Juno News - Liberals think bill banning vaccine mandates is ＂waste of time＂

00:00:00.000 Transcription by CastingWords

00:00:30.000 Thank you.

00:01:00.000 Welcome to Canada's Most Irreverent Talk Show.

00:01:16.960 This is The Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.

00:01:20.740 hello and welcome to you all this is canada's most irreverent talk show here on true north

00:01:34.440 the andrew lawton show on this wednesday october 25th you're kind of at the midway point just

00:01:39.920 after lunchtime on well in east eastern time anyway in the middle of the week so hopefully

00:01:45.500 you are surviving it's all downhill i actually i never know because this is like a weird tangent

00:01:51.340 but all downhill sounds like a bad thing but it also sounds like it's meant to be easier so

00:01:56.220 it's all improving from here we'll just abandon the jack and jill like hill analogies anyway

00:02:01.300 uh it is just after one o'clock eastern time i promised yesterday i'd give a little bit of

00:02:06.120 tribute to our atlantic listeners so if you are in the beautiful maritimes it's just after two

00:02:12.000 o'clock eastern or in Newfoundland it is 2 30 for you can't forget those half hour time zones

00:02:18.460 we are going to be doing a bit of a deep dive into the pandemic era which for the most part I think

00:02:24.580 has left us behind or we've left behind depending on which type of person you are though not

00:02:30.600 entirely not entirely it's amazing if you look around especially at a lot of these pro-hamas 1.00

00:02:35.860 protests at the number of people that still want to keep their masks on we at true north nation

00:02:41.440 were like going to jokingly have a sign up at the door that said everyone needs to wear an N95 to

00:02:46.420 be admitted. But we were worried that someone might not get the joke and the whole place would

00:02:50.200 be just like met with protests. And we didn't want to like be the ground zero of some new Freedom

00:02:55.800 Convoy 2.0 or 3.0. So we didn't do the mask gag. Thankfully, there were no masks in sight. We had

00:03:01.700 a bit of normalcy. You had the misfortune if you were there of having to see my face in full. But

00:03:07.260 we do have still very much hanging over us this threat that these things could be reimposed at

00:03:14.200 any given time, that some other winter virus comes along and governments panic, and all of a sudden

00:03:19.640 we're right back into vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and mask mandates and all of the like

00:03:24.980 once again. So it is encouraging, perhaps symbolic, but still important, I think, that the federal

00:03:31.020 government has to make a decision on whether or not it will support a private member's bill by

00:03:36.360 Conservative MP Dean Allison and supported by party leader Pierre Polyev to ban federal mandates.

00:03:43.240 The bill is C-278 and yesterday it came up before the House of Commons and I believe is going to be

00:03:49.500 voted on today as well. But on this bill it's basically the federal parliament demanding that

00:03:57.040 governments ban federal vaccine mandates. So before you do what all these people on the left

00:04:02.440 love to do and say, oh, but mandates are provincial. This is talking about the mandates which are

00:04:07.640 federal. The mandates surrounding the public service, surrounding air and rail travel,

00:04:13.140 surrounding truckers and crossing the border. That's what this bill would prohibit.

00:04:19.700 Now, obviously, it's not a constitutional amendment, which means theoretically,

00:04:23.800 just as Parliament could pass this law banning it, Parliament could repeal that law

00:04:27.720 or temporarily suspend the law in the future. But it would force any future government

00:04:32.040 to have to go through an additional step, which is why even if it is symbolic and theoretical

00:04:36.320 at this point, it is still, I believe, important because it's parliamentarians saying

00:04:41.180 we do not believe government should ever have this power or authority again.

00:04:46.000 Pierre Polyev spoke in support of this private member's bill yesterday. Take a look.

00:04:51.860 Before the prime minister proceeds once again to maliciously divide and attack,

00:04:58.040 Let me remind him that the position put forward in this bill is now the position not only of common-sense conservatives,

00:05:09.620 but it is also the position of the majority of provincial governments,

00:05:14.580 of the Liberal member for Louis-St. Louis-Barre,

00:05:21.660 of the Military Review Complaints Commission,

00:05:26.580 the tribunal responsible for hearing grievances from members of the armed forces,

00:05:31.920 and I will remind the position of the Prime Minister

00:05:34.360 that the position reflected in the bill is now his position.

00:05:39.360 Now, you might question why I would say that.

00:05:41.620 The reason is that he had the temerity to go on television about three months ago

00:05:48.540 and claim he had never forced anyone to get vaccinated.

00:05:52.640 That he claims that it should be a matter of personal choice.

00:05:56.300 He wanted us all to forget the way he divided and insulted and name-called millions of people

00:06:03.060 right across this country, patriotic, law-abiding, decent people.

00:06:07.160 So if he really believes he never forced mandates on anyone,

00:06:12.160 surely he'll be happy to vote for this bill to ensure that those mandates don't apply anymore

00:06:17.620 and will never be reimposed again.

00:06:22.020 How do you like them apples, as I believe the common political parlance dictates now?

00:06:27.140 Yes, if Justin Trudeau is so eager to say he's never divided Canadians,

00:06:30.780 he's never forced anyone to get vaccinated.

00:06:32.880 No, no, I've always viewed it as being a matter of personal choice.

00:06:37.160 he said that with a straight face, believe it or not,

00:06:40.040 then, well, let's just go the whole distance here

00:06:42.780 and commit to banning this type of legislation in the future.

00:06:48.120 But this is not what Justin Trudeau wants to do.

00:06:50.280 The federal government has embraced one of the largest

00:06:52.480 and most institutionalized forms of gaslighting

00:06:55.760 I've ever seen in the wake of COVID.

