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Two Lessons to Learn from PM Trudeau’s Emergency Powers Declaration
To many Americans, the shocking invocation of emergency powers by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, while troubling to say the least, still seems distant and somewhat disconnected from daily life.
After all, our neighbors to the north live without the robust protections of the U.S. Constitution, the Bill of Rights, and reams of U.S. Supreme Court precedent to keep an overreaching government at bay.
But this is at the very least a teachable moment. And more than that, it’s a wake-up call for all Americans that, as the quote often attributed to Thomas Jefferson has it, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.”
In particular, Mr. Trudeau’s decision to authorize the freezing of bank accounts should have our immediate attention. Separating private citizens from their own financial resources is an extreme measure, so the burden of proof lies heavy on any government claiming the authority to do so.
Whether Canadian courts intervene to stop this overt abuse of authority remains to be seen, but there are at least two lessons we can all learn from this troubling development.
First, there’s the inherent authoritarianism of the government picking and choosing which of its citizens may enjoy their freedoms. As my colleague at Alliance Defending Freedom, Kristen Waggoner, pointed out on Twitter, the universal outrage would have been palpable had government forces frozen the bank accounts of those connected with the Black Lives Matter organization during the summer of 2020.
Even though many Black Lives Matter gatherings devolved into outright riots and lawlessness—claiming at least 25 lives, causing $1-2 billion in property damage, and playing a hand in permanently shuttering untold thousands of businesses—no government effort was ever made to financially handicap the protesters.
If anything, the opposite was true. In the U.S., then-candidate for Vice President Kamala Harris went so far as to publicly promote a BLM-themed bail fund that resulted in the release of six men accused of domestic violence. Canadian leaders, including Mr. Trudeau, similarly promoted the organization and related movement that wreaked particularly destructive havoc in minority neighborhoods.
And that brings us to our second lesson—a two-parter: The threat of cutting off political enemies from their own sources of funding both transcends borders and extends beyond government actors.
For example, early last year, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a crucial 6-3 decision in Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Bonta. Building on a key Civil Rights Era precedent, the decision put an end to a California law that forced nonprofits to hand over their list of major donors to the State of California, needlessly exposing donors to the threat of targeting, harassment, and doxxing for giving to the nonprofit of their choice.
That was a crucial court victory for all Americans. But government is not the only line of attack for far-Left activists bent on destroying and silencing their political opponents.
In recent months, activists have pressured financial giants like JPMorgan Chase to target their opponents by weaponizing policies that grant these companies unbridled discretion to cut account holders off from their own funds. Bank of America, Capital One, Regions Financial, and PayPal all rely on similarly broad language. This amounts to a ticking time bomb if banks decide to exert politically-motivated discrimination against their own customers.
Simultaneously, a loose coalition calling itself “Unmasking Fidelity” has tried pressuring Fidelity Charitable—which distributed $9.1 million in donor-advised fund giving in 2020—into breaking its promise of anonymity to any account holder who had the temerity to support a list of conservative groups that included Alliance Defending Freedom.
Fidelity Charitable rightly responded by reiterating its stance of viewpoint neutrality, but it remains to be seen whether Fidelity Charitable will stand firm and make good on its promise to donors in the long run. Banks and other financial institutions are increasingly breaching their public trust and using their privileged position to punish those whose views are out of step with the far Left.
As Americans, we can still hold the hearty legal protections our founders intended, but those safeguards mean little if activists can successfully tear them down by other means, including debanking, intimidation, and doxxing.
The recent events in Canada demonstrate the reality of these threats. Before the Canadian government stepped in with its emergency order, a hacker doxxed some 93,000 Freedom Convoy donors who had supported the cause through GiveSendGo.
Jefferson’s adage was right, “Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty.” That wisdom doesn’t just apply to threats from the government, but to any effort to deprive citizens of their God-given natural rights.
We have more reason to be vigilant now than ever.
