In this episode of The Lawton Show, host Andrew Lawton takes a deep dive into the Pandemic Era, and takes a look at the push for a bill that would ban all federal mandates on vaccines and travel during a pandemic.
00:07:05.160Oh, I never insulted the unvaccinated, Justin Trudeau said before the Public Order Emergency
00:07:10.500Commission. I never called anyone racist and misogynistic and white supremacist, except for
00:07:15.180that time that I called the unvaccinated racist, misogynist, white supremacist.
00:07:19.860Oh, I never forced anyone to get vaccinated, except for when I yelled enthusiastically
00:07:25.060at a campaign rally in Calgary that you may have a right sort of ish to not be vaccinated,
00:07:31.940but you can't like get on a plane. You can't get on a train. You can't, you know, risk other people.
00:07:37.840And it's almost as though they were trying to carve themselves a bit of an out there to say,
00:07:43.900well, yes, you have the choice, but if you make that choice, you can't work, you can't travel,
00:07:51.740you can't go see grandma, you can't do this. Is that really a choice? Hell no, it's not.
00:07:57.540And that is exactly what the government wants you to believe, that when they stripped away all of these abilities you had as a free individual in Canada, if you are not vaccinated, when you strip that all away, then you don't actually have the right to live your life anymore.
00:08:16.460and they're trying to tell you that this was all just a free choice.
00:08:21.380Imagine if, and I've made this comparison before,
00:08:23.820in the last six years we've had a bit of a renaissance
00:08:44.120And that is exactly the line that we are all told,
00:08:47.140I think understandably so when it comes to sexual consent.
00:08:49.600But with vaccination, we're told that coercion is entirely legitimate.
00:08:53.820Coerced consent is consent in the eyes of the government.
00:08:58.080Now, we look at the facts of the situation here,
00:08:59.960and I'll talk about this a bit more later with Christine Van Gein and Joanna Barron,
00:09:04.220who have a fabulous book out about the pandemic era.
00:09:07.600But one of the interesting details is that it didn't work.
00:09:10.720So all of these vaccine mandates and restrictions that were done to get the vaccination rate up a slight bit because it was already at close to 90% didn't actually amount to a hill of beans.
00:09:21.420This came out this week where COVID passports in Quebec and Ontario did not convince more than a few people to get vaccinated.
00:09:30.300This is a peer-reviewed study, such as it is, that looks at the effect that vaccine passports in those two provinces had on overall vaccination rates.
00:09:39.440and it found that it affected 0.9% in Quebec, 0.9% and in Ontario 0.7%. So let's just split
00:09:49.080the difference here. Less than 1%, 0.8% of vaccination was affected by vaccine passports.
00:09:56.640Now, I would argue this is not a failure of government policy because the policy
00:10:01.080government officials knew was not going to increase vaccination. It was meant to punish
00:10:07.000the unvaccinated. It was meant to say you have been non-compliant with government edicts,
00:10:12.720therefore you don't have the right to go to a movie theater, go to a restaurant,
00:10:15.940or in Quebec's case, to even go shopping at a big box store. One of many infringements on
00:10:22.300civil liberties that we'll talk about with Christine and Joanna very shortly. But I want
00:10:27.060to pivot to another topic here. If you've been following tnc.news this week, you'll no doubt
00:10:32.400have seen two really great stories with a third to come in just a couple of hours from my colleague
00:10:37.920Noah Jarvis who has written about this little known federal crown corporation called the
00:10:44.160Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Now this is a group which is by design tasked to
00:10:49.420distribute tons of taxpayer money for innovation and development and clean technology and all of
00:10:55.360that and you may think okay whatever government spends billions on this stuff. Well this crown
00:11:00.800corporation has been given a huge amount of money with very little oversight over how it's spent
00:11:06.380the government actually suspended its funding to this organization a little while back when a
00:11:12.400report found that there was a lot of mismanagement conflict of interest and all of that now my
00:11:18.180colleague Noah has got the receipts as they say and found even more than was in the report and he
00:11:23.560joins me now Noah good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thanks for having me on Andrew
00:11:28.540So, I mean, this was you and I were chatting about this when you were working on the stories and it sounded like this just started out as something that was in one way kind of a standard story.
00:11:37.740And the more you learned, the more you realize just how insane what was happening was.
