Also, unlike Trudeau's mandates which had questionable backing from the constitution, the Farm Bill was passed by a Democratic Govt. with the necessary popular mandate.
The Federal Governme t has almost no control over, well, anything related to health, or covid related mandates.
The provinces rule here.
The truckers had issues with border crossings, and that's federal, one rare area the feds handle here.
So in reality, the last federal election had very little to do with mandates, or validation of mandate response.
More about fiscal response.
That said, I find this protest a bit loopy. Only provinces can revoke mandates, which they created, about closed businesses, masks, vaccines, etc. They're literally protesting the wrong government.
The protests in India lasted over a year with several rounds of talks despite being in the midst of a worse wave of covid than now, yet they didn't resort to using their equivalent of these powers.
It really does make India's democracy look stronger than Canada's.
I am familiar with the protests in India but I did not see any that occupied the downtown of a major city for weeks on end or choked off the most important transport link in the country for over a week. I welcome more information on that front. My view is that if the parade on 26 January 2021 had remained in the city for weeks then it might be somewhat similar, but as it stands that is not my impression.
I didn't keep up with the farmer's protests too closely, but I do recall that at the time there were reports that the govt was having trouble distributing aid in the midst of a big wave of the delta variant in part due to the blocking of roads and trains by the protests (although of course it wouldn't be surprising if that was just blame shifting), going off of Wikipedia however, it does look like several routes to the capital were blocked for a while, along with some news outlets reporting up to ~$7B in economic loss due to associated supply chain disruptions: https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/economy/indicators...
I personally just find it disappointing that Trudeau seemingly hasn't even tried to talk things out, so invoking this act feels pretty excessive considering how egregious the circumstances were in previous uses. Regardless of whether or not he's willing to compromise (or if the truckers can even be reasoned with), I feel that this act should have been a measure of absolute last resort.
The Act has never been invoked before, the predessessor was scrapped because it was considered excessive. Even under these powers the Feds cannot directly order police to do anything.. it is pretty weak in terms of action on the ground unless the military shows up.
The federal government has been begging the OPS and the province to act, IMO they have run out of options precisely because the folks that should be dealing with this want the federal government to "own" it and now they got their wish. There didn't seem to be many resorts left!
Rather weak mandate.
This is not some pre-covid majority exploiting an old mandate like the Ford or Kenney provincial governments, yours is a very weak argument.