They crushed our rights for COVID. We still haven’t won them back
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
166.29562
Summary
John Carpe is the founder and President of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms, a group that has been fighting for years to challenge some of the lockdown methods governments used in order to keep the public safe and secure. In his new book, Corrupted by Fear, John Carpe lays out how the media, politicians and the judicial class betrayed Canadian citizens and their charter rights.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
did you lock the front door check close the garage door yep installed window sensors smoke
00:00:07.520
sensors and hd cameras with night vision no and you set up credit card transaction alerts a secure
00:00:12.640
vpn for a private connection and continuous monitoring for our personal info on the dark web
00:00:16.400
uh i'm looking into it stress less about security choose security solutions from telus for peace
00:00:23.520
of mind at home and online visit telus.com total security to learn more conditions apply
00:00:30.960
wait i didn't get charged for my donut it was free with this tim's rewards points i think i just stole
00:00:37.360
it i'm a donut stealer earn points so fast it'll seem too good to be true plus join tim's rewards
00:00:44.800
today and get enough points for a free donut drink or tim bits with 800 points after registration
00:00:50.000
activation and first purchase of a dollar or more see the tim's app for details at participating
00:00:59.200
the wait is over the gold standard of online casinos has arrived golden nugget online casino
00:01:05.120
is live bringing vegas style excitement and a world-class gaming experience right to your
00:01:10.160
fingertips whether you're a seasoned player or just starting signing up is fast and simple and
00:01:15.760
in just a few clicks you can have access to our exclusive library of the best slots and top-tier
00:01:20.800
table games make the most of your downtime with unbeatable promotions and jackpots that can turn
00:01:26.000
any mundane moment into a golden opportunity at golden nugget online casino take a spin on the slots
00:01:32.480
challenge yourself at the tables or join a live dealer game to feel the thrill of real-time action
00:01:37.760
all from the comfort of your own devices why settle for less when you can go for the gold
00:01:42.560
at golden nugget online casino gambling problem call connects ontario 1-866-531-2600
00:01:50.400
19 and over physically present in ontario eligibility restrictions apply
00:01:54.320
see golden nugget casino.com for details please play responsibly
00:01:58.000
the covet 19 pandemic haunts us still and one of the ways it does is how our charter rights were
00:02:08.320
just shredded in the name of keeping the public safe hello welcome to the full comment podcast i'm
00:02:14.400
brian lily your host today a review of the book corrupted by fear how the charter was betrayed and what
00:02:20.160
canadians can do about it john carpe is the founder and president of the justice center for
00:02:24.640
constitutional freedoms and all through the pandemic and since they have continued to launch
00:02:29.600
charter challenges to some of the lockdown methods that were in place some of the mandates that
00:02:34.480
governments tried to put in force and order in some instances they've been successful and others
00:02:40.240
less so but in his book corrupted by fear john carpe lays out how the media the politicians
00:02:48.240
and the judicial class in this country betrayed canadians and their charter rights it's
00:02:54.240
difficult for me to go back and think about what happened there covet is a time i'd rather not
00:02:58.800
think about but thankfully we have people like carpe and the justice center working hard to ensure
00:03:04.560
that this sort of thing doesn't happen again here's my conversation with john carpe so john i'm in the
00:03:12.080
camp of people who say covet was really bad experience and they don't want to talk about it or think about
00:03:17.840
it anymore i i'd prefer to forget those dark dark years of our lives you continue to write about it you
00:03:25.360
and the justice center continue to fight uh battles over it tell me why it's important to launch these
00:03:33.440
charter challenges that you've been fighting for years what you know covet's over but the court battle
00:03:40.000
continues why is it important to see them through well what we saw in 2020 was the
00:03:47.440
largest violation of citizens rights and freedoms in decades um you know we had the october crisis
00:03:56.080
in 1970 where a lot of quebecers were locked up you know without facing specific charges there was
00:04:03.600
a lot of human rights violations the the lawyers stepped up to the plate and provided legal defense
00:04:08.160
for all these people uh we had the internment of the japanese canadians in uh in world war ii
00:04:14.720
as well as italian and german canadians and in ontario there were camps there as well that had you
00:04:21.120
know not as much known about it as the the japanese canadian experience but you know it was illegal to have
00:04:28.560
christmas dinner with your own parents uh it was illegal to connect with a friend at a pub and so there's
00:04:37.440
there's massive mental health damage psychological harm people's livelihoods destroyed there was a lot
00:04:45.120
of damage i could go on and on and on well yeah i think we all know people who were damaged by covet
00:04:52.080
either because they uh are still living in fear uh much of it generated by the media and government
00:04:58.800
overreach or they're so anger angry at uh and have lost faith in institutions because of what happened
00:05:06.080
we we all meet these people in our lives and i think of the uh the kids going through schools
00:05:12.720
who had their schooling whether it's elementary or high school interrupted lost years of life experience
00:05:19.200
yeah the part of socializing is part of it's important uh pre-lockdowns actually pre-2020
00:05:26.720
there was already abundant uh evidence in the medical literature that we need face to face we