00:06:58.520 All of the things that they did,

00:07:00.000 that they did aggressively, that they did openly, brazenly,

00:07:03.500 they're pretending they never did.

00:07:05.160 Oh, I never insulted the unvaccinated, Justin Trudeau said before the Public Order Emergency

00:07:10.500 Commission. I never called anyone racist and misogynistic and white supremacist, except for

00:07:15.180 that time that I called the unvaccinated racist, misogynist, white supremacist.

00:07:19.860 Oh, I never forced anyone to get vaccinated, except for when I yelled enthusiastically 0.84

00:07:25.060 at a campaign rally in Calgary that you may have a right sort of ish to not be vaccinated,

00:07:31.940 but you can't like get on a plane. You can't get on a train. You can't, you know, risk other people.

00:07:37.840 And it's almost as though they were trying to carve themselves a bit of an out there to say,

00:07:43.900 well, yes, you have the choice, but if you make that choice, you can't work, you can't travel,

00:07:51.740 you can't go see grandma, you can't do this. Is that really a choice? Hell no, it's not.

00:07:57.540 And 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.

00:08:16.460 and they're trying to tell you that this was all just a free choice.

00:08:21.380 Imagine if, and I've made this comparison before,

00:08:23.820 in the last six years we've had a bit of a renaissance

00:08:27.160 and discussions about sexual consent.

00:08:29.160 And you see the Me Too movement, campus advocacy, all of that.

00:08:32.800 And people have re-evaluated.

00:08:34.180 The one thing that we are all told about consent

00:08:36.280 is that it must be clear, unequivocal, and enthusiastic.

00:08:41.020 Coercion is not consent.

00:08:44.120 And that is exactly the line that we are all told,

00:08:47.140 I think understandably so when it comes to sexual consent.

00:08:49.600 But with vaccination, we're told that coercion is entirely legitimate.

00:08:53.820 Coerced consent is consent in the eyes of the government.

00:08:58.080 Now, we look at the facts of the situation here,

00:08:59.960 and I'll talk about this a bit more later with Christine Van Gein and Joanna Barron,

00:09:04.220 who have a fabulous book out about the pandemic era.

00:09:07.600 But one of the interesting details is that it didn't work.

00:09:10.720 So 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.

00:09:21.420 This came out this week where COVID passports in Quebec and Ontario did not convince more than a few people to get vaccinated.

00:09:30.300 This 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.

00:09:39.440 and it found that it affected 0.9% in Quebec, 0.9% and in Ontario 0.7%. So let's just split

00:09:49.080 the difference here. Less than 1%, 0.8% of vaccination was affected by vaccine passports.

00:09:56.640 Now, I would argue this is not a failure of government policy because the policy

00:10:01.080 government officials knew was not going to increase vaccination. It was meant to punish

00:10:07.000 the unvaccinated. It was meant to say you have been non-compliant with government edicts,

00:10:12.720 therefore you don't have the right to go to a movie theater, go to a restaurant,

00:10:15.940 or in Quebec's case, to even go shopping at a big box store. One of many infringements on

00:10:22.300 civil liberties that we'll talk about with Christine and Joanna very shortly. But I want

00:10:27.060 to pivot to another topic here. If you've been following tnc.news this week, you'll no doubt

00:10:32.400 have seen two really great stories with a third to come in just a couple of hours from my colleague

00:10:37.920 Noah Jarvis who has written about this little known federal crown corporation called the

00:10:44.160 Sustainable Development Technology Canada. Now this is a group which is by design tasked to

00:10:49.420 distribute tons of taxpayer money for innovation and development and clean technology and all of

00:10:55.360 that and you may think okay whatever government spends billions on this stuff. Well this crown

00:11:00.800 corporation has been given a huge amount of money with very little oversight over how it's spent

00:11:06.380 the government actually suspended its funding to this organization a little while back when a

00:11:12.400 report found that there was a lot of mismanagement conflict of interest and all of that now my

00:11:18.180 colleague Noah has got the receipts as they say and found even more than was in the report and he

00:11:23.560 joins me now Noah good to talk to you thanks for coming on today thanks for having me on Andrew

00:11:28.540 So, 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.

00:11:37.740 And the more you learned, the more you realize just how insane what was happening was.

00:11:42.020 Yeah, 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,

00:11:56.100 a corporate culture of corporate mismanagement, funding companies in which board members have

00:12:01.220 conflicts of interest in and trying to hide these conflicts of interest, whether that be

00:12:05.840 through firing employees who would speak up about this, or whether that be through the president

00:12:12.100 backdating documents to cover up the fact that she was working with people and funding companies in

00:12:19.640 which there's a conflict of interest. It's quite concerning that board members of this

00:12:24.980 crown corporation who are responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars

00:12:29.780 annually of taxpayer dollars are possibly distributing money to which they have

00:12:34.560 personal financial vested interests and perhaps even distributing money to their friends and

00:12:40.560 colleagues. Yeah and your first story on this subject really just listed like board member by

00:12:45.880 board member all of these companies they're involved in that have received in some cases

00:12:50.100 tens of millions of dollars from sdcc from sustainable development technology canada

00:12:55.860 and what i found interesting about looking through that we don't know i mean they have

00:12:59.620 a conflict of interest policy and that theoretically these people could have recused themselves from

00:13:04.100 those individual votes but the report that was done as you shared with me was that like a lot

00:13:10.180 of the time they weren't even following the conflict of interest policy right and the only

00:13:14.500 reason why this report was done was because uh whistleblowers from sdtc uh about a dozen or so

00:13:21.620 uh current and former employees were sick and tired of the corporate mismanagement and they

00:13:26.100 asked iscd which is the ministry responsible for administering sdtc that's led by francois

00:13:32.900 philippe champagne that's correct um they asked iscd to do a report and an investigation on this

00:13:39.300 They 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.

