A federal court in Canada has ruled that the government’s use of emergency powers to remove protesters who used a convoy to gridlock traffic was unreasonable and violated the protesters’ Charter rights.

Federal Court Justice Richard Mosley ruled that even though the protesters were breaking the law, the government’s invocation of emergency powers was unwarranted. For the Emergency Act to be used, the nation must be facing an emergency that “cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada,” according to CBC News. For the Act to apply to a public order emergency, it must be in response to “an emergency that arises from threats to the security of Canada that are so serious as to be a national emergency.”

The protests were against the government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which included mandated vaccinations. Protesters used trucks to blockade border crossings as well as the center of Ottawa, paralyzing the nation’s capital city for nearly a month. In order to quell the protests, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government invoked the Emergencies Act on February 14, 2022, which gave law enforcement more latitude to remove and arrest protesters and freeze their finances.

Mosley rejected the notion that the Emergency Act was properly applied, stating, “The potential for serious violence, or being unable to say that there was no potential for serious violence, was, of course, a valid reason for concern. But in my view, it did not satisfy the test required to invoke the Act, particularly as there was no evidence of a similar ‘hardened cell’ elsewhere in the country, only speculation, and the situation at Coutts had been resolved without violence.”

Coutts is a border town north of Montana where four men were arrested and charged with conspiring to murder police after a cache of weapons, ammo, and body armor was seized, all before the invocation of the Emergency Act.

The lawsuit was brought on behalf of two people whose bank accounts were frozen. Mosley found that the order to freeze the accounts violated the protesters’ Charter rights “by permitting unreasonable search and seizure of the financial information of designated persons and the freezing of their bank and credit card accounts.”

Notably, Mosley did not find that the men whose accounts were frozen were denied their rights under the Canadian Bill of Rights or that the government’s actions unlawfully prevented anyone’s right to freedom of peaceful assembly.

The government plans to appeal the ruling, reasoning that the protesters’ actions warranted the government’s reaction as they devolved into lawlessness and threatened to do unacceptable harm to the economy.

“This was an extremely tense time. The safety of individual Canadians was under real threat. … Our national security was under real threat — our national security, including our economic security,” claimed Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland.

Protesters have continued to use the tactic of blocking roads in major Canadian cities. Anti-Israel protests in Hamilton last November saw activists standing in front of the entrance to a defense technology company, blocking workers from getting to their jobs.

A post on X purportedly shows an altercation last December between anti-Israel protesters who blocked an intersection in Vancouver and a driver who weaved through the group as the protesters attempted to thwart the vehicle’s passage.

As The Dallas Express reported earlier in January, anti-Israel protesters resorted to blocking the main intersection leading into Dallas Love Field airport as President Joe Biden was arriving. Police arrested more than a dozen protesters who refused to stop blocking the roadway, charging them with obstruction of a highway or passageway.