00:05:32.960
need in-person uh contact for to be well to be mentally healthy and physically healthy we need
00:05:41.280
to actually connect with people this is why every christmas you know canadians spend millions of
00:05:45.120
dollars to fly somewhere when really you could just have a you know a zoom christmas or or a telephone
00:05:50.400
christmas but you know people uh people want to see each other in person so to to respond to
00:05:56.400
the question it's it's about you know why why bother why care my my reason is that these um
00:06:02.640
violations were not based on science uh they didn't have a strong evidentiary basis they inflicted
00:06:09.520
massive harm we have to learn from that experience if we don't what's going to happen is uh there's
00:06:15.040
going to be some other virus that the government says oh it's really scary it's going to be like the
00:06:20.080
spanish flu of 1918 it's going to be like the bubonic plague so we're going to take away all your
00:06:24.240
rights and freedoms because we have a scary virus if we don't learn anything from what happened 2020
00:06:29.520
and onwards we're going to get locked down again or what i think is more likely is not another virus
00:06:36.240
but we're going to be told that we have to give up our rights and freedoms uh in order to save
00:06:41.760
ourselves from a climate holocaust and again it's the it's a very precarious shaky not strong basis for
00:06:51.600
taking away rights and freedoms to i mean there's a whole bunch of layers there that could be a whole
00:06:57.200
you know it could be a one-hour discussion but if we don't learn that governments never take away our
00:07:03.040
rights and freedoms without offering a nice sounding pretext that's the key point and so if we don't
00:07:10.080
learn that a government's going to come along in you know three months or three years or 30 years and
00:07:15.760
they're going to have this nice sounding pretext and we have to give up all of our rights and freedoms as
00:07:19.840
we did in 2020. there was no easy way to challenge what was going on because you had municipal ordinances
00:07:26.880
you had provincial you had federal and the provinces even enacted their laws in different ways alberta
00:07:33.840
used the public health act ontario used the emergency powers act and rebranded it as reopening ontario so
00:07:40.480
you know you couldn't just have one challenge and say okay these things have to stop because they were
00:07:44.480
all done differently but in your book corrupted by fear you do write about uh ingram versus alberta
00:07:55.360
explain the the future impact of of that the importance of winning on that one it already helped
00:08:02.320
clear away uh you know some prosecutions and hopefully you can touch on that but going forward
00:08:07.600
do you see that as a a case that will be a marker set out for governments yeah ingram versus alberta
00:08:16.480
was a it was very it was a very mixed result uh we we won in the sense that the lockdowns were were
00:08:24.720
struck down let me back up a little bit so the the claim was filed in december of 2020 against uh jason
00:08:31.680
kennedy's lockdowns and uh we didn't get a decision until two and a half years later which is a
00:08:37.680
disgrace but that's a whole other topic we don't have enough judges we can talk about that in a moment
00:08:43.280
so the ruling that came out two and a half years later in july of 2023 was that the alberta's lockdowns
00:08:52.720
were illegal because the court action and the testimony of the chief medical officer dina
00:09:02.240
hinshaw revealed that the real decision maker in alberta was not the chief medical officer it was
00:09:08.240
jason kenney and the chief medical officer dina hinshaw said that she was advising jason kenney
00:09:14.800
making recommendations to jason kenney but it wasn't really her decision it was it was the premier who
00:09:19.440
really made it was the decision and cabinet yeah yeah the premier and cabinet made the decision
00:09:25.600
and so the court looked at the act and said well according to this act that is flaw according to
00:09:32.560
alberta's public health act that is flawed we um the the decisions ought to have been made by the chief
00:09:39.840
medical officer and so on that basis uh none of these health orders were validly enacted and so from
00:09:48.640
there you know we had prosecutions stop because of people in alberta just like in other provinces or
00:09:54.640
were and in some cases still are getting prosecuted for violating these uh provincial health orders
00:10:01.360
and we so we went on that technicality how the government responded to that was some three six nine
00:10:09.280
months later the government amended alberta's public health act to say that the uh any health orders that
00:10:18.160
that violated charter rights and freedoms which these obviously did i mean every government admitted
00:10:22.880
that in court i mean that's that's not that's not in question these were violations of charter
00:10:26.880
freedoms the only debate is whether it was justified or not so the the government amended the act to say
00:10:33.120
that going forward uh it will be the premier uh that makes the final decision we're not going to have
00:10:39.760
uh unelected unaccountable health bureaucrat be given unlimited power to violate the the charter
00:10:49.040
rights and freedoms of of people no we'll do that yeah well that's a bad thing so we'll do
00:10:58.720
well at least if the premier is doing it there's a little if the premier and cabinet are doing it
00:11:03.120
there's some democratic accountability this is one of the many bad things during lockdowns is we we lost
00:11:09.440
to a large extent uh we lost our parliamentary democracy where the uh laws are enacted by elected
00:11:19.360
representatives who debate and who look at the legislation and who vote on it and who face an
00:11:27.440
election sooner or later and they can be held to account that was ditched and we had these unelected
00:11:33.280
like medieval monarchs just walk up to the microphone and say i the chief medical officer
00:11:38.400
