On January 23, 2024, the Federal Court of Canada released its historic decision in the judicial review of the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act and the regulations made under it in response to the 2022 Freedom Convoy protests.

The Canadian Constitution Foundation believed all along that the decision was illegal. We believed that the high threshold to invoke the Act, which is a tool of last resort, was not met. We believed that the new criminal laws created by Cabinet under the Act – which prohibited attending convoy protests and froze bank accounts without even reason to suspect a crime had been committed – were unconstitutional.

Justice Mosley agreed. He found that the high threshold to invoke the Act was not met because there was no “national emergency,” there was no “threat to the security of Canada” as defined by the legislation, and the regulations violated the Charter rights to freedom of expression and security against unreasonable search and seizure, and that those limits were not justified. The judgment is 190 pages long. 

We know most Canadians are too busy to sit down and read the decision, so here’s a list of 10 key passages that we believe all busy but freedom-loving Canadians should read.