The Law of Rule
The Corbett Report
FEB 27
As viewers and listeners of The Corbett Report will know by now, it's official: Canada has criminalized dissent.
Yes, Paul Rouleau—the judge appointed by the Canadian government to lead the Public Order Emergency Commission examining the Canadian government's decision to invoke the Emergencies Act last year to crack down on the Freedom Convoy—has delivered his thoroughly unsurprising verdict: the Canadian government was completely justified in its actions!
So what does this all mean?
For starters, it means that government officials now have carte blanche to invoke the Emergencies Act whenever they want in order to squelch any protest movement they dislike before the protest has the chance to effect any significant change.
But beyond that, we are witnessing the apotheosis of that rule by emergency that I identified last year as the new governing paradigm for the erstwhile "liberal Western democracies."
And if that realization doesn't send a chill down your spine, then you're not paying attention.
Strap in, folks. We're going for a deeeeeep dive into the murky world of law, philosophy and government this week.
THE DECISION
Last February, the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act to deal with the "national emergency" posed by the honking horns and bouncy castles of the Freedom Convoy protesters.
As I explained late last year, the Emergencies Act is the successor to the War Measures Act, a statute passed by Canadian Parliament in 1914 to provide the government with extraordinary emergency powers in times of war, invasion or insurrection. The War Measures Act was invoked only three times in Canadian history:
during WWI, when it was used to lock up Ukrainian Canadians in internment camps and to quell the Quebec City anti-conscription riots;
during WWII, when it was used to lock up Japanese Canadians (and anyone else deemed to be "about to engage in activities prejudicial to the public safety or the safety of the State") and to censor the press;
and during the October Crisis in 1970, when it was used to suspend the writ of habeas corpus, outlaw the Front de libération du Québec, and arrest hundreds of Canadians without charge.
If it occurs to you that each invocation of the War Measures Act involved unconscionable breaches of basic civil rights, then you're not alone. By 1988, the Canadian government—pressured by survivors of the Japanese internment and other critics of the act—was compelled to table a bill to replace the War Measures Act with a new piece of legislation. This new legislation would, in the words of one member of Parliament, "show those Canadians who have suffered that we have learned from the abuses of the past [. . .] show them our determination that such abuses will never happen again in this country [. . . and] restore their faith in this country and its democratic, political, and judicial processes."
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