00:03:18.640Two reasons come to mind immediately. One is that Canada has too few courts, too few judges. And so
00:03:25.480it always takes years for important issues to get a court ruling compared to the United States, where
00:03:33.920they seem to get court rulings on very significant lockdown measures, masks, quarantines, all kinds of
00:03:42.660issues. And they get their rulings in weeks or sometimes months. And in Canada, it's never in weeks
00:03:51.860or months. It always takes years. And that's a problem. When you've got governments violating our
00:03:58.700rights and freedoms, we are into the 25th month, 26th month. The hardest part about the two weeks to
00:04:06.000flatten the curve has been the first two years. And we don't have too many court rulings yet. We have
00:04:12.360one in Manitoba and the other ones are moving through at the pace of molasses in February. So that's one big
00:04:20.460problem. The second problem is that the Charter Section 1 gives governments the possibility of going to
00:04:27.920court and concocting justification for violating rights and freedoms. And if that aligns well with the
00:04:37.060judge, and if the judge is persuaded, then the judge will say, well, yes, okay, this law did violate religious
00:04:44.260freedom or freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, or this law does violate your right to bodily
00:04:50.460autonomy to decide for yourself what gets injected into your body or not. But that's okay, because the judge
00:04:57.500thinks that it's reasonable. And so we've got this Section 1 of the Charter that allows governments to
00:05:06.560violate our freedoms if they can persuade a judge. And then it's really the luck of the draw. I mean, do you get a
00:05:13.760do you land before a judge who really understands and appreciates fundamental freedoms, who actually demands that the
00:05:23.580government come forward with persuasive evidence, not just speculation and modeling and fear mongering? Or do you get a judge who's more
00:05:33.020pro-government? And those judges exist as well?
00:05:37.380Well, it seems like there's a lot more of the pro-government judges. From my perspective, it seems like a lot of the judges make their
00:05:43.340ruling based on their own views, rather than being tied to the sort of basic principles of protecting individual rights and
00:05:51.920freedoms. So, John, why was this Section 1 put into the Charter? If the whole purpose of the Charter was as an addition to our
00:05:58.820Constitution, to make sure that that federal government couldn't overreach and that individual rights were protected, if judges were just
00:06:04.640going to interpret the law based on, well, the government was just trying to do its best or I agree with these rules and so I'm not
00:06:11.040going to overturn it. I mean, why was that placed in and what good is a Charter with that in there?
00:06:17.380Well, people were warned in 1982. People that looked at the Charter closely said, hey, wait a minute. This is going to give
00:06:27.120unelected, unaccountable judges a lot of power to make rules about our laws and it's going to give this new legislative power to judges that
00:06:38.280they've not had before. And this kind of fell on deaf ears. You know, Pierre Elliott Trudeau, at the time, there was television
00:06:45.760advertisements with, you know, geese flying across the sky and this is Canada's chance to bring the Constitution home from Britain and there was
00:06:55.260not a lot of debate on this question of, you know, do we want a Charter that gives judges the power to strike down laws. Now, more
00:07:06.040specifically, you ask about Section 1 and I would venture a guess that it was put in there to have some kind of a mechanism
00:07:13.320to recognize that rights are not absolute. And so the wording of Section 1 is that the Charter guarantees rights and freedoms,
00:07:25.260subject to reasonable limits prescribed by law that can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.
00:07:36.040Now, it sounds good. So any violation of your freedom of speech, freedom of religion has to be reasonable and the onus is on
00:07:46.820the government to justify it demonstrably. It sounds good, but it does give a lot of latitude to judges.
00:07:56.560Well, that's unfortunate. I want to ask you because you mentioned that there was one case that made its way through
00:08:00.960in Manitoba. Can you, off the top of your head, I don't know if you can, can you tell us a little bit
00:08:05.080about what that case is and which rights it seeks to protect?
00:08:09.420So we had the Justice Centre acted for some individuals and churches in the province of Manitoba.
00:08:16.560We took the lockdown measures to court. We brought forward medical doctors, other scientists.
00:08:23.740We had Dr. Jay Bhattacharya from Stanford University in California, world-renowned scientist and one of the co-authors
00:08:35.420of the Great Barrington Declaration. We had other medical witnesses.
