Juno News - On C2C： How pandemic panic changed Canada forever

00:00:00.000 To get back to the COVID file here, I mentioned earlier on in the program the issues we were

00:00:14.500 having with trying to have some level of accountability for what the federal government

00:00:19.780 did over the COVID era. And I mentioned that bill that Pierre Polyev and the Conservatives

00:00:25.600 have gotten behind Dean Allison's private member's bill. And this is a bill, Dean Allison just like

00:00:31.400 retweeted me one second ago, so I didn't know if he was listening to the show. But he was retweeting

00:00:36.000 me in my comment about what I was just about to bring up here. The liberals are displeased that

00:00:41.500 anyone is trying to muck around on their record. We saw one tweet from Seamus O'Regan, which accused

00:00:49.160 Pierre Polyev of wasting time. Pierre Polyev tabled a bill to ban vaccine mandates. Today we have to

00:00:55.500 waste time debating it. Oh yes, heaven forbid you have to debate legislation and policy. That's

00:01:01.040 what Polyev wants to talk about right now. Not affordability, not inflation, not housing, not

00:01:05.480 what's happening in Europe or the Middle East vaccine mandates. Well, my comment to Mr. O'Regan

00:01:11.180 was that perhaps he wouldn't need to waste time debating your government's egregious violation

00:01:16.880 of civil liberties if you didn't egregiously violate people's civil liberties. And then Mark

00:01:22.020 Gerritsen decided to weigh in with his own comment on this to the same sort of effect

00:01:27.880 there. The anti-vax club. That's what Polyev is talking about right now. Not affordability,

00:01:33.900 not inflation, not housing, not the war in Europe or the Middle East vaccine mandates.

00:01:39.140 Did that sound similar to the other tweet? It's almost as though they just got like a fresh

00:01:42.860 batch of talking points sent down the pipeline from the PMO and they're all just copying and

00:01:47.720 pasting. Now, if Pierre Polyev were truly debating something irrelevant in the House of Commons,

00:01:52.860 he would be debating Mark Gerritsen. But that is not what was happening. He was talking about

00:01:57.100 vaccine mandates, which affected millions of Canadians and not only the individual people,

00:02:03.620 but affected the core civil liberties and right to make individual medical choices that all Canadians

00:02:10.280 enjoy. When you attack the freedoms of one Canadian, you attack the freedoms of all Canadians.

00:02:16.580 And it is noteworthy that the liberals do not want any real scrutiny of their record. That they

00:02:22.060 don't want to rehash this. That you see the government so fervently telling everyone when

00:02:28.160 there are court cases up that, oh, we need to dismiss this. It's moot. We can't talk about this.

00:02:32.720 We don't need this. Because they don't actually want people going back to that three-year period of

00:02:38.180 2020 to 2023, really. And seeing the extent to which these policies did break the law, did violate

00:02:47.020 people's rights. They don't actually want to have that discussion. And it's kind of interesting. There

00:02:52.380 was that call from, I believe Emily Oster is her name, a writer last year for Pandemic Amnesty, which

00:02:59.140 was basically, yeah, we all said some things. We all did some things. You know, it sucks, but it was a

00:03:04.320 difficult time. Let's all just move on. Let's just, you know, let bygones be bygones. And it's a lot 0.97

00:03:09.580 easier for the people who were responsible for some of the violations of people's rights to call

00:03:15.580 for Pandemic Amnesty. It's, in fact, it's very similar to Hamas attacking Israel and then calling

00:03:20.320 for a ceasefire. As if to say, okay, we hit you. Now we just want to stop. We just want to get rid of 0.97

00:03:25.660 this all. But that's kind of what's happening here. The people that are calling for us to move on and

00:03:30.020 never look at this again are the people that were very directly involved in the reasons we should

00:03:36.220 look into this period. Joanna Barron is the executive director of the Canadian Constitution

00:03:41.220 Foundation. Her colleague, Christine Van Gein, is the CCF's litigation director. The two have a

00:03:47.520 fascinating piece in C2C Journal about this and an even more fascinating book that is coming out in

