EDITORIAL: Liberals on invoking EA — trust us

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In a display of arrogance surprising even for the arrogant Trudeau government, it has refused to provide the public inquiry into its use of the Emergencies Act with the legal opinion it relied upon to invoke the legislation in order to break up the Freedom Convoy protest.

That was a brief prepared by the federal justice department — referred to by CSIS director David Vigneault in his testimony — which Prime Minster Justin Trudeau and his cabinet used to justify invoking the EA.

This even though the convoy protest wasn’t a threat to national security, according to the EA’s wording.

Without that threat, the government wasn’t supposed to invoke the EA, as it did for the first time since the law was passed in 1988.

Justice Paul Rouleau, presiding over the inquiry, asked Attorney General David Lametti, who refused to answer questions about the legal brief, how the inquiry could determine the reasonableness of what the government did without knowing the information it acted on?

Rouleau said he still doesn’t know what Trudeau and his cabinet members were thinking when they invoked the EA, “and I guess the answer is, we just assume they acted in good faith in application of whatever they were told. Is that sort of what you’re saying,” Rouleau asked Lametti, who responded, “I think that’s fair.”

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Commission lawyer Gordon Cameron criticized the Trudeau government for “an absence of transparency” by putting into a “black box” information relevant to the central question before the inquiry — what was the understanding of Trudeau and the cabinet about the law they were invoking when they did it?

Cara Zwibel of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association said by invoking solicitor-client privilege, the government is undermining its own inquiry’s mandate and it should voluntarily disclose the legal advice it received.

Indeed, the government’s use of solicitor-client privilege in this context — as if it was on trial and needed to be able to speak to its lawyer in confidence and vice-versa — is absurd.

The inquiry isn’t a trial. No one is going to be charged or convicted of anything and the Trudeau government was essentially giving legal advice to itself.

Which raises the question of what’s in that advice it doesn’t want Canadians to see?