00:13:51.120 Board members seldom recuse themselves from votes in which they are funding companies in which they have conflicts of interest.

00:13:58.340 the report also found that there is very little if any dissension dissent within the board of all

00:14:06.160 of the votes for funding companies were done unanimously there was very little evidence of

00:14:11.600 vote mixing and the report notes that this is very concerning because the clean tech industry or

00:14:18.160 whatever you want to call it is a very small industry and you know there's a lot of people

00:14:22.980 who know each other and thus it makes it very important that there is a strong conflict of

00:14:28.000 interest policy there. And not only is there a very weak conflict of interest policy, this

00:14:33.840 conflict of interest policy was seldom followed. Yeah, and even with this report, SDTC has been

00:14:40.440 pretty unrepentant, it looks like. They've basically told the government to go pound

00:14:44.600 salt and said, we've done nothing wrong. Exactly. I reached out for them for comment,

00:14:48.980 and basically SDTC said, oh, there's nothing to see here. There's no wrongdoing. They put out a

00:14:54.320 press release a day after Minister Francois-Philippe Champagne announced that they would be cutting

00:14:59.740 funding to SDTC until December 31st. They put out a press statement saying, we don't need an

00:15:05.460 investigation on this matter. Everything's completely fine. Nothing to see here.

00:15:09.720 Yeah, it's always great when someone says, we don't even need to investigate. We're that

00:15:12.960 confident. There's no, don't even look. No, no, no. Please, please, please don't look.

00:15:17.040 Exactly. And it's concerning that Francois-Philippe Champagne is basically entrusting the people

00:15:21.120 implicated in this report they're trusting the board members and the executives to carry out

00:15:25.840 these reforms to sdtc uh for their conflict of interest policy when these are the people that

00:15:31.680 have been funding you know their friends and you know companies in which they're personally

00:15:35.840 invested in uh one example i want to point out too is a board member who served on the sdtc

00:15:41.200 board for six years between 2015 and 2021 andre lee's method she is the head of a venture capital

00:15:48.000 firm and if you go on their website this is all public information you go on their website seven

00:15:53.280 out of the 25 companies that cycle capital is invested in they have received money from sdtc

00:16:01.200 millions of dollars from sdtc while she served on the board uh enterchem for example she also sits

00:16:07.120 on the board of enterchem they received 12 million dollars in 2016 while she sat on their board and

00:16:11.920 the sdtc board and andre lee's method also sat on the project review committee which reviews the

00:16:19.200 the companies in which they plan on uh funding before it actually goes to a vote before the

00:16:24.560 board so she has a lot of power uh within uh sdtc as well as many other board members who 0.72

00:16:31.440 also sat on the project review committee now i just to to give people the benefit of the doubt

00:16:36.160 here and i know you reached out to this woman for your story and as i understand it she didn't

00:16:40.000 respond but to give them the benefit of the doubt if it is a small space and you know there aren't

00:16:45.040 that many players in the space and obviously people might know each other and uh they try to

00:16:49.520 be diligent and recuse themselves were you able to look into the meeting records and see if each

00:16:56.960 individual member recused themselves on these things where there was a conflict or a potential

00:17:01.360 conflict i i personally wasn't able to look into their meeting records but uh because they're not

00:17:07.680 public is they're not public but uh grant thornton uh they did an investigation and they got you

00:17:14.000 know those internal internal access uh to the documents and the meeting uh notes and their

00:17:20.080 report basically outlines that you know from looking at the meeting minutes do like rarely

00:17:24.960 if ever do they even talk about uh potential conflicts of interest and you know rarely if ever

00:17:30.800 do board members recuse themselves uh from these meetings you know don't take my word for it take

00:17:35.280 the people that the government hired to investigate the matter. So you said that the funding

00:17:41.040 suspension from the federal government goes until the end of this year. Do you have any

00:17:45.520 indication at this point of what's going to happen come January 1st? I mean, the government

00:17:52.120 is entrusting these board members and executives implicated in the report to do these reforms. And

00:17:57.500 I guess if Francois-Philippe Champagne feels as if SDTC has made enough steps into correcting

00:18:03.820 their corporate mismanagement, quite frankly. If he feels as if they've taken enough corrective

00:18:11.060 measures, they'll probably restore funding. But it's quite concerning because this SDTC is

00:18:18.120 responsible for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars annually. I think in 2021 or 2022,

00:18:23.560 they distributed $140 million worth of taxpayer dollars. And the report basically notes that

00:18:29.580 about 20% of the projects that they looked into,

00:18:33.740 it's more than 20%, but I'm being generous,

00:18:35.780 about 20% of the projects that they've looked into,

00:18:39.460 board members and executives

00:18:40.940 have conflicts of interest with these companies.

00:18:42.700 So if you extrapolate 20% out to $140 million,

00:18:46.940 that's tens of millions of dollars annually

00:18:49.420 in which companies are being,

00:18:50.980 more money is being given to companies

00:18:52.780 in which these board members have personal

00:18:55.020 and financial connections to.

00:18:56.580 But, 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.

00:19:15.960 Yeah, self-investigations are rarely, if ever, appropriate for correcting wrongdoing.

00:19:21.980 Well, you've done great work on this.

