Juno News - Locked Down： Canada’s failed approach to COVID-19

00:00:00.000 Hi, and welcome to this evening's discussion, Locked Down, Canada's Failed COVID-19 Response.

00:00:12.520 This event is co-hosted by True North and by Civitas Canada. For anyone interested in finding

00:00:18.800 out more about True North, please visit our website at tnc.news, and please consider making

00:00:24.880 a tax-deductible donation to support independent fact-based journalism in Canada. We have a lot

00:00:31.280 of exciting projects going on over at True North, including a forthcoming mini-documentary

00:00:36.560 on Justin Trudeau's war against legal gun owners in Canada, which is written and hosted by my

00:00:41.600 colleague, Andrew Lawton. And for anyone interested in more information about Civitas Canada, please

00:00:47.520 visit our website at civitascanada.ca, where you can find out more information about joining

00:00:52.880 your organization. Okay, that's it for the housekeeping program, so let's go to tonight's show.

00:00:59.600 It has been over a year now since the Wuhan novel coronavirus began to wreak havoc on our society.

00:01:07.200 One year ago, we were introduced to a bevy of new catchphrases and euphemisms that are now heard

00:01:13.840 almost daily. Shelter in place, social distancing, mask mandates, lockdowns, quarantines, vaccines,

00:01:21.680 herd immunity, flatten the curve, and the new normal. These were things that we barely ever heard

00:01:27.760 before, and now we hear them every day. Remember, a year ago we were told that we were staying at home

00:01:33.920 for a few weeks to help flatten the curve. While those two weeks have turned into 52 weeks and counting,

00:01:40.720 and in that time we have witnessed a remarkable transformation of our society. In January 2020,

00:01:47.360 no one would have believed you if you had said that the government would be confining people

00:01:51.920 in their homes, that they would be forcing businesses to shut down, causing record unemployment,

00:01:57.600 tanking the economy, and racking up hundreds of billions of dollars in new debt. No one would

00:02:03.920 believe that the Trudeau government would be the ones closing the borders, shutting down the border with

00:02:08.880 our biggest trading partner, and banning flights to warm locations during a bitter cold winter.

00:02:14.800 No one would think that government busybodies would be issuing fines to children playing in parks

00:02:20.240 to adults exercising outside, or that Canadians would be detained and held against their will

00:02:26.400 without access to a lawyer for the crime of coming home, crossing the border to come back home.

00:02:32.160 No one would believe that there'd be a government crackdown on religious services, and no one would

00:02:36.720 believe that journalists would be playing cover for some of the most overbearing and restricting

00:02:42.800 policies in Canadian history. Okay, well, this is Canada, we have the CBC, so you might have guessed

00:02:48.880 that one about government journalists, but no one would have believed that there'd be surgeries being

00:02:54.080 cancelled, patients being turned away, suicide and drug overdoses surging, Canadians dying, not because

00:03:00.560 of the disease that's causing all this mayhem, but because of our government's overzealous reaction to

00:03:05.760 the disease. No one would have thought any of that were possible, and yet here we are. And I think many

00:03:11.440 in this audience would agree when I say that the cure has become worse than the disease.

00:03:17.200 And of course it's worth saying that we know that COVID-19 poses a serious threat to public health.

00:03:22.720 It's deadly to many, and the shameful occurrences and deaths that happened at nursing homes across

00:03:28.720 the country show that we did fail to protect some of the most vulnerable people in our society.

00:03:34.400 But we've also learned a lot about the coronavirus since March of last year. We now know how the virus

00:03:39.600 spreads. We know who are the most vulnerable, and we know the steps that are needed to take to protect

00:03:45.600 those people. So tonight's discussion is not about the harmful effects of COVID. We all know what those

00:03:53.040 are. We've been hearing about them over and over again. Instead, tonight's discussion is about the

00:03:58.320 unintended consequences of our reaction to COVID, the heavy-handed government policies, the implications,

00:04:04.880 be it medical, legal, cultural, or economic, to that reaction to COVID. So we've got a lot of ground to

00:04:12.400 cover. We have some fantastic panelists who are far more qualified to speak about this issue than me.

00:04:17.520 So let's get to it. First, this evening we're going to hear from Dr. Sean Watley. Watley is a rural

00:04:24.320 doctor, rural family doctor, based in Mount Albert, Ontario. He's the author of the new book,

00:04:29.920 When Politics Comes Before Patients, Why and How Canadian Medicare is Failing, and he's a Munk 1.00

00:04:36.400 Senior Fellow in Health Policy with the Macdonald Laurier Institute. Sean has spent much of the last

00:04:42.080 20 years serving in various leadership roles for a number of boards, and he's also the past president

00:04:48.000 of the Ontario Medical Association. After Sean, we're going to hear from Mr. John Carpe. Carpe was born

00:04:55.440 in the Netherlands and grew up in British Columbia. He speaks English, French, and Dutch. He holds a

00:05:00.560 political science degree and a law degree. He was called to the bar in 1999 and has been an advocate

00:05:07.200 for freedom and the rule of law in constitutional cases across Canada. He's the founder and president

00:05:12.480 of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms and has devoted his legal career to defending

00:05:17.920 constitutional freedoms through litigation and education. In 2010, John received the Pyramid Award for

00:05:24.720 ideas and public policy in recognition of his work in constitutional advocacy and his success in

00:05:31.040 building up and managing a non-profit organization dedicated to defending citizens' freedom.

00:05:38.080 Finally, last but not least, Anthony Fury, who is an author, journalist, and the national comment editor

00:05:44.640 of the Toronto Sun and the Sun Media newspaper chains. Anthony was recently the morning host of the

00:05:50.800 satellite radio, Sirius XM show, Canada Talks, and he's been a guest on some of the biggest shows in the

00:05:56.800 world, including Fox News. He was on with Sean Hannity, BBC, and he's often the sole voice of reason

00:06:04.400 over on a CBC panel. Anthony's written for Time Magazine, the Literary Review of Canada,

00:06:09.840 the New York Daily News, to name a few. Nowadays, he's fearlessly pushing back against the groupthink

00:06:15.600 that happens among his colleagues in the mainstream media, debunking their exaggerated claims and

00:06:20.800 exposing their fear-mongering about COVID-19. And one fun fact about Anthony, he once stepped into the

00:06:27.520 boxing ring and had a friendly jostle with our now Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. Anthony, I know that a

00:06:32.960 lot of our viewers are a little envious of that left jab that you landed there. Yeah, I'm just kidding,

00:06:38.640 no violence, no violence. We'll give each of the panelists the floor for about 10 minutes,

00:06:44.080 followed by a group discussion that we're all going to have. And then we're going to open the

00:06:47.440 floor up to our participants who will be allowed to ask live questions with the panelists. And to

00:06:55.040 those watching on YouTube and Facebook, if you would like to join a future panel or have the

00:06:59.600 opportunity to participate and ask questions live at our next event, please head on over to tnc.news

00:07:05.920 slash donate and become a TrueNorth Insider. Or alternatively, come join us at Civitas,

00:07:11.280 become a member, head on over to CivitasCanada.ca where you can apply for membership. Okay,

00:07:17.760 without further ado, let's hand it over to our panelists. First to you, Dr. Watley.

00:07:24.800 Thanks so much, Candice. I've really been looking forward to this panel. And not so much just for

00:07:30.000 who's speaking, but the questions that are going to come and you've done a brilliant job of actually

00:07:33.760 setting it up and really described a lot of the details that we're facing. You know,

00:07:38.800 every patient that I've seen for the last 20 years, I say, how can I help you? What can I do for you

00:07:43.280 today? But for the last year, I've been saying, and how are you doing? So many people are finding

00:07:49.600 this last year difficult on multiple levels, not just because they can't access care, cancer screening,

00:07:56.640 services for their family members, a placement in long term care homes, but just simply because of the

00:08:02.960 the whole pandemic itself, the nonstop news that is telling them something really, really bad is going

00:08:09.760 to happen, worst case scenario planning, the necessity to stay in your home and wash your hands and wear a

00:08:18.080 mask. And it's really, it's really been hard, at least on the patients that I'm trying to take care of.

00:08:24.080 So it's been tough for me to try to make sense of this. And actually, Candace, you did a great job of

00:08:31.120 adding a lot of sense making to the whole thing. But as a physician, as a policy person, how can I

00:08:39.680 put this together? How can I make sense of people trying to act access care for medical services for

00:08:47.440 COVID in particular? But how can we make sense of people not getting care for cancer care and surgery

00:08:54.240 that's non cancerous, but equally as crucial? How can we make sense of our lack of preparation as a

00:09:01.360 healthcare system? So we only have 2.5 beds per 1000 population, whereas the OECD has 4.7 beds in

00:09:09.440 hospitals per 1000 population. And on top of all this, we have over 100,000 scientific articles,

00:09:19.680 100,000 scientific articles in the literature published just on COVID-19 in 2020. And those

00:09:27.280 publications started coming out around March. And so even if they were spread out on an equal

00:09:32.080 basis, you're looking at 10,000 articles a month. If you took the weekends off, that's 500 articles a day

00:09:37.920 just to stay abreast of the scientific literature on COVID-19. And that's leaving aside all the medical

00:09:44.560 literature and the economic literature and every other discipline that's been out there writing

00:09:50.480 about the COVID pandemic. So what I found helpful is to apply a framework to this deluge of information

00:10:03.120 in a way to help us sort and make sense of what's going on. And it's really just a four-level

00:10:07.840 framework. And I break it down in terms of care, coordination, culture, and then concepts. So

00:10:15.040 care is just everything to do with the nuts and bolts of COVID itself. Candace, I'm glad you said

00:10:20.240 we're not going to be talking about the nuts and bolts of virology and infectious diseases. That's

00:10:24.720 fantastic. But all of that goes into that top level, the care level, and that's including vaccinations

00:10:30.880 and how they work and that sort of thing. But equally important to care, we have a layer right beneath

00:10:36.480 that of coordination. And coordination is where health policy lives, that's where regulatory reform

00:10:42.000 lives, legislation. So that directly impacts how patients receive care. In the case of the pandemic

00:10:49.840 though, that coordination level, the policy level actually impacts businesses, small businesses, schools,

00:10:56.080 whether or not people get to have their wedding on time. So all sorts of things happen at the coordination

00:11:01.360 level. And the general public, I find, has the greatest interest in those two levels, care and

00:11:07.120 coordination. But beneath those, we have a level that I'm referring to as culture. And culture is just

00:11:13.440 simply the collection of norms and behaviors that exist within any group. So at your workplace, if you

00:11:19.680 start your meetings 15 minutes late, your culture at your organization is to start meeting 15 minutes late.

