Juno News - December 05, 2021


Lawyers sign ＂Free North Declaration＂ to defend civil liberties


Episode Stats

Length

17 minutes

Words per Minute

195.81885

Word Count

3,397

Sentence Count

161


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 You're tuned in to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:00:08.680 Welcome back to The Andrew Lawton Show. If you haven't detected it, there's been a bit of a
00:00:12.940 civil liberties theme on this show for the last, oh, I don't know, maybe 18, 19 months. Part of
00:00:18.260 it's become, part of it has been because that has been the biggest issue facing not just Canadians
00:00:23.860 in provinces all across this country, but even people around the world. We've covered a lot of
00:00:28.700 court cases that have been taken up against some of these very significant and severe measures we've
00:00:34.200 seen. Obviously, there have been some wins, but a lot of losses on that. But I think we all agree
00:00:38.960 it's probably going to be a years-long process as a lot of these challenges work their way up through
00:00:43.920 all the various courts and perhaps may have a favorable outcome at the Supreme Court. Who
00:00:48.300 knows? Well, a number of lawyers from all across this country have signed a declaration acknowledging
00:00:54.300 that civil liberties are under what the declaration says is unprecedented attack. This is the Free
00:00:59.920 North Declaration, founded by our friend Bruce Party, who's been on the show on a number of
00:01:04.700 occasions. And one of the signatories is D. Jared Brown, a lawyer with Brown Law in Toronto, also a
00:01:11.300 bencher with the Law Society of Ontario. He joins me now. Jared, good to have you back on. Thanks for
00:01:16.800 coming on the show. Thanks for having me. This has just taken off like wildfire. I mean,
00:01:22.060 all sorts of lawyers and not just the usual suspects that we hear in the media on civil liberties,
00:01:27.200 but people with family law practices, real estate practices. There does seem to be a significant
00:01:32.700 contingent of the legal community that's not happy with what's happening right now.
00:01:37.960 Yeah, I think absolutely there's a growing opposition to the new normal, if you will. I think that people
00:01:45.880 are, everybody's feeling it. It's taken some people longer than others to sense that change, what the
00:01:52.360 new normal looks like, and to develop the opposition to it, if you will. So yeah, there's a lot more
00:01:59.960 people in this space now, especially in the legal world than there were 18 months ago. And certainly
00:02:06.840 putting some attention on it from some of its opponents has certainly galvanized some of the
00:02:15.580 lawyers to take a look at what the Free North declaration is all about, and to decide whether
00:02:19.960 or not they want to affirm their belief in that proposition. I know at the bottom of it, there's an
00:02:26.540 option that allows people to sign it anonymously if they'd like. And the petition says, or the
00:02:31.520 declaration rather says, if they fear negative repercussions from disclosing their name publicly.
00:02:36.660 Now, I know you've never shied away from putting your name to what you think. Neither has Bruce Party,
00:02:41.020 leaseability, all of these folks that have been involved in this. But for a lot of lawyers, the
00:02:45.300 idea of standing up for civil liberties, there could be negative repercussions, or at least they fear
00:02:50.620 there could be. Why is that? Oh, absolutely. And it's part of the new normal. In the before times,
00:02:55.900 you were considered a champion of the bar and a hero of the law if you were to champion human rights
00:03:03.980 and basic civil rights. Well, in the new normal, that's not the case at all. It depends on which rights and
00:03:08.740 freedoms that you are supporting or defending. And one need look no further than the opposition to
00:03:15.960 the Free North Declaration, which is building, to see why people are legitimately afraid to stand up
00:03:22.980 to put their names to things like the Free North Declaration. I mean, by way of example, I just read
00:03:28.980 a piece calling for myself and some of my colleagues who are governors at the Law Society of Ontario to
00:03:35.440 somehow be reprimanded or to have our elected positions on that board somehow put in jeopardy
00:03:41.480 because we decided to affirm our belief in fundamental human rights, fundamental charter
00:03:46.100 rights and freedoms. There's also another individual who a lawyer who was calling for the
00:03:51.020 any articles that publish the Free North Declaration uncritically, that those should be censored,
00:03:56.960 those articles should be pulled down. I mean, it's the typical mob reaction that typically comes from
00:04:03.700 the left on these things, and it's been mobilized, and it's been mobilized quickly.
00:04:08.020 But when you talk to your legal colleagues that are seeing a lot of concerns here,
00:04:12.240 are they all politically conservative? Because it used to be a lot of the biggest civil libertarians
00:04:16.620 came from the left.
00:04:18.560 No, absolutely. This is in the new normal, if you will. The coalitions and alliances are not the
00:04:25.040 ones of old. And so you've got traditional sort of socialist lefties who recognize that there are