00:19:23.040 I know you have a third part coming out in just a few hours,

00:19:25.340 so people can head on over to tnc.news.

00:19:27.920 Noah Jarvis, thanks so much.

00:19:29.560 Thanks for having me.

00:19:31.220 All right, to get back to the COVID file here,

00:19:33.720 I mentioned earlier on in the program the issues we were having

00:19:38.100 with trying to have some level of accountability

00:19:40.920 for what the federal government did over the COVID era.

00:19:44.760 And I mentioned that bill that Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives have gotten behind, Dean Allison's private members bill.

00:19:52.260 And this is a bill, Dean Allison just like retweeted me one second ago, so I didn't know if he was listening to the show.

00:19:58.240 But he was retweeting me in my comment about what I was just about to bring up here.

00:20:02.600 The Liberals are displeased that anyone is trying to muck around on their record.

00:20:08.160 We saw one tweet from Seamus O'Regan, which accused Pierre Polyev of wasting time.

00:20:15.120 Pierre Polyev tabled a bill to ban vaccine mandates.

00:20:17.920 Today we have to waste time debating it.

00:20:19.840 Oh yes, heaven forbid you have to debate legislation and policy.

00:20:23.760 That's what Polyev wants to talk about right now.

00:20:25.880 Not affordability, not inflation, not housing, not what's happening in Europe or the Middle East vaccine mandates.

00:20:31.580 Well, my comment to Mr. O'Regan was that perhaps he wouldn't need to waste time debating your

00:20:38.460 government's egregious violation of civil liberties if you didn't egregiously violate

00:20:42.460 people's civil liberties. And then Mark Gerritsen decided to weigh in with his own comment on this

00:20:49.100 to the same sort of effect there. The anti-vax club. That's what Polyev is talking about right 0.85

00:20:55.380 now. Not affordability, not inflation, not housing, not the war in Europe or the Middle East

00:20:59.920 vaccine mandates. Did that sound similar to the other tweet? It's almost as though they just got

00:21:05.520 like a fresh batch of talking points sent down the pipeline from the PMO and they're all just

00:21:10.280 copying and pasting. Now, if Pierre Polyev were truly debating something irrelevant in the House

00:21:15.480 of Commons, he would be debating Mark Gerritsen. But that is not what was happening. He was talking

00:21:19.960 about vaccine mandates, which affected millions of Canadians and not only the individual people,

00:21:26.580 but affected the core civil liberties and right to make individual medical choices that all

00:21:32.820 Canadians enjoy. When you attack the freedoms of one Canadian, you attack the freedoms of

00:21:38.880 all Canadians. And it is noteworthy that the Liberals do not want any real scrutiny of their

00:21:44.460 record, that they don't want to rehash this, that you see the government so fervently telling

00:21:50.320 everyone when there are court cases up that, oh, we need to dismiss this. It's moot. We can't talk

00:21:55.320 about this, we don't need this, because they don't actually want people going back to that

00:22:00.040 three-year period of 2020 to 2023, really, and seeing the extent to which these policies did

00:22:08.240 break the law, did violate people's rights. They don't actually want to have that discussion.

00:22:13.760 And it's kind of interesting. There was that call from, I believe, Emily Oster is her name,

00:22:18.540 a writer last year for Pandemic Amnesty, which was basically, yeah, we all said some things,

00:22:24.960 we all did some things, you know, it sucks, but it was a difficult time. Let's all just move on.

00:22:29.540 Let's just, you know, let bygones be bygones. And it's a lot easier for the people who were

00:22:34.660 responsible for some of the violations of people's rights to call for pandemic amnesty. It's in fact,

00:22:40.260 it's very similar to Hamas attacking Israel and then calling for a ceasefire as if to say, 0.88

00:22:45.340 okay, we hit you. Now we just want to stop. We just want to get rid of this all. But that's kind

00:22:50.140 of what's happening here. The people that are calling for us to move on and never look at this

00:22:53.780 again, are the people that were very directly involved in the reasons we should look into this

00:22:59.880 period. Joanna Barron is the executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation. Her

00:23:05.660 colleague, Christine Van Gein, is the CCF's litigation director. The two have a fascinating

00:23:11.100 piece in C2C Journal about this and an even more fascinating book that is coming out in the next

00:23:17.700 few days here called Pandemic Panic, how Canadian government responses to COVID-19 changed civil

00:23:23.660 liberties forever. They don't want to move on from this without a deep dive into all that went wrong

00:23:28.400 and perhaps setting out a roadmap for how to avoid this in the future. Christine and Joanna,

00:23:35.220 wonderful to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for having us on.

00:23:40.100 I mentioned a couple of moments ago in court cases where these restrictions are coming up,

00:23:45.640 we're often hearing from the government's lawyers these appeals to mootness. It was kind of this

00:23:49.940 just little moment. It was almost like the twilight zone. It's not really where we are now.

00:23:54.360 So there's no point in dealing with this. They've had some success on that, notably

00:23:58.240 in the travel vaccine mandate case, although it stands to reason what's happening with the

00:24:03.540 federal court of appeal there. But let me just ask you on that. Why is it important to not just

00:24:08.500 let this era be put in a box and stowed away on some back shelf? Well, I don't think that you've

00:24:15.780 seen in recent memory an extraordinary, you know, areas of life, just an extraordinary array of

00:24:22.180 areas of life that we never imagined the government could start regulating in. Health, our social

00:24:28.240 lives, our religious lives, our expressive lives, pretty much you name it. And if we can't go and

00:24:34.660 see how our judiciary, how our politicians even, because politicians ideally should use the charter

00:24:41.760 as a sort of guardrails for their behavior. If we can't have an honest accounting of how we

00:24:47.760 fared at this stress test, we are certain to see other public health emergencies, pandemics,

00:24:54.420 who knows what other nature of thing in the future that will affect all of those domains

00:24:59.680 of life. And we're doomed to repeat it. So as you rightly noted, we opened this book by being sort

00:25:05.260 of against the pandemic amnesty. No, we can't have amnesia about all these things that happen.