00:03:54.220 the next few days here called Pandemic Panic. How Canadian government responses to COVID-19 changed

00:04:00.120 civil liberties forever. They don't want to move on from this without a deep dive into all that went

00:04:04.960 wrong and perhaps setting out a roadmap for how to avoid this in the future. Christine and Joanna,

00:04:12.100 wonderful to talk to you. Thanks so much for coming on today. Thanks for having us on. I mentioned a

00:04:18.440 couple of moments ago in court cases where these restrictions are coming up, we're often hearing

00:04:23.240 from the government's lawyers, these appeals to mootness. It was kind of this just little moment. It

00:04:28.220 was almost like the twilight zone. It's not really where we are now. So there's no point in dealing

00:04:32.540 with this. They've had some success on that, notably in the travel vaccine mandate case, although it

00:04:38.460 stands to reason what's happening with the federal court of appeal there. But let me just ask you on

00:04:43.400 that. Why is it important to not just let this era be put in a box and stowed away on some back

00:04:49.980 shelf? Well, I don't think that you've seen in recent memory an extraordinary, you know, areas of

00:04:57.260 life, just an extraordinary array of areas of life that we never imagined the government could start

00:05:02.600 regulating in. Health, our social lives, our religious lives, our expressive lives, pretty much

00:05:08.640 you name it. And if we can't go and see how our judiciary, how our politicians even, because

00:05:15.920 politicians ideally should use the charter as a sort of guardrails for their behaviour. If we can't have

00:05:22.640 an honest accounting of how we fared at this stress test, we are certain to see other public health

00:05:29.260 emergencies, pandemics, who knows what other nature of thing in the future that will affect all of those

00:05:36.200 domains of life. And we're doomed to repeat it. So as you rightly noted, we opened this book by being

00:05:41.940 sort of against the pandemic amnesty. Nope, we can't have amnesia about all these things that

00:05:48.420 happened. I'll ask you about this, Christine, as well, because one of the challenges here is that

00:05:54.160 there's a legal aspect. And I know you're approaching this book as two lawyers, and a lot of your advocacy

00:05:59.400 on these issues has been through the legal lens. There's also the political aspect and the cultural

00:06:04.220 and the media aspect. And I'm curious how much you think this is really a legal question versus a

00:06:10.600 political question. Well, it's a legal question, because a lot of these issues were addressed by

00:06:15.340 the courts. But I think there's also a political question as well, and also a cultural one. And one

00:06:21.760 of the things that we noticed in writing this book was how the culture around civil liberties seems to

00:06:27.460 have shifted really dramatically. I think that there became this pendulum swing towards expediency and

00:06:38.600 towards deference among the members of the public to government decisions that didn't quite exist

00:06:44.820 before. I think we were more skeptical of state power before the pandemic. And during the pandemic,

00:06:51.020 it seemed like there was only one way that you could think about government restrictions. And it was to

00:06:56.800 wholeheartedly celebrate them, even when they violated some of our most fundamental tenets of our

00:07:02.020 constitution. And these things are all interconnected, right? The politics, the culture, and the court

00:07:09.000 decisions that come out of it, and it kind of operates in a cycle. And now we have a number of

00:07:14.460 pretty terrible precedents legally, where courts evaded judicial scrutiny of rights violations through

00:07:24.460 procedural reasons. Mootness is one example that you gave, and we dealt with mootness a lot.

00:07:30.980 Another example is standing. There were cases where cases were dismissed for lack of standing. And

00:07:39.900 the really important and novel questions about our rights in the context of a unprecedented crisis

00:07:47.320 were never resolved. And if we don't resolve those issues from the courts, we don't have good precedent

00:07:53.340 to protect ourselves against intrusions in the future. We don't have everything resolved, right? We're

00:07:58.960 still waiting for some decisions. We had to put the book out at some point. I actually just received

00:08:04.420 my copy this afternoon. I was happy to see your endorsement on the back there, Andrew.

00:08:09.560 Oh, I'm happy it made it to it. I'm glad it was useful.

