Juno News - October 08, 2021Trudeau's vaccine mandate is unconcerned with civil liberties or science
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Summary
Justin Trudeau's government is mandating that federal public workers be vaccinated, even if they're working from home, and also if they travel by rail or air. Is this a good or bad thing? And what does the Supreme Court have to say about it?
Transcript
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Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
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Coming up, an in-depth look at vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and civil liberties in the COVID era.
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Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show. This is Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
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For our weekend shows, we try to shake things up a bit and do a deep dive into some of the big issues that we talk about on the show and some other fora,
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and bring in some other voices to really delve into the implications of them.
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And this weekend, we're going to do something very timely, which is talking about the vaccine mandate that Justin Trudeau's government just announced a couple of days ago,
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requiring federal public servants to be vaccinated, even if they're going to be working from home,
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and also anyone wanting to travel by rail or travel by air.
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So we're going to talk about the implications of this legally, culturally, insofar as Canada's efforts to vanquish the pandemic are concerned.
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And I have a great team of people that have joined me to tackle this.
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We've got Anthony Fury, a True North contributor and also host of the fantastic post-media podcast, Full Comment.
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We've got John Carpe, the president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms,
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and also Aaron Woodrick, who's the director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Domestic Policy Program.
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Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Great to talk to you all.
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I want to talk to you about this first, Aaron, because this is from a policy perspective.
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Before we get into some of the legal aspects of it, a fairly concerning development.
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You've got the public sector union that represents the federal government employees saying that they had one day to weigh in on this.
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And despite the fact that the liberals were campaigning on a similar program to this for several weeks in the election,
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it seems like no one really planned it all that thoroughly.
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Yeah, it's disconcerting to have a program that's going to have such a huge impact on so many people's lives.
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And you don't really see any evidence that the government has consulted anyone, never mind the chief stakeholder involved, right?
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I mean, this is a government that usually pays close attention to the public sector union.
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Some would argue that they're a little too cozy.
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And yet in this instance, you even see the unions themselves saying, well, nobody even bothered to get any input from us.
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So I think it's more evidence that this is a policy that's sort of written on the back of a napkin.
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It's not well thought out. You know, they've made a sort of very broad emotional case about vaccine, the need for a vaccine mandate,
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but they haven't thought about any of the details or the implications or the needs for simple things like exceptions,
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which, you know, virtually every other mandate and sort of rules around vaccinations for particular places has.
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They have not really seemed to put much thought into it at the federal level.
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Yeah, let's talk about that, John, because we know that exemptions have been a key part of vaccine mandate discussions for several weeks and months.
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Now, the liberal government has said that they're going to be very rare, very narrow and very onerous for people.
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So they're trying to preempt against folks trying to just get a doctor's note or some religious exemption here,
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which in and of itself seems to be a bit of a concerning priority.
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But also the lack of accommodation on, you know, even allowing someone to work from home.
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So the fact that they've specified here that even if you work from home, you're a remote worker,
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you're not going to be in the office, you're going to have to be vaccinated to keep your job.
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It sounds like by design they're not granting people much latitude here.
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And the legal aspect and the science are meshed in together.
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You cannot separate them because under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
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governments can, in fact, violate our rights and freedoms.
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However, the onus is on government to justify it.
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So the Charter Section 7 right to life, liberty, security of the person very clearly includes a right to bodily autonomy
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that's been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court of Canada and others.
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What you get injected into your body is a personal, private decision,
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and it is a charter right to not be injected with a substance.
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And not only does that mean that the government cannot physically force you by taking four guys
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and holding you down on the floor and injecting you, not only a forced vaccination like that,
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but even a mandatory vaccination where there's very clear, very direct pressure like job losses,
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the government, it's a violation of the Charter right to bodily autonomy.
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So, you know, the government will have the onus in court of proving that this pandemic really warrants
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And I know that's been the government's propaganda machine, which is the mainstream media,
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the government-funded media has been saying for the last 18 months that, you know,
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this is on par with bubonic plague or the Spanish flu of 1918.