00:25:12.620 I'll ask you about this, Christine, as well, because one of the challenges here is that

00:25:17.260 there's a legal aspect. And I know you're approaching this book as two lawyers, and a

00:25:21.800 lot of your advocacy on these issues has been through the legal lens. There's also the political

00:25:25.900 aspect and the cultural and the media aspect. And I'm curious how much you think this is really a

00:25:32.000 legal question versus a political question? Well, it's a legal question because a lot of

00:25:37.200 these issues were addressed by the courts. But I think there's also a political question as well,

00:25:42.800 and also a cultural one. And one of the things that we noticed in writing this book was how the

00:25:48.720 culture around civil liberties seems to have shifted really dramatically. I think that there

00:25:53.960 became this pendulum swing towards expediency and towards deference among the members of the public

00:26:04.700 to government decisions that didn't quite exist before. I think we were more skeptical of state

00:26:10.840 power before the pandemic. And during the pandemic, it seemed like there was only one way

00:26:16.020 that you could think about government restrictions, and it was to wholeheartedly celebrate them,

00:26:21.740 even when they violated some of our most fundamental tenets of our Constitution.

00:26:26.720 These things are all interconnected, right?

00:26:29.340 The politics, the culture, and the court decisions that come out of it.

00:26:33.500 And it kind of operates in a cycle.

00:26:35.920 And now we have a number of pretty terrible precedents legally

00:26:40.760 where courts evaded judicial scrutiny of rights violations through procedural reasons.

00:26:50.100 Mootness is one example that you gave, and we dealt with mootness a lot.

00:26:54.860 Another example is standing.

00:26:56.900 There were cases where cases were dismissed for lack of standing.

00:27:02.360 And the really important and novel questions about our rights in the context of an unprecedented crisis were never resolved.

00:27:12.320 And if we don't resolve those issues from the courts, we don't have good precedent to protect ourselves against intrusions in the future.

00:27:19.540 We don't have everything resolved, right?

00:27:21.900 We're still waiting for some decisions.

00:27:23.740 We have to put the book out at some point.

00:27:26.240 I actually just received my copy this afternoon.

00:27:29.460 I was happy to see your endorsement on the back there, Andrew.

00:27:32.660 Oh, I'm happy it made it to it.

00:27:34.020 I'm glad it was useful.

00:27:36.520 But yeah, not everything is resolved.

00:27:41.060 In particular, we're waiting for the result in the Emergencies Act Invocation Judicial Review,

00:27:47.280 which we had brought.

00:27:48.340 and we're expecting that maybe in the next few months. Let me actually ask you, I'll start with

00:27:53.720 you, Joanna, but if you want to bring in your own perspective, Christine, please do, about the

00:27:58.400 Emergencies Act, because some of the government's arguments on trying to dismiss these challenges

00:28:03.620 have been insane, and one of them, I'm crudely paraphrasing here, is basically, well, this was

00:28:08.760 a once-in-a-lifetime fact pattern, so therefore, you know, there's no point in really, you know,

00:28:15.000 having it out because the next time the emergencies act is brought in, it's going to be under

00:28:18.300 different circumstances. And that's a really dangerous argument because every case has its

00:28:24.060 own unique facts. And the point of precedent is not that you have a one size fits all solution,

00:28:28.260 but certainly you start defining this. So the fact that this never before used legislation,

00:28:34.440 the emergencies act came in, we've never had judicial guidance on how to use it. And the

00:28:40.080 government doesn't want that is incredibly concerning. Have I misrepresented anything

00:28:45.200 there, Joanna? No, certainly not. And I would add that in addition to the government pointing to

00:28:51.700 the so-called unprecedented nature of the freedom convoy, as you say, it's not clear to me that

00:28:58.640 there couldn't be some other type of emergency. We have climate issues. We have global security

00:29:04.500 issues. The world is a dynamic and changing place. But the important thing to add, even beyond

00:29:09.200 speculation is that at the hearings, both at the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings,

00:29:14.480 as well as the judicial review hearings, the government very specifically and very stridently,

00:29:20.640 I would say, pushed an interpretation of the application for the Emergencies Act,

00:29:25.680 which would give them very wide ambit to act. So specifically in the Emergencies Act, which

00:29:32.000 defines threats to the security of Canada in a way that's linked to the CSIS Act and that thus,

00:29:37.600 you know, relies on a CSIS assessment, an independent assessment specifically to avoid

00:29:44.040 concentrating too much power in the hands of the executive. We heard the prime minister himself

00:29:49.140 directly say that his interpretation, his government's interpretation of that was that

00:29:54.260 he could declare a state of emergency throughout Canada based on his understanding of threats to the

00:30:01.820 security of Canada as the governor and counsel, independent from any external threat assessment

00:30:07.560 And 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.

00:30:19.680 So actually, if that standard rules the day, Justice Rouleau seemed to accept that.

00:30:26.820 And we know that the federal government, which is going to be bringing forward proposals for amendments to the Emergencies Act,

00:30:33.280 they're going to seek to separate out the CSIS Act definition so that basically the prime minister can decide when an emergency exists.

