Justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime Minister has declared that he will no longer invoke the Emergencies Act and will unfreeze protestors’ bank accounts.
Trudeau announced in a Twitter thread that the country’s condition is not considered an emergency anymore and that the federal government’s emergency acting powers will be rescinded. He stated that legislators are sure that existing laws and bylaws will protect the public. The Prime Minister has also begun to unfreeze numerous demonstrators’ and Freedom Convoy donors’ bank accounts that had been frozen due to their use of Bitcoin (BTC) to accept donations.
Isabelle Jacques, Canada’s assistant minister of finance, verified this while testifying before a parliamentary committee on February 23, saying that “information was shared by the RCMP with financial institutions, and we were informed yesterday by financial institutions that they were unfreezing the accounts. The vast majority of accounts are in the process of being unfrozen, subject to any new information that the RCMP may have.”
In an attempt to shut down the ‘Freedom Convoy’ demonstrations, Trudeau used the Emergencies Act for the very first time in the history of the country, giving police wider power to intervene against demonstrators.
A new Emergencies Act regulation was announced by Chrystia Freeland the Canadian Deputy Prime Minister. The regulation mandates payment providers for all transaction types, including crypto transactions and other virtual assets, and crowdfunding platforms to register with the Financial Transactions and Reports Analysis Centre of Canada (FINTRAC) and flag “large and suspicious transactions” to the regulatory authority.
The Canadian trucker protest resorted to Bitcoin (BTC) after GoFundMe prohibited donations of millions. On the cryptocurrency crowdfunding platform Tallycoin, a Bitcoiner organization called “HonkHonkHodl” launched a campaign, where the likes of Jesse Powell, the CEO of Kraken, had pledged 1 Bitcoin (BTC) to the campaign. Protesters had raised 21 Bitcoin (BTC) by mid-February. The team in charge of the Bitcoin (BTC) fundraising campaign relocated the cryptocurrency funds to a different wallet with separate key holders in wake of the crackdown.
For anyone unfamiliar with the country’s COVID-19 vaccine rules, all truckers crossing the US-Canada border must be immunized or face a two-week quarantine in their houses or apartments. Freedom Convoy activists had crowded the route to challenge these laws.
The impasse came to an end days after the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) authorized the freezing of 206 bank and corporate accounts containing millions of dollars in protest funding. Furthermore, the RCMP has detected 253 Bitcoin (BTC) addresses and barred national cryptocurrency exchanges from carrying out transactions.