00:08:40.420And we put forward very persuasive evidence as to the harm of lockdowns and questioning whether lockdowns were saving lives.
00:08:51.620We put forward the medical and scientific evidence and the judge ruled against us and upheld all of these government measures,
00:09:00.340but didn't really do a deep probing analysis of that evidence, but said, well, in times of crisis,
00:09:08.760we really should just kind of defer to government. And it wasn't the deep and engaging type of analysis that we would have wanted.
00:09:16.180And so we have appealed this to the Manitoba Court of Appeal, and we'll see if we do better at that level.
00:09:24.400Well, good for you. And I'm curious as to why Manitoba was the place that you chose,
00:09:28.840because I saw that the JCCF put out a ranking of the worst charter violators among the provinces.
00:09:34.920It seems like, well, I can ask you for more details on this, but it goes Quebec number one,
00:09:40.040British Columbia number two, Manitoba was number three.
00:09:42.560So maybe you could tell us a little bit about this list and then why specifically you chose to do the legislation in or do the court case in Manitoba.
00:09:51.220So when you're able to launch a constitutional challenge, it's often a constellation of different factors,
00:09:56.280like having willing clients, having a good fact scenario that's going to put your clients into the best light.
00:10:04.360So it was just kind of the convergence of various circumstances.
00:10:11.260It wasn't that we really looked at Manitoba and said, well, we want to do Manitoba before we do other provinces.
00:10:17.980It's more like it just came together there first.
00:10:21.100But we also have litigation against lockdowns or against vaccine passports or both in BC, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario.
00:10:29.660And it's only recently that we've got a full-time lawyer in Quebec.
00:10:35.640And so we are hoping to do more litigation there as well, but have not been in the past as much.
00:10:46.080Congratulations on getting someone in Quebec.
00:10:48.300John, why don't you tell us about the ranking, though?
00:10:50.640What was it that made Quebec the worst offender during COVID?
00:10:53.920Because I think you could talk to people in just about any province and they would think that their province was the worst.
00:10:58.500I know I spent a bunch of time in Ontario during lockdowns and it was horrible there.
00:11:03.260Alberta's been bad, people complaining.
00:11:05.760Most of my family's out in British Columbia, including some unvaccinated family members who've basically been housebound because they can't go places.
00:11:13.160And, you know, everyone probably feels like they are in the worst place.
00:11:17.200So how did you come about this ranking and why was it that you deemed Quebec to be the worst?
00:11:22.320So these assessments are somewhat subjective.
00:11:27.900So, you know, somebody else could come along with a different ranking and it's not a mathematical equation.
00:11:50.560But just this fanatical obsession that, you know, if it might help just a little bit, let's just violate people's rights and freedoms, even if we have no idea if it's going to help save lives.
00:12:02.640We'll do it anyway, just in case it might help.
00:12:07.240So they had curfews, they closed the border with Ontario, which is violation of the charter mobility rights.
00:12:14.780They had restrictions on travel within Quebec, depending on whether it was an orange or red or green zone.
00:12:22.400They were the only province that was, took it upon, where the government actually thought so highly of itself that it could dictate who does and who does not come into a house of worship.
00:12:38.940Blatant violation of religious freedom, where instead of the mosque, the synagogue, the church making its own decision about its own house of worship as to who is able to come in or not, the Quebec government said, if somebody's not had the COVID shots, they are not to come into the house of worship.
00:12:56.900So they basically usurped the legitimate civil authority of, like private authority of houses of worship to practice their religious freedom by deciding, you know, who comes into the mosque, who does not.
00:13:13.420And based on what criteria, the government stepped in and told the houses of worship, everybody has to be vaccinated.
00:13:20.280No other province did that on a province by basis, although British Columbia did that for one of its health regions, the, there's one health region in the north that tried the same thing.
00:13:34.980Other provinces violated religious freedom less severely.
00:13:39.200British Columbia did close houses of worship entirely for a year and two months, which was, puts it up right behind Quebec.
00:13:45.560But to finish off on Quebec, it's just the combination of curfews and telling houses of worship who is or is not allowed to attend the travel restrictions and then all the other lockdowns and raising the possibility as a serious item for that Premier Legault said, we're going to impose a tax on people that have not had two COVID shots.