00:08:11.900 But yeah, not everything is resolved. In particular, we're waiting for the result in the Emergencies Act

00:08:22.460 Invocation Judicial Review, which we had brought. And we're expecting that maybe in the next few

00:08:27.400 months. Let me actually ask you, I'll start with you, Joanna, but if you want to bring in your own

00:08:33.040 perspective, Christine, please do, about the Emergencies Act. Because some of the government's

00:08:37.180 arguments on trying to dismiss these challenges have been insane. And one of them, I'm crudely

00:08:43.640 paraphrasing here, is basically, well, this was a once in a lifetime fact pattern. So therefore,

00:08:50.000 you know, there's no point in really, you know, having it out, because the next time the Emergencies

00:08:53.820 Act is brought in, it's going to be under different circumstances. And that's a really dangerous

00:08:58.420 argument, because every case has its own unique facts. And the point of precedent is not that you have

00:09:03.740 a one size fits all solution, but certainly you start defining this. So the fact that this never

00:09:09.680 before used legislation, the Emergencies Act came in, we've never had judicial guidance on how to use

00:09:16.160 it. And the government doesn't want that is incredibly concerning. Have I misrepresented anything

00:09:22.080 there, Joanna? No, certainly not. And I would add that in addition to the government pointing to

00:09:28.540 the so-called unprecedented nature of the Freedom Convoy, as you say, it's not clear to me that there

00:09:35.720 couldn't be some other type of emergency. We have climate issues, we have global security issues,

00:09:41.820 the world is a dynamic and changing place. But the important thing to add, even beyond speculation,

00:09:46.640 is that at the hearings, both at the Public Order Emergency Commission hearings, as well as the

00:09:51.940 judicial review hearings, the government very specifically and very stridently, I would say,

00:09:58.180 pushed an interpretation of the application for the Emergencies Act, which would give them very wide

00:10:04.600 ambit to act. So specifically in the Emergencies Act, which defines threats to the security of Canada

00:10:11.160 in a way that's linked to the CSIS Act, and that thus, you know, relies on a CSIS assessment,

00:10:17.240 an independent assessment, specifically to avoid concentrating too much power in the hands of the

00:10:23.200 executive. We heard the Prime Minister himself directly say that his interpretation, his government's

00:10:29.520 interpretation of that was that he could declare a state of emergency throughout Canada based on his

00:10:36.340 understanding of threats to the security of Canada as the governor and counsel, independent from any

00:10:43.220 external threat assessment. And at both hearings, he declined to provide any type of legal brief,

00:10:49.340 legal memo, let alone external threat assessment, which we know from the testimony of Jody Thomas,

00:10:55.540 was never provided. So actually, if that standard rules the day, Justice Rouleau seemed to accept that.

00:11:03.540 And we know that the federal government, which is going to be bringing forward proposals for amendments,

00:11:08.980 the Emergencies Act, they're going to seek to separate out the CSIS Act definition so that basically,

00:11:16.500 the Prime Minister can decide when an emergency exists, that would make it even more common that

00:11:23.300 something like the Emergencies Act could be invoked again. And perhaps Christine will talk a little bit 0.63

00:11:27.940 about what that actually meant throughout all of Canada, not just Ottawa.

00:11:32.100 Yeah, it is important to remember that when the Emergencies Act was invoked, it wasn't geographically

00:11:38.340 limited. The Prime Minister had said, this is short, this is limited and temporary, but it was not

00:11:46.820 limited. It applied across the country, even though by the time it was invoked, the protests were only

00:11:53.780 taking place in Ottawa. Literally, quite literally, as the Emergencies Act was being invoked,

00:12:00.180 the police were in the process of clearing the border blockades at Coutts and the blockades at the

00:12:07.940 other border locations had already been cleared. I think one of the interesting things that

00:12:13.940 the book does, though, is it looks at this from an approach of constitutionalism and places a premium on

00:12:23.700 the values of the rule of law. And look, we're not here to cheerlead the convoy. I think that the convoy