decree as follows and so we had we had government by uh we had lawmaking by way of of news conferences
00:11:46.080
and that was really a repudiation of our parliamentary democracy in you know we put it on the front page
00:11:51.920
of the toronto sun as doctatorship we we put the pictures of uh dr tam uh then uh ontario uh medical
00:12:01.520
officer dr williams uh local officer uh dr eileen davila and we just called them a doctatorship in
00:12:07.840
the early days i remember there was a news conference in the morning where they outlined
00:12:12.880
uh what were then very uh mild restrictions uh but still restrictions that truly i don't think
00:12:19.920
would survive a charter challenge and then by the end of the day they had said oh no that's not good
00:12:24.640
enough we've got to go even further it was within 12 hours uh it was remarkable to see how disappointed
00:12:32.720
were you to see that so many canadians were willing to just give up on charter rights uh did did that
00:12:40.000
surprise you it can't remember if it surprised me i do remember it being very disappointed that i would
00:12:48.960
make an argument that well yes i understand the need for us to slow the spread of this virus but
00:12:55.200
this is going too far this is a violation of individual rights and liberties and people just
00:13:00.080
simply wouldn't care yeah i was very disappointed i was somewhat surprised i've seen what in my view
00:13:08.080
you've kind of had a slow decline in the respect for and appreciation for our the free society uh i think
00:13:17.040
it was strong you know at 1945 we had just lost a lot of soldiers and had you know hardship and
00:13:24.800
suffering in world war ii to win this war against these tyrannies we had imperial japan we had nazi
00:13:30.400
germany we had muslims italy and in 1945 i think people were very aware of the difference between us
00:13:37.600
with a parliamentary democracy and a free enterprise economy and the government respecting our basic
00:13:43.600
freedoms of speech religion conscience association etc etc and we felt that we were that our free
00:13:51.440
society was superior to the nazis and the fascists and so on and so forth and then throughout the cold
00:13:57.840
war we also had that dichotomy where you had this regime in power in the soviet union and china vietnam
00:14:04.720
cambodia uh so on and so forth where people had no private property rights no free speech no religious
00:14:10.960
freedom they lived in poverty etc and we saw the contrast and we believe that our system was
00:14:17.760
superior some of the strongest critics john that i met uh that i saw protest movements that i saw
00:14:26.080
uh challenge political leaders were people who had come from countries like poland before the fall of
00:14:32.160
the iron curtain and said no i've seen this before uh i'm not living like this but an awful lot of
00:14:39.040
canadians were willing to sacrifice you know i'll just give it up that's fine look after me daddy yeah
00:14:46.240
the other part of it is so the i i think the survival of the free society depends first and foremost it
00:14:54.480
depends on having a culture of freedom if you have the majority of people hopefully the vast majority of
00:15:01.440
people who really believe that a free society where government is our servant not our master where
00:15:07.520
government respects our our fundamental constitutional freedoms our human rights and so on if if the
00:15:13.520
vast majority of people believe that that is superior to a repressive regime be it fascist communist
00:15:20.480
national socialist theocratic whatever there's there's uh you know there's dozens of varieties of of
00:15:26.480
repression but we have to believe that our respect for human rights and and our freedoms and the free
00:15:34.400
society is is morally superior to other regimes if you're if you don't have the majority of people
00:15:41.040
believing that then it doesn't no constitution no judge you know nothing's going to save you so it's
00:15:47.200
about the culture and so we've seen this decline in canada where today there are an awful lot of people
00:15:55.120
who don't really appreciate our freedoms and we saw that during covet it's like yeah okay so it's it's
00:16:01.440
illegal for for me to go to a peaceful outdoor protest well i don't care and it's illegal for
00:16:07.120
me to have christmas dinner with my parents i don't care and you know businesses are getting
00:16:11.200
destroyed left right and center especially the restaurant industry was just severely punished
00:16:15.760
um and oh i don't care just this this uh it was it was really bad and that's another reason to keep
00:16:22.800
on talking about these issues is to i guess encourage people or even challenge people to think about
00:16:31.280
what happened five years ago and get people thinking and are you gonna uh be acquiescent again that the
00:16:38.640
next time the government comes to violate your rights maybe because i worked in the restaurant
00:16:44.560
industry as a teen but i wrote an awful lot about you know defending the restaurant industry here in
00:16:49.760
toronto and ontario from the ford government's lockdowns and crazy restrictions such as okay well
00:16:55.520
we can open up at this percent capacity but you've got to wear a mask when you walk to the table then
00:17:00.240
you can take it off while you're at the table but put it back on to go to the bathroom or to leave and
00:17:04.720
all these crazy things and and i just i would have people write to me who were embracing those uh
00:17:12.560
those measures and they would say why is your right to go have a beer more important than my right to
00:17:19.440
uh stay safe well one there is no right to stay safe i i don't see that in the charter i mean
00:17:27.360
there's various ways you could argue it i suppose but it was about the right of people to to gather
00:17:32.800
to socialize to be gainfully employed i mean then at one point i think it was a 40 unemployment rate
00:17:40.480
in the hospitality sector um just decimated yeah well i get into this in the book uh corrupted by fear
00:17:48.400
i talk about the the false media narrative uh present company accepted but uh the just the