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But the truth, the reality based on government data and statistics is that this virus
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and even the variants of this virus do not warrant this kind of a draconian violation
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We're talking about the federal government's mandate here.
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Other municipalities are doing it, notably Toronto.
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Crown corporations that weren't immediately under the federal government's vaccine mandate
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I think I saw CBC is planning something along these lines.
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There's a cultural thrust behind this that I almost think is more concerning than the legal
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and political action here in that a lot of people seem to welcome this.
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Remember, Justin Trudeau was campaigning on this and won an election, however narrow a mandate it was.
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He won, really wedging conservatives on this, of making them out to be the crazy ones
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for thinking that your employment shouldn't be contingent on whether you're vaccinated.
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There's absolutely a cultural component to this, Andrew, and a sense of positioning
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and political positioning and going with the right narrative or the right trends.
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And one of the things that I've been lamenting for quite some time now is that Canada,
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and I would say Ontario in particular, is in something of an information silo
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in terms of how we typically think of ourselves as very cosmopolitan people.
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People in Toronto are just always patting themselves in the back for having that sort of attitude
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And yet right now, we are incredibly ignorant of what's going on in other jurisdictions
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How are vaccine passports being rolled out in other jurisdictions?
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Well, whatever you think of vaccine passports in general, do you support them?
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So many other countries, which in the past, we would look to them for best practices,
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or in the case of the Northern European countries, we're told you must be more like those social
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We find that in France, for instance, their vaccine passport, well, what do you got to
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Well, prove that you have had two doses of this vaccine.
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Or prove that you've had natural immunity, that you have had COVID somewhat recently,
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it's either 90 days or six months, somewhere in that time window, or show that you've taken
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a negative test recently, whether it's in the past seven days or past three days,
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It's much more broad-based, and it's not just about we have to get this 100% or what
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have you vaccination rate, but it seems more geared towards moderating things and making
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So many countries are doing this, and yet Ontario in particular, but other provinces,
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really going with perhaps the most severe best practices approach you can find based
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Yeah, I think that's an important point, and one I'd want to put to you, Aaron.
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I mean, do you find that throughout the pandemic, either with this mandate or even other policies,
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that the Canadian government has been trying to look and learn from the experiences elsewhere?
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I recall in one case, I think it was the hotel quarantine case, the government said,
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oh, no, no, no, we could have done things as harshly as Australia did, but we didn't.
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But generally speaking, I don't know if there is much of a consideration of these best practices,
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And I go even further and say that even within provinces, you don't see them looking at each
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I mean, sometimes you look at schools in Ontario as another example.
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You had other provinces which kept schools open during the entire first couple of waves,
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And yet in Ontario, Doug Ford and others talked as if they left schools open, it would be
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So I think, to be fair, this is a problem that afflicts Canadian policy on a whole range
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It's as if we're the only country in the world and we're not supposed to look anywhere else
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for any lessons, things like things like health care.
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And if we do look anywhere, it's only to the United States and only for bad examples,
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Which is why when you get into things like debate about health care in this country,
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the only answer a lot of defenders of the status quo have is, well, at least we're not
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Well, there are 200 other countries in the world, including some of these countries that
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like Anthony points out that we're often supposed to be mimicking in other policy areas.
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A lot of them have two-tier health care systems which get better bang for their buck and better
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We're only supposed to talk about the American system.
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And I think I would just say the other thing that's been missing in most sort of COVID debates,
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if you can even call them debates, because they're mostly just sort of declarations by
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governments that we have to take the most extreme position, is a sense of proportionality.
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You know, I certainly don't take the view that COVID is a hoax.
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I believe it is high risk to a certain group of people, and I think it needs to be taken
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But there is no real weighing of the cost-benefit of a lot of these policies.
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I think the benefit is overplayed, and the costs are downplayed, and there is a lot more
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cost in a lot of ways of these policies than politicians are comfortable discussing.
