Juno News - October 08, 2021


Trudeau's vaccine mandate is unconcerned with civil liberties or science


Episode Stats

Length

38 minutes

Words per Minute

192.68953

Word Count

7,505

Sentence Count

375

Hate Speech Sentences

12


Summary


Transcript

00:00:00.000 Welcome to Canada's most irreverent talk show. This is the Andrew Lawton Show, brought to you by True North.
00:00:12.980 Coming up, an in-depth look at vaccine mandates, vaccine passports, and civil liberties in the COVID era.
00:00:20.340 The Andrew Lawton Show starts right now.
00:00:23.860 Welcome to the Andrew Lawton Show. This is Canada's most irreverent talk show here on True North.
00:00:32.280 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,
00:00:40.260 and bring in some other voices to really delve into the implications of them.
00:00:44.560 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,
00:00:53.080 requiring federal public servants to be vaccinated, even if they're going to be working from home,
00:00:58.420 and also anyone wanting to travel by rail or travel by air.
00:01:02.620 So we're going to talk about the implications of this legally, culturally, insofar as Canada's efforts to vanquish the pandemic are concerned.
00:01:11.440 And I have a great team of people that have joined me to tackle this.
00:01:14.720 We've got Anthony Fury, a True North contributor and also host of the fantastic post-media podcast, Full Comment.
00:01:20.940 We've got John Carpe, the president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms,
00:01:25.820 and also Aaron Woodrick, who's the director of the Macdonald-Laurier Institute's Domestic Policy Program.
00:01:32.120 Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on. Great to talk to you all.
00:01:35.220 Great to be here.
00:01:36.380 Great to be with you.
00:01:37.480 I want to talk to you about this first, Aaron, because this is from a policy perspective.
00:01:42.700 Before we get into some of the legal aspects of it, a fairly concerning development.
00:01:48.100 You've got the public sector union that represents the federal government employees saying that they had one day to weigh in on this.
00:01:55.180 And despite the fact that the liberals were campaigning on a similar program to this for several weeks in the election,
00:02:01.040 it seems like no one really planned it all that thoroughly.
00:02:04.240 Yeah, it's disconcerting to have a program that's going to have such a huge impact on so many people's lives.
00:02:09.560 And you don't really see any evidence that the government has consulted anyone, never mind the chief stakeholder involved, right?
00:02:14.880 I mean, this is a government that usually pays close attention to the public sector union.
00:02:18.920 Some would argue that they're a little too cozy.
00:02:20.840 And yet in this instance, you even see the unions themselves saying, well, nobody even bothered to get any input from us.
00:02:26.440 So I think it's more evidence that this is a policy that's sort of written on the back of a napkin.
00:02:31.160 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,
00:02:39.420 but they haven't thought about any of the details or the implications or the needs for simple things like exceptions,
00:02:44.480 which, you know, virtually every other mandate and sort of rules around vaccinations for particular places has.
00:02:53.200 They have not really seemed to put much thought into it at the federal level.
00:02:55.980 And that's really disconcerting.
00:02:57.060 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.
00:03:06.120 Now, the liberal government has said that they're going to be very rare, very narrow and very onerous for people.
00:03:12.340 So they're trying to preempt against folks trying to just get a doctor's note or some religious exemption here,
00:03:17.860 which in and of itself seems to be a bit of a concerning priority.
00:03:21.080 But also the lack of accommodation on, you know, even allowing someone to work from home.
00:03:26.360 So the fact that they've specified here that even if you work from home, you're a remote worker,
00:03:30.980 you're not going to be in the office, you're going to have to be vaccinated to keep your job.
00:03:34.600 It sounds like by design they're not granting people much latitude here.
00:03:39.400 Indeed, that's it. It does sound like that.
00:03:41.860 And the legal aspect and the science are meshed in together.
00:03:47.240 You cannot separate them because under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms,
00:03:52.520 governments can, in fact, violate our rights and freedoms.
00:03:56.520 However, the onus is on government to justify it.
00:04:00.560 So the Charter Section 7 right to life, liberty, security of the person very clearly includes a right to bodily autonomy
00:04:09.840 that's been upheld repeatedly by the Supreme Court of Canada and others.