00:11:26.560 You have a culture of lateness. It's just the way you do things. But beneath that culture is a layer of ideas

00:11:34.720 that inform the culture. And most of us actually get into that idea level. Unless you're a member of Civitas,

00:11:42.320 right? We're a society where ideas meet and where we come to debate. But most people find it less interesting

00:11:50.800 than those top two layers. So if you're always late in your organization, maybe the ideas that inform

00:11:57.680 that are the thinking that being on time isn't important. Or maybe it's actually good to be late

00:12:03.680 because you're being kind to the people who show up late. Maybe running meetings on time is actually

00:12:09.840 impolite. And so it's actually morally bad to start meetings on time because you're being insensitive to

00:12:15.920 all the late people. You get what I'm saying. Within that cultural level in healthcare, there are a

00:12:21.680 whole bunch of norms and behaviors around how we make decisions, who gets to make decisions that inform

00:12:28.720 the coordination of care or the experience of how the pandemic presents itself or how we experience it

00:12:35.440 in our homes, in our businesses, in our communities, and also directly impacts that care level.

00:12:41.120 So for example, in healthcare, whenever we have a problem, not enough beds in my hospital or not

00:12:47.600 enough nurses or whatever, who do I call for help? I reach out to the government. I reach out to the

00:12:53.760 Ministry of Health. Please help us. We need more funding. We need more beds. So that's a natural,

00:12:59.520 that's a culturally accepted response within the Canadian healthcare context. But it's based on the

00:13:07.280 presupposition of a benign view of government. We wouldn't reach out to government if we didn't

00:13:12.480 think government was there to help us. If we thought government was by nature bad for us, we wouldn't

00:13:19.440 ask government to help us. And so we never go about asking whether or not we should have a benign

00:13:25.680 view of government or whether or not we do have a benign view of government. But that concept feeds the

00:13:30.800 cultural level, which plays out at coordination, policy environment, and then actual bedside care.

00:13:37.600 Another example might be people saying, you know what, it's not fair that some privileged people get

00:13:43.760 to the front of the line for their COVID screens. They get to pay for a COVID swab. We need to pass a

00:13:50.000 law to stop that. Well, the reflex or the knee jerk to ask government to pass laws to fix concrete problems

00:13:59.520 presupposes legal instrumentalism. Now, John's probably going to tell me why I've got this wrong,

00:14:04.800 and I hope he does. But within the legal community, you can look at the law as a tool to simply solve

00:14:11.440 problems. So, for example, we don't have a good enough distribution of healthcare providers across

00:14:17.200 your province. Let's pass a law and force doctors to go work up north or to go work in in small towns. 0.99

00:14:24.320 Well, that presupposes a view of the law, again, at the conceptual level of legal instrumentalism. Well,

00:14:31.360 that's very different from a rule of law approach, which is an entirely different concept. So those

00:14:38.320 concepts, and we could talk forever about those concepts because there's so many of them, they feed

00:14:43.920 into that cultural level or the norms of decisions and behaviors that we see within healthcare. So for the

00:14:50.880 last year, the Canadian public, everybody on this call, has had a backstage pass to the culture of

00:14:59.600 healthcare. So everything that I've been living and breathing for the last 30 years or 20 years of practice

00:15:05.280 is now front and center. It's on the front page of every newspaper. You've been able to see,

00:15:10.160 you know, how come people are making these decisions? How come regulations are this today

00:15:14.960 and that way tomorrow and they're not applied? Or how come we have such regulatory unreasonableness?

00:15:19.920 We're throwing people in prison or we're fining them, maybe they're not going to prison. Or we're

00:15:25.280 taking little old ladies, you know, throwing them out of the hospital because they held the hand of 1.00

00:15:29.600 their dying husband during COVID. You know, they broke the rule. They need to be thrown out of the

00:15:34.400 hospital. How come this happens? Well, it happens because of the concepts that feed into the culture,

00:15:40.160 that impact the coordination and then ultimately the care level. So it's fine to understand or to have

00:15:47.920 a framework to look at COVID. But ultimately, and I'm going to end here, we need to think about how we

00:15:56.000 can influence through that framework into this mass of information and stories and dialogue and op-eds and

00:16:04.480 videos and blogs. How can we as a group of people, ideas, start applying tactics to advance a strategy

00:16:14.800 that will challenge bad concepts or faulty thinking, will advocate for ideal culture. So making decisions

00:16:24.000 where they actually are closest to where they're going to have their impact. At least that's, I'm

00:16:28.560 portraying my bias now. Advocate for sound policy. Often people right of center, leave the policy

00:16:36.800 environment alone, right? Conservatives, classical liberals and libertarians often say, we don't

00:16:42.880 really want to get involved in policy because it sounds like big government. Well, if we don't get

00:16:48.240 involved in policy and offer policy options of our own, it leaves that whole space wide open to everybody

00:16:54.160 on the other side of the aisle. And so we need to have tactics to speak into that space. And we also

00:16:59.920 need to think about how we're going to offer something positive at the care level. So I hope that's

00:17:04.480 helpful. Huge, huge topic. And I'm looking forward to hearing what the other speakers say. Thanks so much.

00:17:12.560 Great. Thank you so much for that, Sean. I'm sure we'll get into some of those suggestions and policy

00:17:17.760 ideas in the Q&A. So next we'll leave it up to John Carpe for his talk. Thank you very much, Candice.

00:17:28.880 And I'm deeply honoured to be part of this panel and with such esteemed guests. And I'm going to talk

00:17:36.880 briefly about the court actions that the Justice Centre has on the go and also what are some of the

00:17:43.520 issues in court that we're going to be tackling. So currently we have anti-lockdown court actions in

00:17:52.320 British Columbia, Alberta, and Manitoba. Saskatchewan hopefully will be filed by the end of this month.

00:17:58.400 And Ontario is also on the horizon as well. We also have an action in federal court against the prison

00:18:08.720 hotels and hotels or hotel prisons. And the legal test. So our argument is that these lockdown measures

00:18:20.000 are an unjustifiable violation of our charter freedoms to move and travel and associate and assemble and

00:18:30.000 worship. And more recently with the federal quarantine measures, we're now also looking at

00:18:37.600 charter section 7 through 14, the right to life, liberty and security of the person. So the basic

00:18:44.240 right that we all have to not be locked up somewhere. And currently an accused murderer in Canada has more

00:18:52.640 legal rights than a returning snowbird. Because if you're accused of a crime, you must be charged with

00:18:59.280 a crime before you get arrested. Once arrested, you have a right to contact a lawyer, you have a right

00:19:06.560 to have your detention reviewed within 24 hours before a justice of the peace or a judge. You have the

00:19:13.920 right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty. You have the right to a fair trial before an

00:19:20.880 independent and impartial tribunal. And usually when you get arrested, your friends and family will know

00:19:27.360 where you are. Are you at the police station? Are you in a, you know, temporary remand center? Are you

00:19:33.920 in prison? So all of these rights are just completely tossed out the window with the new federal policies.

00:19:40.640 Now the test laid out by the Supreme Court of Canada in a case called Oakes, O-A-K-E-S. And

00:19:47.440 it's a test with four components. And so the first one is, does the government have a pressing

00:19:53.840 a public policy objective, serious pressing objective. And so on this issue in court, governments

00:20:02.000 are going to argue that COVID is an unusually deadly killer that we should all be very afraid of. This is

00:20:08.240 a very, well, as Jason Kenney has stated publicly on more than one occasion, that this is like the Spanish flu.

00:20:15.760 Now, it's easy to say that at a news conference and frighten people. But the evidence that we will be putting

00:20:25.120 forward, government evidence, government statistics, is that COVID is not an unusually deadly killer.

00:20:32.800 The impact on population life expectancy is minimal. We know that roughly 80% of the deaths are amongst people

00:20:40.400 who are elderly and already sick with cancer, heart disease, emphysema, diabetes, etc.

00:20:49.840 So the impact on population life expectancy is minimal. Years of life lost analysis, which we're working on,

00:20:57.920 I think will confirm that COVID is not having the big scary impact that the politicians and chief medical officers

00:21:06.400 are making it out to be. The most important thing is the government will have to produce evidence.

00:21:12.240 Right now, they've just been running a campaign of fear for 12 months, supported by biased pro-lockdown media

00:21:19.840 that tell us about all these scary case numbers, which brings me to another issue in the court cases.

00:21:25.600 We're going to challenge the legitimacy and validity of the PCR tests, which were never designed to diagnose

00:21:33.760 COVID, but are now frightening the population with screaming headlines about another 2000 cases in

00:21:39.200 Ontario and 3000 new cases in Quebec. We have to remember that until 12 months ago, the word case

00:21:45.760 referred to a sick person. Now, anybody who's got a positive test with the PCR test is deemed to be a

00:21:54.000 so-called case. And I wonder how many members of the public know when they see the scary headline about

00:22:00.480 2000 new cases that that involves 40, 50, maybe 60 people who are actually sick and the other

00:22:08.560 1900 and something people are perfectly healthy. So pressing objective is kind of the first issue.

00:22:16.320 The onus is on the government to show that the charter violating measures, and I don't think the

00:22:21.680 government will dispute that these health orders are violating our charter freedoms. I think that's kind of

00:22:27.520 a no-brainer, and I think the government would would look foolish in court if they tried to argue that,

00:22:32.080 well, no, these are not charter violations. I mean, obviously they are. When you can get a thousand dollar

00:22:36.880 ticket for associating with your mother in your own home at Christmas time, obviously that's a violation of

00:22:42.800 freedom of association. When you're told that you cannot sing in church, obviously a violation of religious freedom.

