Pierre Trudeau

Trudeau's government invoked the War Measures Act during Canada's October Crisis in 1970, enabling extraordinary arrest and detention powers. Temporary replacement legislation expired in April 1971, so this was not an indefinite continuation of the same emergency. The wider framework was eventually replaced by the Emergencies Act in 1988, with explicit rights protections and parliamentary supervision. The episode is useful for tracing both the expansion of executive power and the later effort to constrain its legal basis.