00:12:58.340They had commissioners, people that have very impressive resumes.
00:13:01.460And they've worked for the better part of nine, 10 months from hearings to inquiry, to writing, to now publication to publish this report, which came out this morning and has, as I mentioned, five, is it 5,234 pages? I think. Yeah. No, sorry. 5324. 5,324 pages. That's how many pages there are in this.
00:13:25.040a lot of that is transcript from testimony, but even so, no one can say this is not thorough and
00:13:31.160meticulously researched. And when you read through it, a lot of the recommendations are things that
00:13:37.440are tremendously important. Things like the protection of civil liberties, not closing
00:13:43.000schools. That's a very important one. The presumption of innocence, the rule of law,
00:13:49.320things that are already supposed to be enshrined in law, but as we saw in practice, really do not
00:13:55.660have major protections. So that's a big part of what this thing has done. One section here that
00:14:03.260I'll read, which I think a lot of you will appreciate, churches do not require the permission
00:14:08.440of governments to open or close. However, when churches decided to respond favorably to the
00:14:15.440government's called two weeks to flatten the curve, those same churches must also have had
00:14:19.720decision-making authority to reopen when projected COVID death and illness numbers don't come to
00:14:25.580fruition. And I think that's a very important part of this discussion is that governments deferred
00:14:31.980to individual organizations and individual people and their ability to make decisions
00:14:35.820only when people made decisions that the government wanted. And when people didn't
00:14:40.360make those decisions voluntarily, that's when the involuntary measures came in. Vaccination was a
00:14:45.920great example of this. Everyone get vaccinated, get vaccinated. It's available to you. We'll promote
00:14:50.040it. We'll educate you. We'll run ads. And then when not enough people get it, that's when the
00:14:56.140mandates come in. That's when the vaccine passports come in. And that's when all these restrictions
00:15:01.620come in. So basically you never really had a choice. At the beginning, it was the illusion of
00:15:08.300choice, which is great for, you know, the people that make that choice and are happy with that
00:15:12.620choice, but then it becomes no longer that. And that was, I think, one of the most fundamental
00:15:18.600distinctions here. And when you read through this, there are other measures like schools
00:15:23.700should not be closed for periods of time, exceeding one week in duration. You'll have to excuse me for
00:15:30.040a moment. I have to cough and I don't want to blow out your eardrum. So I'm going to mute for a moment.
00:15:34.380thank you i like choked on something before the show started and i think it would like it had
00:15:41.700been working its way down and then must have started coming back up but uh nevertheless the
00:15:45.420joys of being live on the air here so that was the the school should not be closed for a period
00:15:50.400of time exceeding one week in duration that was a very important one and i will point out that that
00:15:55.520was very similar to what preston manning in his alberta report had ultimately concluded which was
00:16:01.980that people should view school closures as an absolute last resort and only for as narrowly a
00:16:11.060time as possible. Now, they didn't put a time frame on it. The National Citizens Inquiry Report did.
00:16:17.040They put a time frame as one week. What else do we have here? Enhanced mental health services. Yes,
00:16:23.860there has not been, to my knowledge, any real recognition by government of the harms of lockdown
00:16:30.380on mental health. Now, in many cases, the mental health harms people had as a result of COVID
00:16:35.620lockdowns were far worse than the physical consequences they would have had from COVID
00:16:41.060itself. I think this is well known to a lot of people, but has not been regarded well by people
00:16:46.520in positions to do anything about it. So looking at some of the other measures that have been
00:16:50.760recommended here, and again, I'd encourage you to read the report yourself, but they take a very
00:16:55.980firm position that they don't embrace what's called pandemic amnesty, which is this idea
00:17:00.280that we've heard championed often from people who were big fans of lockdowns that,
00:17:04.940well, we should just all move on. We should just say, well, yeah, yeah, it sucks and things happened
00:17:09.720and maybe we said or did some things we regret, but we should just move on and move forward and
00:17:14.060never think of it again. And one, I'll read one passage from the report here. They say it is not
00:17:20.180an option to take a business-as-usual posture and simply carry on as if nothing happened.
00:17:28.580Institutions must recognize and publicly admit their culpability in what was perpetrated on
00:17:34.800Canadians and, if appropriate, must face criminal and civil penalties for their actions. Now,
00:17:42.180it does not explicitly call for jailing politicians and public health officials, but
00:17:47.840that's a line I'm very curious about. Now, that's what the commissioners say, that they believe
00:17:52.480there should be criminal and civil penalties. Now, that to me is almost like a separate line
00:17:57.840from this idea that we shouldn't just have business as usual. But this is something I've
00:18:02.420heard increasingly from folks, that they don't want to just move on from this. And I'd say it's
00:18:06.060unhealthy to live in the past and dwell in the past and just never leave the COVID era.
