The Candice Malcolm Show - People in BC are still being fired over Covid vaccines (Ft. Harley Sims)

00:00:00.120 Thousands of government workers in British Columbia have been fired by the province for not taking the COVID vaccine or not revealing their status, and the province continues to fire people to this day, now, in April 2022.

00:00:12.920 Why is this still going on? I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

00:00:27.140 Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the podcast.

00:00:29.560 So over the weekend, it was revealed that thousands of public health care workers in British Columbia had been laid off after previously being put on unpaid leave for not following the vax mandate rules being enforced by the province.

00:00:42.120 Well, last Friday, a group of fired employees tried to issue an emergency injunction in order to keep their job, but a judge threw their case away.

00:00:49.860 And so more people are continuing to be fired over these really mundane, punitive vaccine policies in British Columbia.

00:00:59.360 It seems like they're lagging behind the rest of the province, the rest of the country in eliminating these kinds of restrictions.

00:01:04.920 And joining me today to talk about this is True North reporter and editor, Harley Sims.

00:01:10.060 Harley is based out of British Columbia.

00:01:12.460 He's a senior editor, investigative reporter with True North.

00:01:15.300 He holds a PhD in English from the University of Toronto.

00:01:18.180 He currently lives in the Fraser Canyon of British Columbia, and he's been doing lots and lots of reporting, exclusive reporting for us at True North.

00:01:26.780 Harley, thank you so much for joining us.

00:01:29.260 It was a pleasure, Candice.

00:01:31.280 So the news that I got out of BC was that you guys were finally getting rid of your vaccine passport. 1.00

00:01:36.560 Your vaccine card will no longer be in use, which is sort of some good news.

00:01:40.020 We could definitely talk a little bit about that.

00:01:41.600 But I want to talk about this court case and this injunction that was thrown away by a judge.

00:01:46.720 So can you walk us through what exactly happened?

00:01:48.660 So towards the end of the summer, the beginning of the fall, BC Public Service had signaled that it was going to be requiring 30,000 employees to be vaccinated in order to keep their jobs.

00:02:03.720 Now, this was just kind of, it was mentioned, it was said, this is coming.

00:02:09.100 And Bonnie Henry has put out, I believe, 14 different health orders that have been affecting different sectors, contractors, healthcare workers, public servants.

00:02:22.800 But in this case, the policy was announced and it was not actually defined until a month later, policy 25, it was called.

00:02:33.500 Public servants were expected to get two shots before November 22nd.

00:02:42.360 But what is interesting is on November 19th, which was a Friday, the Horgan government passed an order in council that made that law that if public servants did not get those vaccinations, they could be fired with cause.

00:02:56.960 And fired with cause is the worst way you can be fired.

00:02:59.960 Assaults, thefts, you are denied benefits, you are denied EI, you're just thrown out the window type thing.

00:03:08.960 And so, you know, anybody that's worked in politics knows that when you pass legislation on a Friday, it's called taking out the trash.

00:03:15.840 You do it because the media is asleep, no one's paying attention.

00:03:18.760 That's what they did.

00:03:19.460 So the following Monday, non-compliant public servants, we were put on unpaid leave, forced onto unpaid leave.

00:03:28.980 There are several organizations, but one, the BCPS, Employees for Freedom, represent 500 civil servants, both unionized and non-unionized, vaccinated and non-vaccinated.

00:03:41.520 But they were involved in this constitutional challenge to the vaccine mandate that's supposed to be coming in May.

00:03:51.480 Now, in the meantime, four of the petitioners, I think there are nine now, but there were four original petitioners, had filed for an injunction to keep from being fired before that hearing.

00:04:04.860 Now, they're already on unpaid leave.

00:04:06.840 They're not getting paid.

00:04:08.260 So the question was, well, why not just drag it out a little longer?

00:04:13.620 But after incurring the decision for a week, Justin Frost at the BC Supreme Court in Victoria decided on Friday that no, an injunction would not be issued, that these employees will continue to be terminated.

00:04:28.000 And these are all precedent-setting cases, basically.

00:04:30.400 Every other lawsuit is looking at them and saying, OK, well, how does the decision bear on ours?

