COVID, the Charter
& Government Overreach

Canada has long described itself as a country that limits the power of the state over the individual. The 1960 Canadian Bill of Rights spoke of being free to speak, worship, and live without fear of arbitrary government action. The 1982 Charter of Rights and Freedoms entrenched that further: mobility rights under section 6, freedom of expression and peaceful assembly under section 2, and the right to life, liberty, and security of the person under section 7. None of these rights are absolute — section 1 allows "reasonable limits" — but the word reasonable is supposed to mean something. I believe Canada's COVID-era response, and in particular its use of emergency powers in 2022, tested that word past its limit, and that the country has not yet had the reckoning it deserves about what happened.

1The Emergencies Act: Courts Have Now Ruled Twice

On February 14, 2022, the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time since it replaced the War Measures Act in 1988, in response to the "Freedom Convoy" protests and border blockades. The Act allowed Ottawa to freeze bank accounts without a court order, compel services such as tow trucks, and create no-go zones for protest activity — extraordinary powers that had never been used under this legislation before.^[1]

This isn't a matter of opinion anymore. On January 23, 2024, Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that the invocation was unreasonable and unconstitutional. He found there was no national emergency and no threat to the security of Canada — both legal prerequisites built into the Act specifically to prevent it from being used this way. He also found that freezing bank accounts violated the Charter's protection against unreasonable search and seizure, and that restricting protest-related travel and funding violated freedom of expression. Neither violation was justified under section 1.^[2]

The government appealed. On January 16, 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal dismissed that appeal and upheld the original ruling in full, writing that "as disturbing and disruptive" as the blockades were, they "fell well short of a threat to national security." The appeal court agreed that the bank-account freezes and protest restrictions were unconstitutional infringements of Charter rights.^[3]

I want to be precise about what this means and doesn't mean. The Public Order Emergency Commission, a separate, mandatory review process, had concluded in 2023 that the government met the legal threshold to invoke the Act.^[4] Two different review processes reached opposite conclusions. But the courts — twice, at two levels — found that the government's own intelligence service, CSIS, had assessed there was no threat of serious violence, and that Cabinet substituted a broader, more convenient definition of "threat to national security" than the law actually permits.^[3] When the body whose entire job is assessing security threats says there isn't one, and the government invokes emergency powers anyway, that's not a technicality. That's the exact scenario the Act's threshold was written to prevent.

What This Says About the Pattern, Not Just the Moment

The Emergencies Act has built-in safeguards precisely because Parliament, in 1988, replacing the War Measures Act after its abuse during the 1970 October Crisis, wanted to make sure no future government could reach for sweeping power as a first resort.^[5] A government invoking it anyway — and having that invocation rejected by courts at two separate levels — is, in my view, a serious data point about how this government weighed civil liberties against political convenience when the two were in tension. It's not the only data point. It's just the clearest one, because it's the one a court has actually ruled on, twice.

2The Pattern of Restrictions Beyond the Convoy

The Emergencies Act invocation didn't happen in isolation. It came after two years of provincial travel bans (Newfoundland and Labrador's border restrictions on non-residents were challenged in court as a mobility-rights violation), federal vaccine mandates for cross-border trucking despite roughly 85% of drivers already being vaccinated, the ArriveCAN app requirement, and gathering limits that in some cases affected attendance at funerals.^[6] Most of these measures were defended, and in many cases upheld by courts, under section 1's "reasonable limits" clause. I'm not arguing every single COVID measure was unjustified — early in a novel pandemic, with real uncertainty about transmission and severity, caution had a legitimate place.

What I am arguing is that the standard of evidence required to impose a restriction on a Charter right and the standard required to lift it were treated asymmetrically. Restrictions came quickly, often through emergency orders with limited public evidence behind them. Removing them took much longer, even as vaccination rates rose and case severity data became clearer. A government willing to invoke its most extraordinary power against a protest — power that two courts later said wasn't justified — is a government that, in my view, had drifted toward treating emergency measures as a normal governing tool rather than a last resort.

3Said One Thing, Did Another

None of this would sting as much if the government's own conduct had matched the seriousness of what it was asking of everyone else. It didn't, on several specific, documented occasions.