00:04:15.560 What you get injected into your body is a personal, private decision,
00:04:21.560 and it is a charter right to not be injected with a substance.
00:04:27.000 And not only does that mean that the government cannot physically force you by taking four guys
00:04:34.460 and holding you down on the floor and injecting you, not only a forced vaccination like that,
00:04:40.360 but even a mandatory vaccination where there's very clear, very direct pressure like job losses,
00:04:47.080 the government, it's a violation of the Charter right to bodily autonomy.
00:04:50.760 So, you know, the government will have the onus in court of proving that this pandemic really warrants
00:05:00.440 this kind of a response.
00:05:01.940 And I know that's been the government's propaganda machine, which is the mainstream media,
00:05:06.300 the government-funded media has been saying for the last 18 months that, you know,
00:05:11.340 this is on par with bubonic plague or the Spanish flu of 1918.
00:05:15.000 But the truth, the reality based on government data and statistics is that this virus
00:05:22.820 and even the variants of this virus do not warrant this kind of a draconian violation
00:05:28.140 of Charter rights and freedoms.
00:05:30.840 Thank you, John.
00:05:32.220 I want to turn to you on this, Anthony.
00:05:33.760 We're talking about the federal government's mandate here.
00:05:36.140 Other municipalities are doing it, notably Toronto.
00:05:39.640 Crown corporations that weren't immediately under the federal government's vaccine mandate
00:05:44.000 have been encouraged to follow suit.
00:05:46.400 I think I saw CBC is planning something along these lines.
00:05:50.340 There's a cultural thrust behind this that I almost think is more concerning than the legal
00:05:55.480 and political action here in that a lot of people seem to welcome this.
00:05:59.600 Remember, Justin Trudeau was campaigning on this and won an election, however narrow a mandate it was.
00:06:05.100 He won, really wedging conservatives on this, of making them out to be the crazy ones
00:06:09.580 for thinking that your employment shouldn't be contingent on whether you're vaccinated.
00:06:14.420 There's absolutely a cultural component to this, Andrew, and a sense of positioning
00:06:18.720 and political positioning and going with the right narrative or the right trends.
00:06:23.340 And it's really alarming.
00:06:24.260 And one of the things that I've been lamenting for quite some time now is that Canada,
00:06:28.260 and I would say Ontario in particular, is in something of an information silo
00:06:32.560 in terms of how we typically think of ourselves as very cosmopolitan people.
00:06:36.140 People in Toronto are just always patting themselves in the back for having that sort of attitude
00:06:41.980 towards life and the world and news gathering.
00:06:44.520 And yet right now, we are incredibly ignorant of what's going on in other jurisdictions
00:06:47.980 and all across the world.
00:06:50.080 How are vaccine passports being rolled out in other jurisdictions?
00:06:53.260 Well, whatever you think of vaccine passports in general, do you support them?
00:06:56.660 Do you oppose them?
00:06:57.780 So many other countries, which in the past, we would look to them for best practices,
00:07:01.700 or in the case of the Northern European countries, we're told you must be more like those social
00:07:05.400 democratic nations.
00:07:06.740 We find that in France, for instance, their vaccine passport, well, what do you got to
00:07:11.140 do to get a green light on it?
00:07:12.780 Well, prove that you have had two doses of this vaccine.
00:07:15.200 Okay, that's what we have here.
00:07:16.260 Or prove that you've had natural immunity, that you have had COVID somewhat recently,
00:07:21.000 it's either 90 days or six months, somewhere in that time window, or show that you've taken
00:07:25.180 a negative test recently, whether it's in the past seven days or past three days,
00:07:28.500 whatever it is.
00:07:29.280 So there you go.
00:07:30.540 It's much more broad-based, and it's not just about we have to get this 100% or what
00:07:35.740 have you vaccination rate, but it seems more geared towards moderating things and making
00:07:41.040 things work as a society.
00:07:42.860 So many countries are doing this, and yet Ontario in particular, but other provinces,
00:07:48.580 really going with perhaps the most severe best practices approach you can find based
00:07:54.140 on pretty much anywhere in the world.
00:07:55.500 Yeah, I think that's an important point, and one I'd want to put to you, Aaron.
00:08:00.520 I mean, do you find that throughout the pandemic, either with this mandate or even other policies,
00:08:04.380 that the Canadian government has been trying to look and learn from the experiences elsewhere?