00:30:43.340 That would make it even more common that something like the Emergencies Act could be invoked again.

00:30:49.200 And perhaps Christine will talk a little bit about what that actually meant throughout all of Canada, not just Ottawa.

00:30:56.000 Yeah, it is important to remember that when the Emergencies Act was invoked, it wasn't geographically limited.

00:31:02.540 The Prime Minister had said, this is short, this is limited and temporary, but it was not limited.

00:31:10.320 It applied across the country, even though by the time it was invoked, the protests were only taking place in Ottawa.

00:31:18.200 Literally, 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.

00:31:33.220 I 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.

00:31:48.200 law. And look, we're not here to cheerlead the convoy. I think that the convoy accomplished

00:31:56.040 the political goals that it set out to accomplish, but certainly there were aspects of that protest

00:32:01.140 that were illegal. And we have a whole chapter in the book about the rule of law and the

00:32:06.500 value of the rule of law. And we hold the federal government to the standard of the rule

00:32:12.220 of law. They can't invoke legislation when the legal threshold to invoke is not met.

00:32:17.960 They don't have this extraordinary power unless they're authorized by law. But on the same hand,

00:32:24.080 we need to hold members of the public who participated in the convoy to the standards

00:32:27.840 of the rule of law as well. And certainly there were illegal acts that took place. People should

00:32:32.440 face criminal charges related to those criminal acts. And certainly a protest cannot go on

00:32:38.980 indefinitely. By the end, the police were certainly entitled to exercise ordinary police

00:32:47.800 powers, to move large vehicles off of streets, not to permanently block a protest from proceeding.

00:32:55.720 I think there's no question you can protest on the lawn of Parliament Hill, but you certainly

00:33:00.240 can't indefinitely block Ontario highways. There's provisions of the criminal code that address that

00:33:08.300 though, and there was no need to resort to the use of the Emergencies Act. So I think that that's

00:33:14.080 one of the things that is going to challenge readers in our book is whatever your perspective

00:33:19.740 on this, on all of these issues, on COVID, on the Emergencies Act, I think you need to be prepared

00:33:24.940 to have that perspective challenged because these things are not straightforward. Whatever the

00:33:30.180 mainstream media might say, this is not a black and white issue. These issues are complex. And

00:33:34.540 that's why we required an entire book that took us years to write to go through all of this. So

00:33:40.100 I encourage anyone who reads the book to read it with a very open mind, because we really have

00:33:45.640 spent a lot of time trying to get the balance right on all of these issues. Well, one of the

00:33:51.200 things that you have both done in this, which I was very grateful for, is you've gone right back

00:33:55.860 to the beginning, because I think when the Convoy and the Emergencies Act came in, we're talking

00:34:01.040 about now more than two years after the onset of some of the earlier COVID restrictions. And

00:34:05.400 some of those early stories that almost sounded quaint in comparison of like, you know, oh, some

00:34:10.840 kid, you know, given a citation for using a public basketball court. Or I remember there was one in

00:34:16.540 Hamilton where a drug dealer was arrested for operating a non-essential business, as well as

00:34:21.580 for dealing drugs, like some of these things, which almost became novelties. But the reason

00:34:25.980 they did is because the government response to COVID got more and more severe. At that point,

00:34:30.560 we didn't know we'd be looking at church closures pastors in jail uh family gatherings being uh in

00:34:37.520 some cases you know raided by police and all of these things you know are too large to just say

00:34:44.160 we can't look into and i'm curious what your thoughts are on on the procedural aspects here

00:34:49.040 because i know there have been a lot of these charges that were issued that have just been

00:34:52.640 dropped because of judicial resourcing you know it's we don't have enough time to go through three

00:34:56.720 years of fines. Courts are backed up. The problem with that, of course, is that no one has had their

00:35:02.240 day in court. The arguments and the precedents haven't been made, but for the individual people

00:35:06.560 charged it to win. So how do you reconcile those two? I think we had one case that was like that

00:35:11.760 that we talk about in the book, and it relates to an individual protester in Kingston. And you're

00:35:17.200 so right. It's so quaint when you think back to it. It's also surreal. So the facts of some of

00:35:23.160 these stories, you know, like roping off the cherry blossom. So one of the stories we talk

00:35:26.860 about in this book is a case that we were working on at the Canadian Constitution Foundation. It

00:35:31.720 involved a man named Robert who was frustrated as a gym user and a supporter of small business. A

00:35:39.160 lot of his friends ran small businesses. He was frustrated with these sort of never-ending

00:35:43.240 lockdowns. I think we were on our third or fourth lockdown in Ontario and he decided to go in

00:35:49.320 protest. He wore a mask and he went by himself. He wanted to start his own protest to say end the

00:35:56.720 lockdowns. And he was charged under, I think it was at the time, the stay-at-home order. And

00:36:03.740 I mean, the idea that someone protesting or standing outside alone with a mask expressing

00:36:12.120 a political view poses some type of public health threat. It's just absurd. And so we wanted to use

00:36:18.020 this as an opportunity to challenge the broader lockdown provisions. But I mean, in the best

00:36:25.420 interest of Robert, the charges were dropped. So obviously, that's the route that we need to

00:36:30.540 proceed with. But the result of it procedurally is that you don't get a precedent. You don't get

00:36:36.380 to challenge the broader law, which is really what the problem is here.

