Despite all the assertions that Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, who has invoked the Emergencies Act to deal with the threat posed by truckers’ bounce houses, is the son of Fidel Castro or Ronnie Wood or whomever, it always seemed more probably to me that he is the son of Pierre Trudeau, who was prime minister for about a decade and a half when I was young.
Trudeau père famously imposed the Emergencies Act’s predecessor, the War Powers Act, in 1970 in response to French Canadian terrorists kidnapping a couple of officials, one of whom was later murdered. The government rounded up 497 separatists and raided the homes of 36,000 more.
From the Montreal Gazette:
The War Measures Act was used a total of three times, with the two other invocations occurring during the First World War and Second World War. It was replaced by the Emergencies Act in 1988.
The Emergencies Act, which has never been used, defines a national emergency as “an urgent and critical situation of a temporary nature that:
- Seriously endangers the lives, health or safety of Canadians and is of such proportions or nature as to exceed the capacity or authority of a province to deal with it, or
- Seriously threatens the ability of the Government of Canada to preserve the sovereignty, security and territorial integrity of Canada
and that cannot be effectively dealt with under any other law of Canada.”
Yup, the Bounce House Menace is a unique threat.
