The Rouleau Commission has now heard sworn testimony that the Freedom Convoy was not foreign funded and did not constitute a threat to democracy and that the Emergencies Act was not needed or asked for by any police force. That reflects very poorly on the prime minister. The act’s invocation was the worst peacetime assault on civil liberties since Pierre Trudeau’s use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis 52 years ago — when a Quebec cabinet minister was assassinated and a British trade commissioner held hostage.

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Joe Oliver: Emergencies Act inquiry shows we can't be selective on civil liberties Back to video

Yet restricting the rights of 38 million Canadians has not attracted the widespread outrage it merits because the blue-collar protesters it targeted are widely viewed with disdain, including by much of the mainstream media. This selective indifference is both distressing and dangerous. Suspending civil liberties because of a peaceful protest that went on too long sets a low bar that puts everyone’s freedom at risk.

Canadians take pride in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, which they believe is among the most robust in the world. Generally, they put great stock in freedom and equality under the law irrespective of race, gender, religious affiliation or sexual preference and identity. But the Charter’s purpose is not mainly to protect people who espouse opinions or act in a manner favourable to authority or aligned with popular opinion. The robustness of our freedoms is tested by obnoxious or offensive opinions and behaviour.

Conventional opinion can change, sometimes swiftly and radically, and governments’ electoral interests shift with the political landscape. This is especially true of a self-righteous woke government led by a prime minister who deliberately sows divisions based on his own ideological and partisan preferences. So there may come a time when those whose opinions are currently in the ascendant may need the Charter’s protection.

Our view of the Emergencies Act should not be governed by our admiration of or scorn for the protestors. The Charter is meant to protect speech of all kinds from all sources. Unfortunately, personal views are too often determinative, which can create a political opportunity for governments willing to run roughshod over dissent. I have not met anyone hostile to the truckers who opposed the act, including otherwise staunch civil libertarians.

We are learning a lot from the Commission hearings, which were mandated by the Emergencies Act to determine, among other things, whether its invocation met the legal threshold, including that the “national emergency … cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.” In deciding this, the fact that existing legislation was not relied on is irrelevant. Otherwise, incompetence or deliberate inaction could be used to invoke the Act anytime a government found it convenient.

Assume for a moment the Emergencies Act did not exist. Can anyone seriously argue the government would have been powerless to remove trucks illegally parked on the streets of Ottawa … forever? To ask the question is to answer it. The legal test clearly was not met.

Other evidence shows how egregious the prime minister’s actions were. He instigated the Freedom Convoy by belatedly imposing a mandatory vaccine on truckers last January. Rather than reaching out and listening, as he has done with other protest groups, he exacerbated the conflict by demonizing protesters as racist radicals and falsely accusing them of violent criminal activity. His cabinet colleagues searched for extreme language used by truckers and falsely claimed the police had requested the Emergencies Act. He ignored imminent resolution of the standoff right before invoking the act, tried to narrow the mandatory hearing’s mandate, appointed Justice Paul Rouleau, who had worked as a Liberal staffer and donated to the Liberal Party, presumably in hopes he would be friendly, asked the RCMP for retroactive approval and falsely claimed he requested the current hearings when in fact they were mandated by statute. It is a damning litany of misinformation, missteps, cynical opportunism, snobbery, pique and evasion of responsibility.

His unjustified suspension of civil liberties has tainted the prime minister’s moral authority to govern. Perhaps the commission will open Canadians’ eyes to the inequity and risk of taking away fundamental rights from people regarded as disagreeable.

Joe Oliver was successively minister of natural resources and minister of finance in the Harper government.