Tuesday, January 23, 2024

Judge Rules That Trudeau Over-Reach Was Unfair

It's time to sue Justin and his family personally until all of that grifting money is gone:

The Liberal government’s decision to invoke the Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable, unjustified and violated the Charter, the Federal Court has ruled.

In a lengthy ruling published Tuesday, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley found that though the Freedom Convoy protests in early 2022 were causing harm to Canada’s economy, trade and commerce, they did not rise to the level of a threat to national security as defined by the law.

Mosley sided with civil liberties groups who argued the Liberal government went beyond its powers, violated the Charter and was not justified in its historic invocation of the Emergencies Act in February 2022.

“I have concluded that the decision to issue the Proclamation (of the Emergencies Act) does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified,” Mosley wrote.

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No, it wasn’t OK for the federal government to commandeer banks and perform account seizures in the face of protest two years ago. The Federal Court ruled Tuesday that the “economic measures” taken to quell 2022’s Freedom Convoy violated the Charter rights of those impacted.

Ladies and gentlemen, this is great news. We now have it on good authority that the government, facing a political crisis and the logistical nightmare of a sudden truck migration, cannot legally de-bank dissidents without a court order. The decision, written by Justice Richard Mosley of the federal court, is an important reminder that the state is not entitled to keep a tight financial leash on its citizens.

That leash was previously yanked by the feds, who triggered the Emergencies Act on Feb. 15, 2022 and slapped down a number of regulations to dissuade protesting. One of these rules mobilized the entirety of Canada’s financial apparatus — banks, credit unions, insurance providers, loan and trust companies, securities dealers, investors and even donation platforms — to monitor their clients on behalf of the government and report any accounts of suspected protesters to the RCMP and CSIS.

Any such accounts were required, by this law, to be frozen. Dissidents were not given due process, either: no warrants were required to delve into their accounts, no notice was required to be given and no routes of appeal were set out. There’s only one problem: every Canadian citizen has a right to be free from unreasonable search and seizure. And as Mosley explained Tuesday, Canadians were owed that protection back when their accounts were frozen in 2022.

If you’re wondering how such a harsh regulation, now declared unconstitutional by the Federal Court, made it through the drafting process, perhaps it’s because government legal experts at the time insisted that the measures didn’t amount to a seizure at all, let alone an unreasonable one.

“The Emergency Economic Measures Order does not seize any assets,” wrote Timothy Huyer, federal lawyer of 16 years, on Twitter in late February 2022. “It does provide that financial service providers cease providing services to anyone who is engaged in the prohibited activities.”

The feds argued this point later in court, maintaining that the financial restrictions issued under the Emergencies Act weren’t “seizures” in the first place. The notion was dispelled by the judge.

“While the purpose of Charter (Section 8) is to protect privacy rights and not property, governmental action that results in the content of a bank account being unavailable to the owner of the said account would be understood by most members of the public to be a ‘seizure’ of that account,” wrote Mosley.

“Alternatively, I am satisfied that the disclosure of information about the bank and credit card accounts of the ‘designated persons’ by the financial institutions to the RCMP constituted a ‘seizure’ of that information by the government.”

 

(Sidebar: my lord, the banks had no reason to willingly co-operate with the over-reaching government. Let us bear that in mind.)

 

 

Just a reminder that Chrystia Freeland is a horrible Nazi b!#ch:

 


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