00:14:15.120And we're going to bar these people from grocery stores.
00:14:18.100Now, the government backed down, may have been related to a warning letter received from the Justice Centre from our Quebec lawyer.
00:14:27.760But the very fact that the Quebec government would actually seriously consider and announce that they were definitely going to impose a tax on people based on vaccination status.
00:14:37.920Just just and last, very last point on Quebec, they still have mask mandates, the only place in Canada, probably the only place in North America where you have to wear a mask when you're in public spaces.
00:14:52.980It's it's it's really remarkable that we are still living in this sort of dystopian nightmare.
00:14:58.900John, there's been a lot of discussion recently about the sort of robustness of our institutions, the strength of our ability to sort of move on from COVID.
00:15:07.500You wrote in a recent op-ed with the JCCF, you compared communism to Canada's pandemic response.
00:15:12.880You said the utopian goal of communism and the utopian goal of a world with no COVID, both ideologies use the same have been used the same way to trample human rights and constitutional freedoms.
00:15:22.140I'm wondering, like when you hear, for instance, conservative politicians say that Trudeau is acting like a dictator and then the response from the Laurentian elites in the media is just to absolutely clutch their pearls and say, how dare you say something like that about Trudeau?
00:15:38.000But yeah, at the same time, we've lived through two years of just heavy handed, you know, really, really intensive government overreach.
00:15:45.000Yeah, I wonder if you could kind of elaborate on your comparison of communism to our COVID reaction and then speak more broadly about the robustness of Canada to withstand these kind of emergencies that take two years to trample on our rights.
00:16:00.040And, you know, we're still we're still not completely out of the woods.
00:16:04.760So governments never take your rights and freedoms away without proffering a good pretext or a nice sounding excuse.
00:16:13.100So dictators need an enemy who could be the enemy.
00:16:17.900Well, it could be let's look at communist Russia, 1917, right on through to 1991.
00:16:25.740The enemy is capitalism, capitalists, wealthy landowners, people that oppress the workers.
00:16:34.600So in order to fight the enemy and build our socialist utopia, we have to take away your freedom of speech, your freedom of religion, your parental rights to raise your own children as you deem best, your freedom of association, your freedom of peaceful assembly.
00:16:48.340We're taking away all your rights and freedoms, but it's for your own good, because we got these evil capitalists and aristocrats and landowners and factory owners that are oppressing the proletariat.
00:17:06.700Adolf Hitler in Germany said you have to be very afraid of the communists and the Jews.
00:17:11.920And so we got to protect Germany from Jews and communists.
00:17:16.120So we're going to take all your rights and freedoms away.
00:17:18.500And that's exactly what the Nazis did.
00:17:20.740As soon as they came to power, freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of peaceful assembly, the full freedom of religion, mobility rights, everything was taken away.
00:17:34.560And a lot of people supported it, sadly.
00:17:36.940That's another thing about the dictators.
00:17:38.880Another example would be some, you know, right-wing military dictatorships in Latin America.
00:18:40.080And that extends to people that don't want to take the vaccine, whom our prime minister has described as anti-science, misogynist, extremist, racist.
00:18:55.340You have that kind of demonization of a minority.
00:18:59.000And so people who don't see the playbook, I think, are probably just ignorant of history because it's the same thing.
00:19:05.480When governments take away your rights and freedoms, they will create an enemy and they will proffer a nice sounding excuse for taking away your rights and freedoms.
00:19:18.340Well, it's so interesting to see because I think you're completely right in your assessment of what is going on.
00:19:24.220And yet, John, so many of the people who are doing just what you say or excusing someone like Justin Trudeau and doing that were the same people who were out last week, you know, banging the drum of Canadiana, saying how wonderful and enigmatic our charter is.
00:19:39.820It's almost like ignorant of what's in the charter and what the charter was designed to do and what the charter was designed to respect.
00:19:46.160So why is it that we have people who call themselves liberal, call themselves liberals, used to wrap themselves in the charter, who are the ones out there doing that?
00:19:54.840And we saw it clear as day during the trucker convoy when Justin Trudeau came out on day one after being in hiding and having COVID and whatever else was going on with him, saying these people are Nazis.
00:20:08.520So if you're standing with them, you're standing with people waving swastikas.