00:17:55.440
whole notion that it's possible to stop the spread of a virus when in fact the best you could hope for
00:18:01.440
is to slow down the speed at which it spreads but you know people were claiming without with zero
00:18:06.800
evidence people say well lockdowns are saving lives well really when you consider the fact that 80
00:18:12.320
of covet deaths were in the long-term care facilities or the nursing homes so lockdowns
00:18:17.520
did not stop covet from getting into long-term care facilities which is where you had 80 of the deaths
00:18:22.320
nor did lockdowns prevent uh covet from reaching every city town village hamlet everywhere in canada
00:18:30.480
where there's people living covet got there yes so and we've seen this in the court so the justice
00:18:36.800
center had these you know court actions all across canada there's no court actions where uh governments
00:18:42.240
put evidence before the court that lockdowns are saving lives they just asserted it over and over
00:18:46.960
again lockdowns are saving lives lockdowns are saving lives lockdowns are saving lives and then the
00:18:50.800
judges bought that and said oh yeah well we need these lockdowns because they're saving lives there's
00:18:55.120
no evidence uh that i've seen that that would support the notion that lockdowns were saving lives
00:19:01.200
john this book is about the charter and you reference a lot of court cases but you spend an
00:19:08.480
awful lot of time beating up on the media and i don't blame you uh the media had a bizarre role
00:19:15.920
in this and you know we've got a 24-hour news channel here that's just serving toronto that was like a fear
00:19:21.680
factory um and few people were willing to look at the numbers you were just talking about long-term care
00:19:27.840
there this is from a piece that i published in october of 2020 and i looked at the coveted deaths in
00:19:33.600
long-term care uh in ontario and i compared it to the flu for the previous six years and the uh 2018
00:19:43.520
was a bad flu year but in the same time period of january to june in each year there was just an
00:19:51.680
increase of 3.7 percent in the number of deaths um due to covet it it was similar in many ways we
00:20:02.800
could have treated it in much the same way but we didn't we we overreacted and instead of you know
00:20:10.480
putting all of our resources into protecting vulnerable people they decided that well professional
00:20:16.960
young athletes who are very healthy have to go get vaccinated and they're not allowed to play in
00:20:21.920
front of people yeah so when i published that i was actually attacked by other media for being
00:20:29.040
anti-science despite laying out all the evidence um there was all this talk about um the you know
00:20:35.920
follow the science but people weren't willing to tell me why you you focus so much on on the media's
00:20:42.640
role in helping undermine charter rights well it's you know the journalistic code of ethics includes
00:20:51.440
things uh like you know get uh get give time and space and attention to different viewpoints you know
00:21:00.960
whether at least two maybe there's three four or five different viewpoints um don't you know have a
00:21:07.440
healthy skepticism so if uh if a premier or health minister if any politician walks to the podium and
00:21:15.760
makes a statement you don't go into this paranoia you know i'm sure they're lying they're lying all
00:21:20.960
the time but you also don't go to the opposite extreme of this credulous well the the politician
00:21:25.760
said it i believe it that settles it it must be true there's this healthy middle way of skepticism
00:21:30.560
where you you know somebody says it and you kind of go okay well let's check that out let's do some
00:21:35.120
research uh this was just gone and i guess yeah corrupted by fear i i say that the judges were
00:21:41.120
corrupted by fear the media were corrupted by fear the legal establishment was corrupted by fear
00:21:45.920
all of society was corrupted by fear and it's not the first time in history uh because politicians in
00:21:51.280
the past and i i look at you know the opening uh quarter of the book is is uh history in europe uh
00:21:58.640
fascism the growth of fascism in the 30s uh how the national socialists in germany used fear to take
00:22:07.840
away rights and freedoms and to keep those uh keep themselves in power they kept on promoting the fear
00:22:12.640
didn't they didn't just use fear to acquire power and then let up they continued with the fear the
00:22:17.840
germans were told in the 30s that they were in imminent danger of a communist takeover and so we had to be
00:22:25.280
always vigilant and and any opposition to the regime was communist and there there was this grave danger
00:22:32.000
uh that the communists were going to take over and so you know we got to support the government and so
00:22:37.280
we have to give up all of our rights and freedoms so the fear has been used by politicians in the past but
00:22:43.840
it's very sad that the media just went along with this en masse it's like uh well i'm sad that they
00:22:52.320
were so sheep-like and you had so few journalists that would just pause for a minute and say okay
00:22:57.520
well wait a minute you know is this actually true does this actually make sense which is the type of
00:23:03.360
questions media should be asking yeah there was very little of that i can assure you we have to take
00:23:08.000
a quick break when we come back more horror stories on the media front and how the media narrative
00:23:12.880
influenced court opinions bank more encores when you switch to a scotiabank banking package
00:23:22.320
learn more at scotiabank.com banking packages conditions apply scotiabank you're richer than you
00:23:29.120
think this is tristan hopper the host of canada did what where we unpack the biggest weirdest and
00:23:35.600
wildest political moments in canadian history you thought you knew and tell you what really happened
00:23:40.560
stick around at the end of the episode to hear a sample of one of our favorite episodes
00:23:45.760