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What I do understand, and correct me if I'm wrong here, John, is that if the government
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is going to infringe on your constitutional rights, they're going to invoke Section 1
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and apply what they say are reasonable limits, the infringement has to be as narrow and targeted
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And secondly, that's not what's happening here.
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I mean, COVID is real, and it is a serious threat to a certain demographic, particularly,
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for example, if you are 85 years old, you're in a nursing home, you've got cancer, heart
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disease, emphysema, you have serious comorbidities, COVID will shorten your life.
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And so it's real, but whenever a government violates charter rights and freedoms, proportionality
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is part of it, and you have to weigh the benefits against the costs and the harms of your policies.
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There was a report coming out of Simon Fraser University within the past six months, I think
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it's a Dr. Allen, but I might not have the name right, but he said that the lockdown measures
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have cost at least three times as many lives as what has been saved, minimal, and possibly
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So that's the kind of scientific research that governments seem to be ignoring, and the
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past 18 months has just been this badgering propaganda that lockdowns are the only solution,
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lockdowns are saving lives, and now vaccines are the only solution, and so detached from
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science, and even from that spirit of humility where you would say, well, you know, what is
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There's not a single province in Canada that, to my knowledge, has actually conducted an
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open-ended cost-benefit analysis of lockdown measures.
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I note, going back to Justin Trudeau's announcement on this and some of the rhetoric he used in the
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campaign, that sure, you have a choice to not get vaccinated, but you don't have a choice
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to get on the plane if you're not unvaccinated, or to get on a train, or to go to an office.
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And when you're threatening people's employment, when you're taking away their mobility rights
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in effect within Canada, this isn't really a choice.
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No, it reminds me of a scene in The Godfather where they're talking about, you know, well,
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my father made him an offer he couldn't refuse, you know, and I said, well, what was that?
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And he said, well, you know, my father said, I'm going to count to 10, and when I get to
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number 10, either your signature or your brains are going to be on that contract.
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Well, technically, there was a choice there, but it's not fair to call it a choice.
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If you've got a gun to your head, you know, you can no longer support your family because
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That's not a choice in any meaningful sense of the word when you're threatening job losses
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or, you know, threatening that you cannot get on an airplane, you cannot leave the country
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And this is something I saw a couple of people bring up online.
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Now, no Canadian has a right to enter another country.
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That is something that we accept that other countries can set out their own policies on.
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But you do have a right as a Canadian to leave the country, assuming there's somewhere else
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The land border with Canada and the US is indefinitely closed.
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As of this point, the only way you can, and there's no land border anywhere else.
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So the only way you can go outside the country, apart by, you know, swimming across the Atlantic
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or Pacific, I guess, is to take a plane or take some commercial vessel, both of which are
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So is there a constitutional argument that could be applied here that Canadians are being
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denied the right to leave their country because they can't get on a plane and there's
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I think that the fact is, absolutely, given the rules in place now, your mobility rights
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have effectively been abolished in this country.
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And I think that, you know, there's a very, very high bar for the government.
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They have the right to curtail our rights, but the onus is on them to explain why they
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are doing it and that they are doing it in a way that is minimizing the impact.
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And they have not even engaged in that analysis.
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And that, to me, you know, just speaking broadly about that issue, that's the most fascinating
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thing to me is, you know, I think many people would be, they could be convinced on things
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like vaccine mandates or passports, but the government needs to make the case about the
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They're just sort of asserting that this is what we're going to do.
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And if you question it, then you don't care about people dying.
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And I think that's extremely disconcerting that, you know, even legitimate concerns raised,
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for example, people who might want to get vaccinated but can't, if you're going to treat those people
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identically to people who might not want to, I just, I don't think that that's, I don't
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And I really, it's just really disappointing that there are so many, and we know this from
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public opinion surveys, that a lot of people seem to be in favour of vaccine passports and
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And the justification seems to simply be that because it makes me feel safer and that the
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They're not concerned about the details and the evidence.