00:04:36.780 And so the decision at this point is, no, the courts will not stop anybody from being fired in British Columbia over these vaccine mandates.

00:04:47.000 So going ahead, anybody that's been put on unpaid leave can be fired.

00:04:52.680 And it's just a question of seeing where the constitutional challenge goes in May.

00:04:56.920 It's interesting.

00:04:59.140 I know we have a little bit of an internal debate at True North, jokingly, about which province has the most severe, strictest COVID restrictions.

00:05:08.020 And you tend to think it's British Columbia.

00:05:10.800 So first of all, why do you think BC is worse than other provinces?

00:05:15.260 And what is it about the culture and the government in BC that makes them so ardent in issuing these kind of heavy-handed edicts?

00:05:26.680 That's a good question, because growing up in the north of BC, we kind of had our own world.

00:05:32.760 And I didn't really, I wasn't really aware of the reputation of BC as wacky.

00:05:37.180 I think BC has a reputation as being wacky politically across the country.

00:05:41.180 And so it wasn't until we moved down south that you started to see, you know, why it is different scandals like that that happened.

00:05:49.560 But in the case of COVID, actually, it was the other way around.

00:05:52.360 I mean, I was speaking with a lawyer about this this week.

00:05:56.580 I think a lot of the country was a little bit envious that we had Bonnie Henry in the beginning, because she seemed pretty laid back. 0.83

00:06:03.640 She didn't lock down British Columbia.

00:06:06.060 She lifted the mask mandates at one point.

00:06:08.340 And she seemed pretty level-headed.

00:06:11.180 But as time progressed, BC came to adopt the same kind of strict measures that the rest of the country did, but also just different language that was used.

00:06:21.640 I think it was around winter, like the winter COVID lockdowns for Omicron, that all of these really draconian measures started coming out.

00:06:30.220 And they were more precautionary.

00:06:32.560 Keep in mind, this was this, we see this coming, let's lock down just in case.

00:06:37.280 And one of the things that Bonnie Henry said was that non-vaccinated people cannot gather.

00:06:44.480 They cannot go to the homes of vaccinated people. 0.99

00:06:47.240 They cannot go out.

00:06:48.460 And keep in mind, they were already denied entry into theaters, restaurants, gyms, anything like that.

00:06:55.760 Aside from that, the mandates continue in British Columbia, even as the other provinces are rolling them back.

00:07:04.560 And not just, you know, the prairie provinces, you know, like Saskatchewan and Alberta, but Ontario, Quebec, even Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, which a lot of people may not be paying much attention to, they were pretty strict, too.

00:07:18.580 They were pretty draconian.

00:07:19.500 Remember, New Brunswick had denied, given grocery stores the ability to deny people entry based on their VAX status and then rolled that back.

00:07:27.540 But, you know, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, even, were removing their VAX mandates.

00:07:33.340 Even then, British Columbia was still moving ahead with a mandate for private sector healthcare professionals, dentists, chiropractors, therapists, acupuncturists.

00:07:48.080 There's a ton of them.

00:07:49.200 I wrote a story on it, and I think it was 19 different regulatory colleges.

00:07:52.340 But she was still moving ahead with that, requiring them to be vaccinated or not be able to practice. 0.83

00:07:59.420 And so this idea that the BC has become an outlier, it's out of step with the rest of the province or the rest of the country now.

00:08:06.620 Even still, with public servants being fired, healthcare workers not being able to get their jobs back, Alberta is inviting them back.

00:08:15.260 I spoke of the paramedics from Alberta a couple of weeks ago who's going back.

00:08:18.460 Public servants are going back to work in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick.

00:08:23.140 And across the country, we're turning around.

00:08:26.780 BC is sticking to this hard line.

00:08:30.300 And I don't know why it is.

00:08:32.200 I'm not a legal professional, but judges do have to be aware of the precedence their decision set.

00:08:38.640 And so I can't help but suspect this has gotten so big to pull that brick out that causes the whole thing to fall down.

00:08:45.300 Well, it's so interesting, Harley, because I would say since the Omicron wave last December, last November, is when we really started to realize, I mean, there were a lot of sort of people in scientific communities whistleblowing, saying that this vaccine isn't as effective as it's being sold as.