Published in Business
There are some ways that Canada’s Constitution arguably provides more robust protections against government overreach than the US Constitution.
Example #1: It’s much easier to depose a government in Canada. All it takes is a simple majority vote in the House of Commons to declare no-confidence in the government, thereby triggering an election. This has happened six times in Canada’s 155-year history. Also, a party’s caucus can depose the party’s leader, again with a simple majority vote. This has happened once, although the party in question was in opposition at the time rather than being the government.
The US Constitution, by contrast, requires a majority vote in the House of Representatives to impeach a president and a two-thirds vote in the Senate to convict, and even then it doesn’t replace the party in power. This has happened zero times in the 235-year history of the US Constitution.
Example #2: In the USA, if the Supreme Court makes a ruling that is widely believed to be unconstitutional, the only remedy is to pass an amendment to the Constitution. There have been 27 amendments, but one can argue that very few, if any, were enacted in order to remedy bad Supreme Court decisions.
In Canada, there are two options for overruling a bad Supreme Court decision. The first method is a constitutional amendment, which is more difficult to accomplish in Canada than in the US because there is a four-year time limit to get the provincial legislatures to agree to ratify, so a single province can kill an amendment simply by running out the clock. The second method is the Notwithstanding Clause, which allows the federal parliament or a provincial legislature to pass a law overriding a Supreme Court decision but with a five-year sunset, at which point parliament or the legislature must either pass the law again or else let it expire. This clause has only ever been used by the Quebec legislature, to give the French language a privileged place over all other languages, in contravention of the constitution’s guarantees of freedom of speech and protection for minority languages.
The problem is that lovers of liberty don’t have the votes.
All the protections listed in both the US Constitution and in Canada’s constitution are simply for naught without the wisdom of judges, the virtue of politicians, and the vigilance of voters. Since 2015 Canadian voters have rewarded parties that have little-to-no interest in defending the liberties of those with whom they disagree. We now have to pray that our Supreme Court justices have wisdom when they rule on the powers that those Liberal and NDP members of parliament have seen fit to grant Justin Trudeau.
Banking in Commonweath countries has its privileges.
Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, and to an only slightly lesser extent, the United Kingdom, have been disappointments in how they have safeguarded their civil liberties. And this goes way before Covid.
You can see articles in National Review, at least 5 years old, that talk about the regulatory (deep) state that Australia has.
In Canada there have been conflicts, highlighted by Mark Steyn’s, with provincial human rights commissions, which sanctions people, often with fines, who engage in “hate speech”, whether it be in established publications like the National Post, or social media.
All four of the above anglophile countries have those issues. And all four have a parliamentary form of government, which translates into a soft dictatorship with elections every 3-5 years (New Zealand and Australia require elections roughly every 3 years while Canada and the UK extend to every 5 years).
During Covid, there has been international focus on Australia’s camps for those who test positive for Covid. They actually have a more controlling government than Canada’s, though obviously there’s little stopping Canada in being just as bad.
Will Canada punish the present government in upcoming elections? Well, the incumbent government decides when Parliament dissolves and have elections. Under their system, the next federal election has to be held no later than October of 2025, unless the House of Commons votes a loss of confidence in the government. Right now, that doesn’t look likely. In politics 3 1/2 years is a long time.
Yep! Parliamentary governments are downright un-American.
The precedent for government use of financial institutions has already been set in the US. When WikiLeaks was targeted with having their funds and internet access cut off it was done without the inconvenience of a trial or any sort of due process. Financial institutions simply cited “information” they got from the government to the effect that WikiLeaks was acting illegally as justification for denying service. So now mere claims by the government are enough to strip one of one’s rights.
These institutions should be taken to court and asked why they have the authority to do these kinds of things without proof of illegal conduct established in a court of law.
It was established years ago that the news media can’t even so much as say a person committed a crime unless there is proof of that in the form of a court verdict. I think that principle ought to extend to any action by any private business against a citizen based on the idea that the citizen is doing something illegal.