Juno News - February 21, 2023


Is the stage set for future abuses of the Emergencies Act？


Episode Stats


Length

2 minutes

Words per minute

220.87231

Word count

606

Sentence count

30


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

A federal judge rules that the federal government was within their right to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time in history to deal with the Freedom Convoy. But what does that mean for the future of the law and what does it mean for our understanding of it?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.180 Word on the street is Commissioner Paul Rouleau ruled that the federal liberal government was
00:00:04.980 within their right to invoke the Emergencies Act for the first time ever in history to deal with
00:00:10.080 the Freedom Convoy. And I say word on the street because that's what the headline item says,
00:00:14.980 and then you read the actual report, and Rouleau sort of says that. He all right says it. He says
00:00:19.860 he was not ruling that they were not within their right to invoke it, but then you read the details
00:00:23.900 and you're like, well, hold on a second. You don't actually seem all that enthusiastic about all of
00:00:28.720 this, and you put a lot of caveats into your ruling. Rouleau said that he made this decision with
00:00:33.900 reluctance, and he outlined some of the reluctance, talking about basically how, yes, the federal
00:00:39.360 government really felt like they were dealing with a major security issue, and he believed that
00:00:44.480 they felt that they had reasonable grounds to do it, so therefore it was kind of justified in that
00:00:49.500 light. There's a lot of couching of terms in all of that. And you go, okay, fine. So you feel like
00:00:55.080 they got off on a technicality a bit, or it just sort of barely flips over onto their side,
00:01:01.180 so you rule just a little bit in their favor. But isn't the whole point of the Emergencies Act,
00:01:06.120 and we talked about this at great length as a nation, the Prime Minister talked about it,
00:01:09.960 even during the commission it was discussed, that it has to be something of absolute last resort.
00:01:15.100 So the ruling has to be kind of like a slam-dunk victory, where you're like, yeah,
00:01:18.860 they had to do this. I mean, you just had to bring in this Emergencies Act. No possible other
00:01:23.940 way to do it. And yet Rouleau also talking about how, well, you know, it would have been preferable
00:01:28.180 if they found other ways to manage the situation. So we're in this position where, what does all of
00:01:34.560 this mean to not actually get a ringing endorsement? Because something as consequential as bringing in
00:01:39.760 the War Measures Act, and let's be honest, that's what this is. This is the modern-day War Measures
00:01:44.060 Act, because it was reformed into the Emergencies Act for a reason. You've got to get a slam-dunk
00:01:49.620 ruling on all of this. But I'm not sure what happens now, because in the past, during the
00:01:54.280 October crisis in 1970, when the War Measures Act was used, and they said, okay, well, let's
00:01:58.780 investigate whether this was the correct usage, turn it into the Emergencies Act. They went through
00:02:02.540 that whole process to kind of talk about whether or not they needed to change the legislation,
00:02:06.740 and of course they did. We're not going to do this here. If Rouleau had ruled that the federal
00:02:11.900 government was not within the right to invoke the Act, we'd probably have much more of an exercise
00:02:16.400 where we revamped the Act, we get rid of it, something like that. But we're not going to do
00:02:20.660 that here. So this is rather concerning, that a precedent has been set where it's not a slam-dunk
00:02:27.180 victory. It's like, yeah, it's kind of debatable. I'm not sure if they should have done it or not.
00:02:30.660 Okay, fine. I'll say they're within the right to do it. Does this set the stage for future abuses of
00:02:35.980 it? I sure hope not. I hope we're never in this situation again. But with the sort of lukewarm
00:02:40.880 component of Rouleau's ruling, I think that's where we're left.