orchestrated by someone seeking to discredit Freedom Convoy. He suggests that “symbols of hate” characterized the heart or the nature of a peaceful protest that was (unlike many protests) devoid of arson, assault, vandalism, threats and violence.

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Without a hint of irony, he accuses the Freedom Convoy “blockaders” of inflicting “very real harm” to Canada’s economy, trade, and commerce.  He does this seemingly without considering how much “very real harm” governments inflicted on thousands of small businesses by imposing lockdown measures that drove so many Canadians into bankruptcy and poverty, not to mention isolation, loneliness, anxiety, depression, and despair.

But whatever his personal opinions about Freedom Convoy might be, Justice Mosley ruled against the federal government because “the record does not support a conclusion that the Convoy had created a critical, urgent and temporary situation that was national in scope and could not effectively be dealt with under any other law of Canada”–which is what the Emergencies Act requires to justify its use.

Expounding further, Justice Mosley pointed out that the “situation at Coutts was dealt with by the RCMP employing provisions of the Criminal Code. The Sûreté du Québec dealt with the protests in that province and the Premier expressed his opposition to the Emergencies Act being deployed there. Except for Ottawa, the record does not indicate that the police of local jurisdiction were unable to deal with the protests.

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John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedom (jccf.ca) which provided lawyers to Jeremiah Jost and other Applicants in their action against the federal government.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.