00:08:10.760 I recall in one case, I think it was the hotel quarantine case, the government said,
00:08:15.420 oh, no, no, no, we could have done things as harshly as Australia did, but we didn't.
00:08:19.440 But generally speaking, I don't know if there is much of a consideration of these best practices,
00:08:25.000 as I think Anthony termed them.
00:08:26.820 Yeah, not at all.
00:08:27.760 And I go even further and say that even within provinces, you don't see them looking at each
00:08:32.000 other.
00:08:32.280 I mean, sometimes you look at schools in Ontario as another example.
00:08:35.860 You had other provinces which kept schools open during the entire first couple of waves,
00:08:40.160 and there was no severe problem in schools.
00:08:43.000 And yet in Ontario, Doug Ford and others talked as if they left schools open, it would be
00:08:46.780 akin to murder.
00:08:47.540 So I think, to be fair, this is a problem that afflicts Canadian policy on a whole range
00:08:52.240 of issues and not just the pandemic.
00:08:53.860 It's as if we're the only country in the world and we're not supposed to look anywhere else
00:08:58.060 for any lessons, things like things like health care.
00:09:00.400 And if we do look anywhere, it's only to the United States and only for bad examples,
00:09:04.700 right?
00:09:04.940 Which is why when you get into things like debate about health care in this country,
00:09:08.140 the only answer a lot of defenders of the status quo have is, well, at least we're not
00:09:11.960 America.
00:09:12.360 Well, there are 200 other countries in the world, including some of these countries that
00:09:18.000 like Anthony points out that we're often supposed to be mimicking in other policy areas.
00:09:21.600 A lot of them have two-tier health care systems which get better bang for their buck and better
00:09:26.620 outcomes in Canada.
00:09:27.340 But we're not allowed to talk about those.
00:09:28.740 We're only supposed to talk about the American system.
00:09:30.620 So, look, I think it's a big problem.
00:09:33.480 And I think I would just say the other thing that's been missing in most sort of COVID debates,
00:09:38.700 if you can even call them debates, because they're mostly just sort of declarations by
00:09:41.780 governments that we have to take the most extreme position, is a sense of proportionality.
00:09:46.380 You know, I certainly don't take the view that COVID is a hoax.
00:09:48.960 I believe it is high risk to a certain group of people, and I think it needs to be taken
00:09:52.380 seriously.
00:09:52.840 But there is no real weighing of the cost-benefit of a lot of these policies.
00:09:57.540 I think the benefit is overplayed, and the costs are downplayed, and there is a lot more
00:10:02.740 cost in a lot of ways of these policies than politicians are comfortable discussing.
00:10:08.520 No, I think you're bang on there.
00:10:10.620 And I will say, I'm not a lawyer.
00:10:12.320 You're a lawyer, Aaron, John.
00:10:13.480 You're a lawyer as well.
00:10:14.700 What I do understand, and correct me if I'm wrong here, John, is that if the government
00:10:18.240 is going to infringe on your constitutional rights, they're going to invoke Section 1
00:10:23.240 and apply what they say are reasonable limits, the infringement has to be as narrow and targeted
00:10:28.640 as possible.
00:10:29.580 And that's, first off, do I have it right?
00:10:31.580 And secondly, that's not what's happening here.
00:10:35.940 I agree entirely with Aaron.
00:10:38.540 I mean, COVID is real, and it is a serious threat to a certain demographic, particularly,
00:10:44.280 for example, if you are 85 years old, you're in a nursing home, you've got cancer, heart
00:10:49.640 disease, emphysema, you have serious comorbidities, COVID will shorten your life.
00:10:55.160 And so it's real, but whenever a government violates charter rights and freedoms, proportionality
00:11:04.560 is part of it, and you have to weigh the benefits against the costs and the harms of your policies.
00:11:12.740 There was a report coming out of Simon Fraser University within the past six months, I think
00:11:18.380 it's a Dr. Allen, but I might not have the name right, but he said that the lockdown measures
00:11:24.820 have cost at least three times as many lives as what has been saved, minimal, and possibly
00:11:32.720 10 times, 20 times.
00:11:34.780 So that's the kind of scientific research that governments seem to be ignoring, and the
00:11:39.980 past 18 months has just been this badgering propaganda that lockdowns are the only solution,
00:11:48.080 lockdowns are saving lives, and now vaccines are the only solution, and so detached from
00:11:54.720 science, and even from that spirit of humility where you would say, well, you know, what is