00:11:42.020Yeah, exactly. I mean, we were sent a tip through the email and basically we were sent this report from SDTC that basically showed that the SDTC has a just a culture,
00:11:56.100a corporate culture of corporate mismanagement, funding companies in which board members have
00:12:01.220conflicts of interest in and trying to hide these conflicts of interest, whether that be
00:12:05.840through firing employees who would speak up about this, or whether that be through the president
00:12:12.100backdating documents to cover up the fact that she was working with people and funding companies in
00:12:19.640which there's a conflict of interest. It's quite concerning that board members of this
00:12:24.980crown corporation who are responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars
00:12:29.780annually of taxpayer dollars are possibly distributing money to which they have
00:12:34.560personal financial vested interests and perhaps even distributing money to their friends and
00:12:40.560colleagues. Yeah and your first story on this subject really just listed like board member by
00:12:45.880board member all of these companies they're involved in that have received in some cases
00:12:50.100tens of millions of dollars from sdcc from sustainable development technology canada
00:12:55.860and what i found interesting about looking through that we don't know i mean they have
00:12:59.620a conflict of interest policy and that theoretically these people could have recused themselves from
00:13:04.100those individual votes but the report that was done as you shared with me was that like a lot
00:13:10.180of the time they weren't even following the conflict of interest policy right and the only
00:13:14.500reason why this report was done was because uh whistleblowers from sdtc uh about a dozen or so
00:13:21.620uh current and former employees were sick and tired of the corporate mismanagement and they
00:13:26.100asked iscd which is the ministry responsible for administering sdtc that's led by francois
00:13:32.900philippe champagne that's correct um they asked iscd to do a report and an investigation on this
00:13:39.300They took about six months to do the investigation, and they found that, yes, SDTC, they have a culture of funding companies in which there are conflicts of interest with board members.
00:13:51.120Board members seldom recuse themselves from votes in which they are funding companies in which they have conflicts of interest.
00:13:58.340the report also found that there is very little if any dissension dissent within the board of all
00:14:06.160of the votes for funding companies were done unanimously there was very little evidence of
00:14:11.600vote mixing and the report notes that this is very concerning because the clean tech industry or
00:14:18.160whatever you want to call it is a very small industry and you know there's a lot of people
00:14:22.980who know each other and thus it makes it very important that there is a strong conflict of
00:14:28.000interest policy there. And not only is there a very weak conflict of interest policy, this
00:14:33.840conflict of interest policy was seldom followed. Yeah, and even with this report, SDTC has been
00:14:40.440pretty unrepentant, it looks like. They've basically told the government to go pound
00:14:44.600salt and said, we've done nothing wrong. Exactly. I reached out for them for comment,
00:14:48.980and basically SDTC said, oh, there's nothing to see here. There's no wrongdoing. They put out a
00:14:54.320press release a day after Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced that they would be cutting
00:14:59.740funding to SDTC until December 31st. They put out a press statement saying, we don't need an
00:15:05.460investigation on this matter. Everything's completely fine. Nothing to see here.
00:15:09.720Yeah, it's always great when someone says, we don't even need to investigate. We're that
00:15:12.960confident. There's no, don't even look. No, no, no. Please, please, please don't look.