00:36:41.740 Well, and you've also done something really interesting, Joanna, instead of organizing

00:36:45.540 it chronologically, which I think probably would have been my instinct as a writer, you've gone by

00:36:49.600 basically sections of the charter and by individual rights and freedoms from freedom of assembly to

00:36:55.760 freedom of movement, freedom of expression, all of these things. And I think it's easy to just

00:37:01.520 look in general in the abstract or in the amalgam and say rights were violated. But when you go

00:37:07.700 through and point specifically to how and which rights, it's a very powerful case. And let me ask

00:37:13.500 you just on religion alone, because, you know, the government's defense of its restrictions on

00:37:18.380 worship ceremonies and services was that, well, you know, you have the right to, you know, be

00:37:23.320 a Christian, you have the right to be a Jew, you have the right to be a Muslim, but, you know, 0.74

00:37:27.200 this is just extraordinary times. But for people of faith, that is the government telling them

00:37:31.740 how their religion must be practiced. I mean, you look at with Judaism, which has very specific

00:37:37.940 guidelines on the number of people that need to be a part of prayer. Government was saying its

00:37:42.720 edicts matter more than these things that we supposedly have a right to define ourselves.

00:37:48.340 Yeah, absolutely. And we talk about in the book that, so for example, because of these,

00:37:53.860 you know, unprecedented restrictions, it brought out some of the frailties in the law itself. So

00:37:58.780 for example, freedom of subjective belief is extremely strongly protected in Canadian law,

00:38:04.180 but freedom of assembly has much weaker protection. And most of its protections are in the context of

00:38:09.560 like labor union strikes and things like that. And so it was quite jarring to religious, you know,

00:38:16.660 religious Canadians that the government had gave such short shrift to the value of in-person

00:38:22.260 worship. I was actually at a conference in the UK this past summer, and I was told that in London

00:38:27.520 or in England at some point, gathering limits were set at five people. At least in Ontario,

00:38:33.680 they were set to 10 people, perhaps in consultation with the Jewish community that would have let them

00:38:37.780 know the minimum amount of people needed for a minion. Having that aside, there are churches

00:38:43.700 in Canada that are important community hubs, particularly for new Canadians, which elderly

00:38:50.400 Canadians rely on because participating by Zoom isn't an option for them. And you really saw that

00:38:57.740 the government was just happy to say, well, you can just log on to Zoom and there's no violation

00:39:04.380 to your religious freedom. The government actually contended in most cases and was

00:39:09.600 countenanced by judges in many cases that these strict restriction and gathering limits didn't

00:39:15.900 even engage the right to freedom of religion. And you can read about some of those, some of

00:39:20.440 those faith communities in the book. Yeah. And I would also point out, I mean, at the early days,

00:39:27.160 there was a much different attitude. Like I remember when the Ontario government was

00:39:30.940 actually taking a bit of a bit of guidance from the Church of God in Elmer, which was the first

00:39:35.660 one to really try to make drive-in services a thing. And then you fast forward a few months and

00:39:40.380 you know, the government's having the doors locked and putting millions of dollars to fines down.

00:39:45.280 And had people at least hiding in the bushes, observing the congregants.

00:39:50.060 Yeah. And I actually had, there was one report that was handed over in Discovery in which I was

00:39:55.200 named as a person of interest in the police's investigation of that, because I had interviewed

00:40:00.120 the pastor and they were suspicious that I might attend the service. So they had preemptively put

00:40:06.480 me on the person of interest list, which was quite an honor. I had never had that before. I would

00:40:11.380 have preferred it to be about something I did rather than something someone thought I might

00:40:14.940 have done. But that's the insanity here. And I wanted to bring up another dimension of this that

00:40:19.960 I had almost forgotten. And it was seeing you cite me that I remembered this when the government of

00:40:26.440 Ontario had tried to give police the power to stop and question anyone who was outside their home

00:40:33.400 about what they were doing. And, you know, very gratefully, every police department in Ontario,

00:40:39.640 except for the OPP, I think in the next couple of days said, we're not going to do this. But

00:40:44.400 like that would have seemed insane if you had said in 2019 that that was at all something that

00:40:49.940 government would direct the police to do in a province. Yeah, you did some really great

00:40:54.760 reporting on that. That's, I think you were, you were the person who was literally, quite literally

00:40:59.560 counting which police. Well, I was like cold calling them all. I spent my weekend doing that.

00:41:03.940 Yeah. Great, great work, Andrew. And it's very valuable. And it's very important that we have

00:41:09.840 a record of that. The reality is that police are the ones who need to interact with the community.

00:41:16.440 And, you know, I'm generally skeptical of police power, but I know police as well. And I know that

00:41:22.600 for the most part, police want to have a good relationship with their community and have worked

00:41:28.040 hard to develop a relationship of trust with the communities where they are policing. And they are

00:41:34.400 not interested, generally, in stopping mothers taking their children on a walk to a playground,

00:41:41.380 which is what that stay-at-home order was going to do, combined with that police authority to

00:41:46.860 stop people. And I'll point out that this police power to stop people and demand, they identify

00:41:54.060 themselves and explain why they're outside their house. It's very similar to a policy that was

00:42:01.140 controversial in Ontario called carding, because carding had resulted in a lot of police interactions

00:42:08.580 with racialized communities, in particular, who are generally over policed. And the government

00:42:15.920 created a policy that they would no longer engage in carding. And there were constitutional concerns

00:42:21.660 around that policy. And in fact, when, and it is so similar to what was announced and what was

00:42:28.660 announced during the pandemic was actually more extreme than the carding policy, that everyone

00:42:34.740 sitting at that cabinet table would have known how similar this is to carding. And in fact,

00:42:39.900 we know from reporting from, it was from the CBC, they found, they had spoken to someone who

00:42:47.460 disclosed that in cabinet, the attorney general, the provincial attorney general had warned cabinet