00:04:32.540 some fundamental rights and freedoms, freedom of speech, things like that, that they actually care
00:04:36.500 about, that matter to them. And then there's also liberals, small L liberals, classical liberals,
00:04:41.800 and then conservatives. And then, of course, there's the libertarians themselves. There is an
00:04:45.460 alliance of people who recognize that our society was organized on the basis of some pretty good ideas,
00:04:53.620 you know, the rights and freedoms of individuals, for instance. And they don't like seeing how this new
00:04:59.860 normal under the COVID era has pushed those aside. And so if you value individual rights and freedoms
00:05:07.680 on any level, then you will find a home amongst this new coalition, if you will, from across the
00:05:15.020 political spectrum.
00:05:16.560 Now, I know it's obviously not something that judges would sign and could sign, nor do I want judges that
00:05:22.500 are signing what are political or political adjacent declarations. But I would certainly like them to be
00:05:28.360 taking heed of this current and a lot of the legal arguments that have been put forward in favor of
00:05:33.800 that. And I know, as I said, in the preamble there, there are going to be a lot of cases that I think
00:05:38.100 are going to be litigated for years into the future. But when it's coming down to it, the challenges that
00:05:43.120 have been going towards courts, fighting for civil liberties, courts seem to be generally taking a very,
00:05:49.980 very broad view and giving government a lot of latitude.
00:05:53.180 Let's be clear. I mean, judges and those that sit on administrative tribunals, they're just
00:05:58.520 members of society like you and I. They live within the same society that we live in. They get their
00:06:04.900 media and information from the same sources as us. And they're scared. They are scared. I have said to
00:06:12.940 people that there is a mania that has descended upon society. And judges and tribunal members are not
00:06:20.980 immune from that mania. And so absolutely, they, there has been no bold decision making, if you
00:06:29.060 will, on the side of fundamental rights and freedoms on anything COVID related or the public health
00:06:34.960 response to it. And I'm not surprised. And I'm not surprised only because like I said, the mania does
00:06:41.940 not stop at the steps of the courthouse. It's at all levels of society. And, and so in the midst of
00:06:49.080 the grips of something that you think is this existential threat to the entirety of society,
00:06:53.380 then maybe you're going to look over some rights and freedoms getting stomped upon by, by the
00:06:59.080 government. So yeah, it's that I'm not surprised. I've told anybody who wants to know that I think
00:07:05.560 the only solution to these problems are going to be political. I do not believe that you'll find any
00:07:10.600 refuge in the court system or the tribunal system on anything COVID public health related.
00:07:15.060 I fear you're right about that. One point that the declaration makes, which I think is interesting
00:07:20.780 about the process aspect of, of courts is that one example, which I hadn't actually come across,
00:07:26.580 come across that unvaccinated people are being denied the participation in juries. Now, some people
00:07:31.940 who don't like doing jury duty might say, okay, that's great. You know, it gets me out of it. But,
00:07:35.860 but that actually is in a way something that would bias a jury if you're excluding a segment
00:07:41.160 of the population. So, so even just the way that courts are operating as institutions,
00:07:46.360 forgetting about the decisions that judges are being made are not immune from a lot of these
00:07:51.060 things that are being challenged in courts. Well, that example that you just mentioned
00:07:54.920 about juries was a, was what looked like a simple and minor decision by, by a single judge,
00:07:59.800 I believe it was at Western BC saying that they didn't want to convene a jury pool in, in during COVID
00:08:05.640 times at that point, this, I think it was in the spring when vaccinations were a relatively new
00:08:11.220 thing. We didn't know much about them in terms of their efficacy long-term or otherwise, or about
00:08:15.680 transmissibility, things like that. And so that a judge made a decision, he was going to exclude
00:08:19.980 the non-vaccinated. And now my understanding is that, that, that decision is now being rolled out
00:08:24.620 everywhere. And what you're effectively doing is you're denying unaccused in, in a jury trial or,
00:08:30.880 or, or the defendant, if you will, in a civil trial, the jury of their peers. And, and I think
00:08:36.600 that's something we need to take seriously. We need to understand how, what the implications may
00:08:40.800 be. I mean, it is conceivable that at some point a jury may be deciding issues related to vaccination
00:08:46.960 status, possibly. And, and if you're going to exclude a, what, I don't know what the size of the
00:08:52.740 population is, but a cohort, if you will, of the population from sitting on a jury, you, you're really
00:08:57.860 meddling amongst some fundamental, uh, tenants of Western judicial systems.