00:18:10.520but it's similarly unhealthy for a society for a society to just move on as though nothing had
00:18:18.880happened and allow pretty egregious and heinous violations of civil liberties to stand without
00:18:25.080challenge and one of the ways that courts have allowed this to happen is with what's called the
00:18:30.180doctrine of mootness where when legal challenges are brought forward whether it's on the emergencies
00:18:34.380act or the air travel vaccine mandate whatever the case is uh people will argue the government
00:18:38.720will argue well it's moot now the vaccine mandate's gone and the court will say well yeah you know we
00:18:43.240have a backlog of cases we don't have time to do it all there's no mandate so this is moot just
00:18:47.880you know bring it up if it comes up again and we'll we'll go back to square one and the problem
00:18:52.400with that is that mootness allows the government to avoid scrutiny it allows the government to
00:18:57.400evade scrutiny so this is where i would be very very pleased to see one of these recommendations
00:19:04.620embraced and adopted which is to limit the scope of mootness doctrine and to make it so that a lot
00:19:10.340of these things cannot evade scrutiny by the courts although again i mean as we've seen when
00:19:16.160the courts have scrutinized these cases their decisions have not generally been the most
00:19:20.980favorable which is a big part of the problem also is that we need to take a look at the judiciary
00:19:26.220and its role in all of this and how a lot of judges were uninterested in hearing all the evidence and
00:19:32.120the testimony when it came to these measures and came to these restrictions so these are among the
00:19:37.720things that have stood out to me you i'm going to take a closer look at it i'm actually flying out
00:19:41.800to alberta so uh this week so i'll be able to you know dig into it a little bit more on the flight
00:19:46.600get some nice reading there but the reason i think this is important is that it sets a standard for
00:19:53.000a discussion that should exist in society and i heard from the lead counsel for the nci sean
00:19:59.640Buckley, that they sent out summons and requests to a number of public officials. I forget how
00:20:04.780many, but what they said is that not a single one answered with a favorable response. Most of them
00:20:13.980didn't respond at all. So no one agreed to testify under oath before this commission who didn't want
00:20:21.020to be there, who wasn't a voluntary figure, and obviously it didn't have subpoenaing power,
00:20:25.380but no public officials were prepared to withstand that. Now you may say okay well why would they?
00:20:30.400It doesn't have any official status. It's a citizen-led inquiry but I'd say putting the
00:20:34.920voices of citizens front and center is exactly what Canada and much of the world was missing
00:20:40.520over the last three years and hearing testimony that was very citizen focused and citizen oriented
00:20:48.880was precisely what this discussion needed so yes the fact that alberta and danielle smith
00:20:56.160had their inquiry is good but it was not meant to be as broad and holistic as this one ches
00:21:02.160crosby is an institution in newfoundland politics and was the administrator for the national
00:21:07.460citizens inquiry and is that i should say he joins me now ches good to talk to you thanks for coming
00:21:12.120on today thank you andrew you and i met in an elevator in calgary just before the dinner
00:21:19.640that's held annually to benefit the canadian center for constitutional freedoms i only had
00:21:26.840time to introduce myself but not to give you an elevator speech so maybe i got that chance now
00:21:33.640yes you certainly do and i know you were at that hearing and the press conference a few moments
00:21:38.440ago i'm glad you were able to peel away and join us one of the things that jumped out at me in
00:21:43.560the report and again i haven't read through the whole 5300 pages yet is a call to have criminal
00:21:49.960and civil penalties for institutions that the commissioners say were culpable in perpetrating
00:21:57.400these things on canadians now what are we talking about here i mean who are we talking about there
00:22:01.560we're talking about people at various levels of responsibility as a lawyer won't surprise you that
00:22:11.160my outlook is the more civil lawsuits the better but also eventually this country is going to have
00:22:19.240to get to the stage where criminal proceedings are taken usually those proceedings begin with people
00:22:27.240at lower levels of responsibility and then you you have people becoming whistleblowers you have
00:22:34.680people doing plea bargainings and they give the receipts and people higher up the chain of command
00:22:43.320and generally you work your way up that way but we very much do need criminal prosecutions
00:22:49.080what sorts of crimes am i thinking of here this is not an exhaustive list but criminal negligence
00:22:55.960causing death might be one uh hate crimes could be another and we have a very uh interesting and
00:23:03.880powerful uh statute in this country called the war crimes and crimes against humanities act
00:23:11.640it was borrowed from international law and uh it's sitting on the books of parliament since
00:23:19.880since the year 2000. Now one little problem with that is that it requires the permission of the
00:23:27.860Attorney General of Canada before a prosecution can be brought. I don't think you can expect to
00:23:34.620get that permission as long as the people are in office who are in office right now at this moment
00:23:41.220in Ottawa. That's the Trudeau Liberals. But eventually that permission will be granted
00:23:47.180should somebody want to seek it and i happen to know of a group of retired detectives who are
00:23:52.380hard at work on this now so do i take from your answer that you don't buy into the idea that this