00:22:50.560 When you get ticketed for being at a peaceful protest, that's obviously a violation of your

00:22:57.760 charter freedom of peaceful assembly, etc. So the next part of the test is rational connection. So the

00:23:06.000 government measure has to be rationally connected to the objective. The objective presumably is to

00:23:12.960 save lives, although I would argue you can't really save lives. You can only delay death. We're all going to

00:23:18.480 die, but maybe that's just semantics. The government's going to say that these measures are going to

00:23:25.520 are rationally connected because if we have mask wearing and social distancing and capacity limits

00:23:31.920 and shutting down businesses and forcing kids to wear masks and so on and so forth, that those measures

00:23:39.680 actually save lives. The onus will be on the government to prove that lockdowns actually save

00:23:48.240 lives and they have to show that direct causal connection, which raises another issue in the

00:23:54.240 court actions, which is the whole question of asymptomatic spread. We're going to have medical

00:23:59.280 experts on our side testifying that asymptomatic people, healthy people, are not significant spreaders of

00:24:07.200 the virus and we've got the science there. It'll be interesting to see what science the government

00:24:13.280 comes up with. I've asked the Alberta government repeatedly what science are you relying on for your

00:24:19.520 belief that asymptomatic people are significant spreaders of COVID and I get stonewalled. I get no

00:24:26.320 answer and I'm looking forward to the court actions because the government is, they can try to stonewall 1.00

00:24:32.880 the judge but they're not going to look very good when we're saying that asymptomatic people are not 0.67

00:24:37.840 significant spreaders of the virus, hence most if not all lockdown measures are not producing any

00:24:45.360 benefits. If the government wants to remain silent, that'll be up to them but I would anticipate

00:24:52.400 they're going to try to muster up some science to back up their position. So rational connection and the goal

00:25:00.160 is important here as well because initially we were told, oh no, no, we can't stop a virus.

00:25:05.680 You know, never in human history have have lockdowns succeeded in stopping a virus. It's out

00:25:12.640 and about, it's everywhere. So is the goal to flatten the curve, in which case we get into this whole

00:25:18.400 question of hospitals being overrun. We would argue that this is a long-standing endemic problem. It's not

00:25:24.560 caused by COVID and the government, you know, would have to, I guess, make up its mind as to whether

00:25:31.200 these measures are just to flatten the curve. We're not going to save any lives but we're only doing

00:25:35.680 this to try to make sure that the hospitals don't get overwhelmed, which is what I heard in March and

00:25:40.640 April. But now it seems to be this across-the-board generic effort to just save lives by stopping the

00:25:47.120 spread. It's kind of a much broader and vaguer objective. The next part of the Oaks test, minimal

00:25:55.200 impairment. So do the government measures violate rights and freedoms as little as possible or could

00:26:02.000 they be saving lives, assuming they are in the first place, could they do so through less onerous

00:26:08.640 measures? And this will be a good opportunity to challenge some of the stupid rules like in British

00:26:13.760 Columbia, six strangers can sit together at a table and eat together but houses of worship are closed.

00:26:24.080 Where's the science behind that? The last and perhaps most significant portion is harms versus

00:26:30.960 benefits. Do lockdown harms outweigh benefits or do the benefits outweigh the harms? The Justice

00:26:37.920 Center released a paper. It's on our website www.jccf.ca. It's called Flying Blind and we delve into

00:26:45.680 deaths from cancelled surgeries, deaths from delayed cancer diagnosis, increases in suicides,

00:26:52.160 increases in drug overdoses. You could write many, many books on lockdown harms and we've got higher

00:27:00.320 unemployment which there's research saying there's a statistical correlation and probably causation.

00:27:07.920 Higher unemployment means higher suicides. All of the mental health issues, what happens to people

00:27:14.000 when they're forced into isolation and loneliness? What about all the stress and anxiety and depression?

00:27:20.480 And we could go on and on and on and on and on.

00:27:24.480 And sadly, governments, apart from any court actions, governments are required by the charter

00:27:32.480 to actively consider harms of these measures. And what we found with our research team, having spent

00:27:40.640 hundreds of hours trying to gather information and get information, lots of FOI requests, lots of internet

00:27:47.760 research on government websites. And the conclusion we've come to is that governments are

00:27:53.520 not deliberately actively looking to investigate and study and fully understand all of the lockdown

00:28:02.960 harms. We see willful blindness at play, which is very sad and something that we will be drawing the

00:28:10.080 attention of the courts to the government's willful blindness in not aggressively trying to measure and

00:28:18.080 analyze and investigate all of the lockdown harms. It's a big battle. We are currently looking to hire

00:28:27.440 four more lawyers. We're getting some great applications. We're doing interviews. So we're

00:28:31.360 going to expand the legal team from 9 to 13. These are huge, huge court actions with massive amounts of

00:28:39.360 evidence. So they will be tough battles. The government has to win on all four points. The government has to

00:28:45.680 persuade the court that COVID is truly an unusually deadly killer that warrants government action

00:28:55.120 that violates charter rights and freedoms. They have to really make the case that this is a pressing

00:29:01.440 objective. They have to show that the lockdown measures are rationally connected to the goal of

00:29:07.440 saving lives. They have to show that they are impairing our rights and freedoms as little as possible.

00:29:14.320 And they have to show that the lockdown harm, sorry, the government has to show that the lockdown

00:29:19.680 benefits outweigh the harms. The government has to win on all four points. I think before a fair-minded

00:29:27.760 judge, they have an uphill fight. But of course, I've always said anybody who predicts a court outcome

00:29:35.040 is a fool. You never know what's going to happen. So I'm not predicting that we will win or lose.

00:29:40.480 But these battles are important to be fought. And I think one of the side benefits,

00:29:46.800 even if we lose all of our court cases in every province, the wonderful thing is the government

00:29:51.760 will for the very first time have to answer some tough questions, and they will have to produce some

00:29:55.840 evidence, and they will not be able to coast by on the basis of biased pro-lockdown media beating the

00:30:04.880 drum of fear and just making scary announcements at news conferences, the government will have to

00:30:10.800 actually answer some tough questions in court. So again, thank you very much for having me on this

00:30:17.520 panel tonight. Great. Well, thank you so much, John, for your contribution and the work that you're doing

00:30:22.560 offline as well to sort of, you know, expose what's really happening in the country. And I think it's a good

00:30:29.440 segue to our next panelist, Anthony Fury, who's going to talk about both the sort of biased media

00:30:35.360 elements that you touched on, John, and also the culture at large and how we got here. So over to

00:30:41.200 you, Mr. Fury. Hey, guys, great to be here. John, I'm really offended that you haven't started the

00:30:46.400 legal challenge in Ontario yet, almost every other province. We're such a backwater here in Ontario.

00:30:51.280 Please, please hurry it up. Okay. But it's great, great to be here to speak to everyone and great, great

00:30:59.360 comments from Sean, and from john. And I want to pick up on something Candace was saying in her

00:31:03.200 introduction about journalists playing cover for some of the most overbearing policies really ever

00:31:09.360 that's that's going on right now. And I would contend that to tie into everything that's been said before

00:31:14.320 me. I think shoddy media coverage and media coverage, lacking context and nuance and, and

00:31:21.680 the usual sort of critical questions that one would expect of journalists, and that they have

00:31:26.800 traditionally done in the past. That is all the absence of those good questions and the presence

00:31:32.080 of all the shoddy media coverage. I think it's one of the key reasons why we're so stuck in this rut,

00:31:36.880 this situation we're in right now where public opinion is bizarrely high in support of some of these

00:31:43.360 lockdowns and why it's hard to get politicians to move and why it's so difficult to get traction

00:31:49.520 in all of this, you know, here I am in in downtown Toronto, which is supposed to be a very cosmopolitan

00:31:54.640 worldly place, and everyone's always patting themselves on the back about all of that.

00:31:58.560 And yet how shockingly ignorant and unworldly everybody in my media area and in you know in

00:32:04.720 Toronto and GTA and Ontario has become these past 12 months that that there's a lack of awareness of

00:32:11.280 what's going on, how other countries are dealing with coronavirus, how other jurisdictions all across

00:32:17.840 North America are various United States, whether they are led by Republicans or left-leaning Democrats,

00:32:24.400 they're all sort of finding much more productive ways to reopen. But somehow that doesn't get hit

00:32:29.680 Canadian coverage, even though in the past, of course, you would get ad nauseum coverage, you get

00:32:33.920 more coverage of what Donald Trump is up to than what Justin Trudeau is up to. So somehow we've gone from

00:32:38.480 being very worldly to very closed-minded. Ontario parents, for example, are not aware of the fact

00:32:43.920 that in BC small children do not have to wear masks in the classroom or that we send pretty much

00:32:52.160 the entire classroom home. If one kid has a positive case, we send them home for 14 days in Ontario.

00:32:57.200 Sometimes they choose just random other classes to send home. They'll send like two or three classes

00:33:01.520 home. It's not done in other jurisdictions, but people are not given the knowledge that that is the

00:33:06.800 case. They're not sort of empowered to seek out best practices and to seek out reference points.

