A Federal Court of Appeal has ruled that the government's use of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa in 2022 was a violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and infringed on the rights of protesters.
00:00:00.000I am sure that you are all very well aware at this point that a federal justice court, Richard Mosley, has ruled against the government of Canada on their use of the Emergencies Act to crack down on the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa back in January and February of 2022.
00:00:16.220Although the judge did say that, yes, there were certain aspects of the protests that were illegal and nobody would doubt that you can't just park trucks on the street for days on end without incurring some sort of fines, which the convoy leaders were perfectly fined with paying off in order to keep the trucks there as long as possible, that the government cannot just willy-nilly declare an emergency because they don't happen to like the tone or tenor of a protest.
00:00:40.560The Freedom Convoy itself being kind of like a music festival, very happy and lively, not that many angry people, mostly people just having a laugh at the government's expense, rightfully so in my mind.
00:00:52.240I want to read a couple of little sort of sentences that came out of this decision.
00:00:56.720I will have it linked below a substack where someone does a more fine breakdown of the sort of Freedom Convoy decision that the courts handed down,
00:01:05.160but you don't really want to hear me the entire show just talking about these kind of minute little factual details of the case.
00:01:13.000Obviously, the Liberals are going to appeal this decision and that's more of what I want to talk about.
00:01:17.960But before I get into that, I just want to quickly plug the fact that I, Wyatt Claypool, I'm running in the riding of Calgary-Signal Hill for the Conservative Party nomination federally.
00:01:27.720If you live in that riding, except for the Greenbrier and Bowness areas because they're being cut out soon when the boundaries change,
00:01:33.440if you live in that riding, buy a Conservative Party membership.
00:01:36.540My website for my campaign is in the description below, wyattclaypool.com.
00:01:41.000Go check that out, buy a membership if you want real Conservatives representing these ridings.
00:01:44.660There's a lot of red Tories trying to take these strong Conservative ridings and I'm running against a lot of them.
00:01:49.620But here's some of the sentences that came out of this decision.
00:01:52.760I'm reading some of the excerpts that people have posted.
00:01:55.260So this is something that Andrew Sheard posted.
00:01:56.840It's on point seven because, of course, all these federal decisions, any court decision breaks down into the different factual points that the judge is ruling on.
00:02:06.480He says, on the substantive issues, I have concluded that the application of Edward Cornell and Vincent Gersey, the CCLA and the CCF, must be granted in part for reasons discussed below.
00:02:18.420In brief, I found that the reasons provided for the decision to declare a public order emergency do not satisfy the requirements of the Emergencies Act and that certain of the temporary measures adopted to deal with protest infringe provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights.
00:02:33.360One of the aspects that was cited heavily was the freezing of bank accounts, freezing a pregnant single mother in BC's account so that she cannot buy food and medication for herself and her children because she happened to give $50 to the Freedom Convoy.
00:02:49.500That's the sort of thing that is just ridiculous that the Liberals are even trying to fight back against this decision because of.
00:02:56.500It looked really bad, and you can cite polling all day long showing, well, 60% of Canadians still think that the Emergencies Act was justified.
00:03:05.220Well, 40% don't, and that's a growing 40% that do not believe this.
00:03:09.920The 60% who believe that the Emergencies Act was necessary are not a particularly motivated voting bloc.
00:03:18.800That's kind of what I would consider, I guess, the normie kind of perspective that, oh, I guess there was a big protest and, you know, emergency measures were probably needed because they believe, or at least very passively believe a lot of things that they hear in the media, that these are extremists, these are fascists.
00:03:32.900All those stupid fascism cartoons that came out from the different legacy media outlets saying that the truckers were coming to Ottawa to promote fascism, even though they were standing against vaccine mandates and lockdowns.
00:03:46.160Here's another couple of points that were taken out of this decision that I just want to quickly talk about.
00:03:52.840And yeah, so number four point, it says, it is declared that the regulations infringed Section 2B of the Charter and declared that the order infringed Section 8 of the Charter and that neither infringement was justified under Section 1.
00:04:07.940And that, yeah, you can keep going on and that, yeah, you can keep going down here.
00:04:10.860And a lot of the stuff is that basically what the government had done with Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland was effectively treating this protest as if it was terrorism.
00:04:23.160During the FLQ crisis in the 70s, with Justin Trudeau's dad, Pierre Trudeau, with the War Measures Act, you could justify that there was people dying, there was a terrorist group running around, hiding behind, being hidden by members of the public potentially, and that they need curfews in place.
00:04:41.760And then they needed more measures to be able to hunt these people down.
00:04:45.780The fact that people are trying to say that it was justified in this case that there was going to be a January 6th style takeover of Parliament was ridiculous.
00:04:53.520If anything, it was actually the government officials having cops move in in very reckless fashion that created any violence.
00:05:01.220And the vast majority of the violence on the sort of attack day by the police was not because of the convoy protesters.
00:05:07.980They mostly just kind of stayed huddled and made it difficult for the cops to get rid of them.
00:05:12.000The cops are the ones running people over with horses and whatnot.
00:05:15.060And this is where I get to the part about Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland declaring that they're going to appeal this decision.
00:05:28.560It makes you look like you don't know what Canadians actually care about.
00:05:32.120Nobody thinks that this is like something that the federal government should be actively pushing on.
00:05:38.180The 60% of people who still think the Emergencies Act was justified are not voting against the Conservatives because maybe they thought it was unjustified too.
00:05:46.620The 60% who think it was justified are mostly people who don't really pay attention to this issue.
00:05:51.300The 40% who think it was unjustified are actively passionate about voting for whoever justifies that, about voting against whoever justifies that.
00:06:00.700I just want to pull up exactly what Chrystia Freeland said.
00:06:03.800So what she had basically said is that we took these decisions with a heavy heart that were not actions we took with any satisfaction, justifying why the Emergencies Act was used.
00:06:13.740Who cares if you had a heavy heart about it, Chrystia?
00:06:15.740If it was not the right thing to do, it was not the right thing to do.
00:06:19.880You cannot violate people's rights, the courts deciding that you did violate people's rights and say, well, we didn't do it for fun.
00:06:27.940I think you did it because you didn't like people pushing back on your mandate policy and building up support against it.
00:06:33.400I want to maybe, I can maybe pull up this video right here.
00:06:36.260It'll take me a second, but it is quite remarkable how parties cannot get off issues.
00:06:44.420The Liberals should be just moving on to household bread and butter issues.
00:06:48.560This is carrying a lot of their attention.
00:06:51.540This is sort of eating up a lot of their attention because the Liberals have nothing else but the social issues, but the cultural issues.
00:06:57.640Their economy sucks, their woke, their sort of woke politics are not appealing to anybody so that the worst they can do or the best they can do before the next election is try and paint pure poly of the Conservatives as if they're, you know, Trumpian Republicans and they want to have a January 6th style attack on the Parliament and they support this convoy.
00:07:17.400I guarantee in the next 24 hours, that will be the narrative from the Liberals.
00:07:22.180But I'm just getting the clip up here.
00:07:23.520This is Christia Freeland justifying the government's appeal of the Emergencies Act decision and saying why it was still right for the government to suspend people's rights.
00:07:35.500It didn't just take issue with the path that you acted.
00:07:37.840It took issue with how you acted and how you wrote the regulations you did, including in that PCO memo.
00:07:42.700There's a warning that the decisions you're taking and how you're writing them were open to constitutional challenge.
00:07:48.260Looking back, was there a necessary step you had to take to minimize the constitutional impact of these regulations?
00:07:54.100And did you do a good job of respecting Canadian civil liberties in writing those regulations?