Ontario Premier Doug and former solicitor common Sylvia Jones will challenge a summons to seem earlier than a fee investigating the federal authorities’s use of the Emergencies Act subsequent week.
Documents obtained by CP24 Tuesday night present the premier and present well being minister will convey their argument not to testify to a federal courtroom in Toronto on Nov. 1.
The submitting of court paperwork makes good on a remark made by a spokesman for Ontario’s Attorney General a day earlier in which he mentioned the “summons are inconsistent with the members’ parliamentary privilege.”
Laywers for the national inquiry, Shantona Chaudhury and Jeffrey Leon, said the summons were issued on Monday after Ford and Jones refused to appear voluntarily.
They said their “repeated invitations were all declined” and that Ford and Jones refused to be interviewed privately earlier than the general public hearings started earlier this month.
However, Ford mentioned at an unrelated information convention final week that he didn’t seem earlier than the fee as a result of he had not been requested.
At the identical information convention, Ford mentioned he stood “shoulder-to-shoulder” with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau through the three-week occupation of Ottawa’s downtown core.
“If you disrupt the lives of the people of Ottawa every single day, disrupt the lives and economic flow across our borders, I have zero tolerance for it,” he mentioned on the time.
In addition to parliamentary privilege, the Ontario authorities is difficult the summons primarily based on the truth that the legislature is presently in session and that their proof is “not necessary to this commission.”
Ontario Premier Doug Ford attends a information convention on the Ontario Legislature in Toronto, on Monday, February 14, 2022. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Chris Young
“It is Ontario’s view that these protests invited primarily a policing response and the police witnesses that are testifying can best provide the Commission with the evidence it needs,” an electronic mail from Ministry of the Attorney General lawyer Darrell Kloeze learn.
Moreover, the federal government is arguing that the summons had been issued “without jurisdiction, pursuant to an error of law, and must be quashed.”
Some MPPs at Queen’s Park Tuesday accused the premier — who was noticeably absent from the legislature — of ducking duty in the face of rising calls to testify.
In response, Government House Leader Paul Calandra mentioned the inquiry is a “policing matter and not a political matter.”
Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act for the primary time in Canadian historical past on Feb. 14 to convey an finish to the ‘Freedom Convoy’ final winter.
Ford mentioned in response to the measure the next day that using such powers wanted to be “extremely targeted” and solely used as “long as necessary to resolve the situation and not one minute longer.”
With information from The Canadian Press