00:12:00.780 the truth?
00:12:01.240 What is the data?
00:12:01.900 Let's look at the data.
00:12:02.680 Let's have a cost-benefit analysis.
00:12:05.200 There's not a single province in Canada that, to my knowledge, has actually conducted an
00:12:10.460 open-ended cost-benefit analysis of lockdown measures.
00:12:15.100 Well, there's been some wordplay here, too.
00:12:18.020 I note, going back to Justin Trudeau's announcement on this and some of the rhetoric he used in the
00:12:23.280 campaign, that sure, you have a choice to not get vaccinated, but you don't have a choice
00:12:28.140 to get on the plane if you're not unvaccinated, or to get on a train, or to go to an office.
00:12:32.760 And when you're threatening people's employment, when you're taking away their mobility rights
00:12:36.640 in effect within Canada, this isn't really a choice.
00:12:41.080 No, it reminds me of a scene in The Godfather where they're talking about, you know, well,
00:12:46.820 my father made him an offer he couldn't refuse, you know, and I said, well, what was that?
00:12:52.740 And he said, well, you know, my father said, I'm going to count to 10, and when I get to
00:12:58.760 number 10, either your signature or your brains are going to be on that contract.
00:13:03.600 Well, technically, there was a choice there, but it's not fair to call it a choice.
00:13:08.780 If you've got a gun to your head, you know, you can no longer support your family because
00:13:12.480 you're going to lose your job.
00:13:14.120 That's not a choice in any meaningful sense of the word when you're threatening job losses
00:13:19.880 or, you know, threatening that you cannot get on an airplane, you cannot leave the country
00:13:26.280 effectively.
00:13:27.740 Those are not choices.
00:13:29.780 So this is an important point.
00:13:31.680 And this is something I saw a couple of people bring up online.
00:13:34.440 And I want to go to you on this first, Aaron.
00:13:37.600 Right now, the Canada-US border is closed.
00:13:40.060 Now, no Canadian has a right to enter another country.
00:13:43.520 That is something that we accept that other countries can set out their own policies on.
00:13:48.740 But you do have a right as a Canadian to leave the country, assuming there's somewhere else
00:13:53.160 to go.
00:13:53.700 The land border with Canada and the US is indefinitely closed.
00:13:57.540 It's up for renewal, I think, on October 21st.
00:14:00.220 As of this point, the only way you can, and there's no land border anywhere else.
00:14:03.520 So the only way you can go outside the country, apart by, you know, swimming across the Atlantic
00:14:07.840 or Pacific, I guess, is to take a plane or take some commercial vessel, both of which are
00:14:13.500 going to now have this vaccine mandate.
00:14:15.360 So is there a constitutional argument that could be applied here that Canadians are being
00:14:21.320 denied the right to leave their country because they can't get on a plane and there's
00:14:24.980 no land border to cross?
00:14:26.340 I think that the fact is, absolutely, given the rules in place now, your mobility rights
00:14:32.080 have effectively been abolished in this country.
00:14:35.140 And I think that, you know, there's a very, very high bar for the government.
00:14:38.940 As John says, the government has the right.
00:14:40.940 Our rights are not absolute.
00:14:41.860 They have the right to curtail our rights, but the onus is on them to explain why they
00:14:46.560 are doing it and that they are doing it in a way that is minimizing the impact.
00:14:50.720 And they have not even engaged in that analysis.
00:14:52.460 And that, to me, you know, just speaking broadly about that issue, that's the most fascinating
00:14:56.140 thing to me is, you know, I think many people would be, they could be convinced on things
00:15:01.080 like vaccine mandates or passports, but the government needs to make the case about the
00:15:04.800 specifics.
00:15:05.080 And they're not.
00:15:05.660 They're just sort of asserting that this is what we're going to do.
00:15:07.960 And if you question it, then you don't care about people dying.
00:15:11.460 And I think that's extremely disconcerting that, you know, even legitimate concerns raised,
00:15:18.340 for example, people who might want to get vaccinated but can't, if you're going to treat those people
00:15:23.160 identically to people who might not want to, I just, I don't think that that's, I don't
00:15:27.240 think that's justified at all.
00:15:28.460 And I really, it's just really disappointing that there are so many, and we know this from
00:15:33.360 public opinion surveys, that a lot of people seem to be in favour of vaccine passports and
00:15:38.100 mandates.
00:15:38.840 And the justification seems to simply be that because it makes me feel safer and that the