00:15:17.040Exactly. And it's concerning that Francois-Philippe Champagne is basically entrusting the people
00:15:21.120implicated in this report they're trusting the board members and the executives to carry out
00:15:25.840these reforms to sdtc uh for their conflict of interest policy when these are the people that
00:15:31.680have been funding you know their friends and you know companies in which they're personally
00:15:35.840invested in uh one example i want to point out too is a board member who served on the sdtc
00:15:41.200board for six years between 2015 and 2021 andre lee's method she is the head of a venture capital
00:15:48.000firm and if you go on their website this is all public information you go on their website seven
00:15:53.280out of the 25 companies that cycle capital is invested in they have received money from sdtc
00:16:01.200millions of dollars from sdtc while she served on the board uh enterchem for example she also sits
00:16:07.120on the board of enterchem they received 12 million dollars in 2016 while she sat on their board and
00:16:11.920the sdtc board and andre lee's method also sat on the project review committee which reviews the
00:16:19.200the companies in which they plan on uh funding before it actually goes to a vote before the
00:16:24.560board so she has a lot of power uh within uh sdtc as well as many other board members who
00:16:31.440also sat on the project review committee now i just to to give people the benefit of the doubt
00:16:36.160here and i know you reached out to this woman for your story and as i understand it she didn't
00:16:40.000respond but to give them the benefit of the doubt if it is a small space and you know there aren't
00:16:45.040that many players in the space and obviously people might know each other and uh they try to
00:16:49.520be diligent and recuse themselves were you able to look into the meeting records and see if each
00:16:56.960individual member recused themselves on these things where there was a conflict or a potential
00:17:01.360conflict i i personally wasn't able to look into their meeting records but uh because they're not
00:17:07.680public is they're not public but uh grant thornton uh they did an investigation and they got you
00:17:14.000know those internal internal access uh to the documents and the meeting uh notes and their
00:17:20.080report basically outlines that you know from looking at the meeting minutes do like rarely
00:17:24.960if ever do they even talk about uh potential conflicts of interest and you know rarely if ever
00:17:30.800do board members recuse themselves uh from these meetings you know don't take my word for it take
00:17:35.280the people that the government hired to investigate the matter. So you said that the funding
00:17:41.040suspension from the federal government goes until the end of this year. Do you have any
00:17:45.520indication at this point of what's going to happen come January 1st? I mean, the government
00:17:52.120is entrusting these board members and executives implicated in the report to do these reforms. And
00:17:57.500I guess if Francois-Philippe Champagne feels as if SDTC has made enough steps into correcting
00:18:03.820their corporate mismanagement, quite frankly. If he feels as if they've taken enough corrective
00:18:11.060measures, they'll probably restore funding. But it's quite concerning because this SDTC is
00:18:18.120responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars annually. I think in 2021 or 2022,
00:18:23.560they distributed $140 million worth of taxpayer dollars. And the report basically notes that
00:18:29.580about 20% of the projects that they looked into,
00:18:33.740it's more than 20%, but I'm being generous,
00:18:35.780about 20% of the projects that they've looked into,
00:18:56.580But, you know, as I stated, you know, these same board members and executives are being entrusted to enact these reforms, and it would be very disappointing if Francois decides to reinstate their funding without any serious personnel change on the board and the executive of SDTC.
00:19:15.960Yeah, self-investigations are rarely, if ever, appropriate for correcting wrongdoing.
00:27:48.340and we're expecting that maybe in the next few months. Let me actually ask you, I'll start with
00:27:53.720you, Joanna, but if you want to bring in your own perspective, Christine, please do, about the
00:27:58.400Emergencies Act, because some of the government's arguments on trying to dismiss these challenges
00:28:03.620have been insane, and one of them, I'm crudely paraphrasing here, is basically, well, this was
00:28:08.760a once-in-a-lifetime fact pattern, so therefore, you know, there's no point in really, you know,
00:28:15.000having it out because the next time the emergencies act is brought in, it's going to be under
00:28:18.300different circumstances. And that's a really dangerous argument because every case has its
00:28:24.060own unique facts. And the point of precedent is not that you have a one size fits all solution,
00:28:28.260but certainly you start defining this. So the fact that this never before used legislation,
00:28:34.440the emergencies act came in, we've never had judicial guidance on how to use it. And the
00:28:40.080government doesn't want that is incredibly concerning. Have I misrepresented anything
00:28:45.200there, Joanna? No, certainly not. And I would add that in addition to the government pointing to
00:28:51.700the so-called unprecedented nature of the freedom convoy, as you say, it's not clear to me that
00:28:58.640there couldn't be some other type of emergency. We have climate issues. We have global security
00:29:04.500issues. The world is a dynamic and changing place. But the important thing to add, even beyond
00:29:09.200speculation is that at the hearings, both at the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings,
00:29:14.480as well as the judicial review hearings, the government very specifically and very stridently,
00:29:20.640I would say, pushed an interpretation of the application for the Emergencies Act,
00:29:25.680which would give them very wide ambit to act. So specifically in the Emergencies Act, which
00:29:32.000defines threats to the security of Canada in a way that's linked to the CSIS Act and that thus,
00:29:37.600you know, relies on a CSIS assessment, an independent assessment specifically to avoid
00:29:44.040concentrating too much power in the hands of the executive. We heard the prime minister himself
00:29:49.140directly say that his interpretation, his government's interpretation of that was that
00:29:54.260he could declare a state of emergency throughout Canada based on his understanding of threats to the
00:30:01.820security of Canada as the governor and counsel, independent from any external threat assessment
00:30:07.560And at both hearings, he declined to provide any type of legal brief, legal memo, let alone external threat assessment, which we know from the testimony of Jody Thomas was never provided.