if you don't want to stick around make sure you subscribe to canada did what everywhere you get
00:23:51.040
podcasts in chapter 11 you open up john by uh it's titled repeating the government and media narrative
00:23:57.760
and court rulings and here's some of the narratives that you say judges were operating under and that my
00:24:02.720
colleagues in the media pushed covet is unprecedented an unusually deadly killer the worst global pandemic in
00:24:08.560
a century covet threatens everyone including children and healthy adults everyone should live in fear
00:24:14.080
death numbers and death rates are much higher than previously uh thanks to covet you know there were a lot
00:24:19.840
of things that um you know we had to fight for such as getting the government to actually give out
00:24:27.760
reliable data um you know they were counting everyone in hospital with covet as a covet patient
00:24:35.040
well at one point i can tell you i ended up in the emergency room after um a bad fall and a concussion
00:24:41.760
and and some bleeding that's how i found out that i had covet i was counted as a covet patient because
00:24:46.960
they hadn't changed the rules yet uh i only found out that i had the the virus by going into hospital to get
00:24:54.320
checked out for something else there were people who were dying with covet but didn't die due to covet and
00:25:00.320
they were reported as covet deaths there was so much bad science and so much malpractice uh by the journalists
00:25:07.360
but what you drive at there is that judges who in many cases aren't equipped to be making public health
00:25:16.640
rulings we're just relying on the media narrative to support these lockdowns
00:25:22.320
well case in point would be the gateway decision coming out of manitoba this was a gateway bible
00:25:29.920
baptist church and a bunch of other churches and individuals they challenged the lockdowns
00:25:34.240
and so you have the judge um in that case declares that covet is unprecedented and it's the worst pandemic
00:25:41.360
in over a century zero evidence to support either of those assertions but he's he's just parroting what
00:25:48.320
the media say because in fact we had the spanish flu of 1918 was was many many multiples more deadly than
00:25:54.240
than covet and uh the asian flu 1957 the hong kong flu 1968 were both more deadly than covet and yet
00:26:05.040
this judge just says oh covet's the worst pandemic in a century and it's false he then ignored completely
00:26:11.120
an expert report from the former chief medical officer of the province of manitoba dr joel kettner
00:26:18.560
wrote this lengthy report and he went through how pcr testing does not diagnose covid how the
00:26:26.720
government's numbers of covet cases and covet deaths are inflated and not accurate on and on and on big
00:26:33.440
fat lengthy report eviscerates the case for lockdowns what does the judge do with it he ignores it completely
00:26:40.480
you're he could have and he ruled in favor of lockdowns and said oh yeah these were these were
00:26:46.400
necessary justified he doesn't explain why joel kettner's expert report is wrong so there's no
00:26:54.640
excuse for that uh like the the judges at least they're looking at something six months later or
00:27:01.040
12 months later two years later they've got all this evidence they're not on a deadline where they have
00:27:06.720
to you know push a story out the door in three hours they've actually got lots of time to look at the
00:27:11.920
data and so judges failed and they they uh adopted the media narrative
00:27:19.680
there just seemed to be a willingness um you know for demanding that the ford government for example
00:27:27.600
and i just keep picking on that because that was my main area of coverage um although covered the the
00:27:32.960
federal material as well but asking for evidence for shutting down restaurants for example or banning
00:27:40.320
outdoor greetings um was met with shock and horror from other members of the media i mean never mind
00:27:48.160
never mind folks who were scared and at home and i understand why many people were scared and um why
00:27:55.040
they felt this way absolutely can understand that but journalists normally say yeah but you know they've
00:28:03.440
got questions you you you say something and we question it and that went out the door other than
00:28:10.880
why aren't you locking us down harder seemed to be an acceptable uh question for a long time yeah well
00:28:17.040
matthias desmet uh professor from uh ghent university in in belgium came out with um this mass uh mass
00:28:29.120
mass formation mass hysteria mass delusion where uh i mean this gets into the field of psychology which
00:28:37.920
i don't touch i don't get into it too much in the in the book but this is where the conversation takes
00:28:44.720
us to right like why why do you get this mass delusion that that uh people fanatically buying into
00:28:54.080
notions which in 2019 they would have rejected i mean the the idea that it's possible to stop the
00:29:00.320
spread of a virus uh the the idea that uh we can um we should just give up all of our our rights and
00:29:08.000
freedoms the idea that we should fixate on live life as though the only purpose and of life is to avoid
00:29:17.200
covid and and the only important thing in life is to not catch covid and then so detached from
00:29:23.520
the reality that this was not a threat to more than 99 percent of the population was not threatened
00:29:29.120
by it at all and we could have quite sensibly taken uh steps to to protect the vulnerable and instead we
00:29:37.280
just impose all this harm on people so desmet talks about uh free floating anxiety and people not
00:29:44.640
personally connected and then uh politicians present covid as this this demon enemy and then all
00:29:52.400
the people the anxiety latches onto that and then we we all get into this mission to to uh to fight
00:30:00.320
covid and gives people a sense of meaning and purpose etc etc so you know that's the kind of stuff that we
00:30:07.280
have to look at as possible explanations is is the psychology side of it yeah the the only time i remember
00:30:14.080
