(BBC News) A federal judge has ruled that Canada’s use of emergency powers to end the anti-government Freedom Convoy protests two years ago was “unreasonable” and unjustified.
In a decision on Tuesday, Judge Richard Mosley also said it violated Canada’s rights charter.
The federal government said it will appeal the decision.
The Emergencies Act bestows the government with added powers in times of crisis.
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau invoked it on February 14, 2022, three weeks into protests that gridlocked the core of capital city Ottawa.
Dubbed the “Freedom Convoy”, the protest against the government’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate gained international attention as hundreds of demonstrators settled in for weeks around Ottawa’s city centre, many in trucks.
Shorter protests and blockades cropped up at various border points across the country.
The emergency powers allowed the government to impose bans on public assembly in some areas and to prohibit travel to protest zones, including by foreign nationals, among other measures. The government froze the bank accounts of thousands who donated funds to the protest.
In Tuesday’s decision, Judge Mosley wrote: “I have concluded that the decision to issue the proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration.”
The court case was brought by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Canadian Constitution Foundation.
They had argued that the protests did not meet the “high legal threshold” needed to invoke the act, which was being used for the first time since it became law in 1988.
Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland defended the government’s actions on Tuesday, arguing that the country at the time faced a threat to its national and economic security, and it was an “option of the last resort.”
“We acted to secure and protect Canada and to secure and protect the national interests,” she told reporters in Montreal. “It was not an easy time, these were not easy decisions.”
