The winter the accounts were frozen

In February 2022, a number of Canadians went to use their bank cards and found they could no longer get at their own money. The balance was intact. The account had not been emptied. The card was declined, and the funds sat there, present and unreachable, belonging to the holder in every sense except the ability to spend them.

In response to the convoy protests that had occupied parts of Ottawa for weeks, the federal government invoked the Emergencies Act, the first time that law had been used since it was written in 1988. Among its measures was a financial one; banks were directed to freeze the accounts of people connected to the protest, and they did so without a court order, without a charge, and without a conviction.¹ Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland announced the power the same day. “As of today, a bank or other financial service provider will be able to immediately freeze or suspend an account without a court order.”

Set aside, for a moment, what you think of the protest itself. That is the argument everyone had at the time, and it is the one that distracts from what should concern you whatever your politics. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had dismissed the protesters as “a small fringe minority” holding “unacceptable views.”² Whatever you make of that, the freeze did not stop at organizers. It reached donors, people whose entire involvement had been to give a modest sum, in some cases as little as $20, to a crowdfunding campaign that was legal on the day they gave. They woke to find their own accounts cold.

How fast, and how easily

Reports at the time put it at just over 200 accounts, holding about C$7.8 million, frozen in a matter of days.³ No judge reviewed each name. No hearing let you appear. The mechanism ran through the banking system itself, the same accounts where most people keep most of their money, reached by an order sent from a department to the banks.

In January 2024 the Federal Court found that the invocation of the Act had been unreasonable and had violated the Charter. In law, that is vindication. For the people involved, it changed little; the money was already frozen, the lesson already delivered.

Beyond the politics

The episode teaches the same lesson, whatever side you were on. Money held inside one country’s financial system is subject to that country’s emergency powers, whoever happens to hold those powers, and however stable and lawful the country is. Freezing citizens’ bank accounts over their politics had long been a tactic of authoritarian states. This time it was a G7 democracy, one with elections and independent courts.⁴ If it can happen there, it can happen where you live.

You may hold a dozen different assets and keep nearly all of them on the same rails, the same domestic banks, the same payment system, reachable by the same authority through the same instruction. If one instruction can reach all of it, holding it across a dozen places changes nothing. The people who could still reach their money in February 2022, and in every episode like it, were the ones who held some of it outside that system entirely.

Note the effort it still took. Freezing those accounts meant directives, lists, banks acting one by one. Programmable money would make the same act instant and automatic, no directive required, the condition built into the currency. What took a week in 2022 would take a keystroke.

Gold held in your own name, in a private vault outside your country, is not subject to your government’s emergency powers or your bank’s compliance department. It cannot be frozen by an instruction sent down a domestic wire, because it never travels on one.

You do not lose at trial, lose again on appeal, and fight on to the highest court in the land to keep a tool you mean to leave in the drawer. They want to be able to do it again.

They went back for the power

The defeat did not end it. The government appealed, and lost again; in January 2026 the Federal Court of Appeal agreed the invocation had been unreasonable and unconstitutional. Two courts have now called it unlawful. The Carney government did not let that ruling stand. It has asked the Supreme Court for permission to appeal, to have the freeze declared lawful after all, continuing a fight begun under the prime minister who first used the power.⁵ Consider what that means. You do not lose at trial, lose again on appeal, and fight on to the highest court in the land to keep a tool you mean to leave in the drawer. They want to be able to do it again. So the winter is not behind us. The power it revealed was used, struck down twice, and is being fought for again. The people who keep a portion of their wealth out of its reach are answering a question the government itself has left open.

Some have already answered it with their feet. In the months after that winter, vaults outside Canada were unusually busy, people moving a slice of what they owned into nonfinancial private vaults. Then the rush subsided. The urgency passed, and life went back to looking normal. The government presses on to regain the power, and yet the alarm faded with the headlines. Memory is short, and the belief that it will not happen again is the easiest story we tell ourselves. Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. A few were shown, once, how quickly the familiar can change, and decided not to be shown a second time.

It can happen where you live. It already has, in a country few would have expected. The rest only you can answer. When the next winter comes, will your money already be beyond that reach, or will you be among those affected, reading the news at the same moment as everyone else? If you would like to make sure it is the former, while the time to choose is still yours, that is what I help you put in place.

Footnotes

1. The Emergencies Act, which replaced the War Measures Act in 1988, was invoked on 14 February 2022, the first use in its history; its measures directed banks to freeze the accounts of people connected to the protests. Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland confirmed the same day that accounts could be frozen “without a court order.” Sources: Federal Court of Appeal, 2026 FCA 6 (plain-language summary), https://www.fca-caf.ca/en/pages/decisions/plain-language-decision-summaries/2026-fca-6 ; CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/ottawa-protests-frozen-bank-accounts-1.6355396 ↩

2. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, 26 January 2022, on the convoy. Source: Global News (Rachel Gilmore), https://globalnews.ca/news/8539610/trucker-convoy-covid-vaccine-mandates-ottawa/ ↩

3. A Department of Finance official told the House of Commons Standing Committee on Finance that just over 200 accounts (about C$7.8 million) had been frozen; the RCMP told the committee at least 257 accounts had been frozen and roughly 170 cryptocurrency wallets flagged. Sources: House of Commons Finance Committee, https://www.ourcommons.ca/DocumentViewer/en/44-1/FINA/report-5/page-138 ; CBC, https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/rcmp-names-banks-freeze-1.6376955 ↩

4. Until 2022, freezing the bank accounts of protesters without a court order had been a tactic associated with authoritarian governments, with recent cases documented in Russia, China and Sudan; Canada ranks among the freest countries on the Cato Institute’s Human Freedom Index. Source: Cato Institute (Nicholas Anthony), https://www.cato.org/commentary/canadas-plow-through-financial-freedom-stopped-convoy ↩

5. The Federal Court (January 2024) found the invocation unreasonable and in breach of the Charter; the Federal Court of Appeal upheld that finding on 16 January 2026 (2026 FCA 6); in March 2026 the federal government, by then under Prime Minister Mark Carney, sought leave to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada, which has not yet ruled on whether it will hear the case. Sources: Federal Court of Appeal summary, https://www.fca-caf.ca/en/pages/decisions/plain-language-decision-summaries/2026-fca-6 ; Global News, 17 March 2026, https://globalnews.ca/news/11735319/emergencies-act-supreme-court-appeal/ ; Canadian Constitution Foundation, https://theccf.ca/carney-asks-scc-to-overturn-emergencies-act-ruling/ ↩