pushback on on the lockdowns there had been all these calls for melbourne australia style lockdowns
00:30:19.360
because in i think it was april of 2021 or perhaps it was later it's a it's a bit of a blur uh everyone
00:30:27.440
wanted the very strict melbourne style lockdowns and then they were implemented and people lost their
00:30:33.120
minds and said how dare you uh well yes this is what you were asking for um you're still fighting some
00:30:40.800
cases through the justice center and it's still hard to fathom that we had people in various
00:30:49.680
fired by various governments uh or institutions who were working at home uh you know you you've
00:30:57.440
mentioned uh some uh health administrators in british columbia but i believe there were federal
00:31:02.480
civil servants in ottawa working from their home no interaction with anybody else but fired for refusing to
00:31:09.520
get vaccinated we suddenly went from my body my choice to your body my choice yeah yeah it was quite
00:31:17.200
quite the shift again it shows the the utter lack of science and appreciation for science when in british
00:31:25.520
columbia there were healthcare administrators who were fired for not getting injected with with the
00:31:30.400
covid vaccine and the same with university students there was a there's a very twisted irony that that
00:31:37.680
society went from in 2020 and into 2021 the universities switched largely to or in some cases entirely to
00:31:49.520
zoom right so now we've got all you know nobody's going to meet in class anymore and everybody's taking
00:31:54.000
their class from through a computer screen then in september 2021 they make the vaccine mandatory
00:32:01.920
and all of a sudden universities lost their ability to have zoom things because people could say well
00:32:08.640
you know uh i've got my reasons for not wanting to get injected but i want to join class by zoom and
00:32:15.840
universities are going nope nope you're going to get expelled from university over not getting injected
00:32:22.880
because we refuse to set up a zoom link it yeah there there have been mixed results in in this if i'm
00:32:30.400
correct in terms of challenging these in court uh i i can't see how a judge would reasonably come to
00:32:39.920
the conclusion looking at all the charter evidence that forcing someone to be vaccinated and i say this
00:32:45.520
is someone who you know was vaccinated by choice um it it makes me really worried about the state of our
00:32:55.520
court system that we would have judgment saying that this is acceptable we had a court judge michael
00:33:02.400
mcgaw a harper appointment by the way not a trudeau appointment uh judge michael mcgaw in saskatchewan
00:33:08.880
ordered a 12 year old girl to get injected with covet vaccine against her will and the will of her
00:33:15.920
mother but it was a father's application to uh to get his daughter injected and the scariest thing about
00:33:24.240
the ruling is that he declared he took judicial notice which as you know it's a it's a tool that
00:33:29.600
judges have if you've got some lunatic that you know walks into court and says that the world is
00:33:35.600
is flat and not round and he wants to use up the court time to prove that that the world is not round
00:33:41.280
and the judge has this discretion to take judicial notice of the fact that the earth is is round and so
00:33:48.480
that's all well and good judicial notice is a it's a tool but it's supposed to be used only in uh
00:33:54.560
situations where no reasonable person would dispute what is being advocated and where there is um
00:34:02.880
immediate access to a source of verification of indisputable accuracy so judicial notice is a
00:34:11.840
tool that judges should use sparingly in an extreme situation like you know somebody says
00:34:17.680
gravity is not real or the earth is flat this judge says he takes judicial notice that the
00:34:23.760
vaccine is safe and effective for adults and children because health canada and the saskatchewan
00:34:31.440
health authority have said so this is statolatry this is the worship of government for this judge
00:34:37.520
the government said it it's absolutely true i believe it that settles it we can move on
00:34:42.000
like like government government's like god government can't governments can neither deceive
00:34:47.760
nor be deceived and if government says that it's true and you you have to believe that so he takes
00:34:52.400
judicial notice of the vaccine being safe and effective because government says it is but
00:34:57.360
shouldn't it be about that person's individual choice this one's a bit muddier because it involves
00:35:02.160
you know parents fighting but you know someone getting fired and that being held up in court the
00:35:08.480
judge should be looking at my individual rights i chose individually to say yes i will take this
00:35:14.400
vaccine you know and i had my reasons such as my parents being in the prime area and looking at the
00:35:20.720
facts and saying okay i want to see my parents i want to make sure they're protected um but if i had come to
00:35:27.360
a different conclusion then it's my individual rights that should be the the judge's consideration not
00:35:35.120
hey i've looked at what the government said so to hell with you and your rights well this is where
00:35:40.960
the comparisons with fascism come in i think we we should learn from history so fascist movements in
00:35:46.720
europe were strong in uh germany and italy uh in particular because they took power there uh but there
00:35:54.640
were fascist movements in in uh portugal spain france hungary the netherlands denmark britain i mean
00:36:02.720
it was it was all over the place and it was this rejection of the classical liberal respect for the
00:36:09.920
individual where i say look you know i'm i'm a human being created in god's image i have certain
00:36:16.160
rights i have bodily autonomy uh i have the right to practice my religion i have the right to say what
00:36:22.240
i want to say etc etc etc that is a classical liberal perspective and the fascists in europe in the 1930s
00:36:30.000
