If it could have been handled by existing laws, why wasn’t it?
As vary as I am of non-lawyers handling legal analysis, there’s no place to start an Emergencies Act column with the crock of shit that was handed down on Tuesday. The judge had no interest in lawmaking – admitting his benefitting from hindsight, admitting he would have done what the Liberals did at the time, openly raising the possibility he erred in his judgement – and basically punted this upstairs (where it always belonged).
But it’s also boring to hear a bunch of non-lawyers debate points of law that have already been hashed over. The Rouleau commission said it was justified, legally, the Federal Court said no. There’s absolutely some choose your own adventure that can and will go on from here. What’s interesting in all of this mess is that there’s no common institutions anymore that anyone will trust.
I’m on the record thinking this crock of shit gets tossed on appeal, but let’s say I’m wrong and that its main finding is upheld. Will anyone on the liberal (and Liberal) left care? Will it change anyone’s minds about the efficacy or the necessity of it? Same thing if it is tossed on appeal, will any conservatives (and Conservatives) loudly celebrating judicial oversight maintain that same energy? Of course not. And it’s emblematic of the Convoy itself.
Why did voluntary vaccination rates top out in the low 70s for the COVID vax? Why did the Convoy protest in Ottawa against a variety of measures that Doug Ford or Francois Legault had implemented? Why did nobody understand that even if Justin Trudeau had returned the exemption to the land crossing ban to Truckers they still wouldn’t have been allowed into the US without proof of vaccination? Because we have allowed our institutions to decay and allowed trust to die.
Spend any amount of time around vaguely left wing people, whether of the liberal bent or of a more fervent variety, and there is an amount of unreality that encompasses it. Last night someone attacked “Harper’s brutal crackdown” at the 2010 G20, an attack on protesters carried out by *checks notes* current Liberal Defence Minister Bill Blair in his capacity as chief of the Toronto Police, a job he was appointed to under David Fucking Miller.
Remember when the budget deficit was going to be no bigger than $10B a year and the budget would get back to balance after 4 years? Remember when 2015 was going to be the last election under First Past The Post? Remember when the Liberals talked about unmuzzling experts and scientists and then had to fire their Attorney General for not overriding the decision of the Director of Public Prosecutions?
Obviously Harper was just as bad and Paul Martin’s Mad As Hell Tour is a classic example of a willingness to say in public ludicrous things that nobody will believe, but the Convoy didn’t just happen. It wasn’t about vaccination, and if you think that’s revisionism I literally wrote that it wasn’t the night the trucks rolled onto Wellington for the first time. But if this court case is worth anything, it’s worth understanding why this country is in as deep a hole as it is, and why the Liberals can’t seem to get out of their own fucking way.
…
If the Convoy was anything at an even semi-coherent level, it was a nostalgia play for a country that made more sense. The motif I used the night the trucks rolled in – Neil Young’s The Losing End (When You’re On) – still holds as true now as it ever has. Was the protest logical? Of course not, but it arose from an issue of feel, not one of substance. The great advances in gay rights or a more full understanding of racism’s role in our history does not take anything away from others, but it does make things feel uncomfortable in a way that nobody really kept in mind. That isn’t an argument that the radical societal changes of the last 25 years have been bad, it’s just an acknowledgement that thinking this was all about mRNA or whatever is bullshit.
We have lost a collective community in the course of my life, a sense of commonality. In the micro it makes sense, and I’ve even argued that Justin Trudeau’s political life would be better off right now if they leaned into the label of divisive instead of pretending everyone pisses rainbows at the thought of the guy. But that’s the point, isn’t it? We can’t even get our Federal Government or its supporters to admit to a very basic point, because they think it’s uncouth to admit it. It’s corrosive to our shared humanity, if not electoral prospects.
Was the Emergencies Act justified? I think it was. Was the weeks leading up to the invocation a failure of the Ottawa Police and the OPP and Doug Ford (and the failure to have more properly defined jurisdictional lines about whose responsibility Wellington is)? Obviously. But more than that, the three decades before have been a failure. When I was born 27 years ago this past Saturday, we had an economy starting an expansion we had desperately needed since the 60s, we were rounding the corner on the Constitutional Wars and Quebec separation was slowly receding as a threat, and we were about to enter into an era where there would be huge advances in terms of the rights and acceptance of gay people and other minorities. And we’re now at a place where it all feels like it’s coming apart at the seams.