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They're just, if it makes me feel safer, I'm not really too concerned about other people's
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Have you been witnessing this as well, Anthony, when you look around and hear what people are saying
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here, that there seems to be this idea that we have a right to feel safe, not to be safe,
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but a right to feel safe, and that all of these measures, if they make us feel safer,
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I'll never forget an email I got from a reader a few months ago where I guess I complained
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about a rights violation and someone wrote in and said, oh, give me a break.
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This is all being done because we are in a pandemic, because people are dying.
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Maybe you believe everything that has been done is necessary.
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Maybe you're one of those COVID zero people who wants even more done.
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In fact, pretty much most rights are being violated right now.
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That's the question people need to ponder over themselves.
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And to the point of Aaron and John, maybe, you know, those can be overruled and various
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sections can talk over each other and make it work and so forth.
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And that's where I think it was Aaron brought in the proportionality issue.
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That's where we really need to sit down and talk about the fact, okay, is it really such
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that people need to lose their jobs or people need to be, you know, tackled by police if
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they don't wear their mask in this one circumstance or not?
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Or should the person get a fine like one would, you know, when you don't pay your parking and
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Yeah, and I want to ask you as well, Anthony, because my theory, and I'm open to being
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challenged on this, but my theory was that Justin Trudeau is trying to make as broad a
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vaccine mandate as possible, because it's the closest that can, that the government can
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really get to mandatory vaccination for the general population.
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So you do one that applies to as many people as possible, air travelers, train travelers,
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public servants, people that work from home for the public service, the janitors that go
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into government buildings on contract, because that's sort of the closest they can get to
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But I also realize that that sounds moderately conspiratorial, but plausible at the same time.
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No, I don't think it's conspiratorial at all, because we have a de facto mandatory vaccine
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in that if you wish to participate in society in the way one would have pre-pandemic, you cannot
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Of course, you can navigate the situation and, and, you know, let's be honest.
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I mean, this is clearly there were science fiction novels written about, you know, people
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who, who, who go rogue and, you know, live under the radar of society to avoid these odd
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And they make it work, but they're, you know, part of this different code of folks living
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And we can all laugh at those books that were written, but it is a similar situation.
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I mean, you know, I, you know, you, we've all heard the stories of people who, for instance,
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were running the, the illegal barber shops back when things were shut down, visiting people's
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There were places clandestinely messaging each other saying, okay, I'm a restaurant.
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I guess if you present it to me, I'll accept it, but I'm not bothering people about it.
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And there's one or two places in the media that are making a big show of it.
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And some of them have lost their liquor licenses for it, but there are many more that are doing
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They're talking off the grid with each other and their communities.
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I mean, it's really quite something to see this happen.
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Ontario printer, Doug Ford was adamantly against vaccine passports before he was in support
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I find it funny that to say now, oh, I don't support these passports is, I don't know,
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quasi conspiratorial, even though the very people implementing them were fervently against
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And Doug Ford was quite a prophet when he said this would create a split society because, well,
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he has created a split society by forcing people into these choices, navigating this
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And I'll go to you as the token Albertan on the panel here, John, because Jason Kenney,
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I mean, I guess Saskatchewan and Alberta were the last holdouts on opposing vaccine passports.
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And then Jason Kenney, a couple of weeks ago, puts this in, but again, doesn't call it
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And when we talk about the wordplay here, he says it's a restrictions exemption program.
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So if you're a business, you don't need to have a vaccine passport.
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You could also close, but if you, if you're open, this is what you have to do to get out
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And I think your point about the offer you can't refuse is a valid one here where it's
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When I, I think Andrew made a very important point that there's a difference between saying
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that no rights have been violated versus you're okay with the rights violations.
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Those are, those are two very different positions.
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I really think it's not, it's almost beyond debate that in fact, the government measures
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do restrict our charter freedoms to move to travel, entering and leaving a country freely
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is one of the hallmarks of our liberal democracies of a free and democratic society.
