Trudeau Liberals relied on ‘fabricated intelligence’ to justify use of Emergencies Act on Freedom Convoy: report

The federal government was quick to brand attendees as a "fringe group" with "unacceptable views," and used that to suggest that they posed a threat to national security, however new documents obtained via Canada's Access to Information and Privacy Act have called into question how such a determination was made in the first place.

Following a months-long investigation, the substack Public asserted that "the Canadian government used disinformation to crack down on the 'Freedom Convoy' protest, led by truckers demanding an end to Covid-19 vaccine mandates, in February 2022."

The report went on to claim that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police "then promoted this false information" with other nations in Five Eyes, a security coalition that also includes the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

The latter nation's police force was contacted by Public, but did not divulge any information, citing "privacy reasons."

According to the report, the federal government's view that the convoy was motivated by far-right ideology and that participants were largely adherents to those beliefs was parroted by the media, which in turn helped justify the use of the Act in the eyes of the Canadian public.

"Central to Trudeau’s invocation of the Act was the alleged threat of right-wing extremism and violence," the Public article explained, noting that the aforementioned documents "show that this drastic measure was based on fabricated intelligence."

Nonetheless, numerous Canadians were arrested, had their bank accounts frozen, and their rights violated, all for participating in the protest.

On Tuesday, a federal judge ruled that the Liberals' use of the Act to quash the protest was "unreasonable" and that it "infringed" on Charter rights.

Justice Richard Mosley found that, "the decision to issue the Proclamation does not bear the hallmarks of reasonableness – justification, transparency and intelligibility – and was not justified in relation to the relevant factual and legal constraints that were required to be taken into consideration."