Edit: changed AT ALL to without a trial because on second thought resized it's possible that there are some legit uses for freezing bank accounts.
Is this something that has precedent in Canada?
We don't have the concept of co-equal branches of government, but the judiciary can declare acts of parliament to violate the charter of rights and freedoms. The Emergencies Act explicitly says it does not supercede any constitutional rights.
Several MPs and MLAs have received suspicious packages: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/mike-kelloway-sus...
"Protesters" tried to break into a federal MP's constituency office: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-scotia/covid-19-protests...
And that's just Nova Scotia. This isn't as bad as the October Crisis, but it's still quite serious. It's not small potatoes.
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
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Under Canadian law, the Liberal government has to put this before both the House of Commons and Senate within 7 days.
Say what? Those two are literally polar opposites. I guess they can be progressive on the social scale and conservative on the economic one, but there's got to be a better name for that.
There’s plenty of areas of this that are misused (see things like civil asset forfeiture), but the overarching strategy of freezing bank accounts isn’t novel or dystopian.
Edit: it’s a bit sneaky to change “AT ALL” to “WITHOUT A TRIAL” without calling out the change.
You can't just have the executive decide they can do that using pure administrative action to seize property. Also, you generally also have to prove in a court of law there was a crime before you can do anything at all.
The US civilian asset forfeiture (and now in Canada too, it seems) are actually quite unique in that regard outside of maybe China (not sure even you can do that there anymore), and at most couple other dystopian very authoritarian nations.
Guess we were all a little asymmetrical with our "reply" button pushes.
That’s it. It’s a time out, not a forfeiture. The Emergency Act is powerful, but this invocation isn’t that powerful.
Is Canada throwing the market efficiency and equity principles baby with the trucker's protest bathwater ?
Oh yeah, letting a bureaucrat freeze assets on an arbitrary basis people's savings and then, eventually, another bureaucrat will unfreeze it.
Rights delayed are rights denied.
Moral is, don’t ignore court orders in democratic countries.
It doesn't exist in the normal course of judicial business, how does it get created here ?
My understanding is that the legal link was created by the Emergencies Act. The government believes that it will be able to calm the situation faster if they can track and cut off the flow of money. This invocation gives the government increased powers to track (they ordered crowdfunding platforms/payment processors to register with FINTRAC). And increased powers to cut off funds (through freezing bank accounts).
Edit:
Here's a relevant quote from Canada's Deputy PM:
“The government is issuing an order with immediate effect under the Emergencies Act, authorizing Canadian financial institutions to temporarily cease providing financial services where the institution suspects that an account is being used to further the illegal blockades and occupations,” she said. “This order covers both personal and corporate accounts.”
They created a power of themselves, out of expedience, but there still doesn't seem to be any justification or grounds for it according to the basic principles of the Canadian legal order, except it formally comes from the PM, and he has cops.
They created a false legal reality (grave danger of violence to Canada and its people), which isn't objectively observable, to justify a power to solve that false reality, where in fact they are using it for something else (forcing people to move parked trucks).
They could have just arrested all the truckers for a variety of traffic laws or public-order laws (honking, noise), and then moved the trucks one by one. Instead, Emergency powers...
As my administrative and fiscal law professor taught us, after listing for two weeks all the principles which can be used to craft a law (not Canadian law school, European) :
There's one very old legal principle left, according to which laws are sometimes made, wrongly, but well, that's the real world for you : "I'mma the state, I do it because I can, or I'mma gonna crush you".Due process should be quicker, I wish more people would vote based on making the courts more responsive, but unfortunately no one does.
The forcing of wearing masks is a tyrannical action, whether it's for a 'good cause' or not.
Some people view the ends do not justify tyrannical means.
A mandate with a good justification is authoritarian but not tyrannical.