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And sure, you know, having to carry like a normal passport, not a vaccine passport.
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It's a minor restriction, but governments can regulate these rights.
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This is taking away the right to enter and leave Canada freely and all kinds of civil liberties
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When you patronize a business, I could go on and on.
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We can have a debate on whether they're justified or not.
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But what we have now in Alberta and everywhere is, I would call it medical apartheid.
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And we have first class citizens and second class citizens.
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And your first class citizen, if you've been vaccinated, the requisite number of times,
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and don't think for a minute, it's going to stop at two.
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In Israel, they've now mandated your vaccine passport is not valid until you've had your third shot.
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So two years from now, Canadians, your vaccine passport will not be valid unless you've had the seventh shot
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to deal with the second wave of the fifth variant, whatever.
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Government will be mandating injections once every six months.
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And if you choose not to get that seventh injection, your passport will not be valid
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And so it is in many ways similar to the racial apartheid that was enforced in South Africa
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You know, if you were not a white and you wanted to work in a white zone,
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you needed your legal official papers to be allowed to be there.
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And now we have zones all over the place where only vaccinated people are allowed to go.
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One of the big concerns that I have, and I'm sure you'd agree with this, Aaron,
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Government does not set up temporary infrastructure very well at all.
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When we were hearing even about the federal vaccine passport for international travel,
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the government was saying, yeah, we'll come out with one in December of 2021
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that will last about a year until we get a permanent one in place.
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We're already talking about permanent documentation for the vaccine passport system
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Is there a concern that you have that a lot of this infrastructure will outlive COVID,
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I worry about the wrong lessons being learned about some of these things.
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And look, I don't want to, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
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I don't think a lot of governments plan to make these things permanent,
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but they end up becoming permanent because the yardsticks move
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and because governments realize they can get away with it over time.
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You've seen governments, I mean, Anthony had mentioned flip-flopping by Doug Ford,
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Jason Kennedy flip-flopping, even Justin Trudeau, let's not forget,
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as recently as the spring said that it would be wrong, you know,
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to have these, to impose these sort of de facto requirements of vaccination.
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So they changed their mind and I think they'll change their mind in terms of temporary things.
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If they think that they can get away with it, odds are they're going to try it again.
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Yeah, and one interesting point here, and I know this goes outside of this week's announcement
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and looks at the bigger picture here, but the poor communications from the government at this,
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at many levels, has been noteworthy from actually masks make things worse
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to masks are mandatory, border closures are racist, border closures are necessary,
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we don't want a vaccine passport, we want one, it's up to the provinces,
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And it becomes very difficult to have any buy-in from the population when,
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to John's point about the, about third doses, fourth doses,
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that's a concern I'm hearing from people that were on the fence.
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They're saying, you know, I just, what's the point if in, you know, three months,
00:24:39.680
I'm not going to be, I'm going to go, I'm going to be de-vaccinated basically.
00:24:45.980
not a lot of public buy-in right now to what the government's selling.
00:24:51.700
And like, it's not, I think it's easy to understand
00:25:00.420
Nevermind if you're, you know, and I think something that's often not said
00:25:03.240
is that when we talk about people who are vaccine hesitant, for example,
00:25:07.280
it's not this sort of stereotypical guy who lives in the woods,
00:25:12.300
There are a lot of people, for example, in immigrant communities
00:25:14.520
who come from countries where they don't trust government for good reason.
00:25:19.140
And, you know, to sort of accuse these people of being conspiracy theorists
00:25:22.540
because they're rightly suspicious of authority
00:25:32.040
I would like to encourage other people to get vaccinated.
00:25:34.500
And I think governments are within their ambit to be encouraging
00:25:38.260
and to try and, you know, educate people in a way.
00:25:48.700
I think that's a very dangerous road to go down.
00:25:53.280
because I know that when provinces have announced these passports,
00:25:56.360
they've seen in the immediate days following uptake and vaccination.
