Day #2 video summary of Emergencies Act in court; what happened to the second Threat Assessment?

Christine Van Geyn live tweets the 
proceedings  all day long - 
if you would like to 
follow along with her updates, 
visit https://twitter.com/cvangeyn

In her April 4^th summary of Emergencies Act court proceedings, CCF Litigation Director Christine Van Geyn highlighted the fact that the CCF team believes Cabinet was told it would receive a second threat assessment on Trucker protests, which was never delivered.

“We know CSIS did not think that a threat to the security of Canada existed, but Cabinet still decided to invoke even though that is supposed to be a part of the threshold for invocation.

“So, this is a really big question before the court. Sujit Choudhry (CCF counsel) explained that Cabinet’s determination that there was a threat to the security of Canada was unreasonable, because Cabinet had insufficient evidence to reach that conclusion, since CSIS said that no threat existed, and there was no alternative threat assessment.

“An alternative threat assessment was actually promised in the notorious ‘invocation memo’ that Privy Council Office sent to the Prime Minister, but no second threat assessment was ever prepared.

“The memo was prepared by the Clerk of the Privy Council, a woman named (Janice) Charette. She gave this memo to the Prime Minister giving advice about the invocation of the Act… in that memo, the Clerk said the government would prepare a threat assessment, since CSIS said that there was no threat to the security posed by the convoy or the protests across Canada.

“But no second threat assessment was ever prepared. It never actually happened. So, we’ve brought this up in our written arguments. And in the responses in their responses to this, the Attorney General of Canada has said there was no legal duty to prepare an alternative threat assessment, this it was a ‘nice to have.’

“Well, today, we made three arguments in response to that. We say that the alternative Threat Assessment wasn’t just nice to have, but actually legally required in the face of CSIS is finding that there was no threat.”

Van Geyn’s full summary on this and other elements of the April 4^th proceedings are available in the video summary, above.