00:15:43.000 ends justify the means.
00:15:44.100 They're not concerned about the details and the evidence.
00:15:47.060 They're just, if it makes me feel safer, I'm not really too concerned about other people's
00:15:50.060 rights violating, being violated.
00:15:51.500 And that's really troubling to me.
00:15:53.240 Have you been witnessing this as well, Anthony, when you look around and hear what people are saying
00:15:57.520 here, that there seems to be this idea that we have a right to feel safe, not to be safe,
00:16:02.780 but a right to feel safe, and that all of these measures, if they make us feel safer,
00:16:06.920 are therefore justified?
00:16:08.960 I'll never forget an email I got from a reader a few months ago where I guess I complained
00:16:14.060 about a rights violation and someone wrote in and said, oh, give me a break.
00:16:17.240 Name a single right that has been violated.
00:16:19.560 This is all being done because we are in a pandemic, because people are dying.
00:16:23.260 This is, all these actions are necessary.
00:16:25.420 And we go, well, hold on a second.
00:16:26.800 Step back.
00:16:28.320 Maybe you believe everything that has been done is necessary.
00:16:30.820 Maybe you're one of those COVID zero people who wants even more done.
00:16:33.740 But there are rights violations going on.
00:16:35.640 In fact, pretty much most rights are being violated right now.
00:16:38.200 You're just saying you are okay with that.
00:16:40.920 And I think that's the sort of discussion.
00:16:44.140 That's the question people need to ponder over themselves.
00:16:46.480 Yes, many rights are being violated right now.
00:16:48.840 And to the point of Aaron and John, maybe, you know, those can be overruled and various
00:16:53.820 sections can talk over each other and make it work and so forth.
00:16:57.060 But it is happening.
00:16:58.500 And you kind of deny it's happening.
00:17:00.160 And that's where I think it was Aaron brought in the proportionality issue.
00:17:03.820 That's where we really need to sit down and talk about the fact, okay, is it really such
00:17:08.060 that people need to lose their jobs or people need to be, you know, tackled by police if
00:17:11.700 they don't wear their mask in this one circumstance or not?
00:17:15.060 Or should the person get a fine like one would, you know, when you don't pay your parking and
00:17:19.720 it lapses and so forth?
00:17:20.700 Let's talk about that proportionality.
00:17:22.560 Yeah, and I want to ask you as well, Anthony, because my theory, and I'm open to being
00:17:27.860 challenged on this, but my theory was that Justin Trudeau is trying to make as broad a
00:17:32.880 vaccine mandate as possible, because it's the closest that can, that the government can
00:17:38.320 really get to mandatory vaccination for the general population.
00:17:41.480 So you do one that applies to as many people as possible, air travelers, train travelers,
00:17:46.360 public servants, people that work from home for the public service, the janitors that go
00:17:51.020 into government buildings on contract, because that's sort of the closest they can get to
00:17:56.120 a mandate under the legal means available.
00:17:58.740 But I also realize that that sounds moderately conspiratorial, but plausible at the same time.
00:18:04.940 No, I don't think it's conspiratorial at all, because we have a de facto mandatory vaccine
00:18:09.920 in that if you wish to participate in society in the way one would have pre-pandemic, you cannot
00:18:15.320 anymore unless you're not vaccinated.
00:18:17.360 So a mandatory vaccine to live your life.
00:18:20.000 Of course, you can navigate the situation and, and, you know, let's be honest.
00:18:24.480 I mean, this is clearly there were science fiction novels written about, you know, people
00:18:28.560 who, who, who go rogue and, you know, live under the radar of society to avoid these odd
00:18:33.440 rules and so forth.
00:18:34.380 And they make it work, but they're, you know, part of this different code of folks living
00:18:37.600 underground.
00:18:38.100 And we can all laugh at those books that were written, but it is a similar situation.
00:18:41.860 I mean, you know, I, you know, you, we've all heard the stories of people who, for instance,
00:18:46.540 were running the, the illegal barber shops back when things were shut down, visiting people's
00:18:50.360 homes when they weren't supposed to.
00:18:51.500 That was a thing that happened right now.
00:18:53.300 There were places clandestinely messaging each other saying, okay, I'm a restaurant.
00:18:57.280 I know I got to do the vaccine passport thing.
00:18:59.440 I guess if you present it to me, I'll accept it, but I'm not bothering people about it.
00:19:03.080 And there's one or two places in the media that are making a big show of it.