00:33:12.080 So everybody's kind of been put into these, have these different blinders on when it comes to the

00:33:17.280 things that the knowledge and information they're sort of exposed to. And I think this is a major

00:33:22.560 problem, the lack of nuance, the lack of context. And I would say the most radical thing that a member of

00:33:27.760 the public can actually do is go to the original source and go and read your province's daily COVID reports

00:33:35.360 or weekly COVID reports, because we do live in an era of open data. And while there is information

00:33:39.840 that I think should be in those reports, that is not, they are fairly comprehensive and they tell

00:33:44.400 interesting stories. The Ontario charts, for instance, they show that in recent weeks, there's

00:33:49.760 practically zero new cases in long-term care, zero deaths among long-term care residents. Well,

00:33:54.480 hold on a second. That was the original crisis. That was the reason sort of for the first wave

00:33:58.720 lockdowns. Okay. So that's interesting. That story is not being told though. We see that people over 80 used to

00:34:04.080 have a much greater percentage. They do a decade breakdown in Ontario of who has cases. And now I

00:34:09.680 think today it's something like 25 people, 80 plus have, are in these COVID counts. Whereas a month ago,

00:34:15.360 it would have been 200 people or so. And that's the high risk people. And that's kind of one of the

00:34:19.280 reasons we're doing all of these lockdowns. That information is not getting out there. John referenced,

00:34:25.600 you know, poor questions, not real, not real questions, not really challenging people. And it's quite

00:34:31.360 something to watch a full press conference and watch the statements and watch all the media questions

00:34:36.000 after. And I participated in some of them sometimes asking these questions. Most of the questions are

00:34:42.800 generally about, okay, but how can we actually get further into lockdown? And I had to chuckle at one

00:34:48.480 reporter who was really kind of pushing and say, well, can't we lock down harder than we've ever locked

00:34:53.280 down before? And this was of course, just a week ago when the situation is better than it's ever been

00:34:58.560 before. So it's a very bizarre and troubling phenomenon to watch unfold. And I think there's

00:35:05.520 just, I don't know why there's a lack of interest in so many people in the media in telling a more

00:35:10.240 nuanced, contextualized story that tells greater data. I know of infectious disease physicians,

00:35:16.320 ICU doctors who are treating COVID patients, who they are actively on a regular basis,

00:35:20.480 emailing, corresponding with journalists and saying, there's some big errors in your story. I just

00:35:25.040 want to let you know, I'm kind of troubled by all of this. And a lot of them don't really have an

00:35:29.760 interest in correcting the record. I had an exchange, I won't name the publication or the

00:35:33.760 reporter, but there's a story on schools reopening, I guess, after this last break in Ontario,

00:35:39.760 a story maybe from back in January. And they were talking about all the different sort of concerns

00:35:44.560 around reopen schools, how it could be a disaster. And they said, and of course, some children have died

00:35:48.400 of coronavirus here. And I wrote to the person, what are you talking about? I mean, this is an influential

00:35:53.040 publication. There's not like a no school child in Ontario has died of coronavirus. Why is this in

00:36:00.080 this here in the story, like misleading parents like this? And they kind of wrote back hopefully

00:36:04.720 and said, well, if I check the, you know, the Canadian tab on all deaths by year, it says there

00:36:10.480 are three people under the age of 20 who have died of coronavirus in Canada. So I mean, technically,

00:36:15.280 it's true. I said, well, I watched this stuff in great detail. And I can tell you this individual

00:36:20.800 stories about all three of those people and who they are. And one's a 19 year old, so not a school

00:36:24.880 child. Toronto Public Health said the seven year old girl who died did not die of coronavirus. She

00:36:30.240 died with coronavirus. But Toronto Public Health was very clear that it was not the contributor to

00:36:35.280 her death. So I said to this person, why are you lying in this story? This is an error. And then,

00:36:39.680 of course, the conversation ghosted away. And they weren't interested in having that piece of

00:36:46.000 information in that story. And they never corrected the record. But not only do they not have an

00:36:51.920 interest in telling these contextual stories that I really think would help Canadians see a fuller

00:36:57.840 picture of what's going on and then be able to better make their personal risk assessments about

00:37:01.920 their health and make their own determinations about whether or not these various restrictions

00:37:06.000 are necessary, but they actively punish other people who do it. And I have been on the receiving end

00:37:11.920 of this in some very bizarre ways. Back at the end of last year, I wrote several stories about

00:37:17.600 comorbidity data. And I'll credit the Alberta government for having the most sort of rigorous

00:37:23.840 comorbidity open data platform out there. And what you find, and John touched upon this earlier,

00:37:28.880 is that in Alberta, and I'm sure it's pretty similar in all other provinces, that about 75% of the people

00:37:36.240 who've died of coronavirus had three or more underlying medical conditions. And then something

00:37:41.680 like a lot more like 18% had two or more. And then and then there's some that are one. And the people

00:37:46.480 who had no underlying medical conditions is about I think it's about 4% right now. And that that 4%

00:37:52.880 also includes people in their 80s, 90s and 100s, who didn't have underlying medical conditions, but still

00:37:58.960 died of it all. And I wrote this, and the story quoted, you know, very prominent infectious disease

00:38:03.760 experts who are cross pointed at universities and so forth. I mean, you know, very rigorous stories.

00:38:08.320 And I was that is the story that I believe I was denounced by Patty Hadju for for spreading dangerous

00:38:15.440 misinformation. Justin Trudeau kind of obliquely referred to it as well as, you know, something to

00:38:20.800 be denounced, and so forth. I understand Dina Henshaw had to kind of downplay it at a press conference 1.00

00:38:26.000 as well. And this is 100% verified facts that are right up there to see. And it's absolutely disturbing

00:38:33.360 that this was all said. And we know that if somebody dares, you know, in the United States,

00:38:38.320 the former president, he was a bit critical with people like that, whatever that Jim Acosta and so

00:38:43.200 forth, and we ought to rally behind Jim Acosta and make him some sort of international icon because the

00:38:47.280 president criticized him and so forth. And here, Patty Hadju calls my work dangerous misinformation,

00:38:52.560 even though it's just directly from the Alberta government website. And I guess, you know,

00:38:57.520 my media colleagues across the country were were satisfied with her saying that about me. And in fact,

00:39:02.240 there were pieces in CBC and another news outlet that, that basically took my work and denounced

00:39:09.600 it called it misinformation, they managed to find one doctor who, to that person's discredit was willing

00:39:14.560 to attach their name to that piece. And so it was very, very bizarre. And I will say CBC and another

00:39:19.840 outlet had to make revisions to their piece. And I did not have to make any revisions to my piece,

00:39:23.760 and they're still standing intact online, because they're 100% correct. I had a similar situation,

00:39:29.760 I guess, a few weeks ago, where we found out that a doctor who was doing a lot of advising to the

00:39:34.640 Ontario government, and also was talking about whether schools should be opened or closed and

00:39:38.800 so forth. He had actually been paid by a teachers union here to offer an argument in a court case

00:39:44.640 against the government for teachers issues. So I sort of reported this, the doctor when we got in touch

00:39:49.200 with him did not deny it, he confirmed it. And then the story hit. And there was bizarre attacks against

00:39:55.120 me. And they managed to get Christie Freeland to make a statement kind of standing up for this

00:39:58.800 doctor and so forth. And, and people labeling it this, that and the other story is 100% correct.

00:40:04.000 It's still up there. Now, there's no errors within I think parents had a right to know that very basic

00:40:10.000 information. But for whatever reason, you know, I was attacked for all of that. And media seemed okay

00:40:16.240 with that, even though they usually talk a big game about, you know, freedom of the press,

00:40:20.880 why politicians shouldn't criticize the media. So they punished that. Experts who are very highly

00:40:26.720 credentialed, but don't support lockdowns do not get the media presence and coverage that they should,

00:40:31.360 although it is, I will say it is starting to change a little bit, and they punish you,

00:40:36.000 they punish the general public, they punish the broader community, by bringing in bizarre attempts to

00:40:42.560 shut down people's social media, and so forth for saying things that, well, I don't know, I just want

00:40:48.320 to wrap here on Facebook has introduced new rules on things that they're going to delete.

00:40:52.000 And one of them, here's what they say, they say, COVID-19 is no more dangerous than the flu. So

00:40:57.200 that's something that will get your account shut down. Posts that deny the existence of COVID-19 or

00:41:01.840 downplay it are banned. Any claim that the number of deaths from COVID-19 is much lower than the

00:41:06.160 official figure must include additional information or contacts, and that can get you banned and your post

00:41:10.320 removed and so forth. Okay, well, Canadian pediatricians, very top ranking prominent ones,

00:41:16.240 have said in an open letter that coronavirus is less dangerous than the flu in children.

00:41:22.880 So that's not the exact sentence Facebook used, but should those doctors who are much more experts

00:41:28.640 in coronavirus than, you know, whoever's posting this at Facebook, should they have their Facebook

00:41:33.360 accounts shut down for giving their informed opinion on coronavirus in children? And then when they

00:41:38.160 go on to say Facebook that the deaths are much lower than they are, Statistics Canada says that 9% of

00:41:44.720 coronavirus deaths are actually deaths of other things like cancers and so forth. That's the

00:41:49.120 number they use. So should Statistics Canada's website be like shut down or something or should

00:41:53.680 Facebook not allow you to link to Statistics Canada because of all of this? So I guess Facebook, I guess

00:42:00.800 I kind of know what Facebook's trying to do, but they realize they're not actually, they should

00:42:06.000 realize they're not actually allowing a contextual and nuanced conversation about all the stuff

00:42:10.480 that we should be talking about here. But we're not allowed to because the politicians aren't talking

00:42:16.080 about it. My other colleagues in the media won't allow us to do it. And apparently Big Tech wants

00:42:20.400 to censor it. So it's a very troubling situation we're in right now. Right. Thank you, Anthony,

00:42:24.640 for those remarks. I definitely know how you feel. I think at one point I wrote an article about how,

00:42:30.640 you know, everyone's focusing on the case numbers, but they're not focusing on the fact that we're

00:42:34.880 testing like 10 times as many people as we were compared to like the last wave. And yeah, I got

00:42:41.120 attacked by all these other journalists. Like, it's like, as soon as you say something that falls

00:42:45.520 from the narrative, you're just open for attack from these sort of institutional powers. So

00:42:51.360 I get to evolve to that because the interesting thing is they now say they would have attacked you,

00:42:55.280 that would have been months ago. It was, yeah. They acknowledge that's true. So now journalists all

00:42:59.680 percent positivity is actually what matters, which is deals with the thing you're addressing. But they

00:43:03.920 attack you first. And then they a few weeks later, they realize how ignorant they are. So they have

00:43:08.640 to adapt to the fact that Candace was right all along like the comorbidity data reporting that I did.