00:30:19.680So actually, if that standard rules the day, Justice Rouleau seemed to accept that.
00:30:26.820And we know that the federal government, which is going to be bringing forward proposals for amendments to the Emergencies Act,
00:30:33.280they're going to seek to separate out the CSIS Act definition so that basically the prime minister can decide when an emergency exists.
00:30:43.340That would make it even more common that something like the Emergencies Act could be invoked again.
00:30:49.200And perhaps Christine will talk a little bit about what that actually meant throughout all of Canada, not just Ottawa.
00:30:56.000Yeah, it is important to remember that when the Emergencies Act was invoked, it wasn't geographically limited.
00:31:02.540The Prime Minister had said, this is short, this is limited and temporary, but it was not limited.
00:31:10.320It applied across the country, even though by the time it was invoked, the protests were only taking place in Ottawa.
00:31:18.200Literally, quite literally, as the Emergencies Act was being invoked, the police were in the process of clearing the border blockades at Coutts and the blockades at the other border locations had already been cleared.
00:31:33.220I think one of the interesting things that the book does, though, is it looks at this from a approach of constitutionalism and places a premium on the values of the rule of law.
00:31:48.200law. And look, we're not here to cheerlead the convoy. I think that the convoy accomplished
00:31:56.040the political goals that it set out to accomplish, but certainly there were aspects of that protest
00:32:01.140that were illegal. And we have a whole chapter in the book about the rule of law and the
00:32:06.500value of the rule of law. And we hold the federal government to the standard of the rule
00:32:12.220of law. They can't invoke legislation when the legal threshold to invoke is not met.
00:32:17.960They don't have this extraordinary power unless they're authorized by law. But on the same hand,
00:32:24.080we need to hold members of the public who participated in the convoy to the standards
00:32:27.840of the rule of law as well. And certainly there were illegal acts that took place. People should
00:32:32.440face criminal charges related to those criminal acts. And certainly a protest cannot go on
00:32:38.980indefinitely. By the end, the police were certainly entitled to exercise ordinary police
00:32:47.800powers, to move large vehicles off of streets, not to permanently block a protest from proceeding.
00:32:55.720I think there's no question you can protest on the lawn of Parliament Hill, but you certainly
00:33:00.240can't indefinitely block Ontario highways. There's provisions of the criminal code that address that
00:33:08.300though, and there was no need to resort to the use of the Emergencies Act. So I think that that's
00:33:14.080one of the things that is going to challenge readers in our book is whatever your perspective
00:33:19.740on this, on all of these issues, on COVID, on the Emergencies Act, I think you need to be prepared
00:33:24.940to have that perspective challenged because these things are not straightforward. Whatever the
00:33:30.180mainstream media might say, this is not a black and white issue. These issues are complex. And
00:33:34.540that's why we required an entire book that took us years to write to go through all of this. So
00:33:40.100I encourage anyone who reads the book to read it with a very open mind, because we really have
00:33:45.640spent a lot of time trying to get the balance right on all of these issues. Well, one of the
00:33:51.200things that you have both done in this, which I was very grateful for, is you've gone right back
00:33:55.860to the beginning, because I think when the Convoy and the Emergencies Act came in, we're talking
00:34:01.040about now more than two years after the onset of some of the earlier COVID restrictions. And
00:34:05.400some of those early stories that almost sounded quaint in comparison of like, you know, oh, some
00:34:10.840kid, you know, given a citation for using a public basketball court. Or I remember there was one in
00:34:16.540Hamilton where a drug dealer was arrested for operating a non-essential business, as well as
00:34:21.580for dealing drugs, like some of these things, which almost became novelties. But the reason
00:34:25.980they did is because the government response to COVID got more and more severe. At that point,
00:34:30.560we didn't know we'd be looking at church closures pastors in jail uh family gatherings being uh in
00:34:37.520some cases you know raided by police and all of these things you know are too large to just say
00:34:44.160we can't look into and i'm curious what your thoughts are on on the procedural aspects here
00:34:49.040because i know there have been a lot of these charges that were issued that have just been
00:34:52.640dropped because of judicial resourcing you know it's we don't have enough time to go through three
00:34:56.720years of fines. Courts are backed up. The problem with that, of course, is that no one has had their
00:35:02.240day in court. The arguments and the precedents haven't been made, but for the individual people