00:12:31.780 accomplished the political goals that it set out to accomplish. But certainly there were aspects of that

00:12:37.380 protest that were illegal. And we have a whole chapter in the book about the rule of law and the value of the

00:12:43.940 rule of law. And we hold the federal government to the standard of the rule of law. They can't invoke

00:12:50.820 legislation when the legal threshold to invoke is not met. They don't have this extraordinary power

00:12:58.020 unless they're authorized by law. But on the same hand, we need to hold members of the public who

00:13:02.740 participated in the convoy to the standards of the rule of law as well. And certainly there were

00:13:07.140 illegal acts that took place. People should face criminal charges related to those criminal acts.

00:13:12.980 And certainly a protest cannot go on indefinitely. By the end, the police were certainly entitled to

00:13:22.980 exercise ordinary police powers to move large vehicles off of streets, not to permanently block

00:13:31.140 a protest from proceeding. I think there's no question you can protest on the lawn of Parliament Hill,

00:13:36.260 but you certainly can't indefinitely block Ontario highways. There's provisions of the criminal code

00:13:44.340 that address that though. And there was no need to resort to the use of the Emergencies Act. So I think

00:13:50.420 that that's one of the things that is going to challenge readers in our book is whatever your

00:13:56.100 perspective on this, on all of these issues, on COVID, on the Emergencies Act, I think you need to be

00:14:01.380 prepared to have that perspective challenged because these things are not straightforward. Whatever the

00:14:06.900 mainstream media might say, this is not a black and white issue. These issues are complex. And that's

00:14:11.460 why we required an entire book that took us years to write to go through all of this. So I encourage

00:14:17.940 anyone who reads the book to read it with a very open mind because we really have spent a lot of time

00:14:23.300 trying to get the balance right on all of these issues. Well, one of the things that you have both done

00:14:29.540 in this, which I was very grateful for is you've gone right back to the beginning because I think

00:14:33.700 when the convoy and the Emergencies Act came in, we're talking about now more than two years after

00:14:39.540 the onset of some of the earlier COVID restrictions and some of those early stories that almost sounded

00:14:44.740 quaint in comparison of like, you know, oh, some kid, you know, given a citation for using a public

00:14:51.060 basketball court. Or I remember there was one in Hamilton where a drug dealer was arrested for

00:14:55.460 operating a non-essential business, as well as for dealing drugs, like some of these things,

00:15:00.180 which almost became novelties. But the reason they did is because the government response to COVID

00:15:05.300 got more and more severe. At that point, we didn't know we'd be looking at church closures, pastors in

00:15:11.060 jail, family gatherings being in some cases, you know, raided by police. And all of these things,

00:15:18.660 you know, are too large to just say we can't look into. And I'm curious what your thoughts are on

00:15:24.420 on the procedural aspects here, because I know there have been a lot of these charges that were

00:15:28.020 issued that have just been dropped because of judicial resourcing, you know, it's we don't

00:15:32.260 have enough time to go through three years of fines, courts are backed up. The problem with that,

00:15:37.060 of course, is that no one has had their day in court, the arguments and the precedents haven't

00:15:41.380 been made, but for the individual people charged it to win. So how do you reconcile those two?

00:15:46.660 I think we had one case that was like that week that we talked about in the book, and it relates to

00:15:50.980 an individual protester in Kingston. And you're so right, it's so quaint when you think back to it,

00:15:56.500 it's also surreal. So the facts of some of these stories, you know, like roping off the cherry

00:16:02.020 blossoms. So one of the stories we talked about in this book is a case that we were working on at the

00:16:06.580 Canadian Constitution Foundation, it involved a man named Robert, who was frustrated as a gym user and

00:16:14.500 a supporter of small business, a lot of his friends ran small businesses, he was frustrated with

00:16:18.980 these sort of never ending lockdowns, I think we were on our third or fourth lockdown in Ontario.

