US Senator Calls To Amend 'Dangerous' Emergency Act to Avoid Abuse Like That in Canada

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act to curb the Freedom Convoy by freezing assets of the protest's organisers and cracking down on protesters in Ottawa. The lorry drivers have been demonstrating against Canada's vaccine requirements for weeks now.

Republican Senator Rand Paul has called for the US Emergency Act to be reformed, warning that it was "very, very dangerous" and could be misused in the same way the Canadian Emergencies Act had been.

"I think statutes that allow presidents or heads of state to invoke emergencies are very, very dangerous. We have the same sort of statutes here [...] We actually have in the United States an Emergency Act that allows the president to shut down the internet," Paul warned during his interview with the BASED Politics podcast.

The senator recalled his 16 February tweet in which he compared Canada with Egypt, where the incumbent president Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi has kept some emergency laws in place for years, as Paul attests, to gain extra power. The GOP lawmaker went on to slam Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau for using the "emergency edict" to do "some horrendous things" such as limiting travel and detaining protesting truckers in Ottawa.

Paul went on to recall his previous effort to unite Democrats and some of the Republicans to amend the US Emergency Act to prevent abuse of power under the Trump administration. Those efforts, however, ultimately came to nothing.

Paul's warnings comes just weeks after Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act in Canada in an effort to curb the protests of Canadian lorry drivers in the capital over Ottawa's policy on vaccines. The government started demanding truckers from both the US and Canada to present certificates that they had been vaccinated against COVID-19 to cross into the country.

Using the powers gained from the Emergencies Act, which are supposed to be invoked at times when "sovereignty, security and the territorial integrity of Canada" were under threat, Trudeau cracked down on protesters in Ottawa. He also ordered bank accounts of the protests' organisers to be frozen and banned money transfers in their support.

The move was harshly condemned by the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, which insists that the prime minister had no right to invoke the Act as the issues the Canadian government facing with the truckers at present could be dealt with "under any other law of Canada", a proviso which renders the invocation of the Emergencies Act unlawful.