basically said well to hell with your rights we all got to get behind the national project uh to
00:36:37.760
to to to advance the nation and to build up the glory of our of our nation now here with covid
00:36:44.800
obviously it's it's a different project the project was not you know restoring canadian greatness and you
00:36:51.200
know preparing for taking over the united states and world domination it wasn't like that but but but
00:36:57.520
it was like we all got to get you know to hell with your rights and freedoms you got to get on board
00:37:01.520
with the big project everybody has to support the big project that's fascism and it was extremely
00:37:08.800
disappointing to see um how many give us a quick update on cases that you've still got ongoing
00:37:15.120
challenging this uh through the justice center uh i know you're uh providing support to tamara leach and
00:37:22.000
and chris barber that was with the the convoy but also you're you're supporting people who are
00:37:27.360
challenging other mandates yeah so we've got about a half dozen uh criminal cases left uh for people like
00:37:35.440
chris barber tamara leach uh evan blackman where they were criminally charged for participating in a
00:37:44.400
peaceful protest uh and we've got another half dozen or so cases that are before the various courts of
00:37:50.000
appeal especially in british columbia where we had uh you know the the the the government closed down
00:37:58.480
churches it made church in-person worship in church was was illegal but restaurants and bars and strip
00:38:06.480
clubs and gyms like everybody's open except not the churches right so that's an example of of a case
00:38:13.120
where these pastors actually said look we will abide by the you know the uh the hand sanitizer the masks the
00:38:19.520
social distancing the capacity limits everything we'll comply with all the rules we just want to
00:38:24.480
meet in person at church and we'll even do you know limited capacity six feet apart masks the whole
00:38:29.520
kit and caboodle and bonnie henry said no uh you know so utterly bizarre because i didn't realize that
00:38:37.120
and all through the pandemic i kept saying why can't we be more open like british columbia because ontario had
00:38:44.480
ridiculous lockdown measures and by comparison bc looked good i didn't realize they shut down all
00:38:51.600
churches well it was very you know it was different in each province i mean generally speaking the
00:38:58.400
restrictions that in alberta were less they were not as severe however jason kenney is the only premier
00:39:07.760
in in canada who locked up pastors and jailed pastors and he pretends that that was just a
00:39:14.480
decision of the judge and the crown prosecutor and it's beyond his control that's not true alberta
00:39:19.280
health services went to court to get injunctions against these pastors such that if they disobeyed
00:39:26.160
the rules they would not merely get a ticket as they did in other provinces but they would actually be
00:39:31.920
jailed for being in contempt of court jason kenney did that to lock up pastors so it was very what i'm
00:39:37.440
trying to say is it's very mixed in each province so bc was you know less uh uh um locked down than
00:39:44.880
ontario for the most part however there was a period of time i think it was november of 2020 it was
00:39:51.680
november of 2021 i don't know but but for for several months the uh church services were prohibited
00:39:59.520
entirely and the mosques and the synagogues and yeah houses of worship i have a solution for you know
00:40:06.160
you mentioned that strip clubs were allowed to be open but not churches and here in toronto there's
00:40:10.240
a unique solution there's a building on bloor street that is divided in half and half of it is a
00:40:15.280
a bible church and the other half is a strip club so they could have just met at the strip club
00:40:21.280
i'm not sure it's what they would want to do but you know they're neighbors uh
00:40:26.320
so many of the challenges did come from churches uh why is that i know there were people challenging gym
00:40:33.680
lockdowns and there were some attempts by you know some restaurant tours and stuff but an awful lot
00:40:39.120
of this fight was led by uh evangelical churches in particular yeah the you know the catholic church
00:40:47.520
could have as the largest denomination in in canada that could have single-handedly shut down
00:40:52.880
lockdowns entirely by just saying hey it's part of our religion that you have to receive communion in
00:40:58.320
person and the priest has to consecrate the host in person he can't do it via zoom they had a stronger
00:41:05.360
rationale than the evangelicals did but uh catholic church just uh embraced the the false media narrative
00:41:13.440
entirely so we there were churches all over canada but even there i should point out the church was
00:41:19.520
was very divided them the anecdotally my impression um is that the church going people were
00:41:28.320
not much different from those not going to church so you had the overwhelming majority of church going
00:41:32.800
people lived in a state of fear believed everything that the media told them uh enthusiastically
00:41:38.800
complied with the measures uh got very angry with people that were skeptical about the narrative so
00:41:48.000
yeah the there wasn't a huge difference i i think in in as between church going and not church going
00:41:55.200
canadians yeah they just they're the ones that that uh we're pushing it uh you talk for a bit in the
00:42:02.560
book about a a court decision that i keep coming back to um it's more than 20 years old now or about that
00:42:10.160
and i just think it hasn't been you know brought to its fullness yet and that's the chelui decision
00:42:16.800
how does that relate to covet though that's a that's a case about a man in quebec saying you're delaying my
00:42:23.120
uh surgery by not allowing me to pay for it out of my own pocket and therefore you know infringing
00:42:30.000
upon my rights i think that should apply across the whole country by the way but the judges in that
00:42:35.040
case you know twisted themselves into pretzels to make sure it didn't apply but how does it relate to