MPs Travelling While Telling Canadians Not To

Over the 2020 holiday season, while the federal government was actively advising Canadians against all non-essential international travel, at least five Liberal MPs travelled abroad. Two of them, Kamal Khera and Sameer Zuberi, stepped down from parliamentary roles after their trips were disclosed by the government whip's office. Three others — Alexandra Mendès, Lyne Bessette, and Patricia Lattanzio — had taken trips earlier that year for what the whip's office called "essential family affairs."^[7] Trudeau himself said he was "disappointed" in the MPs and confirmed no cabinet ministers had travelled — a contrast that, while accurate as far as it went, didn't change the fact that the same travel advisory was being treated as flexible by sitting members of his own caucus.^[8] Conservative and Bloc politicians were caught doing the same thing; this isn't a one-party problem. But it was the governing party setting the rules everyone else was being asked to follow.

The WE Charity Affair

In June 2020, the government announced a $912-million student grant program to be administered by WE Charity, an organization with which Trudeau's own family had financial ties — his mother and brother had been paid more than $300,000 combined for WE-related speaking engagements, and his wife had volunteered as an honorary ambassador for the charity.^[9] Then-Finance Minister Bill Morneau, who had also failed to disclose that WE had covered the cost of two family trips, did not recuse himself from the cabinet meeting that approved the contract. WE withdrew from the program after the conflict allegations became public.^[10]

I want to be accurate about the actual finding here, because it's more nuanced than either side's talking points suggest. In May 2021, the federal Ethics Commissioner cleared Trudeau of formally breaching the Conflict of Interest Act — but in the same report, the Commissioner wrote that the arrangement gave rise to a "strong appearance of conflict" between the Trudeau family's relationship with WE and the Prime Minister's duty to act in the public interest. The Commissioner's reasoning was technical: the Act's conflict-of-interest provisions don't cover the mere appearance of conflict, only an actual one, and current law doesn't allow that finding to be challenged in court.^[11] Morneau, in the same investigation, was found to have actually breached the Act three times.^[12] A separate House of Commons ethics committee report later concluded the deeper problem wasn't the family connections at all — it was that the government had signed an untendered, $543.5-million contract without basic due diligence on an organization that had never managed anything close to that scale.^[13] Trudeau himself apologized for not recusing himself, attributing it to the speed of the pandemic response.^[14] A government asking Canadians to accept sweeping, fast-tracked emergency decisions on trust was, at the same moment, making exactly the kind of fast-tracked, insufficiently scrutinized decision that trust is supposed to prevent.

A Sitting MP Called Out His Own Party's Approach

By February 2022, even Liberal backbenchers were uncomfortable. MP Joël Lightbound, then a parliamentary secretary, told reporters the government's vaccine-mandate messaging "stigmatizes and divides people" and that measures reasonable in an earlier phase of the pandemic shouldn't be "normalized with no end in sight." He said it was "becoming harder and harder to know when public health stops and where politics begins."^[15] This wasn't an opposition talking point. It came from inside the governing caucus, which is part of why I think it's worth taking seriously rather than dismissing as partisan noise.

4Why the Pattern Matters More Than Any Single Incident

Any one of these episodes, on its own, might be a normal feature of governing — politicians travel, charities have ties to officials, backbenchers occasionally break ranks. What I find more troubling is the cumulative pattern: a government that repeatedly asked Canadians to accept constraints on travel, association, and protest "for safety," while its own members and processes showed a recurring willingness to treat those same standards as negotiable when politically convenient. Trust in public institutions is a finite resource. I believe it was spent faster than it needed to be, and that the Emergencies Act rulings are the clearest, most legally authoritative confirmation that at least one major exercise of that trust — the broadest peacetime expansion of federal power in the Act's history — didn't meet the legal bar Parliament set for it.

5What I Think Should Change

I don't think the answer is "never use emergency powers." I think the answer is that emergency powers need to mean what the law says they mean, every time, regardless of how convenient a broader interpretation would be. Specifically:

• Judicial review should happen faster. It took until January 2024 — almost two years — to get a first ruling on the Emergencies Act invocation, and until January 2026 to get a final one on appeal. That's too slow for a power this serious to operate without a check.
• CSIS threat assessments should be binding, or close to it. When the government's own security service says there's no threat of serious violence, Cabinet shouldn't be able to simply adopt a broader definition to get around that finding.^[3]
• Ethics Commissioner appearance-of-conflict findings should carry real consequences, not just public embarrassment. The WE Charity case shows the gap between "broke the letter of the law" and "the public's confidence was still damaged" — and right now, only the first one matters legally.
• Parliamentary travel advisories need consistent enforcement regardless of party, with real-time public disclosure rather than disclosure forced by leaks.

Restoring trust isn't about relitigating 2022 forever. It's about making sure the next emergency — and there will be one — is met with the legal restraint Parliament actually wrote into the law, not the restraint a government decides is convenient at the time.