The Canadian Prime Minister had introduced these emergency measures last week to put an end to manifestations against sanitary measures, which lasted three weeks.
Le Monde with AFP
After three weeks of events against health measures introduced in Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced, Wednesday, February 23, the end of the emergency measures planned in the exceptional law, invoked last week, to put end to these mobilizations.
“We see that we are no longer in an emergency situation. That’s why the federal government ends the Emergency Measures Act,” said Justin Trudeau, stating that this revocation should be effective “in the coming hours”. This measure was aimed at terminating Ottawa’s headquarters started on January 29 and raise blockages that paralyzed border posts in Alberta and Manitoba.
This is the first time that this Legislation “on emergency measures” , adopted in 1988, was invoked by the federal government. In concrete terms, it grants the Royal Canadian Mounted Police the power to enforce provincial and municipal laws on the ground.
In the case of the blockages of recent weeks, it conferred on the police officers additional powers to inflict fines to truckers engaged in this movement, qualified several times of “illegal” by the head of the Government, or imprison the contestants blocking strategic sites. It also allowed the seizure of the property of the protesters, in this case their trucks, on simple decree.
100 arrests this weekend
As a result of the introduction of this measure, the Canadian police reached, Saturday, to unlock a large part of the streets of the capital, Ottawa, paralyzed by protesters opposed to the sanitary measures taken due to the epidemic of COVID -19. More than 100 people had been arrested and twenty towed vehicles. Many truckers also chose to leave themselves and remove their heavyweight from the streets around Parliament, found a journalist from France-Presse.
Dimaidly minimized by the authorities, this movement, started at the end of January, left truckers protesting against the obligation to be vaccinated to pass the border between Canada and the United States. But the claims have expanded to a refusal of all sanitary measures and, for many protesters, to a rejection of the Government of Justin Trudeau.