00:35:06.560charged it to win. So how do you reconcile those two? I think we had one case that was like that
00:35:11.760that we talk about in the book, and it relates to an individual protester in Kingston. And you're
00:35:17.200so right. It's so quaint when you think back to it. It's also surreal. So the facts of some of
00:35:23.160these stories, you know, like roping off the cherry blossom. So one of the stories we talk
00:35:26.860about in this book is a case that we were working on at the Canadian Constitution Foundation. It
00:35:31.720involved a man named Robert who was frustrated as a gym user and a supporter of small business. A
00:35:39.160lot of his friends ran small businesses. He was frustrated with these sort of never-ending
00:35:43.240lockdowns. I think we were on our third or fourth lockdown in Ontario and he decided to go in
00:35:49.320protest. He wore a mask and he went by himself. He wanted to start his own protest to say end the
00:35:56.720lockdowns. And he was charged under, I think it was at the time, the stay-at-home order. And
00:36:03.740I mean, the idea that someone protesting or standing outside alone with a mask expressing
00:36:12.120a political view poses some type of public health threat. It's just absurd. And so we wanted to use
00:36:18.020this as an opportunity to challenge the broader lockdown provisions. But I mean, in the best
00:36:25.420interest of Robert, the charges were dropped. So obviously, that's the route that we need to
00:36:30.540proceed with. But the result of it procedurally is that you don't get a precedent. You don't get
00:36:36.380to challenge the broader law, which is really what the problem is here.
00:36:41.740Well, and you've also done something really interesting, Joanna, instead of organizing
00:36:45.540it chronologically, which I think probably would have been my instinct as a writer, you've gone by
00:36:49.600basically sections of the charter and by individual rights and freedoms from freedom of assembly to
00:36:55.760freedom of movement, freedom of expression, all of these things. And I think it's easy to just
00:37:01.520look in general in the abstract or in the amalgam and say rights were violated. But when you go
00:37:07.700through and point specifically to how and which rights, it's a very powerful case. And let me ask
00:37:13.500you just on religion alone, because, you know, the government's defense of its restrictions on
00:37:18.380worship ceremonies and services was that, well, you know, you have the right to, you know, be
00:37:23.320a Christian, you have the right to be a Jew, you have the right to be a Muslim, but, you know,
00:37:27.200this is just extraordinary times. But for people of faith, that is the government telling them
00:37:31.740how their religion must be practiced. I mean, you look at with Judaism, which has very specific
00:37:37.940guidelines on the number of people that need to be a part of prayer. Government was saying its
00:37:42.720edicts matter more than these things that we supposedly have a right to define ourselves.
00:37:48.340Yeah, absolutely. And we talk about in the book that, so for example, because of these,
00:37:53.860you know, unprecedented restrictions, it brought out some of the frailties in the law itself. So
00:37:58.780for example, freedom of subjective belief is extremely strongly protected in Canadian law,
00:38:04.180but freedom of assembly has much weaker protection. And most of its protections are in the context of
00:38:09.560like labor union strikes and things like that. And so it was quite jarring to religious, you know,
00:38:16.660religious Canadians that the government had gave such short shrift to the value of in-person
00:38:22.260worship. I was actually at a conference in the UK this past summer, and I was told that in London
00:38:27.520or in England at some point, gathering limits were set at five people. At least in Ontario,
00:38:33.680they were set to 10 people, perhaps in consultation with the Jewish community that would have let them
00:38:37.780know the minimum amount of people needed for a minion. Having that aside, there are churches
00:38:43.700in Canada that are important community hubs, particularly for new Canadians, which elderly
00:38:50.400Canadians rely on because participating by Zoom isn't an option for them. And you really saw that
00:38:57.740the government was just happy to say, well, you can just log on to Zoom and there's no violation
00:39:04.380to your religious freedom. The government actually contended in most cases and was
00:39:09.600countenanced by judges in many cases that these strict restriction and gathering limits didn't
00:39:15.900even engage the right to freedom of religion. And you can read about some of those, some of
00:39:20.440those faith communities in the book. Yeah. And I would also point out, I mean, at the early days,
00:39:27.160there was a much different attitude. Like I remember when the Ontario government was
00:39:30.940actually taking a bit of a bit of guidance from the Church of God in Elmer, which was the first
00:39:35.660one to really try to make drive-in services a thing. And then you fast forward a few months and
00:39:40.380you know, the government's having the doors locked and putting millions of dollars to fines down.
