When does a crowd cheering the death of Canada become an emergency?

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Nearly three years ago, an organized menace swallowed the streets of downtown Ottawa. Businesses were forced to shut down, residents were harassed, and people who lived in the core were tortured by round-the-clock honking. The trucker convoy was a revolt against COVID-19 rules – in particular, the requirement that those crossing the border to the U.S. in either direction show proof of vaccination – though Canada’s government obviously had little control over entry requirements set by the U.S. government. That didn’t matter to many of the protesters: they were going to show Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that he couldn’t simply dismiss them as a “fringe” minority.

Though there were a few documented instances of participants displaying Nazi imagery, the primary threat posed by the convoy was physical: people – and goods – couldn’t get where they needed to go. Trade was impeded because of border blockades, and at the protest outpost near the border in Coutts, Alta., the RCMP discovered a cache of guns and ammunition.

After weeks of mayhem, during which law enforcement were either unwilling or unable to dismantle the occupation, the federal government took the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act, which, among other things, allowed them to freeze participants’ bank accounts to put pressure on them to leave. In invoking the Act, the government purported that the situation had escalated to the point of serious “threats to the security of Canada,” which, according to the CSIS Act definition, may include foreign-influenced activities, “violence against persons or property for the purpose of achieving a political, religious or ideological objective within Canada,” or activities intended to destroy or overthrow the government of Canada.

To this day, reasonable people may disagree about whether Mr. Trudeau was justified in using such an extraordinarily powerful mechanism to dismantle the occupation of downtown Ottawa. But it’s useful to recall some of the arguments the government made at the time when considering the actions, or lack thereof, the federal government has taken in response to a different threat – one that culminated in the burning of Canadian flags and chants of “death to Canada” earlier this week.

The event in Vancouver on Oct. 7 was organized by Samidoun, a group with overt ties to the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which has repeatedly celebrated the massacre of Israeli civilians during public rallies over the past year. A masked speaker at the Oct. 7 event yelled “we are Hezbollah and we are Hamas,” to cheers from the crowd, and also exclaimed: “death to Canada, death to the United States and death to Israel.” Police say they are investigating the incident.

Dominic LeBlanc says Ottawa waiting for security assessment before listing Samidoun as a terrorist entity

That event, however, was not a one-off. Past protests have included Hezbollah and Hamas flags, Nazi imagery, and glorification of the massacre on Oct. 7. And all across the country, these demonstrations seem to routinely find their way into Jewish neighbourhoods, by Jewish community centres, by synagogues and Jewish schools. These protests have not been confined to a single city or downtown core, but instead have spread all across the country and appear to be growing in intensity and fervour.

The nature of the threat here is not simply physical, but also ideological; a pervasive type of menace that undermines the very foundations of what makes Canada open, inclusive and free. Indeed, when Canadians see that these things are tolerated – behaviours including the glorification of terrorism, calling for the destruction of Canada, and the routine, deliberate targeting of the Jewish community – their faith in our leaders’ ability to run a democracy is eroded. Jewish people start hiring their own private security.

I was skeptical of the government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in 2022, and I’d be skeptical of something similar now. But for a year now, law enforcement has seemingly been unable or unwilling to stop the intimidation of Jews in Canada. We’re now seeing – to borrow some language from the CSIS and Emergencies acts – overt calls to destroy the government of Canada, violence against people and property in order to achieve political objectives, and foreign-influenced activities that are detrimental to Canada’s interests. Is it fair to infer, then, based on the fact that these demonstrations have only escalated in intensity and rhetoric, that the situation “cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada”?

Indeed, why was one relatively localized (some border blockades had been dismantled before Mr. Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act), largely physical threat deemed a national emergency, but a movement where terrorism is celebrated in cities all across the country, and where there have been multiple attempts to carry out violence, not viewed as a “threat to the security of Canada”? Why is some intimidation tolerated, while others elicit a federal response? When, exactly, does a crowd cheering for the death of Canada become an emergency?