The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 281. Trudeau, Travel, and “The Science”

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00:00:57.420 Hi everyone.

00:01:11.760 I was sent an interesting article about a week ago, written by Rupa Subramanya.

00:01:16.680 It was sent to me by two sources, one from Barry Weiss's Substack, which is where it was published, and also by Rex Murphy, who's one of Canada's foremost journalists.

00:01:28.620 They were very impressed with the article and thought it was important, and so I read it, and I think it is important.

00:01:35.640 The article was called, Court Documents Reveal Canada's Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.

00:01:41.720 Now, it was very interesting to me that Rupa had to publish this basically in an American news channel and sort of out of the way, although Barry Weiss's Substack is quite popular.

00:01:53.620 And she's also had a lot of difficulty getting the story followed up in the Canadian legacy news, and it's a big story.

00:02:00.920 And I put her in touch with The Telegraph in the UK, and they're going to publish, by all appearances, a variant of the story.

00:02:08.240 And so it's pretty sad, bloody condition, let's say, that a big Canadian news story about the treacherous deceit of our government, federal government, is unable to attract any purchase in the legacy media outlets.

00:02:23.740 It's stunning in some sense.

00:02:25.740 In any case, what Rupa revealed was that the Trudeau government put in what were among the most stringent travel restrictions in the Western world as of August 13, 2021, and claimed scientific justification for doing so.

00:02:43.080 But in fact, not only was there no scientific justification whatsoever for doing so, there weren't any people who were making the decision who were qualified to determine whether such scientific evidence actually existed.

00:02:54.780 And so despite the fact that everyone who objected was pilloried as a public menace, as well as however else they might be pilloried, it appears as though all of it was smoke and mirrors and sheer, bloody, instrumental politicking.

00:03:10.360 And I heard the same thing about operations at the provincial government levels in Canada from very reliable sources, that all this so-called reliance on science was complete, bloody nonsense, and that what was instead happening was that governments were conducting opinion polls like MAD, which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but often is.

00:03:30.960 And ruling on that basis, deriving policy on that basis, so on the basis of public fear and whim, and then passing that off as scientific.

00:03:40.920 And that's pretty horrible.

00:03:42.720 Or maybe it's really horrible.

00:03:44.720 And that was Rupa's claim in some sense.

00:03:47.020 So the story also covered a lawsuit brought against the government by a couple of plaintiffs who we have with us today, Carl Harrison and Sean Rickard, who are represented by a lawyer, and that lawyer is Sam Presvelos.

00:04:04.580 And he's here today, too, so he's also going to talk.

00:04:07.460 And then featured as well, commentary by Bruce Pardy, and Bruce is a law professor at Queen's University who's been very, he's very interested in, well, let's call it rule of law by precedent, you know?

00:04:20.740 Good old classic English common law, essentially.

00:04:24.380 And so he's going to give a broader overview of the whole legal situation.

00:04:29.300 So I'm going to start with some bios, and then Rupa is going to come in and tell the story and weave the plaintiffs,

00:04:35.520 and their representative lawyer into the story, and then Bruce is going to comment, and I'll chime in probably too much.

00:04:42.540 So first, Rupa Subramania is a freelance columnist for the National Post, Canada, and Nikkei.

00:04:49.720 Her previous work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy.

00:04:54.160 She resides in Ottawa, Ontario.

00:04:56.860 Bruce Pardy is a law professor at Queen's University, and is the executive director of Rights Probe.

00:05:03.760 He's a critic of legal progressivism, social justice, and the expansive managerial state at the front lines of the culture war,

00:05:11.880 which is raging madly inside the law.

00:05:15.400 Dr. Pardy has taught at law schools in Canada, the U.S., and New Zealand.

00:05:18.960 He's one of the co-creators of the Free North Declaration, a public petition and movement to protect civil liberties in Canada

00:05:26.920 from COVID-19 irrationality and overreach.

00:05:30.900 Sam Presfalos, the representing lawyer, founded Presfalos Law LLP at 25 years of age and serves there as managing partner.