00:39:45.280And had people at least hiding in the bushes, observing the congregants.
00:39:50.060Yeah. And I actually had, there was one report that was handed over in Discovery in which I was
00:39:55.200named as a person of interest in the police's investigation of that, because I had interviewed
00:40:00.120the pastor and they were suspicious that I might attend the service. So they had preemptively put
00:40:06.480me on the person of interest list, which was quite an honor. I had never had that before. I would
00:40:11.380have preferred it to be about something I did rather than something someone thought I might
00:40:14.940have done. But that's the insanity here. And I wanted to bring up another dimension of this that
00:40:19.960I had almost forgotten. And it was seeing you cite me that I remembered this when the government of
00:40:26.440Ontario had tried to give police the power to stop and question anyone who was outside their home
00:40:33.400about what they were doing. And, you know, very gratefully, every police department in Ontario,
00:40:39.640except for the OPP, I think in the next couple of days said, we're not going to do this. But
00:40:44.400like that would have seemed insane if you had said in 2019 that that was at all something that
00:40:49.940government would direct the police to do in a province. Yeah, you did some really great
00:40:54.760reporting on that. That's, I think you were, you were the person who was literally, quite literally
00:40:59.560counting which police. Well, I was like cold calling them all. I spent my weekend doing that.
00:41:03.940Yeah. Great, great work, Andrew. And it's very valuable. And it's very important that we have
00:41:09.840a record of that. The reality is that police are the ones who need to interact with the community.
00:41:16.440And, you know, I'm generally skeptical of police power, but I know police as well. And I know that
00:41:22.600for the most part, police want to have a good relationship with their community and have worked
00:41:28.040hard to develop a relationship of trust with the communities where they are policing. And they are
00:41:34.400not interested, generally, in stopping mothers taking their children on a walk to a playground,
00:41:41.380which is what that stay-at-home order was going to do, combined with that police authority to
00:41:46.860stop people. And I'll point out that this police power to stop people and demand, they identify
00:41:54.060themselves and explain why they're outside their house. It's very similar to a policy that was
00:42:01.140controversial in Ontario called carding, because carding had resulted in a lot of police interactions
00:42:08.580with racialized communities, in particular, who are generally over policed. And the government
00:42:15.920created a policy that they would no longer engage in carding. And there were constitutional concerns
00:42:21.660around that policy. And in fact, when, and it is so similar to what was announced and what was
00:42:28.660announced during the pandemic was actually more extreme than the carding policy, that everyone
00:42:34.740sitting at that cabinet table would have known how similar this is to carding. And in fact,
00:42:39.900we know from reporting from, it was from the CBC, they found, they had spoken to someone who
00:42:47.460disclosed that in cabinet, the attorney general, the provincial attorney general had warned cabinet
00:42:53.020that this policy is likely unconstitutional. And cabinet and the premier, Ford, proceeded to enact
00:43:00.800it anyway. And I think that there's real concern that there's bad faith there. The bad faith is
00:43:06.180that they knowingly enacted an unconstitutional law. And they did it because they wanted some
00:43:12.280short-term gain. And they knew that any judicial oversight over that would not be heard in time
00:43:19.060before this temporary measure had been repealed. And they would avoid any judicial scrutiny. And
00:43:27.180I think that that's bad faith. And it's very, very concerning. I mean, there's some relief
00:43:32.340that the police said we will not enforce this but it shouldn't just lay with the police to say
00:43:36.760we won't be enforcing unconstitutional laws. I'll go back to you Joanna just as we wind down here
00:43:44.640because the subtitle of the book how Canadian government responses to COVID-19 changed civil
00:43:50.280liberties forever is a lofty one and I know in your conclusion you actually are rather forward
00:43:55.700looking about this but I'll ask with a bit of trepidation because I don't want to know the
00:44:01.240answer as I think I know the answer. Do you think these changes have been for the better or for the
00:44:07.400worse? And I'll just add a bit of an asterisk there. When all of the legal procedures have
00:44:13.420been exhausted, we have the definitive ruling. Do you think that we will end up with fundamentally
00:44:18.540a less free country than we had going into COVID? I think we have a legal system that has shown
00:44:24.920how effectively it can obfuscate answering the question with the declarations of mootness,
00:44:30.160with the deference to government evidence. We were talking to another interviewer who found
00:44:37.840it remarkable that a lot of these issues weren't dealt with under section one. So yes, we can
00:44:43.240acknowledge there was a rights violation, but maybe under section one, which is the justification
00:44:47.920clause, maybe you can say in public health emergencies, it was justified, but at least
00:44:53.640to acknowledge for the record that these were rights violations. So we really have seen all
00:44:59.520the ways that judges were able to wiggle out of telling the truth. Now, I will sort of conclude
00:45:05.620my remarks on a more optimistic note, which maybe I'm a little bit more of an optimist than Christine.
