The government of Canada on Wednesday revoked its invocation of the Emergencies Act, under which it had acted to financially incapacitate, by freezing bank and payments accounts, persons associated with protests that had disrupted the capital Ottawa and other locations for weeks. Two days earlier it had prevailed in a Parliamentary vote sustaining its use of the Act, with the leftist New Democratic Party coming to the aid of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party. The payments freeze, along with a suspension of some other liberties, had raised an outcry both at home and abroad. (See last week’s posts by me and by Norbert Michel and Nicholas Anthony of Cato’s Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives.)

University of Ottawa law professor Michael Geist writes on Twitter, “This is the right thing to do, but in my view re-affirms that the vote on Monday was a mistake. There isn’t grounds to continue the Emergencies Act now and there wasn’t 48 hours ago either.”

The government now says it is instructing banks to undo freeze orders, and has claimed that persons with a more incidental connection to the “Freedom Convoy,” such as small donors, were not included among the 200 or so accounts frozen. But the order was definitely broad enough to have allowed the government to add such names at its whim to the freeze list had it chosen. “The plain language catches anyone sending money to support the public assembly at Parliament Hill and sweeps so broadly that it might catch even the Quickie cashier who sells a demonstrator a can of propane. They would both be ‘designated persons’ whose accounts should be frozen,” University of Ottawa law professor Paul Daly wrote. The threats, from both local police and Trudeau minister Chrystia Freeland, had been broad. “If you are involved in this protest, we will actively look to identify you and follow up with financial sanctions and criminal charges,” Ottawa police tweeted Sunday.

Substacker Zvi Mowshowitz rounds up a number of other materials on the controversy, including a long and regrettably anonymous Twitter thread forcefully arguing that “financial systems underpin everything, including our constitutional rights” and “weaponizing the financial system to resolve domestic dissent or even criminal justice issues is a terrible precedent to set.”

Substacker Tara Henley interviewed law professor Ryan Alford of Lakehead University, who expressed alarm

that people who are associated with a protest movement are going to be labeled as anti-government extremists… on the say-so of the government — just the RCMP forwarding their names to financial institutions. …You have a situation where one of the convoy organizers is released on bail and he states that he’s locked out of his bank accounts. This is amazing stuff.

And at The Hub, Howard Anglin writes:

The government’s action is troubling enough, but what should really disturb us is the ease and invisibility with which it is being done. When we can’t see the consequences of government conduct, the risks of government misconduct increases. A government that sends in riot troops to dispel a crowd will rightly pay a price if the police commit abuses. But the diffuse and anonymous nature of financial enforcement mean that sweeping repression can easily go undetected. It is the political equivalent of using drone strikes instead of boots on the ground.

It also drives home just how powerful technology has made governments and the businesses that gatekeep our digital world. When they work together—whether it is to financially de-platform fringe minorities or shut down disfavored speech—there is literally no way to escape their reach, nowhere to hide. And when they act without due process, there is no way to defend yourself. The same technology that lets us buy dinner with a few clicks from bed also means the government can unperson us with a few clicks from an office in Ottawa.

While the Trudeau government’s retreat is welcome, these questions aren’t going away. The past week’s financial incapacitation of demonstrators without judicial process will be studied for years, and by many regimes: if a government like Canada can arm itself with emergency powers like these, the argument will run, why shouldn’t we do so too?

Let’s hope friends of liberty are ready to answer such arguments.