00:05:40.820 He specializes in corporate, commercial, and real estate litigation

00:05:44.700 and has successfully represented clients before the Superior Court of Justice, Divisional Court, Court of Appeal, and Federal Court of Canada.

00:05:53.220 His peers ranked Mr. Presfalos as one of the top 100 lawyers in Toronto in 2021 in Post magazine.

00:06:01.920 Carl Harrison, one of the plaintiffs against the federal government, has opened, operated, and sold

00:06:07.940 many successful restaurants, bars, and music and comedy venues.

00:06:12.460 In 2011, he was named one of the top 20 most influential people in the U.K. hospitality trade.

00:06:18.740 He has found success as a real estate investor and developer since 1987 and has been involved in the travel sector since the year 2000.

00:06:27.200 He is a co-founder and co-owner of a well-known family holiday brand operating in the U.K., France, Spain, and Ireland.

00:06:35.980 He was also, it's a very interesting life, he was also co-founder and investor at Seattle Seawolves,

00:06:42.580 a team which took the silverware in the first two seasons of Major League Rugby in the U.S.

00:06:46.960 He's also been an occasional contributing writer for the U.K. satirical magazine Private Eye

00:06:53.100 and has as well co-produced a series of award-winning short horror films.

00:06:58.380 Last but not least, he has campaigned for reform of abusive practices in the U.K. pub sector.

00:07:05.300 And finally, Sean Rickard is a 55-year-old entrepreneur and small business owner who resides in Pickering, Ontario.

00:07:14.860 He owns and operates a contracting business specializing in exterior aluminum and vinyl siding and eaveswork on residential homes.

00:07:23.400 He founded the company back in early 2013 and built it from the ground up.

00:07:29.380 He's a British citizen and a permanent resident in Canada.

00:07:31.920 Mr. Rickard came to Canada on a vacation to explore when he was just 20 years old and fell in love with the country.

00:07:39.800 Mr. Rickard also had a fishing and outdoor TV show back in 2005 to 2007,

00:07:45.900 which aired in Canada and the U.S. on OLN, CTV, WFN, and Global.

00:07:52.500 Welcome, Rupa, Bruce, Sam, Carl, and Sean.

00:07:55.640 Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today.

00:07:58.480 Rupa, why don't you start filling us in?

00:08:01.040 Tell us about the story and then fill in the story and bring these other characters in.

00:08:07.840 Okay.

00:08:08.360 Well, thanks, Jordan.

00:08:09.720 Thanks for having us all here.

00:08:11.640 It really is a pleasure and a real honor.

00:08:16.560 So I will quickly summarize the story for our viewers and our listeners.

00:08:22.760 The Trudeau government always claimed that COVID-19 policies were based on the science and the evidence.

00:08:29.600 They kept telling us we're consulting the experts, the scientists, and we're following the science and the evidence.

00:08:36.400 But now, thanks to the civil suit brought by Carl Harrison and Sean Rickard,

00:08:42.580 and we've seen inside the guts of one of the key mandates of the federal government, implemented by the federal government,

00:08:52.220 which is the vaccine mandate for travel, which proved so incredibly destructive and prevented millions of Canadians from traveling,

00:09:00.900 to even visit sick relatives and visiting their loved ones to board a plane or a train.

00:09:09.760 You couldn't even board a train for domestic travel purposes.

00:09:13.320 And so while pouring over hundreds of pages of testimony and cross-examination,

00:09:20.000 thanks to the brilliant cross-examination by their attorney, Sam Presfalos,

00:09:24.100 it becomes crystal clear that the mandates were going to happen and that the bureaucrats had to scramble to find some kind of a scientific rationale

00:09:34.480 for which they weren't able to do even just a few days before the mandate kicked in.

00:09:41.820 So the question is, why did Trudeau do this?

00:09:47.000 Trudeau was, if you remember, the prime minister was in a minority in the House of Commons,

00:09:52.220 having lost his majority back in 2019 because of corruption and cronyism scams.

00:09:57.940 And he was desperate to regain it, and vaccine mandates proved to be the perfect wedge issue.

00:10:04.700 And that's what everybody was saying at that time.

00:10:07.080 This is the fall of 2021.

00:10:09.920 Why for travel?