00:43:13.360 Well, comorbidity stats are now used to determine who's more front of the line for vaccines. So

00:43:17.680 obviously it's a very important thing for us to talk about. So all these things they attack us for,

00:43:22.720 they have to sheepishly admit we're right about later. It is so it is so troubling. Yeah, it's so

00:43:28.000 interesting. And I hope we in the Q&A, we can get into sort of understanding why this is and why

00:43:33.600 there seems to be an agenda by people, you know, in positions of power and government and media and

00:43:39.920 tech, as you outline. But before we get into a couple more questions, I was wondering if anyone

00:43:45.520 on the panel wanted to respond to anything anyone else was saying, Sean, I know you spoke first,

00:43:51.040 it seems like you were sort of itching to jump in at certain points of John and Anthony's discussion.

00:43:56.960 So I'll give it over to you, Sean, if you want to make any comments.

00:44:01.280 Well, thank you so much, Candace. And actually, I loved everything both of those guys said. It was

00:44:05.520 fantastic. And I was actually regretting not packing more details into my opening remarks,

00:44:11.680 because they got to throw in so many good details. It's fantastic. But I guess it speaks to my initial

00:44:16.800 comments that there is so much information that we could attack here. Just the difference between a case

00:44:22.880 versus a an actual positive test and what kind of test PCR versus antibody testing and so on.

00:44:31.680 What do you do if you have a positive test and someone who has no symptoms? So that's all at that

00:44:36.240 care level. And we could I mean, docs debate at whole conferences on, you know, how what's the

00:44:40.960 definition of illness? And and yet all of this is being thrown out into the public. And people are

00:44:47.920 reading like mad on how did like the comments John made in the things that he's feeding into his court

00:44:53.760 case. I'm just like, wow, he is an expert on this. He's clearly read, you know, I don't know how many

00:44:58.960 thousands of papers, Anthony as well. And you just don't see that kind of attention to a particular

00:45:04.960 disease, you know, SARS-CoV-2, and everybody's reading so much about this. And it's being discussed in

00:45:11.680 the public forum. So I worry that, you know, do we have any way to make sense of it all to take a step

00:45:19.680 back? And so I just want to make a shout out to the McDonnell Laurier Institute. They published, I'm a

00:45:24.080 fellow there, as Candace said, but they published the COVID-19 misery index. And what they did is they

00:45:31.120 looked at 16 different data feeds. And these are all publicly available. And they chose these data feeds based

00:45:38.320 on what other large studies tend to use when they're comparing health care systems. And they looked

00:45:44.000 at 15 different health care systems around the world. Canada was one of them. And we ranked 11th

00:45:50.800 out of 15. But the nice thing about it, not just the fact that they tried to quantify suffering,

00:45:57.280 suffering by definition is a subjective experience, but it's important enough that we need to quantify

00:46:04.320 it. So they broke it down into the burden of disease. What was the impact of the disease itself

00:46:10.400 on Canada? So case counts, deaths, how many severe cases, how many patients needed to be in ICU?

00:46:16.800 But then they also looked at the misery caused by our response to it. So in other words, how strict

00:46:23.200 were we with our stay at home orders, our lockdowns, border closures, how good a job did we do with our

00:46:28.960 vaccination program and so on? And then the third bucket is looking at the economic misery? What

00:46:35.360 was the change to the GDP? What were the employment levels changing by? How much did our debt increase?

00:46:40.960 How much did our borrowing increase? And so I think we need somehow to guide people towards these

00:46:51.680 compilations of information. Because I mean, even just to suck everything out of John's head and

00:46:58.320 everything out of Anthony's head, we would all be overwhelmed. They know so much about this topic.

00:47:03.680 So how can we inform those of us in our family, the people we work with in such a way that they can

00:47:11.600 go out and speak confidently to start influencing change, influencing the people that they bump into

00:47:19.440 to change towards some semblance of sanity. So I would love to hear Candace, your thoughts on that.

00:47:25.520 John and Anthony thought, I agree, taking people to court is a great way to force change, hopefully,

00:47:30.880 if you win. But how can the average person who's listening in the audience start educating themselves,

00:47:38.800 but with a view towards change, as opposed to just becoming Uber experts on the different types of

00:47:45.360 vaccines that are out there. So I'll just throw that out there. Thanks so much.

00:47:48.640 I'll go first, if that's all right. We've got a brochure the Justice Centre's produced called

00:47:57.760 The Deadly Cost of Lockdowns. And it's our goal to see 1 million of these printed and distributed,

00:48:05.600 put into the mailboxes of Canadian homes and being distributed by people at their, you know, places of

00:48:13.760 work, places of worship, places of, I guess, recreation and entertainment, except those are

00:48:19.520 mostly shut down now. These lockdowns are not going away unless and until the public opinion shifts,

00:48:26.880 in my view. And top priority should be to kill the fear. And we're working on some papers to try to

00:48:35.440 target that and try to come out with the data and the facts that, you know, some people cannot be

00:48:41.920 persuaded. When we're in a state of fear, we tend to think poorly or not at all. When we're in a state

00:48:48.720 of fear, we're into this mode, you know, do something now, do something now. And of course,

00:48:53.920 lockdowns are very attractive because, hey, we're doing something. But I think there is a big chunk of

00:49:00.000 the population, maybe a quarter, maybe a third, maybe half who are open minded, they're not strongly

00:49:06.240 anti lockdown, they're not strongly pro lockdown. So you got a big chunk of the population that is open

00:49:12.480 to persuasion. So we're going to get these million brochures out there and get people reading them and

00:49:17.680 get people thinking. And it's just kind of a, you know, chipping away. How have any other public policy

00:49:26.240 debates transformed, right? You know, you think about something like you go from sodomy as a criminal

00:49:34.480 co-defense to gay marriage is the law of the land. Now that took several decades, but that was a 180 0.50

00:49:41.760 degree shift in thinking. I don't think we can afford decades to try and turn public opinion around

00:49:49.200 on lockdowns. But it's just a lot of hard work. And it's hard work that needs to get done. Because as

00:49:54.960 long as people are terrified of this disease, this virus, they will continue to embrace all kinds of, 0.98

00:50:02.320 you know, massive and irrational violations of their rights and freedoms. So everybody needs to

00:50:09.760 just roll up their sleeves, whether as in an individual capacity, or you know, if you're leading

00:50:15.680 some organization, we just got to roll up our sleeves and do the hard work of shifting public opinion.

00:50:21.760 Anthony, did you have anything to add? Well, I think John's completely right about the point that

00:50:27.360 it's really public opinion that's going to make things change. There's a Leger poll from a few

00:50:31.440 weeks ago that really, I got kind of depressed after I read it, because it shows Canadians really 1.00

00:50:40.000 do love their lockdowns. It's kind of disturbing to read some of these polls. And one of them asked,

00:50:45.360 when should lockdowns end? It was the opinion poll. And one of the answers, 20% of respondents said,

00:50:52.400 six months after all Canadians have received their vaccines, have been fully vaccinated.

00:51:00.480 And I feel like anybody who's been, who's fully informed of this whole conversation is thinking,

00:51:06.400 even just a little bit about this, that is an irrational, surreal, six months after everybody is

00:51:13.200 fully vaccinated. The vaccine is not yet mandatory. We'll see in all of this. So, I mean, everybody

00:51:21.200 isn't going to be vaccinated. It's sick. It is just bizarre. So that's kind of what we're dealing with

00:51:26.400 here right now in terms of some public opinion, a certain segment of society really embracing lockdowns.

00:51:32.480 It's incredibly sad. While we're on the topic of vaccines, I'll put this one towards you, Sean,

00:51:40.400 and then others can comment on it. But I mean, we've seen an abysmal rollout of these vaccines

00:51:46.480 in Canada. You know, health officials, including the Federal Minister of Health,

00:51:51.440 have said the vaccinated Canadians will still be subject to the same lockdowns and restrictions,

00:51:56.320 even after getting vaccinated. And then we're also seeing, you know, so-called bad strain in Europe

00:52:03.200 and some of the vaccines now being recalled and not being implemented. First, do you think that

00:52:09.760 Canadians should be concerned about the vaccines and any long-term effects, especially because they

00:52:14.480 were so rushed in being developed? But then also with the idea of all these new variants, is it possible

00:52:21.920 that the vaccine wash should protect Canadians against COVID? What about new variants? Is this

00:52:27.120 something that we might have to start taking every single year? And then maybe the other panelists can

00:52:32.640 comment about what your answer is and maybe what that will do for the future of lockdowns and our economy

00:52:40.880 and our society. Yeah, great question. And it's fascinating to see that the same people who have

00:52:47.680 a total lack of fear about COVID itself and lockdown seem to have an almost irrational fear when it comes

00:52:55.440 to the vaccine itself. So we could argue that both camps have a rational fear but just placed on different

00:53:02.800 things. So I think it'd be wise to have our eyes open and to look at whatever products we put into our

00:53:08.400 body, try to make sure they've been tested, try to ask our physicians, you know, does this make sense?

00:53:13.600 Does this seem reasonable? As far as I understand, the vaccines have been tested. They seem to be safe.

00:53:18.880 I took one, not so much to protect myself, but to protect my patients. I see a lot of elderly people. 1.00

00:53:24.480 I don't want to pass something on to them. But with the vaccine itself, as far as rollouts go, I was

00:53:29.920 talking with my office staff just this week and I said to them, you know, we could have predicted that

00:53:35.760 it would be the fiasco that it is. Every single fall with the flu vaccine, we put in a request and we

00:53:43.440 have to, so doctor's offices have to request to public health, you know, can we get our vaccine

00:53:48.320 batch? And if you put your request in too soon, your request is, you know, they say, no, it's denied

00:53:54.240 because it's too soon. It has to be submitted at the right time. If you submit it just a tiny bit

00:53:58.480 too late, then you're behind everybody else. Well, the pharmacies get to request directly to the

00:54:03.520 Ministry of Health. And so they have a completely different supply stream. So the pharmacies end up with

00:54:08.800 the vaccine first. So that's a frustration in itself when our patients are asking us for the vaccine,

00:54:14.880 but they give us a few little doses, you know, a small little basket. We use those up in a day

00:54:19.680 or two. Then we wait for the next supply, the next shipment. A week or two later, we get some more.

