On Friday, November 18, the Trucker Commission, the lawyer representing the truckers, Brendan Miller, brilliantly deconstructs Nathalie Drouin, who served as the Deputy Minister of Justice and Deputy Attorney General of Canada from 2017-2021, and is now Deputy Clerk of the Privy Council and Associate Secretary to the Cabinet. Clearly, by Drouin’s own admission, the Canadian Govt HAD NO AUTHORITY WITHIN THE REALM OF CANADIAN LAW to invoke the Emergency Measures Act. Nada.
Addendum: in closing of the Trucker Commission, the Trudeau administration used cabinet privileges and, bizarrely solicitor-client privilege between the Trudeau cabinet and the Attorney General to, essentially, redact any discussion of the decision to implement the EA or, more importantly, the legal framework used to legally justify the EA. The public commission is a farce that will whitewash the affair.
One aspect of this that has never been addressed is how the EA was enforced in the first place. The Act articulates the legislative process that MUST BE adhered to before implementing the EA. It passed through parliament without the requisite 5-day debate, and then appeared to have gotten hung up in the Senate, which did not have the votes to support the EA. At which point the government stood down.
But, if The Act was never ratified by both Parliament and the Senate, how could it have been implemented? There was no legal basis for enforcement of the EA, as explicitly defined in the Act. The EA was clearly illegal, regardless of any debate about how the decision to implement it was made. This means that all enforcement under the auspices of the EA were conducted illegally.
Testimony given by cabinet members acknowledge the unlawfulness, but offer the justification that there are nuances that the law was unable to reconcile. That is clearly new to my understanding of law as it is written. It is a lie to justify acting outside of the law. And yet, this was allowed to stand.
Given Brenda Lucki’s testimony, it is pretty clear that the RCMP did not need the legal justification to enforce the EA. Political expedience was clearly driving hers and others decisions to enforce the illegal EA.
The whole exercise was a waste of time and money. There were many galling moments, but among the most egregious was Trudeau blaming unnamed bureaucrats for redacting documents. “hey, it wasn’t me …”
The buck stops nowhere. In the end, no one is accountable. And the authoritarian state chalks up another predetermined win.