00:10:11.240 Well, one crucial reason is that it's the only sector apart from the federal workplace which comes under the federal government's powers.

00:10:19.340 In other words, this was the only place where Trudeau could flex his muscles and impose a vaccine mandate, and that's what he did.

00:10:27.980 So your claim here, if I have it right, just so everyone listening knows, is that Trudeau, who was struggling to maintain popularity, to maintain his government,

00:10:39.440 picked a divisive wedge issue, because it was a divisive wedge issue, imposed it on Canadians, and then attempted to insist that it was justified by the science.

00:10:49.280 Yeah, there was no, it's very clear, the scientific rationale is lacking, at least based on the cross-examination of the key government witnesses in this case.

00:11:02.460 Hmm. So, so he risked splitting the country apart and pitting people against each other, personally and socially, to facilitate his government's grip on power.

00:11:15.180 That's what it appears to be at this point, yeah.

00:11:20.700 Okay, so sorry to interrupt. I just wanted to clarify that.

00:11:23.820 So, all right, so you started investigating this. Why?

00:11:26.640 Well, I was actually aware of the case, but I really had no entree into it until, through a mutual acquaintance, one of the applicants reached out to me,

00:11:38.340 and then I became aware of the case and the background and their fight against the federal government, against the travel mandate.

00:11:45.780 And then, thanks to their litigation, the documents eventually became publicly available through the federal court.

00:11:56.420 Ironically, I must point this out, that in response to my piece telling the story of Sean and Carl's legal battle,

00:12:04.000 the federal court, in a very unusual move, and this is what I'm told by many people, that it was an extremely unusual move,

00:12:10.720 they actually made it easier for the public to access the documents by tweeting about it, and they made a link publicly available.

00:12:18.760 And I have to say that some of the cross-examination really reads like a John Grisham novel.

00:12:24.900 You know, you've got the secretive government panel within Transport Canada, which is tasked with crafting the mandate.

00:12:32.240 Apart from its head, who is a career bureaucrat, she has a degree in English literature.

00:12:38.120 We don't really know much about the others. There are about 20 people on this panel.

00:12:43.700 And she names one individual on this panel who seems to have some kind of a public health background.

00:12:53.860 When I reached out to her, she said she has a master's in science, but she refused to tell me what that was in.

00:13:00.660 For all you know, it could be astrophysics, but we don't know that.

00:13:05.680 But the key point here is none of these people had a background in medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, virology, you name it.

00:13:16.160 They were just there to provide a cover for the mandate.

00:13:21.020 And you talk about, is it Jennifer Little?

00:13:23.900 It's Jennifer Little, yes.

00:13:25.800 And she was the one who was in charge of this, is that correct?

00:13:29.100 Yeah, she was the director general of this group of COVID recovery.

00:13:33.680 And these are all civil servants you're talking about?

00:13:37.280 They're all civil servants.

00:13:38.980 Okay, why did they regard it as part of their duty to provide a cover story for the politicking of the Liberal government?

00:13:44.940 I thought they had a duty to the public, fundamentally.

00:13:47.940 So why were they roped into this, and why did they agree to it?

00:13:50.800 Well, I mean, this is something that you would have to ask them, but my guess is they were just doing their jobs, I guess.

00:13:59.340 You have the secretive task force within Transport Canada, and they really had no good scientific rationale, and they were looking for one.

00:14:06.940 They were scrambling for one days before, literally less than 10 days before the mandate goes into effect.

00:14:14.480 And, you know, including hoping that the Public Health Agency of Canada, PHAC, would come up with something, which they didn't.

00:14:21.680 But, and Jennifer Little, the bureaucrat that I referred to with the bachelor's degree in English literature, repeatedly said the decisions were made at very high levels.

00:14:32.160 And these were people senior to her, and invoked cabinet confidence, and refused to answer who exactly ordered the mandates.

00:14:42.780 This was during cross-examination?

00:14:44.960 Yes, this was during cross-examination.

00:14:47.000 And she has the right, she has the right to keep that information secret if it's come from, from what, from a high enough legislative source?

00:14:54.240 I, I, I would guess so.