00:20:12.940Like, why don't they have the self-awareness?
00:20:16.000Why don't they understand, you know, what the purpose of the charter is and what the meaning of the term liberty is?
00:20:23.240How do they square that circle and why the hypocrisy, why the lack of self-awareness?
00:20:30.700Well, anything I say will be speculation, but I think there's a lot of inertia on the part of the so-called mainstream media, not just the CDC, but other media are getting government funding now.
00:20:44.680You know, everything from television stations to newspapers and he who pays the piper calls the tune.
00:20:54.040And so you've got government funded media who are preaching and proclaiming and promoting the government's narrative on COVID, on treatments for COVID, on lockdowns, on vaccines, everything in the past two years.
00:21:10.000We've had the mainstream media kind of beating the government's drum, promoting fear, suggesting falsely that COVID is as dangerous as the Spanish flu of 1918.
00:21:21.840Following the government's line on claiming that there are absolutely no cures or treatments for COVID whatsoever, proclaiming this message that lockdowns are saving lives, that lockdowns are doing more good than harm, preaching the gospel on the vaccines, that they are safe and effective.
00:21:42.220The media have been cheerleaders now, fortunately, they are losing credibility every day as more and more people are just tuning out and more and more people are getting their news from, you know, their friends, their colleagues, their whatever streams, but they're not getting the media from the six o'clock news the way that Canadians were 40 or 50 years ago.
00:22:09.800So I think that there's a bit of a bubble there.
00:22:10.820So I think that there's a bit of a bubble there and there's a disconnect.
00:22:14.740And for Canadians that were not on the ground in Ottawa, the mainstream media did push this message that these truckers were dangerous, violent criminals.
00:22:28.960And sadly, I think that message has probably sunk in to the minds of at least some Canadians, hopefully not too many.
00:22:37.200I agree with you that more and more people are tuning out, getting their news directly from the source.
00:22:41.620That was one of the great things that we saw during the convoy was that a lot of Canadians were just streaming videos themselves.
00:22:48.080You know, there were these viral videos going everywhere on TikTok and Instagram with millions of views, particularly even young Canadians on those platforms.
00:22:55.880But I think even older Canadians, you know, rather than going to the CBC, they might get their news directly from, you know, the JCCF or True North or some alternative.
00:23:05.000So there is some hope. I want to ask you again, though, about Canada's institutions.
00:23:11.460Do you think we're in a good shape as a country? What do you think of the Charter at 40?
00:23:16.080What do you think of the broader constitutional structure? How can we make these institutions more robust?
00:23:23.400Boy, that's that's a very big question. We're in bad shape.
00:23:27.120We have a we have a breakdown in the rule of law.
00:23:30.960It was just striking and disgusting to see how the difference in 24 months between the Aboriginal and environmentalist protesters in February and March of 2020.
00:23:45.880So right around the time that COVID was starting to become an issue, we had people blockading railway lines, making it impossible for ships in Halifax and Vancouver to unload.
00:23:57.300And the cause they were fighting for was it was anti-pipeline in the name of traditional Aboriginal territory, even though the elected chiefs in those areas were pro-pipeline and were looking forward to the job creation and getting their 80 percent unemployment rates, which you see on some reserves, getting that down and getting people working.
00:24:19.020But in the name of Aboriginal rights, in the name of anti-pipelines, we had these protesters that blockaded railway lines in Canada.
00:24:29.120And the prime minister's response was to negotiate and to say, we have to be patient, even though that was definitely criminal conduct, to blockade a railway line, to blockade a highway and prevent any traffic, not just slowing down traffic, but an outright prohibition on train travel.
00:24:49.020So then fast forward to 2021, we've got vandals in Manitoba at the legislature, tearing down and vandalizing a statue of Queen Victoria, which is criminal conduct, and police just stand by and watch.
00:25:04.660And then we get the truckers in Ottawa, not a single trucker charged with any crime in the first three weeks that they're there, which tells you just how not illegal their behaviour was when there wasn't a single criminal charge.
00:25:22.580So there's no charges laid, no arrests made.
00:25:26.060And then you get this crackdown where the prime minister imposes martial law on the country, the Emergencies Act, and declares a national emergency.
00:25:37.080And next thing you know, we've got police horses trampling women.
