(Ottawa) The father of the Emergency Measures Act, Perrin Beatty, believes that the government should reveal the legal opinion on which it relied to resort to this emergency legislation last year and end the “freedom convoy”. The Commission’s report on the state of emergency is expected by Monday.
This legal opinion had been mentioned several times during the hearings of the commission chaired by Judge Paul Rouleau, but the government had refused to make it public. It is therefore unclear on what legal basis he relied to consider the freedom convoy and other truck convoys elsewhere in the country as a threat to national security.
The law defines any threat to national security as espionage or sabotage, foreign interference, use of serious violence and activities to overthrow the government. It specifies that this definition does not apply to lawful demonstrations.
The Freedom Convoy, which paralyzed downtown Ottawa for just over three weeks last year, was seen as an occupation by authorities, but also as a protest by its organizers.
PHOTO OLIVIER JEAN, LA PRESSE ARCHIVES
The father of the Emergency Measures ActPerrin Beatty
“I hope the government will make the legal advice available to Canadians,” said Mr. Beatty in an interview, while avoiding commenting on the government’s decision to use this legislation. He was not yet 40 years old when he piloted the transformation of the War Measures Act. There Emergency Measures Act, which replaced it in 1988, wanted to be more nuanced.
“It was designed to provide the government with a scalpel rather than a sledgehammer to deal with the most extreme emergencies,” he said.
When he introduced his bill, the former Minister of National Defense in Brian Mulroney’s cabinet did not believe the law would be used to respond to civil unrest or even war.
The most likely scenario, he said, was a natural disaster that would be beyond a provincial government’s ability to handle, such as a major earthquake in British Columbia.
“It would be a perfect example of an event that would be regional in nature, where extraordinary powers would have to be used very quickly to save people’s lives and to protect their safety,” he explained.
It would thus have been useless to suspend the fundamental rights of people in another province which would not have been affected by the disaster, contrary to what had happened when the government of Pierre Elliott Trudeau resorted to the War Measures Act during the October crisis.
Mr. Beatty then had in mind certain excesses, notably at the University of Guelph where the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had seized the plates used to print the student newspaper. He was preparing to publish the manifesto of the Front de libération du Québec. Vancouver’s mayor at the time, Tom Campbell, also considered using the extraordinary powers granted by the War Measures Act to rid downtown of its hippies. In the end, he hadn’t.
Revoked before voting
“What I did not have in mind at the time was that the crisis would be over when the government voted to use the Emergency Measures Act », raised the ex-minister. The Trudeau government revoked the state of emergency before the Senate even had a chance to hold a vote, days after the massive police operation that shut down the freedom convoy in Ottawa.
He compared this law to the fire alarm behind a window that you have to break to set it off.
It was not designed for [mettre fin aux] nuisance after all else has failed. We were very clear that there had to be a real emergency and the definition of that emergency was deliberately drafted to include a very high threshold.
The father of the Emergency Measures ActPerrin Beatty
He had then chosen to use the definition of threat to national security in the Canadian Security Intelligence Service Act adopted a few years earlier, in the wake of the McDonald commission on the activities of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. The Commission had recommended the creation of CSIS. The definition had already been the subject of extensive review and debate a few years earlier.
The interpretation of this definition has been at the heart of the Commission on the State of Emergency since the government considers the threat that truck convoys posed to the country’s economy as a danger to national security. The report of Judge Paul Rouleau, who chairs the Commission, is expected by February 20.