00:14:56.400 I mean, this is not my area of expertise.

00:14:58.140 I don't really know the law governing civil servants.

00:15:01.220 But she certainly repeatedly invoked cabinet confidence when she was asked questions on who exactly ordered the mandates, making it pretty clear.

00:15:12.000 I guess, I mean, one could infer from this, the decision was taken either by the prime minister himself or the cabinet as a whole.

00:15:20.020 And this, this confirms what many had suspected all along, that when the prime minister introduced the federal mandate, both for travel and for the civil service,

00:15:30.460 and called a snap election two days later, August 13, he, he announces the mandates, essentially preventing millions of Canadians from boarding a plane or a train.

00:15:42.120 And for civil servants who've been working from home since the pandemic began, they needed to be vaccinated.

00:15:48.360 And it was just one of the most bizarre things.

00:15:50.980 Okay, so let me stop you there and summarize, because this is where the plot gets particularly thick.

00:15:56.120 So not only did the Trudeau cabinet generate an unnecessary travel lockdown depriving Canadians of one of their most fundamental civil rights, especially in a country of our size,

00:16:08.820 but they did it and scrambled to find a scientific lie to justify it.

00:16:13.780 And it was so far off based from the science that they couldn't even find a suitable lie.

00:16:19.560 And then they magnified their error by calling it election.

00:16:23.600 And all of this was an instrumental attempt to gain more power on the election front,

00:16:28.480 because Trudeau was worried about being in a minority position and looking for a way to increase his grip on the prime ministership.

00:16:35.300 Right.

00:16:35.720 Oh, boy.

00:16:37.540 It's no wonder no Canadian newspaper would publish that.

00:16:40.360 That's hardly a story at all.

00:16:43.880 And Jordan, you know, if I may say this, you know, if this really had been about saving lives,

00:16:50.840 why didn't Trudeau just impose the mandates and campaign on them as a fait accompli?

00:16:56.260 That would have been the right thing to do.

00:16:58.160 Instead, he cleverly used these mandates as a wedge issue.

00:17:01.400 And unfortunately for him, he managed to just eke out another minority government.

00:17:08.280 But in the process, he ended up dividing the country.

00:17:11.640 He ended up demonizing and marginalizing millions of Canadians who were unable or unwilling for a range of different reasons to get the vaccine.

00:17:19.460 Yeah, well, and a huge part of the reason they were unable or unwilling to get the vaccine was because they didn't trust the Trudeau government at all.

00:17:28.920 And so there were all sorts of people, and some of them, I suppose, were conspiratorial in their inferences,

00:17:34.280 but many weren't who thought there's something fishy going on here.

00:17:37.040 I don't trust this a bit.

00:17:38.220 And those were all the people who were demonized as, you know, radical anti-vaxxers.

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00:19:18.420 We're going to turn to Carl Harrison, who's taken a, and Sean Rickard, who's taken a lawsuit out against the Canadian government for reasons related to the story that Rupa has been telling.

00:19:34.380 And so, Carl, perhaps you can start by telling us, filling us in on what you're doing and why.

00:19:39.540 Yeah, thanks.

00:19:41.740 Yeah, we're taking, we've made an application for a judicial declaration, essentially in the federal court in relation to the Canadian government's discriminatory mandates for requiring a vaccine as a precursor to traveling.

00:20:03.340 And we filed that in December for a lot of thought and consideration over previous months separately.

00:20:12.280 I mean, I came to this differently to Sean.

00:20:17.040 I came to this throughout the summer months of 2021.

00:20:23.460 In April of 2021, I was listening to the Prime Minister of Canada saying that there would be a vaccine for any Canadian that wanted one.

00:20:32.260 And by the time we got to the fall, I had a man watching a man on television as the Prime Minister of Canada talking about five to seven million of his fellow Canadians as people who were racists and misogynists and people who were taking up space, people who might not be tolerated, which is language.

00:20:53.480 I mean, I'm coming up 60 years old.

00:20:56.040 I've not really heard that kind of language from a prime minister of many Western democracies until recently.

00:21:03.260 And I certainly wouldn't have expected it from a Canadian prime minister.