00:16:24.020 And he decided to go and protest, he wore a mask, and he went by himself, he wanted to start his own

00:16:30.660 protest to say and the lockdowns. And he was charged under I think it was at the time that the the stay

00:16:38.900 at home order. And I mean, the idea that someone protesting or standing outside alone with a mask

00:16:48.500 expressing a political view poses some type of public health threat. It's just absurd. And so

00:16:53.940 we wanted to use this as an opportunity to challenge the broader lockdown provisions. But

00:17:01.460 I mean, in the best interest of Robert, the charges were dropped. So obviously, that's the route that we

00:17:06.820 need to proceed with. But the result of it procedurally is that you don't get a precedent, you don't get to

00:17:13.540 challenge the broader, the broader law, which is really what the problem is here.

00:17:17.860 Well, and you've also done something really interesting, Joanna, instead of organizing it

00:17:22.580 chronologically, which I think probably would have been my instinct as a writer, you've gone by

00:17:26.740 basically sections of the charter and by individual rights and freedoms from, you know, freedom of

00:17:31.860 assembly to, to freedom of movement, freedom of expression, all of these things. And, you know, I think

00:17:37.540 it's easy to just look in general in the abstract or in the, you know, amalgam and say, you know, rights were

00:17:43.380 violated. But when you go through and point specifically to how and which rights, it's a very

00:17:48.900 powerful case. And let me ask you just on religion alone, because, you know, the government's defense of

00:17:53.860 its restrictions on worship ceremonies and services was that, well, you know, you have the right to, you know,

00:17:59.860 be a Christian, you have the right to be a Jew, you have the right to be a Muslim, but, you know, this is just 1.00

00:18:04.660 extraordinary times. But for people of faith, that is the government telling them how their

00:18:09.700 religion must be practiced. I mean, you look at with Judaism, which has very specific guidelines

00:18:15.620 on the number of people that need to be a part of prayer. Government was saying its edicts matter

00:18:20.340 more than these things that we supposedly have a right to define ourselves. Yeah, absolutely. And we

00:18:26.740 talk about in the book that, so for example, because of these, you know, unprecedented restrictions,

00:18:32.820 it brought out some of the frailties in the law itself. So for example, freedom of subjective

00:18:38.100 belief is extremely strongly protected in Canadian law, but freedom of assembly has much weaker

00:18:43.220 protection. And most of its protections are in the context of like labor union strikes and things like

00:18:48.980 that. And so it was quite jarring to religious, you know, religious Canadians that the government had

00:18:56.500 gave such short shrift to the value of in-person worship. I was actually at a conference in the UK this

00:19:02.020 past summer, and I was told that in London or in England at some point, gathering limits were set

00:19:08.100 at five people, at least in Ontario, they were set to 10 people, perhaps in consultation with the Jewish

00:19:13.460 community that would have let them know the minimum amount of people needed for a minion. Having that

00:19:18.980 that aside, there are churches in Canada that are important community hubs, particularly for new

00:19:25.300 Canadians, which elderly Canadians rely on, because, you know, participating by zoom isn't an option for

00:19:32.580 them. And you really saw that the government was just happy to say, well, you can just log on to zoom. And you

00:19:38.740 know, and you know, there's no violation to your religious freedom, the government actually contended in most

00:19:45.380 cases, and was countenanced by judges in many cases, that these strict restriction and gathering limits didn't even

00:19:52.980 engage the right to freedom of religion. And you can read about some of those some of those faith

00:19:57.860 communities in the book. Yeah, and I would also point out, I mean, at the early days, there was a much

00:20:04.820 different attitude. Like I remember when the Ontario government was actually taking a bit of a bit of

00:20:09.780 guidance from the Church of God in Elmer, which was the first one to really try to make drive-in services

00:20:14.820 a thing. And then you fast forward a few months, and you know, the government's having the doors locked,

00:20:19.220 and putting millions of dollars of fines down. And had people at least hiding in the bushes,

00:20:24.740 observing the congregants. Yeah, and I actually had, there was one report that was handed over

00:20:30.660 in Discovery, in which I was named as a person of interest in the police's investigation of that,

00:20:36.020 because I had interviewed the pastor, and they were suspicious that I might attend the service. So