00:23:58.180was a political problem that has to be responded to in a political fashion as though basically
00:24:05.260this was just bad policy and the antidote to bad policy is to vote out the politicians who imposed
00:24:10.100it well that's certainly part of the antidote they got to be voted out the tipping point is
00:24:19.860being reached not just in canada but elsewhere and that's you can visualize that's sort of like
00:24:25.900a dump truck load of sand and at a certain point in the tilt of the dump truck load some of the
00:24:33.780sand begins to run out and then there's a cascade of more sand and then the entire load comes out
00:24:40.000all at once well we're coming up to that point where things that were unthinkable even months
00:24:45.160ago are going to be very thinkable and in fact will be done and i'm talking about you know i'm
00:24:51.280talking about holding people criminally accountable as we were just discussing
00:24:55.920so let's talk about the relevance of this report because obviously it was quite monumental that you
00:25:02.740had uh this citizen-led initiative with no public funding and no official status no royal charter
00:25:08.700that existed and that carried on and that took obviously significant effort and financial
00:25:15.000resources to have happen. At the end of it, you have this 5,000 page report, but the process was
00:25:20.180boycotted by the people who were in positions to make these decisions that were ultimately rebuked
00:25:27.020and rejected by this report. I think it stands to reason those people will not acknowledge or if
00:25:33.100do will not heed the recommendations so at the risk of sounding kind of glib about this what's
00:25:38.940the point of it all well you know these the whole process of accountability always takes time
00:25:49.660we've been through a species of madness to uh there are various terms for it maybe it's mass
00:25:55.820hypnosis, maybe it's mass formations, mass something, mass fear. The commissioners described
00:26:03.100it as a terror. In other words, the authorities perpetrated a state of fear quite deliberately
00:26:09.900and knowingly. And you could use the term a psychological operation, a psyops on the civilian
00:26:17.580population of Canada. It takes a while to get over that and to begin to see life in a realistic way.
00:26:26.480And you probably agree with me that topics that you couldn't have talked about even six months ago
00:26:32.420in social situations now are no longer taboo. You can speak about them. This will continue to change
00:26:40.720and change in a proper and right direction. There will be accountability and without accountability
00:26:46.880there can't be reconciliation and god needs god knows that this country canada needs reconciliation
00:26:55.120well that was i mean when whenever we've talked about this in the indigenous context we're always
00:27:00.780told that you need truth before you can have reconciliation hence the name of the the truth
00:27:04.680and reconciliation commission and and in this context you can't have an honest discussion
00:27:09.760about what happened without dealing with the facts and even still some of the basic fundamental facts
00:27:15.700are in dispute by some of the so-called experts on whom the government relied and a lot of the
00:27:21.780other experts that the government rejected and you know i've often had this challenge as a
00:27:26.260journalist you know how can i sort of adjudicate between two people wearing lab coats with letters
00:27:30.900after their names but i think the government was very quick to shut down anyone with a heterodox
00:27:36.020view and that's part of the reason we got into these problems and they really just entrenched
00:27:40.260that the longer this went on rather than having any basic semblance of humility
00:27:47.540well there's a famous doctor uh dr peter mccullough who you're probably familiar with
00:27:53.220and he writes a substack he calls it courageous discourse and i like that term because there are
00:27:59.540two things that all of us need we need courage but we also need the ability to engage in discourse
00:28:07.700and to learn from people with different viewpoints and so what we've seen lacking in the authorities
00:28:18.180who have instituted the measures that we're all so familiar with from the last several years the
00:28:25.140repression repressive measures is they wouldn't turn up at the inquiry although they are invited
00:28:32.580and explain themselves what are they afraid of they obviously they obviously have something to
00:28:40.820be afraid of they know they've got things to defend that they can't defend very well
00:28:47.140and they're not willing to engage in discourse and as long as people aren't willing to engage
00:28:52.260in discourse and i'd actually include criminal proceedings as a form of discourse as well
00:28:58.660then we're going to have problems and we're not going to have reconciliation
00:29:03.460uh we we lost your video there for a moment uh you're frozen but we can still hear you so i'll
00:29:08.020ask you one final question here chess what would you like canadians to do with this because there
00:29:13.300is i think a call to action whenever something like this is published for canadians to read it
00:29:17.940and understand and review what would you like if you can assign the country homework here and
00:29:22.340certainly this audience what do you think canadians should take from this and do with this document
00:29:26.900Well, thanks, Andrew. I think that people should have a look at it. They should turn
00:29:34.340it over in their minds. There are going to be a spectrum of people, some who, you know,
00:29:38.580accept everything that's being said and are totally on the same page with the commissioners.
00:29:43.220there will be some who who are somewhere in between and there are others it would be more