If you want to fight partisan battles about the Emergencies Act court case you’re free to do so, but we need to understand what has happened to us. Justin Trudeau is staring down the barrel of not just a loss but a landslide and the best they got is a social media campaign trying to turn Poilievre into Trump for the 89098545th time that will fail. We have a Conservative leader who has no interest in being a unifying figure, despite the gaudy figures that any election soon would give him in seats. As a country, we are dying on the vine.
What’s the answer to any of this? It’s simple – Trudeau, far from using this opportunity to fight back and score partisan points, should lead. He should use the return of the House next week to properly lead for all Canadians, and avoid the instinct to play the increased scrutiny on the Convoy for the partisan advantage of tying Skippy to it. If it’s not what the geniuses at LPC HQ want him to do, then even better. Leading, as opposed to whatever weird form of pseudo bitching about Poilievre he’s been doing, would do wonders. It might also make his next poll bump more sustainable than the Abacus one from December.
The first time I wrote about the Convoy, it was Neil Young that sustained me. Now, it’s a different song that’s stuck in my head as I write. “I’m deep inside myself, but I’ll get out somehow.” We take for granted that fundamentally things will be fine. We assume without evidence that we’ll figure it out. We take for granted there will still be a country worth caring about in both good and ill. It’s why we advocate for or defend things that make all of this just a little bit harder to keep together. We take the somehow to be a given. It’s not.
If the Emergencies Act decision is to have any purpose, it has to cause us to pause. Whatever you think of the Convoy, that so many people clung to it is a failure. And if I’m Trudeau, my government rests on trying to fix our underlying malady.
I'm a lawyer, although a retired one.
Mr. Justice Mosley,s task was to see whether the invocation of the EA in February 2022 complied with the requirements of the Act, and also whether the invocation infringed any Charter rights and, if so, whether the infringement was justified under section 1. This he did.
The root problem is that the current wording of the EA is inadequate to cover the situation in February 2022. That is what Mr. Mosley found. He thinks that the EA should be rewritten by Parliament. But he cannot rewrite it himself. He is bound by what it says currently. And he found that the Feb 22 situation did not satisfy the requirements in the EA. I agree with him, for the reasons he gives.
The underlying question is whether we will be governed by the rule of law. If a statute is inadequate, or badly drafted, the solution is not for the politicians and citizenry to ignore the law. Rather, it is for Parliament to change the law. The ball is now in their court. Even if this decision is reversed on appeal, and remember that there are two levels of appeal -- to the Federal Court of Appel and then to the Supreme Court -- the law still should be changed.
All that said, I wish that both the CPC and the Liberals, having had their say, would now shut up about this. We need to heal as a society, not keep poking at old wounds and divisions. Surely there are more important issues facing us, such as housing and the economy.
While I agree with much of what you’ve said Evan, I am struggling with your Leadership is the answer solution! I keep asking myself, “what would that kind of leadership look like? What would I do as a leader in that situation?” What comes up for me, is this is bigger than one man. I would argue that it is on each one of us! We live in a very entitled society. As a boomer, I have frequently said that I am part of the luckiest generation that ever walked this planet. That is not to,say we did not struggle, we did not have to work hard, we did not have to face challenges. But compare my challenges to those faced by past generations, they do not compare. The generations that followed mine, came to expect the same or better, and it isn’t happening. Trudeau and the Liberals are not responsible for that, anymore than the CPC is capable of sweeping in and fixing all of it.
So here is my $.50. We each choose how we meet life’s challenges, personal and otherwise. I am currently in the Yukon. I am the only born and bred Canadian here, including other guests, staff of the resort, and staff at tours I have participated in. I have met Germans, French, Chinese, Japanese, Iranians, Australians, and Americans. Every single person I have talked to has raved about Canada. Many have immigrated and others are trying hard to immigrate. It struck me it is about perspective, where one sees opportunities another sees barriers. Where one see despair, another sees hope. The solution in my opinion, is we all need to open our eyes and our ears to all those perspectives. Canada has its challenges, but as someone who has travelled extensively, those challenges exist pretty much everywhere, if not in the same form in another form. We are all responsible for creating the kind of world we want to live in. So instead of passing the buck to politicians, maybe we need to take a moment to decide what we need to do to create what we want to see in our lives. As I write this, I wonder if that isn’t the leadership Trudeau, and others should be demonstrating. The ability for self reflection, a desire to understand other perspectives and a willingness to make the changes in his own work to better reflect the world he wants to see.