00:20:41.460 they had like, preemptively put me on this on the person of interest list, which was quite an honor,

00:20:46.180 I had never had that before. I would have preferred it to be about something I did,

00:20:49.860 rather than something someone thought I might have done. But that's the insanity here. And I

00:20:54.260 wanted to bring up another dimension of this, that I had almost forgotten, and it was seeing you cite me,

00:21:00.100 that I remembered this, when the government of Ontario had tried to give police the power

00:21:06.980 to stop and question anyone who was outside their home about what they were doing. And, you know,

00:21:12.900 very gratefully, every police department in Ontario, except for the OPP, I think, in the next couple

00:21:18.900 days said, we're not going to do this. But like, that would have seemed insane, if you had said in

00:21:23.860 2019, that that was at all something that government would direct the police to do in a province.

00:21:30.340 Yeah, you did some really great reporting on that. That's, I think you were, you were the person who

00:21:34.900 was literally, quite literally counting which police... Well, like cold calling them all. I spent my weekend doing that. Yeah.

00:21:40.900 But great, great work, Andrew. And it's very valuable. And it's very important that we have

00:21:46.660 a record of that. The reality is that police are the ones who need to interact with the community.

00:21:52.980 And, you know, I'm generally skeptical of police power, but I know police as well. And I know that,

00:21:59.700 for the most part, police want to have a good relationship with their community and have worked

00:22:04.900 hard to develop a relationship of trust with the communities where they are policing. And they are

00:22:11.220 not interested, generally, in stopping mothers taking their children on a walk to a playground,

00:22:18.100 which is what that stay-at-home order was going to do, combined with that police authority to stop people.

00:22:24.580 And I'll point out that this police power to stop people and demand they identify themselves and

00:22:31.940 explain why they're outside their house. It's very similar to a policy that was controversial

00:22:38.660 in Ontario called carding, because carding had resulted in a lot of police interactions with

00:22:45.860 racialized communities, in particular, who are generally over-policed. And the government created a

00:22:53.380 policy that they would no longer engage in carding. And there were constitutional concerns around that

00:22:58.980 policy. And in fact, when, and it is so similar to what was announced and what was announced during

00:23:06.100 the pandemic was actually more extreme than the carding policy, that everyone sitting at that cabinet

00:23:12.820 table would have known how similar this is to carding. And in fact, we know from reporting from,

00:23:19.220 it was from the CBC, they found, they had spoken to someone who disclosed that in cabinet, the attorney

00:23:27.220 general, the provincial attorney general had warned cabinet that this policy is likely unconstitutional.

00:23:33.860 And cabinet and, and the premier Ford proceeded to enact it anyway. And I think that there's real

00:23:39.780 concern that there's bad faith there. The bad faith is that they knowingly enacted an unconstitutional

00:23:45.620 law. And they did it because they wanted some short term gain. And they knew that any judicial

00:23:53.220 oversight over that would not be heard in time before this temporary measure had been repealed. And

00:24:01.540 they would avoid any judicial scrutiny. And I think that that's bad faith. And it's very, very

00:24:07.220 concerning. I mean, there's some relief that the police said we will not enforce this, but it shouldn't

00:24:11.940 just lay with the police to say we won't be enforcing unconstitutional laws.

00:24:17.300 I'll go back to you, Joanna, just as we wind down here, because the subtitle of the book,

00:24:23.460 How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever is a lofty one.

00:24:28.820 And I know in your conclusion, you actually are rather forward looking about this, but I'll ask with a bit

00:24:35.780 of trepidation, because I don't want to know the answer as I think I know the answer. Do you think these

00:24:41.380 changes have been for the better or for the worse? And I'll just, you know, add a bit of an asterisk

00:24:47.060 there when, you know, all of the legal procedures have been exhausted, we have the definitive ruling,

00:24:52.260 do you think that we will end up with fundamentally a less free country than we had going into COVID?

00:24:59.380 I think we have a legal system that has shown how effectively it can obfuscate answering the question

00:25:05.300 with the declarations of mootness, with the deference to government evidence.