00:25:41.100You've got unarmed protesters getting beaten by police clubs.
00:25:44.520And you get this aggressive, physical repression of a peaceful protest.
00:25:52.040Where we're at in Canada is that if you're demonstrating for a cause that the prime minister is sympathetic to, even if you're blatantly breaking the law, you're not going to get in trouble.
00:26:05.100Conversely, if you're protesting for a cause that the prime minister disagrees with, like our charter rights and freedoms that have been taken away from us the past two years, well, then we're going to have a ruthless physical suppression of peaceful protest.
00:26:22.380That double standard is a violation of the rule of law.
00:26:28.340Well, and you forgot in there that during the very, very beginning of the pandemic, right when no one really knew what it was and everyone was told to just stay inside to avoid catching this thing, all of a sudden we had a American-inspired Black Lives Rally movement that swept across Canada, even though it had nothing to do with our history or our justice system or our policing.
00:26:51.840And the prime minister himself went out to that protest right in the spring of 2020 when COVID was brand new.
00:26:59.340And then you had a bunch of epidemiologists and doctors saying that fighting against racism was so righteous and just that you couldn't catch COVID from getting it.
00:27:10.900So, you know, we've had those contradictions for a long, long time.
00:27:14.400John, it's not a healthy society when, you know, you have a prime minister who routinely breaks ethics rules and, you know, gets a slap on the wrist and gets to continue on.
00:27:23.620It's not a healthy society, what you just described.
00:27:26.720So I just had a final question for you here.
00:27:29.960You know, we talked a little bit about how most of the restrictions are lifted, but they're not all lifted, particularly there's still many restraints on people who are unvaccinated.
00:27:41.460We never know when they're just going to get brought back in.
00:27:43.860And it seems like the provincial power, provincial government doesn't want to let go of those powers just yet.
00:27:48.380So what is the JCCF doing to protect us going forward and how can Canadians ensure that our rights are protected and that this doesn't just keep happening again and again and again?
00:28:01.300Well, we've got court actions across the country, but I've often said that winning in the court of public opinion is even more important than winning in the court of law.
00:28:13.860Because if public opinion changes and people recognize how harmful and destructive and how utterly unscientific these measures are and have been, when that public opinion changes, you're going to see change in the law.
00:28:29.320So the best thing that people can do is to try as much as possible to be in dialogue with others.
00:28:38.320You know, some people, you've got people on both extremes that you can't talk to.
00:28:42.140I mean, some people, they're just 100% pro-lockdown.
00:28:46.280They completely buy into the government and media narrative.
00:28:52.180And there's other people, you know, equally passionate on the other side that are not going to be persuaded that lockdowns were good.
00:28:59.400But there are people in the middle that are not firmly decided either way.
00:29:04.720Those are the people that need to be reached.
00:29:06.960So people can, you know, hand out brochures.
00:29:11.520The Justice Centre has mailed out hundreds of thousands of brochures to people that will get a pack of 50 or 100, put them in the mailboxes of their neighbours.
00:29:20.020If anybody wants to do that, contact info at jccf.ca.
00:29:25.140Ask for brochures about our Charter Rights and Freedoms and the problems with the vaccine passport, those kinds of things.
00:29:34.580But do the heavy lifting, do the hard work of persuading people that are in the middle, that are open to being persuaded.
00:29:41.900Because the way out of this, unfortunately, it's just going to be a lot of hard work to change public opinion.
00:29:48.060And apart from that, I think we're, the repression is going to continue if we don't change public opinion.
00:29:54.980Well, I think that certainly with the trucker convoy, there was a little bit of optimism and good news there.
00:30:00.320Because the fact that the truckers went out there, you know, they were greeted on the side of highways in minus 30 degree weather by families and people waving Canadian flags.
00:30:09.280And many, many people did rally around those truckers.
00:30:12.100Many more appreciated them silently at home or quietly, and you're hearing more and more of that.
00:30:15.920So, you know, definitely the truckers changed the tone.
00:30:20.140And I think that the work that the JCCF does is incredibly important in pushing back against just out of control government overreach and activism.
00:30:29.220So, John, we really appreciate what you do.
00:30:31.600Thanks for your time and coming on the show.
00:30:33.440And we hope to have you back again soon.