00:09:01.920 And I think that the world sort of acted that out, and we lived that over Christmas time, when we realized that, hey, being vaccinated doesn't actually stop you from getting Omicron.

00:09:11.700 People who are double, triple vaccinated, including our own prime minister, are still getting this virus.

00:09:16.980 And so, you know, not only is the COVID vaccine not effective at stopping COVID, as we were told, but also, you know, this idea that we're going to demonize and disenfranchise and bully and exclude people who have made a medical choice that we don't agree with, that's not a very good way to run a society.

00:09:37.060 And I think that there has been a lot of retrospective thinking and soul searching.

00:09:42.880 And here on the Candace Malcolm Show, I've interviewed so many people who sort of pick up on this and discuss this issue that demonizing the unvaccinated was a huge mistake.

00:09:52.960 And the division that it caused is something that we need to work on mending.

00:09:56.500 And yet, you know, the story that you just told in British Columbia, it's like they haven't gotten that, they haven't reached that point, they haven't gotten that message, they don't look at the data, or they haven't seen the sort of broader picture of the sort of second and third effect causes of COVID, things like, you know, more Americans under the age of 65 died of alcohol than died of COVID.

00:10:18.900 In Canada, it's very, very similar, the diseases of despair, suicide, depression, drug overdoses, you know, younger people, people under 60s, 65, they die much more from these things than they do from COVID.

00:10:35.100 I just, I can't really wrap my head around why British Columbia is so out of step and why these discussions aren't being had.

00:10:41.640 Do you hear people having these discussions publicly, people in media, you know, academia, public intellectuals, politicians, is this message out there in British Columbia?

00:10:52.400 Or do people just listen to a different set of stories, and they're kind of burying their head in the sand when it comes to the changes that we've seen in our knowledge and in our approach to COVID?

00:11:04.560 I guess I could say there's a lot of confusion, but there's a lot of anger at this point.

00:11:08.840 I don't think a lot of people understand why the province is moving ahead with this, I'm sticking to it, when the data is becoming clear, you could argue it was clear a long time ago.

00:11:21.780 I mean, my children are in school, I just got a form the other day that has like a, it's a liability release in case of COVID.

00:11:31.920 Okay, well, why couldn't we have had that before?

00:11:34.000 You know, you just, you know, if the kid gets COVID, you know, you don't sue the school type thing.

00:11:39.100 But I wrote a story about a dentist about a month ago, who was subject to the private sector vaccine mandate.

00:11:46.060 And it's worth watching, because he just lays it out.

00:11:49.860 He's furious.

00:11:51.240 I think he says, you know, Bonnie Henry should, his regulatory college should tell Bonnie Henry to crawl back into the hole she came out of.

00:11:58.380 Because it doesn't make sense anymore.

00:12:00.000 And he says at this point, ignorance and malice are indistinguishable.

00:12:04.040 Because the data is so clear, why is she sticking with it?

00:12:07.960 It can't be, it doesn't matter if it's ignorance or malice.

00:12:10.100 It's just, it's effectively the same thing.

00:12:12.300 But as far as talking to other people, I've spoken to a lot of people, I've talked to lawyers, union officials, academics.

00:12:21.480 A lot of people who are affected by this mandate, and on the wrong side of the mandate, they don't want to speak publicly about it.

00:12:28.680 And it's because exactly because of the stigma you mentioned, there's still a huge amount of stigma about coming out and saying not only are you unvaccinated, but you're against the vaccine mandates.

00:12:42.680 Going back to work, what's that going to be like?

00:12:45.460 Speaking to the Alberta paramedic, Kate King, a couple of weeks ago, she said for healthcare workers who are unvaccinated who've gone back, it's like no one wants to talk about it.

00:12:55.980 She described it like being like an abusive relationship, walking on eggshells, whereas before there was an eruption of abuse and hatred and condemnation of people that didn't want to disclose or take these vaccines.

00:13:09.760 Now everyone's just kind of looking the other way, and there's no healing.

00:13:13.640 So I think this, again, goes along with what we've been talking about all along, is these policies have created huge sociological problems.