00:42:53.020 that this policy is likely unconstitutional. And cabinet and the premier, Ford, proceeded to enact

00:43:00.800 it anyway. And I think that there's real concern that there's bad faith there. The bad faith is

00:43:06.180 that they knowingly enacted an unconstitutional law. And they did it because they wanted some

00:43:12.280 short-term gain. And they knew that any judicial oversight over that would not be heard in time

00:43:19.060 before this temporary measure had been repealed. And they would avoid any judicial scrutiny. And

00:43:27.180 I think that that's bad faith. And it's very, very concerning. I mean, there's some relief

00:43:32.340 that the police said we will not enforce this but it shouldn't just lay with the police to say

00:43:36.760 we won't be enforcing unconstitutional laws. I'll go back to you Joanna just as we wind down here

00:43:44.640 because the subtitle of the book how Canadian government responses to COVID-19 changed civil

00:43:50.280 liberties forever is a lofty one and I know in your conclusion you actually are rather forward

00:43:55.700 looking about this but I'll ask with a bit of trepidation because I don't want to know the

00:44:01.240 answer as I think I know the answer. Do you think these changes have been for the better or for the

00:44:07.400 worse? And I'll just add a bit of an asterisk there. When all of the legal procedures have

00:44:13.420 been exhausted, we have the definitive ruling. Do you think that we will end up with fundamentally

00:44:18.540 a less free country than we had going into COVID? I think we have a legal system that has shown

00:44:24.920 how effectively it can obfuscate answering the question with the declarations of mootness,

00:44:30.160 with the deference to government evidence. We were talking to another interviewer who found

00:44:37.840 it remarkable that a lot of these issues weren't dealt with under section one. So yes, we can

00:44:43.240 acknowledge there was a rights violation, but maybe under section one, which is the justification

00:44:47.920 clause, maybe you can say in public health emergencies, it was justified, but at least

00:44:53.640 to acknowledge for the record that these were rights violations. So we really have seen all

00:44:59.520 the ways that judges were able to wiggle out of telling the truth. Now, I will sort of conclude

00:45:05.620 my remarks on a more optimistic note, which maybe I'm a little bit more of an optimist than Christine.

00:45:11.020 I think it depends on us. I think it depends on the culture that we build. I think it depends on

00:45:15.980 our collective understanding and our collective assessment of whether this was good enough,

00:45:21.840 whether we think that if we have charter rights, which were, you know, agreed to democratically,

00:45:26.600 whether they should mean something. Um, and if we understand the sort of fiasco that happened

00:45:32.140 and we'll hold future governments accountable, just, you know, out of sort of shock of how

00:45:37.000 abysmally our, our, you know, culture during the last pandemic failed. Um, I think that

00:45:43.660 there could be hope, but it starts with, you know, looking in a sober way at how we actually

00:45:49.400 fared. If I knew that you were the optimist of the two, I probably would have reversed this.

00:45:53.660 So 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.

00:46:00.340 What's the forward-looking takeaway you have after writing this?

00:46:03.760 I'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.

00:46:12.940 And I think that I'm very concerned about whatever the next crisis is, we've now broken the glass on the Emergencies Act.

00:46:19.780 it could be used again in the future, that our culture of civil liberties has been permanently

00:46:24.440 damaged because we've seen how easily people have come to justify huge intrusions into their rights.

00:46:30.940 I think that we're in a very dark time politically in our discourse where disagreement is not

00:46:39.040 tolerated at all. I'm completely pessimistic and I'm very dark. I'm in a very dark place,

00:46:45.420 Sandra. But, you know, that's why you definitely should have ended with Joanna. But yeah.

00:46:51.600 Well, I'll say I'll say this to try to put a somewhat optimistic flavor on it is that you

00:46:56.480 have to diagnose a problem to fix the problem. So even taking the approach that you have,

00:47:01.560 Christina, and the both of you have through this book, I think is essential to rectifying it,

00:47:04.980 because there is in a lot of cases, a political response available. And I, you know, I was

00:47:09.720 mentioning earlier, the private members bill in the House of Commons today, again, may or may not

00:47:14.020 passed. But, you know, if you have a change in government and a government is saying, you know,

00:47:18.320 this should never happen, I will not do this, we could perhaps try to normalize civil liberties

00:47:23.340 again. But I realize the courts will always remain a bit of a wild card there. Nonetheless,

00:47:28.520 it is an incredibly, incredibly important book. I was very honored to be able to write a small

00:47:34.140 blurb for you and even more honored that some of my work helped you put it together. It's called

00:47:38.340 Pandemic Panic, How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever. It's

00:47:44.260 by Joanna Barron and Christine Van Gein. And you can also read a bit of their work in C2C Journal

00:47:49.520 this month as well to get a bit of a sense of what the book holds. Joanna, Christine, thank you so

00:47:54.300 much and well done with this. Thank you, Andrew. And the book's available on Amazon right now for

00:47:58.720 anyone interested. All right, wonderful. Yes, do head over there. And last time we had an author

00:48:02.880 on it like spiked up in the numbers. So I'm hoping we can replicate that here. Go to Amazon

00:48:06.700 on and check it out. Joanna, Christine, thanks very much. That does it for us for today. We will

00:48:12.400 be back tomorrow with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North. Thank

00:48:17.320 you. God bless and good day to you all. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show. Support

00:48:23.060 the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

00:48:36.700 We'll be right back.

00:49:06.700 We'll see you next time.

Juno News - October 25, 2023

Liberals think bill banning vaccine mandates is ＂waste of time＂

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