00:21:06.320 But there we go.

00:21:06.980 And so during the summer of 2021, the prime minister decided he was going to dissolve parliament, go for an election and try to get reelected in the fall.

00:21:17.000 And clearly he had, as you said earlier, identified with his advisers, whoever they are, a wedge issue, which based around people's health choices.

00:21:29.860 And he thought he could polarize the population.

00:21:33.960 He thought he could use it to his advantage.

00:21:35.780 Why did you feel so strongly about this to take such dramatic action?

00:21:40.680 Because obviously most Canadians, even within that five to seven million number that you described, grumbled about this but didn't do what you did.

00:21:50.160 Why did you identify this is so important?

00:21:52.340 And why were you willing to put yourself at substantial risk financially and in terms of your time to do something about it?

00:22:01.620 It's not a difficult question to answer.

00:22:03.900 I mean, when you see this kind of policy implemented by governments, there are three things you can primarily do.

00:22:12.220 I mean, you can accept it, you can fight it, or you can run away.

00:22:17.040 And it's a blend of those actions.

00:22:20.320 And I think if you're able to fight these things, if there's something you can do, then you should.

00:22:26.200 It's good citizenship.

00:22:27.260 I mean, I'm a recent immigrant to Canada.

00:22:29.740 I'm a Canadian citizen and a UK citizen.

00:22:33.200 And I brought my family here in 2009.

00:22:35.820 And I fell in love with Canada in the 1990s.

00:22:38.680 And as a recent immigrant from Europe, I feel it's part of citizenship to stand up against these kind of issues.

00:22:49.840 So running away wasn't an option for us.

00:22:52.720 Accepting it wasn't an option.

00:22:54.200 So how can we fight it?

00:22:55.660 We're not in politics.

00:22:57.000 I think the opposition parties throughout the summer of 2021 were weak.

00:23:03.600 I mean, Erin O'Toole, I think, just demonstrated an extraordinary lack of vision and weakness throughout the summer of 2021 by seemingly going along with Trudeau rather than actually opposing him.

00:23:15.280 Whilst he was opposing him, his polling was doing well.

00:23:18.720 And as soon as he started to go along with him, he plummeted and subsequently lost.

00:23:23.840 So I thought, what can I do?

00:23:26.540 I started to think about illegal action.

00:23:29.160 And at that point, I came across Sean, who was – I saw him on Twitter, the sort of global town hall.

00:23:38.380 And I saw Sean there saying some of the same things that I was thinking and starting the process of raising money.

00:23:46.820 And I reached out to Sean.

00:23:50.040 I thought I could contribute from my own legal experience in the past.

00:23:53.840 I thought that was something I could usefully add.

00:23:55.620 And I thought I could usefully add funding.

00:23:57.880 You know, I've been in business a long time, so I have some resource.

00:24:00.960 And I thought that's something else I can do.

00:24:02.880 So I couldn't politically oppose at that point.

00:24:06.040 We couldn't – we could protest.

00:24:07.360 We can go and do direct action and we can protest with other people.

00:24:10.320 And Canadians should always protest where things are wrong.

00:24:14.560 And coming from the UK, we're used to protest.

00:24:18.740 I mean, it's as you know.

00:24:19.580 I mean, you've been there a lot, I think, to the UK, Jordan.

00:24:21.960 And protesting the UK is seen as, you know, something that definitely has to be done.

00:24:28.240 So taking part in that, something we can do.

00:24:31.040 And legal action, something we can do.

00:24:32.700 I came together with Sean in the fall, 2021.

00:24:35.400 And I'll let Sean pick up there because he can explain how we came to work with Sam, I think.

00:24:43.860 It's probably helpful.

00:24:45.300 Sure.

00:24:45.780 Sean, over to you.

00:24:47.720 Yeah.

00:24:48.120 Hi.

00:24:48.800 And thank you again for having us all on and helping us get this story out.

00:24:52.780 As you said, the Canadian legacy media have essentially ignored this story completely, which is mind-boggling and also deeply disturbing.