00:13:23.260 Now, you can't bring in something like this, just call them orders, and not expect them to create huge chasms in society between people, demonizing people.

00:13:36.040 We talk a lot about the Charter of Rights, the Constitution, provinces have their own human rights codes.

00:13:43.420 And I know when it came to the Freedom Convoy, a lot of people couldn't understand why the Constitution didn't kind of take shape, come down and protect them from this.

00:13:51.500 And what's going on here?

00:13:53.600 And I know that a lot of lawyers, the sign of the Free North Declaration, Bruce Partey's talked about it, DJ R. Brown talked about it with Andrew Lawton.

00:14:02.960 The legal system is made up of people.

00:14:05.660 It's made up of lawyers and judges, and they're all people.

00:14:09.660 And if they are not willing to rule a certain way or stand up for certain things or kind of lean certain ways, then none of these documents mean anything.

00:14:19.940 And so I think that was why it was important with Charlene Lebeau from the Justice Center I spoke with on Monday.

00:14:26.040 She said, we just need one good decision.

00:14:28.100 We just need one judge to look at our evidence, our very compelling evidence, and say, no, this is done.

00:14:34.440 This is over.

00:14:35.160 We have to stop doing this.

00:14:36.680 And she just said it would be a domino.

00:14:38.400 It would start, other judges would start agreeing the precedent would be set.

00:14:42.800 And they would start falling.

00:14:43.980 Right now, we've only ever seen jurisdictions removing vaccine mandates voluntarily.

00:14:51.180 The city of Victoria did it, which is funny because that's where the B.C. Supreme Court decision was.

00:14:55.440 They removed their principal vaccine mandate.

00:14:57.560 Richmond has removed its vaccine mandate and brought back workers, given them back pay.

00:15:01.900 Why are some of these things happening and not others?

00:15:04.360 It's just it's day to day at this point.

00:15:05.840 And it's really frustrating, I think, for observers who want to make sense of it.

00:15:08.920 Well, it teaches us a lesson, Harley, that our democracy and our institutions are not as robust as we would have expected.

00:15:17.340 Like you think, OK, the government is blatantly abusing our charter rights.

00:15:21.240 That's why we have a charter.

00:15:22.360 So let's uphold it and let's stop these abuses.

00:15:26.320 And yet you're right.

00:15:28.000 We haven't we haven't seen that through the courts.

00:15:29.980 We haven't seen that through challenges.

00:15:32.740 And the example that we're talking about on the show today is a very example of that, why we need to create more robust institutions and we need to have more advocacy when it comes to the legal profession as well.

00:15:43.960 So let's talk about the decision or the announcement that British Columbia had that they're finally getting rid of their vaccine mandate vaccine passport system.

00:15:54.680 Do you think that this is sort of a good sign that the government is ready to move on from all of this?

00:16:00.200 And what does it mean sort of in the day to day lives of British Columbians who are not vaccinated?

00:16:06.020 Like, will they be able to have full access to society or are there still some things that are being held on to?

00:16:12.000 Well, careful with our language, because the vaccine passport isn't being scrapped here.

00:16:18.780 It's being lifted.

00:16:20.360 And I think Bonnie Henry has been very clear that the government will support places that want to keep using it.

00:16:27.140 And that has encouraged individual businesses to use it.

00:16:30.900 Restaurants all had to use it.

00:16:32.140 Theaters all had to use it.

00:16:33.240 Gyms all had to use it. 1.00

00:16:34.940 But just because the government is stepping away and saying, OK, we're not going to enforce this anymore, doesn't mean they're not going to encourage the continuation of these policies.

00:16:45.480 And like everywhere else, mask mandate was dropped a couple of weeks ago, March 11th, I believe.

00:16:53.480 And again, people screaming, can you abandon us like this, Bonnie Henry?

00:16:57.260 You know, like what you're going to create another wave and all this.

00:17:00.680 And it's like there's nothing preventing people from continuing to wear them if they don't want to or sorry, if they wanted to.

00:17:06.220 So I think that places like government buildings, like, for example, pools, skating rinks, things like that, they will drop them as necessary.