00:42:40.640
covet and the charter violations from the lockdowns and mandates and everything else
00:42:44.640
well the media started telling us in march of 2020 and politicians and media said uh we've got a
00:42:54.960
covet is causing a crisis in the health care system and so we have to give up our rights and freedoms
00:43:00.720
you know you have to uh government should just you know destroy your restaurant business or other
00:43:06.560
small business and and you can't meet with people etc etc because we've got to save the health
00:43:12.160
care system from overcrowding and people like my mother who had worked as a registered nurse
00:43:18.080
in british columbia for 40 years uh she was scratching her head saying canadian hospitals are routinely
00:43:25.600
uh overcrowded uh there are thousands of people probably tens of thousands of canadians who have
00:43:32.480
died on waiting lists they've got a they need a heart transplant or they need this or that and
00:43:37.200
they're on a waiting list and they die in ontario there was a christine elliott was just didn't
00:43:42.960
care less there were 35 people on waiting lists for heart surgery who died because the all across
00:43:50.560
canada these chief medical officers they cancelled tens of thousands of surgeries okay and in alberta it
00:43:55.840
was like 23 000 surgeries cancelled well that's about a tenth of of of canada's population so it was
00:44:01.840
like 200 000 surgeries cancelled right a lot of those people died now where shawuli comes into this
00:44:08.320
is we've had a long-standing problem in canada uh not caused by covid but we've got a government
00:44:14.000
monopoly healthcare system where there's no incentives for efficiency there's very little accountability
00:44:19.920
we spend more than most countries per person and we get inferior outcomes and to to say that that
00:44:26.960
the overcrowding in hospitals is caused by covid and it's all oh and it's all these shameful people
00:44:32.320
who refuse to get injected that are you know flooding the hospitals i mean uh these are bald-faced lies
00:44:40.080
healthcare has been horrible in canada for a very long time and anybody who says that that this overcrowding
00:44:45.840
is caused by covid uh either they're they're ignorant and they don't know the facts or or they're being deceitful
00:44:51.440
i think the schloui decision was 2005 because i think it was the end of the yes yes the paul martin
00:44:58.240
government and uh um and it was a great great decision he well almost great decision it should have
00:45:06.560
applied across the whole country they said it just applies to quebec but the man uh was granted the
00:45:11.440
right because the government failed to provide adequate services in the hospital system to deal with
00:45:18.320
overcrowding 20 you know 15 years before covet hit that he was allowed to to go and pay for his own
00:45:25.120
that was an incredible decision but you know i i like how you point out that you know again false
00:45:31.040
narrative that uh we needed to shut everything down because the healthcare system's never seen overcrowding
00:45:37.120
before yeah no they flu season routinely overcrowded there they would announce i think it was a code purple
00:45:45.680
meaning all surgeries are cancelled because the hospital is just flooded with a whole bunch of
00:45:50.800
flu patients and we're just you know so surgeries would be uh cancelled and rescheduled but not on
00:45:58.960
the scale this is the other stupid irony of it on the one hand they say well we have to accept the
00:46:04.080
violation of our charter rates and freedoms in order to uh save the healthcare system uh so that the
00:46:11.680
hospital does not get overcrowded so that we don't have to cancel surgeries so on the one hand we're
00:46:17.440
being fed this rationale and then they turn around and they canceled surgeries anyways john thank you for
00:46:25.760
your time i hope you and the justice center continue you uh the good fight thanks so much thank you
00:46:31.840
full comment is a post media podcast my name is brian lily your host this episode was produced by andre
00:46:37.440
prue theme music by bryce hall kevin libin is the executive producer please remember to hit subscribe
00:46:43.040
wherever you get your podcasts on amazon on spotify apple wherever you're listening hit the subscribe
00:46:49.120
button so you don't miss an episode thanks for listening and until next time i'm brian lily
00:46:54.000
here's that clip from canada did what i promised you
00:47:06.800
in the late 1960s you have members of the montreal police who can spend their entire shift rushing from
00:47:13.440
one flq bombing to another here's how new year's eve 1968 played out for robert cote a member of the
00:47:21.440
montreal police bomb squad which put him at the forefront of fighting the flq during this period
00:47:27.760
he was supposed to be at home with his wife who had just miscarried twin daughters but instead at 11
00:47:33.760
pm he's called out to montreal city hall to investigate a bomb that had just gone off
00:47:38.960
he's en route with sirens blaring when he's told actually don't bother with the exploded bomb
00:47:44.400
there's an unexploded bomb on the other side of city hall you have to defuse
00:47:48.480
and then right after snipping the wires on the city hall bomb cote had to speed west where a third
00:47:56.320
bomb has just exploded outside a federal building the bombing started in april and may of 1963 that's
00:48:05.360
when the first bombings took place and the mailbox bombings were the most famous part of the whole thing
00:48:11.680
which was basically on the thursday night and friday night leading into the victoria day weekend in
00:48:17.760
1963 so and initially they they started attacking these symbols of federalism federal institutions
00:48:25.920
whether it was a montreal post office or a revenue canada but the bombings escalated as time went on
00:48:33.840
in terms of the size of the bombs and the powerfulness of these bombs
00:48:39.600
if you want to hear the rest of the story make sure you subscribe to canada did what