HANNAFORD: Who would have thought that it would be the courts that said 'Enough!' to Trudeau?

Diligent readers may have noticed that when the Western Standard referred over the last few years to the Emergencies Act, we inserted a reference to the old War Measures Act that it replaced, thus: Emergencies [War Measures] Act. We did this because the acts varied little in language or purpose, yet the Emergencies Act seemed — in our editorial opinion — to have been seriously misapplied. Although the Trudeau Liberals intend to appeal today’s decision by the Federal Court, we are gratified that we were not alone in our judgment.To some degree, the renaming of the old War Measures Act may have been part of the problem.As a guide to purpose, War Measures Act was clear. It strongly suggests that somebody with a gun is threatening this country. When the present prime minister’s father used it 50 years ago during the FLQ crisis, the enemy was an internal one, not a foreign power. But the FLQ had guns, bombs and had begun to kill people. Pierre Trudeau’s invocation of the War Measures Act was criticized even so, but on the basis of the facts Trudeau the Elder possessed, it was not inconsistent with protecting the security of Canada.An Emergencies Act, however? What’s an emergency?That’s a flexible definition and one clue is to further ask, for whom is it an emergency?Without being completely dismissive of the concerns raised by people in Ottawa who found they had a blockade of trucks around Parliament Hill for neighbours, it is nevertheless the case that all normal services continued peacefully and without interruption, not only in Ottawa but across the country. The truckers themselves weren’t violent — in fact the blockade area was notably safe — and indeed nobody got killed and it was clear almost immediately that nobody was going to be.May all emergencies be so benign.It was however, a considerable embarrassment for a pandemic-obsessed government that was happy doing good to people against their will, that some of the people started saying 'no thanks.' Or profane words to that effect.And that, if you’re a profound admirer of take-charge governments that can get things done and turn things around on a dime, can easily be construed as an emergency. That is, if your whole schtick is to get grateful peasants gratefully marching behind you and thanking you for CERB and having their backs, the Freedom Convoy undercut your entire electoral narrative.You could never have invoked a War Measures Act, even so.But, an Emergencies Act? Worth a try.So it looked to a lot of us at the time, and now apparently to the Federal Court. An “unreasonable, unjustified” violation of the Charter, as the Federal Court ruled it.Now, the Trudeau Liberals will appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. It would have been out of character for them to not do so.However, those patriotic Canadians who called Ottawa's repressive COVID policies ‘outrageous’ can no longer be dismissed as dangerous nutters. Some judges see some merit in their arguments.So, if the famously progressive Federal Court can find against the Trudeau Liberals, maybe the system works after all.And that is extremely good news. For we need a functional government that enjoys the confidence of the governed.Much as we must resist a government that tracks cell phones, freezes bank accounts and whose functionaries cannot sleep comfortably unless they have thought of yet another way to enlarge the state at the expense of the citizen, there is something even worse than a grotesque Leviathan. That is the other extreme — anarchy. Then, no man is safe. Unfortunately, we have so learned under this Liberal administration to distrust everything this government tells us, and look for hidden motives in everything it does, that the younger Trudeau’s single greatest accomplishment may well be that he has made government profoundly unpopular, rather than Canada’s respected arbiter of competing claims.A declared anarchist could have done no more.What Canada needs and deserves now is a government that knows its place.A government then, that remembers it belongs to the people and that the people do not belong to it, offers good governance, not an unmandated platform of fundamental reforms, and elevates the beliefs and convictions that once upon a time made this country great.And the greatest of these convictions, is freedom.That is not what we have today. But it lies now within the gift of the Supreme Court of Canada to restore this country to its liberty-loving fundamentals.Constitutionally, this is the first good news we have had for eight years.There is hope yet, for freedom from government over reach, in this country. And it is a pleasant surprise to see it welling up within a Liberal-appointed judiciary. When even a Laurentian elite turns against them, the Trudeau Liberals must surely now understand that they went too far.

HANNAFORD: Who would have thought that it would be the courts that said 'Enough!' to Trudeau?

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