00:19:06.200 And some of them have lost their liquor licenses for it, but there are many more that are doing
00:19:09.860 it.
00:19:10.860 They're talking off the grid with each other and their communities.
00:19:13.200 And it's a whisper campaign and so forth.
00:19:15.340 I mean, it's really quite something to see this happen.
00:19:18.060 Ontario printer, Doug Ford was adamantly against vaccine passports before he was in support
00:19:22.760 of it.
00:19:23.020 I find it funny that to say now, oh, I don't support these passports is, I don't know,
00:19:27.040 quasi conspiratorial, even though the very people implementing them were fervently against
00:19:31.100 them before.
00:19:32.060 And Doug Ford was quite a prophet when he said this would create a split society because, well,
00:19:36.660 he has created a split society by forcing people into these choices, navigating this
00:19:42.440 landscape.
00:19:43.740 Yeah.
00:19:44.280 And I'll go to you as the token Albertan on the panel here, John, because Jason Kenney,
00:19:48.920 very similar thing was, was the last holdout.
00:19:51.580 I mean, I guess Saskatchewan and Alberta were the last holdouts on opposing vaccine passports.
00:19:56.300 And then Jason Kenney, a couple of weeks ago, puts this in, but again, doesn't call it
00:20:00.240 a vaccine passport.
00:20:01.200 And when we talk about the wordplay here, he says it's a restrictions exemption program.
00:20:06.280 So if you're a business, you don't need to have a vaccine passport.
00:20:09.720 You could also close, but if you, if you're open, this is what you have to do to get out
00:20:13.880 of it.
00:20:14.120 And I think your point about the offer you can't refuse is a valid one here where it's
00:20:18.480 the illusion of having a choice.
00:20:21.440 Yeah.
00:20:22.380 When I, I think Andrew made a very important point that there's a difference between saying
00:20:29.160 that no rights have been violated versus you're okay with the rights violations.
00:20:34.940 Those are, those are two very different positions.
00:20:38.580 I really think it's not, it's almost beyond debate that in fact, the government measures
00:20:45.160 do restrict our charter freedoms to move to travel, entering and leaving a country freely
00:20:49.800 is one of the hallmarks of our liberal democracies of a free and democratic society.
00:20:55.820 You can enter and leave and enter and leave.
00:20:58.180 And sure, you know, having to carry like a normal passport, not a vaccine passport.
00:21:02.540 It's a minor restriction, but governments can regulate these rights.
00:21:06.340 This is not just regulating a right.
00:21:09.320 This is taking away the right to enter and leave Canada freely and all kinds of civil liberties
00:21:14.300 to associate freely with your business.
00:21:17.600 When you patronize a business, I could go on and on.
00:21:21.880 These are rights violations.
00:21:22.920 We can have a debate on whether they're justified or not.
00:21:25.520 But what we have now in Alberta and everywhere is, I would call it medical apartheid.
00:21:32.260 And we have first class citizens and second class citizens.
00:21:35.700 And your first class citizen, if you've been vaccinated, the requisite number of times,
00:21:43.200 and don't think for a minute, it's going to stop at two.
00:21:46.180 In Israel, they've now mandated your vaccine passport is not valid until you've had your third shot.
00:21:51.980 So two years from now, Canadians, your vaccine passport will not be valid unless you've had the seventh shot
00:21:59.540 to deal with the second wave of the fifth variant, whatever.
00:22:03.780 Government will be mandating injections once every six months.
00:22:07.780 And if you choose not to get that seventh injection, your passport will not be valid
00:22:15.040 and you will be a second class citizen.
00:22:17.180 And so it is in many ways similar to the racial apartheid that was enforced in South Africa
00:22:25.940 where you had to have the correct papers.
00:22:28.440 You know, if you were not a white and you wanted to work in a white zone,
00:22:32.240 you needed your legal official papers to be allowed to be there.
00:22:36.000 Otherwise, it was a whites only zone.
00:22:37.680 And now we have zones all over the place where only vaccinated people are allowed to go.
00:22:43.120 One of the big concerns that I have, and I'm sure you'd agree with this, Aaron,
00:22:48.780 is that government does not do temporary.
00:22:51.920 Government does not set up temporary infrastructure very well at all.
00:22:55.800 When we were hearing even about the federal vaccine passport for international travel,
00:23:00.300 the government was saying, yeah, we'll come out with one in December of 2021
00:23:03.880 that will last about a year until we get a permanent one in place.
00:23:07.420 I'm like, well, hang on.