00:17:17.840 Universities, again, like other provinces, like U of T, just dropped a mandate after it was challenged.

00:17:23.400 It'll be bit by bit.

00:17:25.860 You'll see it crumble.

00:17:27.340 But I don't know if people are as relieved at this point.

00:17:31.380 We've seen this before.

00:17:32.760 We've seen the restrictions drop.

00:17:35.320 We've seen masks drop.

00:17:37.120 We've seen capacity limits drop.

00:17:42.040 What's happening now, though, is the dropping of something that came in at the end, which was the vaccine passport.

00:17:47.040 I think the only reassurances we have at this point is it'll be very difficult to bring the vaccine passport back in once it's been dropped,

00:17:54.900 especially with the waning efficacy of these vaccines.

00:17:58.420 You're not going to be able to bring it back in unless you're going to be able to, you know, force people to get third and fourth shots,

00:18:04.160 which, you know, I wouldn't have passed them.

00:18:07.480 But it's at the moment, the holdout province is kind of on the same page as everybody else right now.

00:18:12.980 And we're keeping our eye on them, though.

00:18:14.980 Nobody's breathing easily at this point.

00:18:17.720 One of the things that I find sort of shocking because, you know, we had the terror convoy.

00:18:23.380 We carried we covered it very, very closely at True North.

00:18:26.180 And you yourself were one of the top reporters covering it.

00:18:30.160 And from my perspective, I think so many others, we saw it as a huge victory in terms of changing the public conversation,

00:18:38.260 raising issues around, you know, people wanting to get their life back, sort of the silent majority of people coming out and saying,

00:18:46.020 we don't like all of these restrictions.

00:18:47.780 We don't like this division in our society.

00:18:49.320 And we started to see a whole bunch of the restrictions get dropped.

00:18:52.460 One of the things that still is there is the original mandate that they were protesting against,

00:18:59.420 which is a requirement that truckers continue to have to show a vaccine mandate or passport in order to do cross-border trips.

00:19:08.160 And again, the whole issue was that, you know, we'd had this huge wave of Omicron that was indistinguishable,

00:19:14.500 whether you were vaccinated or unvaccinated.

00:19:16.180 We learned that the vaccine mandate system doesn't work.

00:19:18.260 The vaccine doesn't protect you and doesn't stop you from getting COVID.

00:19:22.060 It doesn't stop the spread of COVID, which was why we were told we needed them.

00:19:26.480 And yet in January, so after the big wave, after things were starting to settle down again,

00:19:31.840 and we saw an end in sight to COVID, Trudeau imposes this restrictive, punitive, mean-spirited rule.

00:19:40.900 And yet it's still in place.

00:19:42.340 You know, I think that we kind of forget that, that, you know, the truckers have been stomped down by Trudeau.

00:19:48.360 He used excessive force for the emergencies act, and he's still maintaining this policy.

00:19:54.220 I'm wondering if you've heard from, you know, many of your contacts and people in the trucking world about this.

00:19:59.640 How is it impacting the sort of day-to-day life of truckers

00:20:04.260 and the ability of trucking transportation companies to get their product to market?

00:20:08.900 I know that we're now talking about, I mean, it's incredible how the economy is starting to crumble

00:20:14.740 in terms of massive inflation, you know, the cost of living just going up, the gas prices going up.

00:20:22.080 But then also, you know, when we hear talk of food shortages in certain parts of North America,

00:20:27.220 it's wild to hear about that, while at the same time we're stopping truckers from being able to do their job.

00:20:32.400 So I'm just wondering if you have any update for us or anything you've heard on this topic lately.

00:20:38.900 We just wrote a story earlier this week saying that livestock feed is going to be affected by this in a terrible way.

00:20:50.920 That trucking companies were, and trucking companies have always had a hard time finding drivers.

00:20:57.520 I mean, let's be clear with that, but it's making it worse.

00:20:59.600 It's like the same thing with vaccine management for healthcare.

00:21:02.440 You've got a cruel industry that you are now moving the ability of it to walk ever.

00:21:10.880 This is a problem.

00:21:12.420 As far as vaccine mandates go, I mean, since the convoy was dispersed,

00:21:17.440 you do see smaller efforts here and there.