00:26:00.640
And there's a part of me that looks at that and says that almost reinforces that it works.
00:26:08.680
because there are some people that are on the fence that do not fit in,
00:26:12.600
as Aaron said, to that, you know, anti-vax box.
00:26:15.040
They're just people that haven't gotten around to it.
00:26:18.760
And when those people get vaccinated because of a vaccine passport,
00:26:27.560
I mean, if you force people to do something, they will probably do it.
00:26:32.660
That doesn't suggest that you were right to force them in the first place.
00:26:37.180
And I know we've been discussing the degree to which the vaccine mandates are and are not,
00:26:41.040
you know, pretty much mandatory vaccination widespread,
00:26:44.800
but that's the attitude a lot of people feel themselves placed in.
00:26:50.460
It is interesting when we talk about the public conversation,
00:26:55.600
and that I have found the buy-in to be remarkably high in terms of how the goalposts shift.
00:27:01.880
I mean, the basic premise that if you're going to be pulled,
00:27:04.600
do you support vaccine passports or just, you know, people hanging out at the cafe or the park,
00:27:09.160
running into each other, talking about it, saying,
00:27:13.260
That's really seen as a radical thing to say in Ontario,
00:27:16.580
even though the chief medical officer said exactly the same thing just two months ago,
00:27:21.980
even though the premier said exactly the same just two months ago,
00:27:25.280
many top officials, many top doctors on television saying the same thing.
00:27:29.240
I happen to think they were right, and I do not support Ontario's vaccine passport system.
00:27:33.900
And it's interesting that that was the mainstream view.
00:27:36.340
I mean, we talked about how culture changes over, you know, oh, 10 years.
00:27:41.060
Now it's 10 weeks, it's 10 days even, how quickly attitudes change.
00:27:46.820
So I would have thought public buy-in for many of these measures would,
00:27:53.120
So the more and more severe the rules go, the more and more things get by,
00:27:56.480
the more and more we have nuanced and contextualized information to help us learn
00:28:00.180
exactly who is high risk of COVID and what we can do to assist those persons and so forth.
00:28:04.560
Sadly, I'm not so sure that that conversion rate has happened as high as I thought.
00:28:09.820
And public buy-in does seem to me to remain alarmingly high.
00:28:16.060
And I'd be interested in seeing some polling on this, you know, do you trust the government?
00:28:19.780
Very simple question, but I feel it might actually pain me to see how high that number is.
00:28:23.920
I don't know if you want to take this, John, or you, Aaron, I'll throw it out to you both,
00:28:27.780
but what recourse is available to federal workers?
00:28:31.020
Can they file a constitutional challenge or do they have to hope the union takes it up
00:28:35.860
and go through some arbitration process if they want to challenge this policy?
00:28:42.520
You can take charter violations, you can take to court in the abstract,
00:28:53.340
So, you know, as soon as these laws come into force, you know,
00:28:57.780
any person or organization could already take them to court.
00:29:01.180
If you want a more persuasive fact scenario and a better chance of success,
00:29:05.460
it would be somebody that has lost their job and has been fired for not getting injected
00:29:12.460
with the mRNA substance that, you know, by the way,
00:29:17.560
has not been subjected to any long-term testing in humans.
00:29:20.740
So, you know, it's not, there are valid reasons for not getting it.
00:29:26.580
So, yeah, federal workers would have to, if they want to challenge it in court,
00:29:33.300
If they quit, you don't really have a legal claim,
00:29:37.240
or certainly not as strong of a legal claim as a situation where the employer says,
00:29:42.220
you are fired and I'm terminating your employment because you are not vaccinated.
1.00
00:29:47.900
That gives you a stronger legal foundation to take it to court.
00:29:53.040
The aspect of this that I wonder is if their whole intention is to put the fear into people
00:29:58.940
and then not actually act on it for that reason.
00:30:01.040
To avoid having to defend against a real challenge.