00:54:24.880 This happens all fall where we don't have enough until in January, we get a whole dump of all that's

00:54:30.960 left over and nobody wants the vaccine at that point because it's not really necessary. And so it goes to

00:54:35.840 waste. So this is standard operating procedure. So I was talking about the cultural level and the

00:54:40.880 type of decisions and governance that happens within healthcare itself. Well, we're seeing this

00:54:46.160 sort of thinking and approach writ large now at a national level for our vaccine program. Now,

00:54:53.680 it's an analogy. It's an analogy and it's not exactly the same, obviously, but I'm just saying we

00:55:00.960 shouldn't be too surprised when we see these vaccine rollout fiascos when we experience it every year

00:55:08.880 with the flu vaccine. The specter of mandatory vaccines I find terrifying for many reasons. Just

00:55:20.160 one of them is if we have public policy right now that is so not science-based in my view,

00:55:26.960 science is not going to really protect us from mandatory vaccines because all these policies

00:55:35.520 are being rolled out without much of a logical basis. Even in Quebec with the curfew, I was told,

00:55:41.040 and I did not personally observe this, but I was told that at a news conference,

00:55:45.040 either the premier or the chief medical officer was asked, will this 8pm curfew

00:55:51.760 have an impact to reduce the number of cases? And the answer was, we don't know. We have no idea.

00:55:56.960 I think you want to give up your freedom to be able to go outside after 8pm without walking a dog.

00:56:03.520 Because, you know, you can go outside if you walk a dog. I guess dogs are guardians against COVID or

00:56:08.480 something. But there is so little science and logic and intelligence behind so many of these measures.

00:56:16.320 And so what frightens me about the vaccines is that if you're going to say, well, you know,

00:56:21.040 if the vaccines, they don't make you not contagious, you know, but everybody has to have one and say,

00:56:29.040 well, where's the logic there, right? If that's true that the vaccine does not make you uncontagious,

00:56:37.200 I don't know what the correct word is. We'll say not contagious. If that's true,

00:56:40.800 why can't it just be left to each individual person? And so that I as a healthy 53 year old

00:56:46.400 would say, well, you know, this has not been subjected to long term testing and I'll take my

00:56:50.480 chances. Thank you very much. You know, why do I have to take the vaccine if it's not even going to

00:56:55.120 help me to be not contagious? So from a legal standpoint, if the government introduces mandatory

00:57:02.720 vaccination, it'd be the same test. Is the vaccine to be used against some unusually deadly killer that

00:57:11.040 really warrants it? Is it a pressing objective? Is there a rational connection between forcing the

00:57:16.720 vaccination either directly or indirectly and getting a better outcome? Is vaccination the least intrusive

00:57:24.320 way to protect society from this supposedly unusually deadly killer? And what are the harms of the

00:57:30.560 vaccines versus the benefits of the vaccines? That would be the legal test that would be applied.

00:57:35.680 And we are slowly getting ready for this. We'll be releasing in the months ahead, we'll be releasing

00:57:44.000 a substantive legal opinion on mandatory vaccination. Canada, and this sort of speaks to you, John,

00:57:51.520 but I think everyone can discuss it. Canada was a country founded on fundamental freedoms.

00:57:56.640 Conservatives and conservative politicians talk a good game about protecting freedom. You hear it a

00:58:01.600 lot. Liberals claim to be the party of the charter of rights and freedoms. And yet now we have both

00:58:07.520 parties that have just completely abandoned this notion. You rarely hear about our charter rights.

00:58:13.440 Instead, it feels like the decisions are being made by unelected health bureaucrats. It feels like a

00:58:20.480 health dictatorship. So I guess it's a pretty simple question, but how did we get here? How did we get to a

00:58:26.080 place where Canadians are so willing to give up their freedoms to experts and to mention something

00:58:32.480 that Sean said early in his address? I mean, there's so much literature and there's so much

00:58:36.720 contradicting information and there's so much we still are learning. And there's so many different

00:58:41.440 elements to weigh against one another. It's not just about the deadliness of one virus. There's so

00:58:46.400 many other factors. So how did we get here? If you can each just take a few minutes to try to answer that

00:58:53.440 very complex question and then we'll open it up to the floor. I think the short answer is cultural

00:59:00.160 rot. Culture shapes politics. Politics shapes law. And the charter is only as strong as the commitment

00:59:10.880 that the appointed judges have to our fundamental freedoms. The Justice Center has done a Judicial

00:59:17.920 Freedom Index looking at the attitudes of different Supreme Court justices towards our fundamental

00:59:24.880 freedoms. And that's on our website. You mentioned the medical dictatorship. This is a serious problem.

00:59:32.240 This is an argument that we are raising in our court actions. In addition to the charter arguments,

00:59:37.520 we're saying that Canada's constitution requires democratic accountability. It requires that

00:59:44.000 the governed have input into the laws that govern us. And the way our democracy is supposed to work 0.99

00:59:52.880 is that we elect the representatives and the representatives pass the law. So at least we have

00:59:58.720 an indirect say into the content of those laws. That's been completely tossed out the window in the

01:00:04.000 last 12 months where you have an unelected, unaccountable chief medical officer, not merely exercising

01:00:12.240 what I think are probably legitimate Public Health Act powers to quarantine sick people.

01:00:16.880 You know, it's one thing and we do have the legislation on the books. It's been there for a long time

01:00:21.040 that the chief medical officer can order and even force sick people into quarantine. Okay. I guess a

01:00:28.080 hardcore libertarian might disagree even with that, but you know, that's something that is at least, you know,

01:00:34.240 reasonable or arguably a legitimate law. What we've got now is chief medical officers making laws of broad

01:00:41.360 application that apply to the entire population released, you know, changed from week to week,

01:00:48.640 from month to month without any visible or transparent input from elected representatives.

01:00:54.880 So democracy has just really gone down the toilet, to use proper legal terminology, in the last year,

01:01:03.600 and we're raising this in our in our court actions, in addition to the charter arguments.

01:01:10.960 And Anita, do you want to add to that?

01:01:14.480 Well, I guess the first place we really went wrong was our deviation from the plans. It's an incredibly

01:01:21.680 disheartening and maddening experience to read through Canada's various pandemic preparedness plans,

01:01:27.760 whether they be federal, provincial or local units do it. It's incredibly disheartening experience,

01:01:33.440 but both are very positive and a negative experience to speak as I've done a number of

01:01:37.680 times with retired Lieutenant Colonel David Redmond, because you listen to someone who goes,

01:01:43.600 this is how we will solve this problem. And you just listen to and you go, that just seems to make

01:01:48.640 so much sense. So it's great to know that A, you're not crazy, that B, there is actually a way to deal

01:01:54.160 with this better than this madness. But then you realize how far afield we are from doing that.

01:01:59.360 These preparedness plans are really interesting. They all presuppose a greater clinical attack rate

01:02:04.400 than we have right now, meaning a much greater percentage of Canadians get sick with an illness.

01:02:09.200 They never at all suggest lockdowns of society. The main thing they talk about is just so you know,

01:02:14.320 your business may have issues because people will get sick or they will have to stay home to care

01:02:18.640 for sick loved ones. So you'd need to come up with a contingency plan. It's all about kind of serving

01:02:23.040 society as opposed to making society serve their goals. They presuppose that ICUs will be at 170%

01:02:32.160 capacity during a pandemic, the highest we've hit. And Sean, please correct me if I'm wrong here,

01:02:38.160 but I feel like no hospitals broken 110 in Ontario or in Canada, which isn't that out of step with general

01:02:44.960 flu season anyway. So you go, you're saying and at 170% ICU capacity, they still talk about ways to manage

01:02:51.920 the system, not this very odd argument that, that you need to, you know, rope off the children's

01:02:57.680 playground with caution tape, lest, you know, a low risk person get it, pass your low risk to a high

01:03:01.600 risk and then a hospital bed and so forth. I mean, it's really all of the plans, whether it's, whether

01:03:06.080 it's Colonel Redmond or, or, or Teresa Tam's document that she wrote in 2018 are all about what are the

01:03:11.520 problems, isolate the variables, solve those problems. And we are not doing that right now. Any of it.

01:03:17.600 Absolutely. And Sean, did you want to add to that?

01:03:24.480 Yes, I would. Please. Thanks so much. So yeah, building off what Anthony just said,

01:03:30.320 when you look at actually the total numbers, so using Ontario as an example, we peaked at around

01:03:34.800 1,600 admitted patients to hospital with COVID at around 400 of those were in our ICUs. Well,

01:03:43.040 the Ford government added 3,100 beds in 2020, 1,500 of which were ICU beds. So if all the new COVID

01:03:52.240 beds were in one giant COVID hospital, and we put all of our COVID patients into that COVID hospital,

01:03:58.720 it would be a little more than half full and our ICU would be almost 70% empty. So we can't blame the

01:04:06.720 challenges and the difficulties of the healthcare system itself on COVID. However, in some places,

01:04:12.240 COVID has made it a lot worse. Just very quickly, will me getting the vaccine help my patients? Well,

01:04:18.720 if I have a lower viral load myself, there's a lower likelihood that I'm going to shed viruses

01:04:24.400 onto my patients. At least that's what I'm hoping until we have better long-term studies on whether or

01:04:29.600 not me getting vaccinated truly helps my patients. I may be proved to be wrong completely, but I'm trying

01:04:36.160 to take the hopeful glass half full approach on it, as I do with the influenza vaccine every year as

01:04:41.760 well. I don't take it for myself. I take it hopefully to protect my patients, and I hope I'm not proved

01:04:46.480 wrong there. But your initial question, Candace, was how did we get here? How did we lose our freedom?

01:04:51.600 And I want to just do a shout out to this book here, James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution from the

01:04:57.680 mid-1940s. I think it was the early 1940s, and he said that we no longer have society run by governments.

