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70 Crim. L.Q. 230 (2022)
The Real Lesson of the Freedom Convoy "Emergency": Canada Needs a Public Order Policing Act

handle is hein.journals/clwqrty70 and id is 242 raw text is: The Real Lesson of the Freedom Convoy Emergency: Canada Needs a Public Order Policing Act Robert Diab Introduction Canada's use of emergency powers in early 2022 to deal with the Freedom Convoy protests may have been excessive and unnecessary. That debate overlooks a deeper source of the problem - a problem that recurs with every large-scale public event in Canada in recent years. We have no clear law authorizing police to do the single most important thing they do to manage large events such as mass protests, intergovernmental meetings, or the Olympics: cordon off significant portions of public space, control access, and assert the authority to arrest and remove people within these spaces. In every case stretching back to at least the APEC meeting in 1997, to give police these powers, federal, provincial, or municipal governments have had to pass ad hoc, temporary measures-often only weeks or days before the event- thus dealing with the problem in a piecemeal fashion at best.1 The Freedom Convoy emergency was no different. Police in Toronto avoided a blockade by cordoning off the area around Queen's Park before protesters could assemble. Police in Ottawa brought an end to the blockade by cordoning off the area around Parliament Hill. Police had authority to do so only under Ontario's emergency law. The additional powers enacted under federal emergency law were likely superfluous. The lesson here is that to avoid further reliance on emergency law to deal with a blockade or protest, Parliament should pass a public order policing act setting out clear authority to create an exclusion zone and limits on what police can do within it. It should follow models found in Britain and * Faculty of Law, Thompson Rivers University. For the general argument in this article about a gap in police powers, I owe an enormous debt to W. Wesley Pue, who first formulated it and with whom I had the privilege of doing earlier research on which I draw here. 1. Temporary measures passed in earlier cases are canvassed in Part 2 below. 230

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