00:45:11.020I think it depends on us. I think it depends on the culture that we build. I think it depends on
00:45:15.980our collective understanding and our collective assessment of whether this was good enough,
00:45:21.840whether we think that if we have charter rights, which were, you know, agreed to democratically,
00:45:26.600whether they should mean something. Um, and if we understand the sort of fiasco that happened
00:45:32.140and we'll hold future governments accountable, just, you know, out of sort of shock of how
00:45:37.000abysmally our, our, you know, culture during the last pandemic failed. Um, I think that
00:45:43.660there could be hope, but it starts with, you know, looking in a sober way at how we actually
00:45:49.400fared. If I knew that you were the optimist of the two, I probably would have reversed this.
00:45:53.660So we get to end on Christine's dour note, but Christine, or maybe you do have a less dour note, but I'll give you the last word on this.
00:46:00.340What's the forward-looking takeaway you have after writing this?
00:46:03.760I'm pessimistic. I think not only did the courts do a terrible job protecting our rights, I think people have just shoved that memory away and forgotten it.
00:46:12.940And I think that I'm very concerned about whatever the next crisis is, we've now broken the glass on the Emergencies Act.
00:46:19.780it could be used again in the future, that our culture of civil liberties has been permanently
00:46:24.440damaged because we've seen how easily people have come to justify huge intrusions into their rights.
00:46:30.940I think that we're in a very dark time politically in our discourse where disagreement is not
00:46:39.040tolerated at all. I'm completely pessimistic and I'm very dark. I'm in a very dark place,
00:46:45.420Sandra. But, you know, that's why you definitely should have ended with Joanna. But yeah.
00:46:51.600Well, I'll say I'll say this to try to put a somewhat optimistic flavor on it is that you
00:46:56.480have to diagnose a problem to fix the problem. So even taking the approach that you have,
00:47:01.560Christina, and the both of you have through this book, I think is essential to rectifying it,
00:47:04.980because there is in a lot of cases, a political response available. And I, you know, I was
00:47:09.720mentioning earlier, the private members bill in the House of Commons today, again, may or may not
00:47:14.020passed. But, you know, if you have a change in government and a government is saying, you know,
00:47:18.320this should never happen, I will not do this, we could perhaps try to normalize civil liberties
00:47:23.340again. But I realize the courts will always remain a bit of a wild card there. Nonetheless,
00:47:28.520it is an incredibly, incredibly important book. I was very honored to be able to write a small
00:47:34.140blurb for you and even more honored that some of my work helped you put it together. It's called
00:47:38.340Pandemic Panic, How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever. It's
00:47:44.260by Joanna Barron and Christine Van Gein. And you can also read a bit of their work in C2C Journal
00:47:49.520this month as well to get a bit of a sense of what the book holds. Joanna, Christine, thank you so
00:47:54.300much and well done with this. Thank you, Andrew. And the book's available on Amazon right now for
00:47:58.720anyone interested. All right, wonderful. Yes, do head over there. And last time we had an author
00:48:02.880on it like spiked up in the numbers. So I'm hoping we can replicate that here. Go to Amazon
00:48:06.700on and check it out. Joanna, Christine, thanks very much. That does it for us for today. We will
00:48:12.400be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North. Thank
00:48:17.320you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support
00:48:23.060the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.