01:05:05.520 We have society run by a managerial class, so a group of experts and managers, and they're the ones that are

01:05:12.720 making decisions. So we have expert advisory panels, and you can't get rid of them. They're really, really

01:05:18.240 smart. They're good at what they do, and they tend to stick around forever. And so although we lobby

01:05:23.200 governments to make changes, it's this managerial class, and they exist not just in government, but

01:05:28.480 in media, in academia, and elsewhere. Now I'll close with this comment. We're actually mixing two

01:05:35.200 different kinds of ethics. So I'm guided by a deontological normative ethical principle, which

01:05:41.200 means I have a duty to provide care to you. Public health has a duty to provide care to a population,

01:05:47.680 so they are guided by a consequentialist ethics, or a utilitarian approach. They want to do the

01:05:54.000 greatest good for the least harm to everybody. So when you butt those two approaches head to head,

01:06:00.480 inevitably you end up with problems. And to John's points earlier about the Oakes test, it reminds me

01:06:08.240 of a paper written by an ethicist in Ontario where he broke it down into four principles, where our first

01:06:14.240 principle is to think about Mill's harm principle. So we're allowed to restrict freedom to prevent harm,

01:06:22.640 but it's unethical to restrict freedom to decrease harm to the individual himself. We're not allowed to

01:06:29.760 do that. That's unethical. And so what we're seeing right now is straying into that protecting a person for

01:06:37.120 his own good. I know better for you what you should be doing, so I'll restrict your freedom to make your

01:06:41.840 life better. Well, that's unethical. And that's a completely different approach than saying I'm going

01:06:46.640 to restrict your freedom so that you don't punch someone else in the face. I think everybody agrees

01:06:52.800 on that restriction of freedom. So you've asked a huge question. How did we get down this path of

01:06:57.920 restricting freedom? What are the ethical principles involved? How are they different for the public health

01:07:02.320 officer versus the physician versus the member of parliament? But fascinating question, and thanks for asking it.

01:07:08.560 So I guess that managerial class is like the precursor for Trump's deep state, right? That's the same group

01:07:17.520 of people we're talking about here. All right. Well, thank you so much. We're going to open it up now to

01:07:22.320 the floor. So to everyone watching, if you would like to ask a question live personally to our panelists,

01:07:28.480 all you have to do is there's a little icon that says raise hand. So you can raise your hand. We'll call upon

01:07:34.320 you. We'll elevate you up onto the panel. You'll have one minute to ask a question. We have about 20

01:07:40.960 minutes or so left on this panel. So we're going to limit you to to a minute or less to ask a question.

01:07:47.280 And then we'll go through the panels. We'll each try to answer as well and in a minute or so,

01:07:51.520 so that we can get through as many questions as possible. So we'll start with our friend Roy Eapin,

01:07:58.160 who has his hand up. So we will elevate Roy up onto the panel. I want to thank the four of you for

01:08:05.920 talking about this subject because I've been despairing in my private life about all of this.

01:08:12.960 My question is about the reaction of our regulatory agencies. So I'm a physician, as you know, and I find

01:08:21.840 that many of my colleagues and I are afraid to say anything because our colleges have been slapping

01:08:29.760 the wrists quite hard of some of the people who have actually spoken out, like my friend Matt Strauss

01:08:36.720 and Dr. Cowher. And I think that our regulators have become a problem too.

01:08:45.040 The Justice Center has represented Dr. Chris Milburn in Nova Scotia, who wrote a column in the

01:08:54.000 Halifax Chronicle Herald. It wasn't about COVID, but it was just his opinion on what was going on

01:08:59.840 in the emergency room. They sent an intimidating letter to him. We sent a very stern legal warning

01:09:05.680 letter reminding the college that it is a government body. It is bound by the Canadian Charter of Rights

01:09:11.200 and freedoms to respect the freedom of expression of doctors, whether it's about COVID or lockdowns or

01:09:17.600 anything else. So I've repeatedly told all kinds of doctors in various email exchanges, if you get a

01:09:25.280 nasty letter from your college, contact the Justice Center. We will give you pro bono legal representation. 0.97

01:09:32.080 And I would just encourage doctors to keep on speaking out because you have more credibility than

01:09:36.640 a lawyer like myself or a journalist, media person, whatever. When a doctor comes out and says,

01:09:43.680 you know, COVID is real, but fear of COVID is exaggerated. Or if a doctor says lockdowns are

01:09:49.440 causing far more harm than good, people sit up and take notice. And it is the most powerful thing in the

01:09:56.480 public arena is for medical doctors to speak out against lockdowns. And the Justice Center is very happy to

01:10:05.200 write a very nasty letter to your college, put them in their place. The Nova Scotia College backed off

01:10:10.000 immediately, because we had the legal research and the case law. And just saying you're completely have

01:10:15.920 no business censoring the speech of doctors, that is the law. And if you want to proceed with this,

01:10:22.880 we will be happy to take you to court and we'll be happy to publicize everything that you're doing as

01:10:28.560 well. So that's my contribution. John, I want to say on behalf of physicians everywhere,

01:10:36.000 thank you for your help. I think that's fantastic. Unfortunately, by the time you engage with lawyers

01:10:42.400 in court and stuff like that, you've wasted so much time and been away from your patients for so long

01:10:46.960 that everybody's in pain and suffering, although hopefully you win. And so Roy raises a great,

01:10:51.840 great point about regulatory unreasonableness. And have we actually lost what it means to

01:11:00.320 certainly self-regulation? The last registrar of the Ontario College said it should be moved into

01:11:04.640 the dustbin of history. And they don't want to have self-regulation. They want to pursue medical

01:11:12.000 regulation. But this issue goes deeper. I mean, anyone with hospital privileges can't speak out unless you

01:11:20.400 get clearance from your hospital communications committee, because you want to make sure that

01:11:24.800 you don't embarrass not only the hospital, but more specifically the Minister of Health in your

01:11:31.040 province. I was silly enough to write just a very short letter to a tiny little local newspaper when

01:11:36.880 I was just out of practice. And it was George Smitherman was the Minister of Health at that time.

01:11:43.920 And so I invited Mr. Smitherman to come down and see how busy our emergency department was. And

01:11:49.280 because he was saying that all the good he was doing for the province. And I think probably in

01:11:56.000 hindsight, appropriately so, got in big trouble. The CEO called me up, the Chief of Staff called me up,

01:12:02.160 the Chief of the Medical Staff Association called me up, because the Minister of Health had called our

01:12:07.440 CEO the next morning and said, Hey, what's the matter? Can't you solve your wait times in your own

01:12:13.520 department? So physicians simply cannot speak out. And maybe the panelists have noticed that I have

01:12:19.120 been maybe less exercised in some of my comments than my two colleagues here, just because I have

01:12:26.000 to think about this all the time. I try to emphasize the pain and suffering from lockdowns. But at no point

01:12:32.480 have I denied the fact that people do die from COVID. And certainly are sick and vulnerable can get very sick and

01:12:39.360 die from this virus. I do think our response to it has been unreasonable and caused harm and suffering

01:12:46.880 in and of itself. However, I never once said that all lockdowns are always dumb, no matter what,

01:12:53.360 because I think perhaps there is a role in a targeted situation and in particular locality,

01:12:59.440 when the hospital resources are overwhelmed. So yeah, great point, Roy. And I apologize to the

01:13:06.240 people listening if I haven't been as brave as you would want me to be. Sean said something very

01:13:14.240 interesting there, though, that, you know, that we're told we have to listen to the doctors, we have to

01:13:19.520 listen to the experts. But the doctors aren't free to talk. And that's quite, that's quite a situation

01:13:25.920 we find ourselves in right now. Well, I'm free to tell you the party line. So for example, if we were

01:13:32.640 talking about cholesterol, the party line is, you must eat salad and do 1000 sit ups a day and get on a

01:13:38.960 statin because we want to save your life. I would be on shakier ground to come out and say, well, you know,

01:13:45.760 you're such an active guy, why don't we let your cholesterol run high? Because really, you don't,

01:13:51.440 you don't fit any of the tests or models that we use to predict your likelihood of cardiac events.

01:13:57.440 Well, now I'm on much shakier ground, it's far safer for me just to stick to the party line.

01:14:03.120 And it's been observed by many that there's almost an insurance liability component to the way chief

01:14:08.560 medical officers talk about things. I mean, there's so many activities that that the actual risk

01:14:14.720 possibility is infinitesimally small, that you will contract the virus in this setting or that setting.

01:14:20.960 But of course, you know, they will not of course, but I guess, and from what you're saying, they don't

01:14:26.000 want to say, you know, okay, yeah, it's safe to do this, because they'll be the one person who does go

01:14:33.360 and get it in a serious way from that. So then they have to tell the rest of us that, that we can't do

01:14:39.440 it. That seems to be a bit of a situation they, they box themselves into.

01:14:43.680 You're absolutely right. The doctors think in a very twisted fashion. So when we tell you to get

01:14:50.240 your colonoscopy, we'll tell you, you could bleed to death, you could have a hole in your bowel,

01:14:53.920 you could get infection, and you could wear a bag that collects your stool for the rest of your life.

01:14:58.400 But you should still get your colonoscopy. When really, if I was talking to my friend, I would say,

01:15:03.120 get your stupid colonoscopy, it's going to save your life, right? And I wouldn't emphasize all these

01:15:07.520 negative things. Now, I hope no one quotes me out of context for that. But you're exactly right. And

01:15:12.960 that's why we're seeing this culture of health care, the way we think and behave, amplified to

01:15:18.880 the front page of newspapers. And so that's why my plea is for some sanity, for some people to make

01:15:25.200 sense of all this and to back away from the details and start contextualizing it in a broader sense.

01:15:31.360 What sort of suffering are we causing this whole country, not just from the disease itself and our

01:15:36.240 lack of response to it, but our our regulatory response, our policy response and the economic

01:15:41.520 response. Great, great comments there. Okay, well, we have three questions left in about six minutes.

01:15:48.560 So I'm going to do rapid fire questions here. So we're going to hear from Scott, David, and Jay Ross,

01:15:56.880 and we'll do it in that order. So Scott, and then David, and then Jay Ross, please try to keep your

01:16:01.760 comments, keep your question to a comment, sorry, keep your comment minimal, ask a question,

01:16:08.640 keep it short, and then we'll go through and try to rapid fire answer them all. So let's,

01:16:13.200 let's start with you, Scott. Hi, thanks panel for a great discussion. I'm a professor of literature,

01:16:20.240 I'm teaching next week, 1984, the week after a brave new world. My question to the panelists is,

01:16:27.760 either these men are prophets, or there's something that was observable 70 odd years ago when they

01:16:37.520 wrote their books about the role of government and the understanding of human nature and dehumanization.