00:23:08.040 We're already talking about permanent documentation for the vaccine passport system
00:23:12.240 starting in, you know, the end of 2022.
00:23:14.980 Is there a concern that you have that a lot of this infrastructure will outlive COVID,
00:23:20.140 will outlive this particular pandemic?
00:23:23.040 Yeah, I think so.
00:23:23.680 I worry about the wrong lessons being learned about some of these things.
00:23:27.440 And look, I don't want to, I'm not a conspiracy theorist.
00:23:30.000 I don't think a lot of governments plan to make these things permanent,
00:23:34.240 but they end up becoming permanent because the yardsticks move
00:23:37.120 and because governments realize they can get away with it over time.
00:23:39.760 You've seen governments, I mean, Anthony had mentioned flip-flopping by Doug Ford,
00:23:44.700 Jason Kennedy flip-flopping, even Justin Trudeau, let's not forget,
00:23:46.920 as recently as the spring said that it would be wrong, you know,
00:23:49.960 to have these, to impose these sort of de facto requirements of vaccination.
00:23:54.700 So they changed their mind and I think they'll change their mind in terms of temporary things.
00:23:58.260 If they think that they can get away with it, odds are they're going to try it again.
00:24:02.000 Yeah, and one interesting point here, and I know this goes outside of this week's announcement
00:24:06.800 and looks at the bigger picture here, but the poor communications from the government at this,
00:24:11.700 at many levels, has been noteworthy from actually masks make things worse
00:24:15.940 to masks are mandatory, border closures are racist, border closures are necessary,
00:24:20.000 we don't want a vaccine passport, we want one, it's up to the provinces,
00:24:23.800 okay, the federal government's going to act.
00:24:25.280 And it becomes very difficult to have any buy-in from the population when,
00:24:30.300 to John's point about the, about third doses, fourth doses,
00:24:34.020 that's a concern I'm hearing from people that were on the fence.
00:24:36.900 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.
00:24:42.680 And I do think that there's not a lot of,
00:24:45.980 not a lot of public buy-in right now to what the government's selling.
00:24:50.220 Yeah, I totally agree.
00:24:51.700 And like, it's not, I think it's easy to understand
00:24:54.340 why people would be skeptical of government
00:24:57.700 just based on the record during COVID alone.
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,
00:25:11.080 who, you know, with a gun.
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
00:25:25.180 and just not taking everything for granted,
00:25:27.460 I don't think that that's unreasonable.
00:25:29.460 I mean, look, I'm a vaccinated person.
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.
00:25:42.760 But I do not support coercion.
00:25:44.240 And I do not think the governments can say,
00:25:45.940 oh, well, our carrots didn't work,
00:25:47.420 so we're going to get the stick out now.
00:25:48.700 I think that's a very dangerous road to go down.
00:25:51.320 Yeah, and let me go to you on this, Anthony,
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.
00:26:06.300 It almost legitimizes that method
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.
00:26:17.200 They haven't seen the need to.
00:26:18.760 And when those people get vaccinated because of a vaccine passport,
00:26:22.720 the government tends to claim victory.
00:26:25.800 Yeah, no, it's quite funny.
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.
00:26:48.400 I mean, coercion is the phrase.
00:26:50.460 It is interesting when we talk about the public conversation,
00:26:52.960 and I'll slightly disagree with you and Aaron,
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,
00:27:11.480 I don't support these vaccine passports.
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.
00:27:39.320 Remember 10 years ago, you couldn't say this.
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,
00:27:51.260 there'd be a drop-off percentage.
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.
00:28:14.360 Now, that's actually fair.
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,
00:28:47.180 or you can wait and get a real client.
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,
00:29:31.040 they would need to get fired first.
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.
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,
00:30:08.380 then that may happen anyway against them.
00:30:10.420 But one interesting point of this,
00:30:12.780 Justin Trudeau was talking about how these are the strongest,
00:30:15.160 most stringent measures in the world.
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,
00:30:25.020 they aren't actually requiring proof, Aaron.