00:09:04.160 Yeah. And when you look at a lot of these, and again, I'm not going to just go through and give
00:09:08.140 the entire list of civil liberties violations because, well, I think you have things to do this
00:09:12.800 afternoon as do I, but there is a point at which if you don't focus on the big picture and realize
00:09:19.980 that they are under attack, the little stuff doesn't really matter anymore. Like I remember at the very
00:09:24.640 beginning of the pandemic, it was almost a novelty when you'd see these little stories about,
00:09:28.900 oh, you know, this kid was given a fine for playing basketball in a park and these were very
00:09:33.440 manageable. And, you know, at, at a certain point it became dozens and then it became hundreds. And
00:09:37.800 now you've got millions, tens of millions of dollars of fines that have been leveled against churches,
00:09:42.940 individuals, uh, people that have just gone to work without being, like, it's just, it's endless now.
00:09:48.640 And at a certain point, how do you chip away at this? Well, it's been incremental, but there are
00:09:54.140 some who saw early on that this was, this was incredible. I mean, this is, this is absolutely
00:09:59.700 amazing that the government would think that it could put, uh, uh, the entire society under house
00:10:04.620 arrest, that it could shut down the economy, that the economy is a switch that they can play with and
00:10:09.420 turn on and off. Some of us thought, no, no, no, that's, that's not how society is organized.
00:10:13.740 Um, that, you know, rights and freedoms are not privileges granted by government, but they are,
00:10:19.120 they are something we are born with, something that comes from a higher source, if you will.
00:10:23.600 Um, and, and for the government to then start treating our rights and freedoms as if they
00:10:27.740 are privileges, which is what they've done, um, to some of us, we knew right away where this was
00:10:32.280 going. Of course, we were called the conspiracy theorists early on, but the conspiracy theories
00:10:36.340 18 months later are looking, uh, pretty credible at this point. And so what's happened though,
00:10:41.460 is from that initial shock that some of us saw, there's been this incremental push and,
00:10:46.900 and, you know, basically what's happened is you find yourself, uh, at a battle line 18 months later,
00:10:53.460 that is further back from where you started without realizing the amount of ground that you've been
00:10:58.180 pushed. Um, and, and so, like I said, people are beginning to realize those who may not have
00:11:03.700 been as shocked as someone like I was back in March, 2020, that the government thought it had this,
00:11:08.580 right. Uh, uh, they're, they're, they're now, they now see that the, the, the forward position
00:11:13.640 that they were in 18 months ago is miles off in the distance. And we, as I call it, the new normal
00:11:18.900 is a very different place.
00:11:20.980 I think that's a brilliant way of putting it because when this was all just about two weeks
00:11:25.700 to flatten the curve, people were willing to put up with a lot for two weeks. And if government
00:11:30.580 had made the appeal to civic duty and said, we're asking you to do X, Y, Z, it would have been a lot
00:11:37.480 different, but the problem is, and you're right, not that many people spoke out against this
00:11:41.480 at the point, even when we didn't know what COVID was, we didn't know how transmissible it was. We
00:11:46.140 didn't know what we were dealing with. I remember when people were wiping down doorknobs before going
00:11:50.540 into buildings and stuff like that, or even their, their own home. But that two week license that we
00:11:56.100 gave the government got extended. It got extended two weeks longer and then in months. And now we are
00:12:01.200 about to enter the third year of COVID. And you are right that the people that kind of gave the
00:12:06.200 benefit of the doubt to government are the ones now that, you know, well, the joke's on them.
00:12:12.060 Well, public health is traditionally, and if you talk to public health experts, and I have,
00:12:15.700 because I had to cross-examine some at trials and I've had to dive into peer-reviewed literature on
00:12:20.680 this stuff in the context of my court proceedings. But if you talk to them, traditionally public health
00:12:25.400 is something where you avoid coercion. In other words, you try and enlist the populace and you give
00:12:30.160 them information and equip them so that they voluntarily want to, in this case, fight COVID.
00:12:36.460 And so for instance, their initial two weeks to flatten the curve, it came across to many as a
00:12:41.300 voluntary suggestion, you know, this is the thing to do. And so I think on that basis, you could justify,
00:12:46.680 like give everyone the information, let them make their decision if they're going to stay home,
00:12:49.700 shutter their business, whatever it is. But that's not what happened. Laws were passed, kids were sent
00:12:54.120 home from school. It was backed up by the power of the state and it was coerced. Now, we're all in
00:13:00.600 this together was the mantra at that time. But the reality is, no, if you weren't in it, you were going
00:13:05.180 to find out very quickly from the police, from our health authorities and from the courts. And that's
