Ottawa Broke the Law to Hide the Answer

By Dana-lee Melfi | Peace-Man.ca

On August 13, 2021, I watched Justin Trudeau stand in front of the cameras and announce two new federal COVID-19 mandates: one for all federal employees and one for travel, domestic and international. After seeing that scrum, I took a few weeks to research the legal chatter online—or the lack thereof—regarding the legality of the mandates in question. I found very little.

I remembered Trudeau’s own words from June 26, 2021: “We will never bring in mandates for COVID vaccination.” Now, less than two months later, he was doing exactly that.

Something didn’t add up. I filed an Access to Information and Privacy (ATIP) request, A-2021-00580, with the Department of Justice on September 23, 2021, well before the mandates took effect on October 6. I asked for every record between December 1, 2020 and October 6, 2021, that showed the legal path and justification for those announcements.

The Department of Justice had 30 days to respond. They didn’t. Instead, they broke the law. They issued an illegal five-year extension (1,825 days) and then placed the entire file on hold.

That triggered a complaint to the Office of the Information Commissioner of Canada (OIC). The OIC complaint was “invalidated” five times before an investigator finally validated the breach. A two-year investigation followed.

On August 6, 2024, the Information Commissioner released her final report and binding orders (OIC file 5822-03179). The report is clear: The Department of Justice broke multiple provisions of the Access to Information Act. It improperly placed the request on hold. It failed to assist the requester as required by law. It was deemed to have refused access altogether. The Commissioner ordered the Department of Justice to remove the hold, provide a complete response by May 17, 2029, give me updates every six months, and release records in stages, if possible.

Notably, the Commissioner used the word “egregious” in her findings—a term she has applied in final reports and orders only one other time, according to a review of publicly available OIC decisions. That rarity underscores just how serious the breaches were.

That should have been the end of the stonewalling. It wasn’t.

The Minister of Justice never reported these breaches to the House of Commons Justice Committee, as required. That is contempt of Parliament.

My MP, Cheryl Gallant, tabled Question Q-866 in the 45th Parliament, 1st session, May 26, 2025 (ourcommons.ca/written-questions/45-1/q-866), asking when the documents would be released and pressing for accountability on the handling of A-2021-00580. The government’s response danced around the real issues and ignored the key point: will the Department of Justice actually narrow the scope and release the one document that matters most—the legal determination that the mandates were sound?

I wrote to the Access to Information team leader at the DOJ on February 4, 2026, quoting paragraph 28 of the OIC report, which explicitly invites the complainant to discuss narrowing the scope. Their reply was bureaucratic doublespeak: “We will continue to process your file … if you wish to narrow further, we are happy to discuss …  See you in Aug 2026.” Yet every time I tried to narrow it—even down to a single page confirming the mandates were legally valid—my requests were ignored.

Here’s What Canadians Need To Understand

I was told by both the OIC and the Department of Justice that no one else has ever requested these records. Not lawyers. Not doctors. Not investigative journalists. Not law enforcement. I am the only Canadian who has used the Access to Information Act to demand proof that the two federal mandates were legal.

Why does that matter? Because the Access to Information Act is the law. When the very department responsible for upholding the law repeatedly breaks it to hide its own legal reasoning, the rule of law itself is under attack.

I have now spent years and thousands of dollars fighting this. I have served Notices of Liability on multiple parliamentary committees demanding oversight. And I paid an even higher price for simply trying to exercise my rights.

In 2022, I stood peacefully on Parliament Hill with the OIC and the Department of Justice documents in my hands. I was there to redress my government, exactly as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees every Canadian the right to do. I was arrested. I was taken to trial. All for standing in peace with the very government documents that prove the Department of Justice broke the law.

That moment crystallized everything. This isn’t just about one delayed ATIP request. It’s about whether Canadians still have the right to ask hard questions about the biggest policy decisions of our lifetimes—decisions that affected jobs, families, travel, and basic freedoms.

The mandates are long gone, but the questions remain. Were they ever legal? Who signed off on them? What advice did the Department of Justice actually give Trudeau before he flipped from “never” to “mandatory”?

We still don’t know. And the Department of Justice is doing everything in its power to make sure we never find out.

Canadians deserve better. We deserve transparency. We deserve a government that obeys its own laws. And we deserve to know whether the mandates that divided this country were ever grounded in law—or whether the entire exercise was an abuse of power from the start.

If you believe the public has a right to see the legal foundation (or lack of it) for those mandates, share this story.

Contact your MP. Demand that the Justice Committee call the Minister to account.

And if you ever file your own ATIP request, know this: the system is designed to discourage you. But one ordinary Canadian refused to be discouraged.

The fight isn’t over. The documents still exist. The truth is still buried somewhere in the Department of Justice’s filing system.

And I will keep standing—peacefully, lawfully, and relentlessly—until it sees the light of day.

You can follow Dana-lee on X @Danalee10346514, or visit peace-man.ca