00:30:27.220 They're requiring an attestation.
00:30:28.800 And obviously, they're saying that lying is a disciplinable offense,
00:30:33.260 to use a word that I'm not sure is real.
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
00:30:43.540 into doing something.
00:30:44.420 And I think that's a large part of it.
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
00:30:56.800 knowing that there's a vaccine passport.
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
00:31:30.000 it safe, safer in spaces.
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
00:31:39.560 like going to restaurants.
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
00:31:43.560 you unless you get vaccinated.
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.
00:32:01.200 It was meant to reduce mobility.
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.
00:32:14.140 They just wanted to stop people from moving.
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
00:32:25.940 as well.
00:32:27.200 Yeah.
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.
00:32:39.040 So you're in a low-risk neighborhood.
00:32:41.480 You know, you're a young, healthy person.
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
00:32:51.300 and you're going to die from it.
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
00:33:08.580 one of those people test positive for COVID.
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
00:33:17.980 positive for COVID, you will not get an alert.
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
00:33:53.980 these restrictions are only ever stacked.
00:33:56.620 They're never removed.
00:33:57.640 They're never taken away.
00:33:58.800 There's never a trade-off.
00:33:59.980 Let's look at airplanes and trains, for example.
00:34:02.080 The government hasn't said, you know what?
00:34:04.080 Everyone on every commercial plane in Canada is going to be vaccinated, so masks off.
00:34:08.820 Have a good time.
00:34:09.640 You're going to be able to fly freely.
00:34:10.960 And we've seen this in classrooms as well.
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
00:34:33.780 what we're taking.
00:34:34.400 Well, liberty has died in the hearts of many Canadians.
00:34:40.980 That's the core problem.
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.
00:35:04.020 There's no rational basis.
00:35:06.020 I mean, statistically, if you are under 70, you have a greater risk of dying from a car
00:35:13.620 accident than you do dying from COVID.
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
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.
00:35:40.500 That's not my opinion.
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
00:35:57.240 some people.
00:35:58.700 But there's no basis in reality for the entire population to be scared of this and to be
00:36:04.680 giving up rights and freedoms.
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
00:36:16.800 stripping away.
00:36:18.760 And there's no end to this.
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
00:36:35.220 websites.
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.
00:36:46.060 Are people going to object to that?
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
00:37:04.960 from acting prudently.
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
00:37:26.440 this.
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,
00:37:48.420 I can't follow 200 rules.
00:37:49.580 I'm going to follow none of them.
00:37:50.400 So I have hope that we will finally turn the corner on this.
00:37:54.720 But yeah, it can seem bleak some days.
00:37:58.400 Aaron Woodrick, Director of the Domestic Policy Program at McDonnell-Laurier Institute.
00:38:02.940 Thank you for coming on.
00:38:04.260 John Carpe, Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms President.
00:38:07.180 Thank you, John.
00:38:08.120 And Anthony Fury of Postmedia Toronto Sun.
00:38:11.420 And do check out his podcast, Full Comment.
00:38:13.900 Thank you.
00:38:14.460 Thanks to all three of you for coming on.
00:38:16.160 Thank you.
00:38:17.340 Thank you, Andrew.
00:38:18.700 That does it for me.
00:38:19.680 Again, if I ever want to end on a cheery note, I can't do a civil liberties topic because
00:38:23.280 I'm inclined to agree with John.
00:38:25.400 There often isn't a lot to be cheery about as far as liberties are concerned in Canada.
00:38:30.500 But that's why we're here.
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.
00:38:36.980 We've got to end things there.
00:38:38.020 My thanks to you all for tuning in and also to John, Aaron, and Anthony for coming on the
00:38:43.560 show.
00:38:43.820 We will talk to you all soon with more of Canada's most irreverent talk show.
00:38:47.420 So thank you, God bless, and good day.
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.