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Is it time for the federal government to invoke the Emergencies Act to help thwart COVID-19’s march across Canada, public health experts say. The question is, what would the government do with it?

Nova Scotia on Sunday became the latest province to declare a public state of emergency, tightening its borders, limiting gatherings to no more than five people and handing police the power to fine individuals who breach the “stay two-metres-apart” social distancing edict $1,000.

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On Saturday, the Northwest Territories shut its borders to those from outside the territory, with some exceptions, after reporting the first known case of COVID-19 in the North.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau Sunday said the federal Emergencies Act “is a significant step that can and should be taken when we’ve exhausted all other steps.”

Some say the country is reaching a tipping point and the pressure on the government to declare a federal emergency will only mount. “I don’t see how they can avoid this,” said Pierre-Gerlier Forest, director of the School of Public Policy at the University of Calgary and a former director of the Institute for Health and Social Policy at Johns Hopkins University.

On Sunday, Rona Ambrose called on Trudeau to declare a state of emergency. “Tell us to shelter in place, except for essential workers. We will not view it as an assault on our civil liberties, we will see it as (an) assault on COVID-19,” the former interim Tory party leader said in a tweet, prompting several to respond that such a declaration would only further spook Canadians and the markets and would indeed be an assault on civil liberties.