00:30:04.420
Of course, if news travels that it's a fairly toothless mandate,
00:30:12.780
Justin Trudeau was talking about how these are the strongest,
00:30:16.960
And I never want to be accused of urging the government to do more.
00:30:20.040
But I do find it interesting that for something they're arguing is meant to be so serious,
00:30:28.800
And obviously, they're saying that lying is a disciplinable offense,
00:30:35.480
But they're not even going as far as they're saying they're going in some ways.
00:30:40.200
Yeah, look, you asked the question about whether they're really just trying to spook people
00:30:45.620
In fact, that's the sort of implicit purpose of these passports.
00:30:48.960
It seems to be that, you know, it's funny when I see people, you know, sometimes online,
00:30:53.940
they'll say things like, well, you know, I feel so much safer now going to a restaurant
00:30:58.760
Well, we all know that even vaccinated people can't.
00:31:01.500
There are breakthrough cases and they can still spread it.
00:31:03.780
And you sort of see people who jump into the argument and say, well, no,
00:31:06.920
the real reason is to encourage people to get vaccinated.
00:31:09.780
So I was saying these, if you're acknowledging that the actual prohibition is not serving
00:31:15.700
a public health purpose, then all you're left with is that it's supposed to be a pressuring
00:31:19.620
device to get people to, you know, to get increased the vaccination update rate.
00:31:23.900
So I like, I just, I find that fascinating that the publicly stated reason, oh, we're making
00:31:31.480
It's not actually defended by anybody who knows anything about disease.
00:31:35.120
They say, well, the real reason is it's a nudge to people saying, well, you know, you might
00:31:40.500
And so we're going to, we're not going to make you, you're going to take that away from
00:31:44.720
That's the real reason behind things like passports.
00:31:47.800
Well, that, that bait and switch though is very key.
00:31:50.420
And I know, Anthony, you talked about this a while ago in the context of Ontario, where
00:31:54.280
Ontario's government never really thought that lockdowns were helping people or saving lives.
00:32:03.220
They wanted to give people fewer reasons to leave the house.
00:32:06.760
It had nothing to do with whether it was safe to go into a store, nothing to do with whether
00:32:10.920
it was safe to go into any other thing that had been shut down.
00:32:16.060
But when we talk about the legality of this, you can't all of a sudden start prescribing
00:32:20.860
off-label use of lockdowns, which is, I fear what, to Aaron's point, this whole thing is
00:32:27.720
And the problem is a lot of these things that were just brought out were brought in out
00:32:31.460
of an abundance of caution, a lot of members of the public, even, you know, very educated
00:32:35.680
people took that to mean, no, this was actually extremely risky.
00:32:43.760
If you go to the grocery store sort of without a mask, and if you at all get anywhere close
00:32:47.620
to someone, you're going to get this illness and you're going to very quickly be hospitalized
00:32:52.460
And most of that is just not true, so much so that the federal contact tracing app that
00:32:58.120
Dr. Theresa Tam, I guess, oversaw, that doesn't register contact between people unless you're
00:33:03.120
together, unless you're within six feet of each other for 15-minute duration, even if
00:33:10.320
So if you're standing beside someone at the grocery store for 10 minutes, 10 consistent
00:33:14.360
minutes at the checkout line, and you're four feet apart, and that person later tests
00:33:20.500
Because Dr. Tam is telling you, you can't really get COVID from them in that situation.
00:33:25.800
And yet at the same time, we're currently in an environment in Ontario where you're going
00:33:29.400
into a grocery store where I know that doesn't have the vaccine passports, but probably 80%,
00:33:33.680
90% of people are vaccinated, yet you still have to wear a mask, and you're still encouraged
00:33:38.960
to sort of be fearful in that environment, even though it's been established by none other
00:33:44.320
than Dr. Tam herself, that you're not really catching COVID.
00:33:47.280
John, one of the painful realities that we've seen in the last year and a half has been that
00:33:59.980
Let's look at airplanes and trains, for example.