00:13:11.420 traditionally not what public health has been. And we've completely annihilated that conception of
00:13:15.880 public health. And I think much to the detriment of the institution that it is.
00:13:19.340 So let's, let's go back to the declaration here for a moment. This is obviously a declaration by
00:13:25.280 lawyers. Who's the target audience? Are you trying to convince other lawyers? Or is it a message to
00:13:29.880 society itself? It's the society itself. I mean, the, the, the, a joint letter is something is not
00:13:36.740 something new. I mean, traditionally, they come from the left. Traditionally, you'll see academics,
00:13:41.900 legal scholars on the left will sign these joint petitions. Typically, they're criticizing
00:13:46.700 conservative governments and the things that conservative governments have tried to do.
00:13:49.840 You know, I'm thinking right now of the Ford government when it tried to restrict the size
00:13:54.120 of Toronto City Council, we saw a big joint letter signed by a bunch of lawyers and law profs saying
00:14:00.020 this is a bad thing. This is essentially in that vein, it's, it's a, it's a bunch of lawyers who are
00:14:06.080 who and legal types as well as among society at large who say, we don't like this. There's certain
00:14:12.060 principles that we hold dear and they're set out in the declaration. And, and, you know, you're not
00:14:18.840 alone if you share these, these ideas, these notions, or just this discomfort with where we are
00:14:24.780 now 18 months later. So no, it's for society at large to, I guess, to provide some comfort, because
00:14:30.780 you're not seeing any of this stuff in mainstream media. You know, the corporate media basically has
00:14:35.680 put the cone of silence on, on what I call the science around COVID. The science around COVID is not
00:14:40.600 what you're getting on your nightly news at 6pm, unfortunately. And that's why we are where we are.
00:14:45.200 So it's about getting a message out. It's about showing people that there are numbers that, that,
00:14:49.520 that share your opinions and your feelings. And then obviously having lawyers involved tells you,
00:14:54.200 guess what? You're not insane. This stuff is not normal in the law.
00:14:58.720 Yeah. And I think that's a very valid point because for a lot of people, I mean, going back to
00:15:03.240 Doug Ford calling those protesting lockdowns, a bunch of yahoos some time ago and, and similar rhetoric
00:15:08.520 about, Oh, just these, you know, absolute lunatics that are out protesting against vaccine mandates.
00:15:13.260 It is good to see here's an educated, regulated profession full of thousands of people of which
00:15:19.060 a large chunk are saying, ah, you know what? We're not comfortable with this. Including, as I pointed
00:15:23.280 out, a lot of fully vaccinated people who like myself can be very pro-vaccination and anti-mandate.
00:15:29.060 And that in and of itself is a position that's just completely absent from the mainstream media
00:15:34.040 discourse. I mean, people need to understand that as a lawyer, I go to court, I go before the human
00:15:38.800 rights tribunal, I go before all manner of, of sort of adjudicated bodies. And I'm having to give
00:15:43.440 advice to clients right now that says this in the before times, this is the way it would have been,
00:15:48.860 but we're now in the mania times, the new normal. And I can't give you an assurance on the outcome on
00:15:54.020 this case that I would have been able to give you 19 months ago and said, no way in hell can they do
00:15:58.540 what they're doing. Now I'm sitting there in a situation where I'm saying, who knows, who knows
00:16:03.240 in the new normal. And, and, and that's what people need to understand is that as lawyers and
00:16:07.320 this on looking at the vaccine debate, for instance, the mandatory vaccine debate, you know,
00:16:11.980 I represent employers, I represent individuals as well. And on both sides, my, the opinion that I
00:16:17.620 have to give is I'm not sure if this would be enforceable at the end of the day, in the old times,
00:16:24.660 it should not be, it would never have been to have to disclose your private health status
00:16:28.920 to your employer, to, to submit to a medical treatment in order to continue employment.
00:16:34.060 But in the new normal, you know, with the mania that I, that I say is out there and what I've
00:16:39.440 seen from the courts, you know, like I said, I think the only solution is going to be political
00:16:44.420 to these things. And, and so that's why the declaration is important that it's signed by
00:16:48.080 lawyers and as the backing of lawyers, because people need to understand even we as lawyers are
00:16:51.720 uncomfortable with this. Well, trying to return to the old normal has been an uphill battle,
00:16:57.500 but that doesn't mean it is not an important one. The Free North Declaration, one significant
00:17:02.160 weapon in that fight. Jared Brown, D. Jared Brown, lawyer with Brown Law in Toronto, one of the
00:17:07.100 signatories, also a bencher with the Law Society of Ontario. Thanks so much, Jared. Always a pleasure.
00:17:12.620 Andrew. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support the program by donating to True
00:17:17.400 North at www.tnc.news.