00:25:12.420 We were talking to another interviewer who found it remarkable that a lot of these issues weren't dealt with

00:25:18.180 under Section 1. So yes, we can acknowledge there was a rights violation, but maybe under Section 1,

00:25:23.140 which is the justification clause, maybe you can say in public health emergencies, it was justified,

00:25:29.780 but at least to acknowledge for the record that these were rights violations. So we really have

00:25:35.700 seen all of the ways that judges were able to wiggle out of telling the truth. Now I will sort of

00:25:42.020 conclude my remarks on a more optimistic note, which maybe I'm a little bit more of an optimist than

00:25:47.060 Christine. I think it depends on us. I think it depends on the culture that we build. I think it

00:25:52.100 depends on our collective understanding and our collective assessment of whether this was good enough,

00:25:58.580 whether we think that if we have charter rights, which were agreed to democratically, whether they

00:26:04.340 should mean something. And if we understand the sort of fiasco that happened and we'll hold future

00:26:09.940 governments accountable, just out of sort of shock of how abysmally our culture during the last pandemic

00:26:18.420 failed. I think that there could be hope, but it starts with looking in a sober way at how we actually

00:26:26.260 failed. If I knew that you were the optimist of the two, I probably would have reversed this. So we

00:26:30.820 get to end on Christine's dour note, but Christine, or maybe you do have a less dour note, but I'll give

00:26:35.940 you the last word on this. What's the forward looking takeaway you have after writing this?

00:26:40.180 I'm pessimistic. I think not only did the courts do a terrible job protecting our rights, I think people

00:26:46.500 have just shoved that memory away and forgotten it. And I think that I'm very concerned about whatever the

00:26:52.660 next crisis is, we've now broken the glass on the emergencies act, it could be used again in the

00:26:57.860 future, that our culture of civil liberties has been permanently damaged, because we've seen how

00:27:03.700 easily people have come to justify huge intrusions into their rights. I think that we're in a very dark

00:27:09.940 time politically in our discourse where disagreement is not tolerated at all. I'm completely pessimistic,

00:27:19.620 and I'm very dark. I'm in a very dark place, Andrew. But you know, that's why you definitely

00:27:26.020 should have ended with Joanna, but yeah. Well, I'll say this to try to put a somewhat

00:27:31.700 optimistic flavour on it, is that you have to diagnose a problem to fix a problem. So even taking

00:27:37.140 the approach that you have, Christine, and that both of you have through this book, I think is

00:27:40.420 essential to rectifying it, because there is, in a lot of cases, a political response available.

00:27:45.700 And I, you know, I was mentioning earlier, the private members bill in the House of Commons today,

00:27:49.860 again, may or may not pass. But you know, if you have a change in government, and the government

00:27:54.260 is saying, you know, this should never happen, I will not do this, we could perhaps try to normalise

00:27:59.540 civil liberties again. But I realise the courts will always remain a bit of a wildcard there.

00:28:04.740 Nonetheless, it is an incredibly, incredibly important book, I was very honoured to be able to

00:28:09.860 write a small blurb for you, and even more honoured that some of my work helped you put it together.

00:28:14.660 It's called Pandemic Panic, How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19

00:28:19.140 Changed Civil Liberties Forever. It's by Joanna Barron and Christine Van Gein,

00:28:23.540 and you can also read a bit of their work in C2C Journal this month as well,

00:28:27.620 to get a bit of a sense of what the book holds. Joanna, Christine, thank you so much,

00:28:31.300 and well done with this. Thank you, Andrew. And the book's available on Amazon right now,

00:28:35.380 for anyone interested. All right, wonderful. Yes, do head over there. And last time we had an author on,

00:28:39.940 it, like, spiked up in the numbers. So I'm hoping we can replicate that here. Go to Amazon

00:28:44.020 and check it out. Joanna, Christine, thanks very much. Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.

00:28:49.060 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.

Juno News - October 27, 2023

On C2C： How pandemic panic changed Canada forever

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