00:34:04.080
Everyone on every commercial plane in Canada is going to be vaccinated, so masks off.
00:34:13.520
Universities in Ontario and elsewhere have mandated vaccination.
00:34:17.680
They've not said, OK, you can take your masks off.
00:34:21.040
And that's where I get very concerned, is knowing that we're not, not that I think liberty should
00:34:27.160
be traded, but we're not even being given the courtesy of, OK, let's give a little for
00:34:34.400
Well, liberty has died in the hearts of many Canadians.
00:34:44.040
And if a love for liberty dies in the human heart and if it dies in culture, it's pretty
00:34:51.320
hard to, you know, revive it using politics or even the courts.
00:34:58.140
But this is, we're in a very serious crisis where people are still scared.
00:35:06.020
I mean, statistically, if you are under 70, you have a greater risk of dying from a car
00:35:16.820
And I could go on and on with all these, I mean, death rates in Canada in 2020.
00:35:20.860
If COVID was truly the scary, you know, the Spanish flu of 1918 equivalent, you would have
0.99
00:35:29.080
seen a significant uptake in the death rates in Canada in 2020.
00:35:34.340
Well, death rates in Canada in 2020 were very much in line with 2019, 2018, 2017.
00:35:41.740
That's simply what Statistics Canada will tell you when you look at the data.
00:35:45.440
But unless and until we can get rid of the unfounded fear, and again, I say unfounded
00:35:52.500
fear, there is a legitimate healthy fear of COVID, that it is real, it is a threat to
00:35:58.700
But there's no basis in reality for the entire population to be scared of this and to be
00:36:06.320
But unless and until we can counter this fear, as long as people are, as long as the majority
00:36:11.640
of people are living in a state of fear, they will continue to acquiesce to more and more
00:36:20.320
I mean, once people accept a vaccine passport for COVID injections, why would they object
00:36:26.860
to government expanding the vaccine passport to other things?
00:36:30.040
Like, you know, we just want to make sure that you have not visited any hateful internet
00:36:36.100
So we just want to see your passport to make sure that in the last three months, you have
00:36:41.260
not visited any hateful websites as determined by the government.
00:36:50.040
I was hoping to end on a cheery note, and then John opened with liberty is dead.
00:36:54.820
Aaron, do you have any optimistic wisdom you can close this out on?
00:36:58.760
Well, look, I would just say that I hope that more and more people start to decouple fear
00:37:06.300
I think you can take COVID seriously without being scared 24-7.
00:37:09.540
And I think it's unfortunate that, you know, governments seem to have decided early on that
00:37:14.080
the only way to get people to take it seriously was to scare the crap out of them.
00:37:18.020
The problem with that is, of course, it's hard to bring them back.
00:37:21.100
And nothing the government has done since has sort of, we've abolished all perspective on
00:37:26.840
And I think it's just troubling to me that there are still some people that are living like
00:37:31.000
it's March 2020 in terms of fear, even though we've learned so much since then.
00:37:35.780
And of course, the other danger with that is that, you know, if everything is equally
00:37:39.320
risky, then people start to question every measure.
00:37:41.840
And if you, I think it just undermines the government's efforts.
00:37:44.700
If every single rule is equally important, then people are going to start to say, well,
00:37:50.400
So I have hope that we will finally turn the corner on this.
00:37:58.400
Aaron Woodrick, Director of the Domestic Policy Program at McDonnell-Laurier Institute.
00:38:04.260
John Carpe, Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms President.
00:38:19.680
Again, if I ever want to end on a cheery note, I can't do a civil liberties topic because
00:38:25.400
There often isn't a lot to be cheery about as far as liberties are concerned in Canada.
00:38:31.540
If you can't smile about it, all you can do is cry.
00:38:33.680
So I try to find ways to do the former, hard as it is.
00:38:38.020
My thanks to you all for tuning in and also to John, Aaron, and Anthony for coming on the
00:38:43.820
We will talk to you all soon with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:38:49.600
Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:38:51.440
Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.