This includes personal accounts if they suspect a transaction is going towards funding a protest/blockade.
Banks are shielded from litigation for acting in “good faith.”
BREAKING: Canada is now regulating crowdfunding platforms and crypto currency under the Terrorist Financing Act. pic.twitter.com/SMzVqonD8v
— True North (@TrueNorthCentre) February 14, 2022
— David (@amdshorn) February 14, 2022
Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has taken the unprecedented step of invoking the Emergencies Act to crack down on anti-vaccine mandate protests.
Mr Trudeau said the scope of the measures would be “time-limited”, “reasonable and proportionate” and would not see the military deployed.
Without a court order, banks will be able freeze personal accounts of anyone linked with the protests.
Hundreds of protesters remain in Canada’s capital city.
On Sunday, law enforcement cleared anti-mandate protesters at the Ambassador Bridge in Windsor – a critical pathway for Canada-US trade – after a week-long stalemate.
What began as a protest against a new rule that all truckers must be vaccinated to cross the US-Canada border, or quarantine upon return, has grown into a broader challenge to all Covid health restrictions.
Canada invokes emergency powers to deal with trucker protest
PM Justin Trudeau invokes powers last used by his father to battle Quebec separatists in 1970
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has invoked the Emergencies Act for the first time in Canadian history on Monday, citing the threat of “Freedom Convoy” trucker protests in Ottawa and several border crossings in the US.
“This is not a peaceful protest,” Trudeau said in a speech on Monday afternoon, adding that “illegal blockades” have been “disrupting the lives of too many Canadians.”
After consulting premiers, government and opposition, “the federal government has invoked the Emergencies Act,” Trudeau said, confirming media reports from earlier in the day that he would do so.
The measures will be “time-limited, geographically targeted, as well as reasonable and proportionate to the threats they are meant to address,” the PM said. It does not involve calling in the military, or suspending fundamental rights and freedoms.