01:16:45.440 My question is, is the lockdowns and the way in which we've proceeded against this virus not related

01:16:53.040 to our misunderstanding what human nature is, a loss of the sense of human nature, which I think

01:17:00.480 is the consequence of a loss of Christian understandings of what a human being is, which

01:17:08.800 is connected with Christian theology, because of course God became man. But rather than me, go on

01:17:14.160 the panelists' comments. That's a, that's a great, great question, a great line of reasoning. Let's,

01:17:20.800 let's go to the next question, and then we'll get everyone to, to chime in on those topics. So we'll

01:17:27.680 promote David up to the panel. Okay, I'll make this pretty quickly, quick here. So all I've noticed from

01:17:37.120 the very beginning, and I know why I'm so unique, opposed to everybody else I know, all the elements of

01:17:42.640 this virus, the lockdowns, has happened in such a coordinated fashion, the attack on personal

01:17:50.160 rights and freedoms from bureaucrats and politicians and doctors and media and more. And it's happened

01:17:57.280 simultaneously across the whole world. And so each element of these things, if you really look into

01:18:04.080 it and try to do that, the falsity of the PCR tests, never intended to be a diagnostic test, mandatory mask

01:18:11.680 use, the vaccine not having been tested or even approved in the US by the FDA. And now there's talk

01:18:20.160 of mandatory vaccines and health passports that do not prove health in any way. Do any of you have

01:18:25.520 views on a possible greater agenda behind the virus and the vaccine? So is it profit? Is it power? Is it

01:18:34.080 ideology? Or something else? Thanks.

01:18:38.400 It's also a very good question. Thank you so much, David. And we'll go to the final question,

01:18:43.200 Jay Ross. If we can promote Jay Ross to a panelist. And you will have the floor to ask your question.

01:18:53.440 I think more egregious even than what the government has done is the attitude of Canadians. And when I tell you

01:19:03.840 just a few things about myself, you'll see this. I have lost the sympathy of my friends in Toronto.

01:19:10.640 You may be able to tell from my voice. I'm a dual citizen. I grew up in Brooklyn, New York. And my

01:19:17.920 permanent residence has been in Toronto for the past 60 years. I'm in my 80s. I'm retired now. And I'm

01:19:26.720 talking to you from my home in Florida. And I had hoped to be a returning snowbird. I did not know

01:19:38.080 that the present situation would hit me. And I'm afraid to come back. I do not want to be imprisoned.

01:19:48.000 I don't want to fear imprisonment. I become moderately claustrophobic just in thinking about it. I had

01:19:59.120 hoped that John Carpe could offer me some hope. But I have doubts about that. And as for specific

01:20:10.880 questions, there's my revenge part. Is there any penalty to the government if they lose anything

01:20:20.080 from a court case? On the more positive side, will they actually have to change the rules if they lose

01:20:28.880 anything? And from the realistic side, could this not take years before I can come home?

01:20:36.000 Okay, thank you. Thank you so much. And sorry, I didn't catch your name. I just have Jay Ross as

01:20:43.840 her name there. But that's okay. All right. So we'll do a rapid fire answer. So I'll just quickly sum up

01:20:49.120 the questions because I know we're running out of time here. But the first question was about predicting

01:20:54.320 human nature in these books like 1984 and Strange New World and whether the erosion of Christian values has

01:21:02.080 something to do with that. The second question was about possible ulterior motives or why so much of

01:21:09.040 this is happening. Is there something else at play that we're not being told? And the final question,

01:21:13.280 does the government actually have any responsibility? Will there be any consequences and should we have

01:21:18.320 any hope going forward? So let's answer in the same order that we did our opening remarks. So we'll go to

01:21:26.080 you first, Sean. Okay, sure. Great. I love questions from Scott. They're always easy to answer. Scott,

01:21:32.640 you're asking if there's a change in the ontology of what it means to be human, I would say there's

01:21:37.120 been a greater change in the ontology of government. And so I think another shout out, I love books,

01:21:42.000 as you can tell, Why Liberalism Failed, Patrick Deneen, fantastic book. And I think we're seeing an end to

01:21:48.160 liberalism, shall we say. And we're now starting to see government really for how to get things done,

01:21:54.000 as opposed to really being in government for government's own sake. So representative democracy.

01:21:58.960 So I would say that that's where the change lies in the ontology of government and civil society,

01:22:04.000 as opposed to the ontology of what it means to be a human. David asked,

01:22:08.000 is there a greater agenda to the virus and vaccine? I don't think there is. However, I think there may be

01:22:14.240 a greater agenda in our response to it. Certainly, that seems like we've heard comments from a number of

01:22:20.560 senior leaders saying that this is an opportunity for a great reset. So I don't think anyone started

01:22:26.160 the virus and the vaccine with ulterior motives. But certainly the response to it seems to be too

01:22:31.920 good of an opportunity to let pass. And to Jay Ross from Florida, I'm very jealous that you're in

01:22:37.600 Florida. So I'm glad that you're there. I would feel your same fear at returning. My relatives are in

01:22:42.640 Florida as well as to a penalty to government. I have no idea. I've yet to see politicians actually

01:22:49.280 be held to account in Canada. The Prime Minister of Finland resigned after failing to meet his

01:22:54.480 healthcare objectives that he promised while campaigning, whereas our current Prime Minister

01:23:01.120 promised a family doctor for every citizen in Canada. And I haven't seen him fulfill that promise

01:23:06.320 yet. So penalty to government, I would be surprised. Thanks.

01:23:10.720 Regarding Scott's question and human nature, one observation I keep on making is that

01:23:17.920 all these lockdown policies treat us as though we have no souls,

01:23:21.920 as if we are merely clumps of cells whose sole purpose is to stay alive as long as possible.

01:23:28.720 And there's this implicit dismissal of our mental health or emotional health, our spiritual health,

01:23:35.680 the way these policies are imposed and promoted, it's almost as though we are just kind of farm

01:23:42.400 animals and whatever, you know, whatever mental or emotional or spiritual health, whatever psychological

01:23:48.080 needs, doesn't matter, you know, thrust into isolation and loneliness, suffering, stress, anxiety,

01:23:53.600 depression, well, too bad, suck it up. We just got to keep your body alive. So I think that's a very twisted

01:23:59.760 ideology underlying the lockdowns. David's question, is there a greater agenda for profit, power,

01:24:06.160 ideology? My answer would be probably yes, but it's not something we're going to argue in court.

01:24:12.320 We don't need to. We're just looking at the lockdown harms versus potential benefits and the legal

01:24:17.680 justification. That's it. We're not going to go further. But, you know, personally, I think

01:24:23.600 there probably is something sinister at play. Again, not to be argued in court. And for Jay's question,

01:24:32.080 my answers are mostly negative. In terms of the timeline, yes, court actions do take years.

01:24:42.640 What we're hopeful for is making an application for an interlocutory injunction, which would still take

01:24:49.360 months, but not years. And so if we can get an injunction that that pending this three year or

01:24:55.120 four year court action, in the interim, we're not going to have the prison hotels, we're going to let

01:25:00.160 people go back to letting people quarantine at home. So that would be the hope is to achieve an 0.73

01:25:08.480 interlocutory or interim injunction. And penalty to government, sadly, no. Will they have to change the

01:25:16.080 rules? Yes. If the if the Justice Center wins in court, then that does have an impact that governments

01:25:22.400 get their hands tied in terms of what they can and cannot do in in future.

01:25:31.680 A very profound question from Scott, and it just makes me think of how

01:25:37.520 now more than ever, at least in decades, I don't know, since the Maoist period or what have you,

01:25:42.320 is the individual more subsumed beneath the group. And that is so, so troubling and disturbing. And

01:25:51.040 we're seeing it at play and other people goaded on to the question of agendas. I think Dr. Watley

01:25:56.000 makes a good point that it didn't start that way. But people have seen crisis and opportunity. At the

01:26:01.520 same time, I don't believe there's actually all that much organization going on only because more

01:26:09.040 what we're witnessing is institutional inertia. Sean mentioned, I believe it was Sean mentioning the

01:26:14.480 managerial class. These are not leaders, whether they're leading us to good or too bad. These are

01:26:20.320 followers. And I think we're kind of victims of that, just them tagging along with whatever memo they

01:26:26.240 got. And they just happened to have received the memo from Wuhan, unfortunately. And that's sort of what

01:26:30.880 normalized lockdowns, which previously these public health officials who are at the press conference

01:26:36.480 saying we need to do the lockdowns. And some of them teach it at University of Toronto Public Health.

01:26:41.120 Two years ago, if one of their students had written a paper calling for what's happening

01:26:44.240 right now, they would have failed that student, or at least, you know, given them a 51% or whatnot.

01:26:48.400 I mean, this is not, they would not have considered a serious idea before. To the lady in Florida,

01:26:54.560 it pains me to say this, but as someone who lives in Toronto right now, I mean, I have spent some

01:27:00.720 wistful time browsing through Florida real estate recently. I'm not a dual national, so it's useless what

01:27:05.840 I've done, but one can dream. Toronto is the shithole of North America right now.

01:27:11.360 I love my city. I love my country. But if I could be anywhere else right now, I would.

01:27:15.760 Well, Anthony, that seems like a very sad note to end the panel on.

01:27:20.800 Sorry.

01:27:21.760 I guess the whole topic is a little bit depressing. So thank you so much to all three of our

01:27:28.000 panelists. I think it was a really interesting conversation and discussion, and hopefully it leads

01:27:32.560 to a lot more dialogue and discussion about what can be done going forward. So thank you so much to

01:27:40.720 to the panelists, to the audience. Thank you so much. And we hope you have enjoyed our event tonight.

Juno News - March 20, 2021

Locked Down： Canada’s failed approach to COVID-19

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