Juno News - Trudeau’s hotel quarantine violates freedoms, but the court says it’s justified

00:00:00.000 The Federal Court of Canada has upheld Justin Trudeau's government's hotel quarantine program

00:00:10.800 as constitutional. This was a lengthy decision released by the Chief Justice of the Federal

00:00:16.560 Court on Friday in which the court determined that yes, the hotel quarantine program violates

00:00:23.520 your liberty, but the government is justified in doing so because of, you guessed it, the pandemic.

00:00:30.720 This is the program that Justin Trudeau put in place in January to stem the tide of the so-called

00:00:36.080 Variance of Concern, a program that would require anyone flying into Canada from outside of the

00:00:41.680 country to stay at their own expense, often costing a couple of thousand dollars at least

00:00:47.200 in a hotel near an airport that the government has designated as an approved accommodation

00:00:53.440 you get a test while you're there and regardless of whether that test is positive or negative

00:00:58.240 you still go home after to do your whole 14-day quarantine. And that was one of the absurdities

00:01:03.920 brought up in the significant constitutional challenge launched by the Justice Center for

00:01:08.880 Constitutional Freedoms as well as Rebel News. And there were a number of criticisms put forward

00:01:14.400 about this. The fact that the hotel quarantine violates your right to liberty, your right to

00:01:19.680 security, it is an insult to injury that you have to pay for this even though government is mandating

00:01:25.600 it, and that it is a form of unlawful detention. And the court heard all of these rulings over a

00:01:31.760 three-day long trial, but at the end of it the court determined that every single one of these

00:01:37.200 liberty violations, which the court acknowledged exists, are justified because of the scope of the

00:01:43.520 pandemic. A couple of highlights I want to share here. The judge says although the applicant's

00:01:48.640 right to liberty is engaged, the deprivation of that right was in accordance with the principles

00:01:54.320 of fundamental justice. The judge also says yes it's fair to say that staying at one of these hotels

00:02:00.800 constitutes a detention, but the detention is not arbitrary so therefore it's not illegal. And the judge

00:02:08.560 also gave that boilerplate that is so essential sadly in Canadian court decisions that yes you have this

00:02:14.640 charter of rights and freedoms that lays out your constitutional liberties, but yeah you might as well

00:02:21.120 don't. The rights and freedoms guaranteed by the charter are not absolute. This is because it may become

00:02:27.840 necessary to limit rights and freedoms in circumstances where their exercise would be inimical to the

00:02:34.480 realization of collective goals of fundamental importance. The court has determined that the

00:02:40.800 collective goals the government has set out for the pandemic are far more important than the individual

00:02:46.000 liberties that are supposed to be guaranteed by the charter of rights and freedoms. There's that old

00:02:52.480 very famous quote from Benjamin Franklin that those who would willingly give up their liberty for a little

00:02:57.040 bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. The judge in this case had a very similar outlook,

00:03:05.200 although on the flip side of it because he said like times of war and other crises pandemics call for

00:03:10.960 sacrifices to save lives and avoid broad-based suffering. If some are unwilling to make such sacrifices and

00:03:18.720 engage in behavior that poses a demonstrated risk to the health and safety of others, the principles of

00:03:24.560 fundamental justice will not prevent the state from performing its essential function of protecting its citizens

00:03:32.240 rights. So the ruling is in a nutshell that the government has the right to intervene in liberty to

00:03:40.640 protect Canadians, although the judge also conceded that the issue here is not the effectiveness of

00:03:48.320 the hotel quarantine program but specifically the objective of it. So if the objective, if the stated purpose

00:03:55.760 matches even in a peripheral sense how the government is seeking to fulfill that objective, that's fine to

00:04:02.000 satisfy that it's not arbitrary. The judge even said he wasn't there to weigh its effectiveness but then

00:04:07.280 you have on the other hand the government saying well we need to do this because it's the only way

00:04:11.440 we can save lives. A very dark day for freedom in Canada. As for what's next for this, yes there's going

00:04:17.760 to be an appeal. The length of time it will take to do that makes it probable however that this court case

00:04:25.040 will outlast the hotel quarantine itself. This may be taken off the table by the Liberals in the next month

00:04:31.200 or the next two months for reasons that have nothing to do with the constitutionality of it.

00:04:36.240 Although if and when we start to see governments behave in this way again it will be paramount to

00:04:42.240 have a ruling that tells them no. It's shameful we didn't get that from the federal court but let's hope

00:04:48.400 as this moves up through the ranks of the Canadian judicial system there might be some more sensible

00:04:53.920 approaches to this. For True North, I'm Andrew Lawton.

Juno News - June 24, 2021

Trudeau’s hotel quarantine violates freedoms, but the court says it’s justified

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