00:21:21.160 I know there was supposed to be a big convoy in Victoria a couple weeks ago that, you know,

00:21:25.400 the city was preparing for.

00:21:26.900 They're even looking into ways of getting them, keeping them off the ferries from getting there.

00:21:30.980 But the thing is, number one, it's a federal mandate.

00:21:37.500 And so a lot of the guys who are protesting, again, they're not really political.

00:21:43.240 So they may not necessarily know where this is coming from.

00:21:45.900 They may not understand how one mandate can be provincial and another federal.

00:21:50.020 And even some can be municipal, depending.

00:21:51.560 So this remains a federal vaccine mandate that hasn't been lifted.

00:21:57.120 And that's why, you know, the convoy was in Ottawa as opposed to a legislature.

00:22:02.300 But Trudeau is getting away with this.

00:22:04.160 He has not lifted anything.

00:22:06.280 It is, you're right, it is spiteful.

00:22:08.060 It's hateful.

00:22:08.900 It's malicious.

00:22:10.220 You can just look at the curl of his lip when he talks about these individuals

00:22:14.100 and their positions towards his mandates and his rules.

00:22:18.500 But I also know of many people who were forced out of work because of vaccine mandates,

00:22:26.080 tried to ride it out.

00:22:28.000 But let's face it, this is British Columbia.

00:22:31.540 It's extremely expensive to live here.

00:22:34.020 They couldn't last forever.

00:22:35.520 They did go back and get the shots.

00:22:37.600 They were coerced into doing it.

00:22:39.160 It's terrible.

00:22:39.760 They're broken people in some ways.

00:22:43.560 And I really hope there is comeuppance for what's been done to them.

00:22:47.620 But this is exactly what was intended in forcing people out of work and crippling them financially,

00:22:54.940 was to force them to get them.

00:22:57.820 And so that's why I know that most people who initially tried to oppose this

00:23:04.620 have ended up getting the shots because you can't last forever without pay.

00:23:10.660 Well, I'm sorry to hear that.

00:23:12.780 And, you know, it's like, to what end, right?

00:23:14.660 It's like, OK, you're spiteful.

00:23:16.600 You hate these people.

00:23:17.400 You force them to get a vaccine that they don't want to get.

00:23:20.620 To what end?

00:23:21.740 You know, do you feel good about yourself?

00:23:23.440 I'm talking to Trudeau.

00:23:24.360 Like, it's not like they're not going to get COVID.

00:23:26.960 They're still at risk of COVID.

00:23:28.420 They're still at risk of spreading the virus if they get it.

00:23:33.040 It's just, it's really unbelievable.

00:23:34.680 Well, there is someone else who is taking a very strong stand against this.

00:23:40.540 I'm talking about James Topp, who is a retired or a veteran of the Canadian Armed Forces.

00:23:45.480 And he made the decision to march or to run or to walk.

00:23:48.860 I believe he's walking from Vancouver to Ottawa to take a stand against this divisiveness.

00:23:54.760 You were the first journalist to cover it.

00:23:56.580 You were there at his launch, which was at the Terry Fox Memorial outside of BC Place in Vancouver there.

00:24:01.120 Why don't you give us a little update about Mr. Topp, where he is, how his progress is going,

00:24:06.860 and again, what his purpose and what his goal is in this march.

00:24:12.520 James is still in Alberta right now.

00:24:14.880 I believe he's going to make it into Saskatchewan by the 10th because he put out a notice looking for places to stay.

00:24:22.160 He's relying on volunteers to lay his roots for him.

00:24:27.820 People have been bringing him meals.

00:24:29.080 He's been doing a lot of speaking, and I'm sure you've seen that he's spoken even as he's walking.

00:24:35.660 I think he was on Viva Frey's podcast the other day.

00:24:38.720 I think he spoke for two hours.

00:24:40.900 But it's really cool to watch him do that, you know, trucks whipping by him on the highway.

00:24:47.160 But James, actually, this was a story that kind of fell in my lap because I did know James before this.

00:24:52.160 We have kind of overlapping circles of enforcement, military guys out here.

00:24:58.880 And I was introduced to him a few weeks before he even chose to do this.

