Emergencies Act challenge

On Feb 17, 2022, the Canadian Constitution Foundation announced its legal challenge to the federal government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act. The federal government invoked this extraordinary piece of legislation in response to protests concentrated in the Ottawa region against various pandemic mandates.

The Emergencies Act was enacted to replace the discredited pre-Charter War Measures Act, which was used during the Second World War to intern Japanese Canadians and Italian Canadians, and during the FLQ Crisis in Quebec. The Act was drafted carefully and narrowly, to minimize the federal governments to abuse emergency powers again and requires that the federal government demonstrate that a situation cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.

The threshold for using the Emergencies Act is extremely high and has not been met.

The decision to invoke the Emergencies Act, which had never been used previously, is unprecedented. Therefore it is vital that we push back against its misuse in this instance so that a precedent is set that discourages future governments from flippantly using its provisions when it is unnecessary.

The CCF has been represented in this case by lawyers Sujit Choudhry and Janani Shanmuganathan. Our factum can be found here.

On January 23, 2024 Justice Mosley of the Federal Court of Canada accepted the CCF’s arguments that the invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the Freedom Convoy protests was unreasonable and violated the Charter rights to expression and security against unreasonable searches and seizures (read our full release).

In February of 2025, the Federal Court of Appeal heard the case. In January 2026, the Federal Court of Appeal upheld the January 2024 ruling that the Trudeau government unlawfully invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy, and violated the Charter rights to freedom of expression and freedom of peaceful assembly.

The Court agreed with the Canadian Constitution Foundation that the government did not satisfy the strict legal threshold required to invoke the Emergencies Act, and agreed with the CCF that the way the government froze bank accounts violated the right to security against unreasonable searches and seizures and that its de facto ban on travelling to or funding Freedom Convoy protests nationwide violated freedom of expression.

On the last possible day, in March 2026, the Carney government served notice that it would seek leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada. We will be ready to continue the fight in the event the Supreme Court agrees to hear the case.