OTTAWA, Feb 15 (NNN-AGENCIES) – Canadian Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, yesterday declared a public order emergency, to support provinces, in ending the ongoing blockades caused by truck convoy protests.
Trudeau said, he invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canada’s history, to give the federal government extra and “temporary” powers, to handle the issue, adding, the move targets those areas in need, not the whole country.
“It is now clear that, there are serious challenges to law enforcement’s ability to effectively enforce the law,” Trudeau said. “This is about keeping Canadians safe, protecting people’s jobs and restoring confidence in our institutions.”
The act will ensure that essential services, such as towing services, to remove trucks, are rendered, said Trudeau. It will also be used to protect critical infrastructure, such as borders and airports from the blockades, and the government will enable the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to enforce municipal bylaws, and he dismissed the involvement of military force.
As the truck convoy organisers secured millions of dollars from crowd-funding sites, the measures also include giving banks the power to suspend or freeze accounts of blockade supporters, without a court order, and force crowd-funding platforms and cryptocurrencies to follow anti-money laundering and terrorist financing laws.
Finance Minister, Chrystia Freeland, said at the same event that, companies with trucks involved in the illegal blockades will have their corporate bank accounts frozen, and their insurance suspended.
She said that, under the act, crowd-funding platforms and the payment service providers must report large and suspicious transactions to the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada, the national financial intelligence agency.
The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in the 1980s, provides special powers to respond to emergency scenarios, affecting public welfare (natural disasters, disease outbreaks), public order (civil unrest), and international emergencies or war emergencies.– NNN-AGENCIES