00:25:02.980 And he is a, I think, 28-year veteran, regular forces, but also reservist after that.

00:25:09.760 And he was a civilian employee with the RCMP.

00:25:14.240 Both jobs hit by vaccine mandates.

00:25:16.900 So he lost both jobs.

00:25:18.360 And so I did speak to him a couple weeks before he even decided to do this.

00:25:24.500 I mean, he knew I was kind of looking for guys to talk about this, and he just wasn't into it.

00:25:29.380 You know, he just kind of started beating on the punching bag and said, you know, maybe one day, but I don't want to talk about it now.

00:25:36.220 And then I saw him a couple weeks later, and he was a new man entirely.

00:25:40.380 He had gone to the Surrey protests on February 12th, and this was during the convoy.

00:25:47.140 He went in full uniform.

00:25:48.720 He decided to make a stand, and he just looked for media.

00:25:54.060 He wanted to tell his story, and he decided that he wasn't going to hide from fear, fear of being canceled, fear of losing his pension.

00:26:03.020 He said, you know, if Russell Williams, the murderer and rapist who's in jail in Ontario can keep his pension, why should he be worried about losing his over a vaccine mandate?

00:26:20.120 So he appeared in full uniform.

00:26:22.720 He looked for media.

00:26:24.260 CBC, I believe, heard about him and called the National Defense to tattle on him.

00:26:28.180 I think that was the most media he got that day.

00:26:30.460 But I did hear about it.

00:26:31.600 I spoke to him in his house, and he was just inspired by the convoy, like so many people, thinking you're alone in all this, feeling demonized.

00:26:41.060 He saw people coming together, and it renewed his faith in people.

00:26:46.900 And what's funny about James is that he's walking across Canada.

00:26:52.340 It was the end of March.

00:26:53.740 He made it into Alberta, 1,000 kilometers in, and everybody's thankful towards him.

00:26:58.880 And the thing is, it's James' gratitude towards them that is causing his march.

00:27:05.320 He said working people built this country.

00:27:07.280 He's proud to have defended it.

00:27:09.320 And now he just wants to defend them.

00:27:12.680 You know, of course, his job was taken from him.

00:27:15.300 But he's put a manifesto on his website representing all those who have been forced to undergo medical treatment, forced out of job because of the medical treatment.

00:27:23.920 And, you know, he'll march with anybody who wants to stand by his side, and he's going to be in Ottawa on June 22nd.

00:27:32.100 And he wants to sit down with any politician that has the brass to meet with him, talk to a man that walked 4,200 kilometers just to have a talk.

00:27:41.060 What an inspiring story.

00:27:43.840 And I don't have high hopes that our prime minister will pay any attention to it, but hopefully some other people will.

00:27:49.460 Hopefully more and more Canadians will learn about his story.

00:27:51.840 I mean, just the fact that he went to a rally.

00:27:54.240 I remember we covered that rally in Surrey, watching videos of it.

00:27:57.480 That inspired him so much.

00:27:59.600 You can only imagine how much more inspiration is coming from people learning about his journey, supporting him along the way, as well as all the truckers.

00:28:07.360 I mean, they inspired all of us to keep going.

00:28:10.020 And I think that the more people, the more Canadians who come together around this cause, around eliminating these horrible draconian policies, you know, we can continue to have that critical mass and force governments to make changes, to your point, not just lifting these awful vaccine mandates, but eliminating them entirely and ensuring that this kind of a system can never come back.

00:28:36.540 So that's what I think that's what I'm hopeful for.

00:28:37.960 And I know that James is doing his small part.

00:28:40.720 You're doing your part as well.

00:28:42.040 And we really appreciate that.

00:28:43.600 Harley, thanks for all your reporting.

00:28:45.240 And thank you for joining the show today.

00:28:47.420 Anytime, Candice.

00:28:48.160 Thank you very much.

00:28:49.880 Right.

00:28:50.160 That is Harley Sims.

00:28:51.240 I'm Candice Malcolm, and this is The Candice Malcolm Show.

The Candice Malcolm Show - April 07, 2022

People in BC are still being fired over Covid vaccines (Ft. Harley Sims)

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