00:25:05.720 Anyway, but I guess this whole process kind of came about for me, as Carl said, in September when I heard this sort of disgusting, divisive rhetoric coming out of our prime minister's mouth when he was campaigning.

00:25:25.020 And the further we went along and the more this whole threat of banning the dirty, unvaccinated or those who refused to be injected from getting on a plane or a train and even leaving the country just absolutely terrified me.

00:25:47.280 I mean, to me, he resembled a sort of a narcissistic, sociopathic tyrant.

00:25:53.660 And it really troubled me.

00:25:56.400 And I felt that I had to do something about it.

00:25:59.880 I like to travel.

00:26:01.360 I feel it's my right to travel.

00:26:03.220 I'm a free man.

00:26:05.500 And for somebody to come along and take that away with no recourse was deeply disturbing for me.

00:26:14.200 So I immediately started putting the feelers out there to various people.

00:26:20.440 I spoke to a couple of politicians.

00:26:21.840 Most of them were useless.

00:26:23.660 And eventually I, I spoke with somebody and I was given Sam's name and literally in the same night, I had a conversation with one person who introduced me to Sam.

00:26:38.240 Sam and I spoke and that same night I started a GoFundMe campaign on a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe and started tweeting about it.

00:26:50.640 I'd never used Twitter before.

00:26:52.000 I had four followers.

00:26:53.020 And in six weeks, I went to 7,800 followers.

00:26:55.640 And during that process, we were gaining a lot of traction, a lot of people's interests.

00:27:00.720 And I began to realize just how this had affected, like Carl said, six to seven million people's lives.

00:27:08.420 People unable to go and visit family, that type of thing.

00:27:12.240 And this is before it even happened.

00:27:14.640 So I got the ball rolling.

00:27:16.700 I spoke with Sam.

00:27:17.860 We hit it off immediately.

00:27:19.060 And he was as passionate about this as I was.

00:27:22.860 And we came up with a sort of a vague strategy of how we might do this.

00:27:29.020 And then the first thing was, obviously, was to start raising some money.

00:27:32.020 And through that process on Twitter, I started getting messages from people like you do.

00:27:40.460 As your followers grow, people start sending you messages, some helpful, some not, some supportive, some not.

00:27:48.980 And I got a couple of messages from Carl.

00:27:51.680 And I was kind of fielding through all these messages and so on.

00:27:55.440 And eventually, he sent me something that sort of resonated with me.

00:28:01.760 And I found out he was in British Columbia.

00:28:05.280 And so I messaged him back a couple of times.

00:28:08.960 We spoke to each other, you know, through direct message.

00:28:12.180 And then we arranged, eventually arranged to have a Zoom call with Sam.

00:28:17.300 And that's the first time that all three of us spoke as a group.

00:28:21.000 And Carl, very kindly at that time, again, as passionate as we all were about putting a stop to this, this tyranny.

00:28:30.260 And I don't use that word lightly, but that's exactly the way we perceived it.

00:28:34.580 Why did you two have enough confidence to go ahead with this?

00:28:39.520 Now, I mean, at that point, people who were opposing the vaccine say,

00:28:43.740 so I'd like to know why it bothered you so much, what the vaccine mandate meant to you personally.

00:28:48.680 But then why you were able to presume that you knew well enough, better to risk bringing a lawsuit against the Canadian government.

00:28:59.940 Did you have support from your family?

00:29:02.200 I mean, obviously, no, you didn't have support from your family.

00:29:05.020 You had support from each other.

00:29:06.740 Who supported you?

00:29:07.960 Why did you have enough confidence to do this?

00:29:10.500 It's a very good question.

00:29:12.100 And I, to be honest, to this day, I don't know why I did this.

00:29:14.900 I was just very angry, and I felt somebody needed to do something.

00:29:18.580 The politicians weren't even speaking up.

00:29:21.220 As Carl pointed out, you know, Erin O'Toole, I mean, what a wet blanket he ended up with.

00:29:28.340 Just a complete rollover.

00:29:31.000 They saw these atrocities, and I'll call them that, going on, and nobody spoke up.

00:29:36.780 Nobody said a thing.

00:29:37.660 So I felt that I don't know why.

00:29:39.380 I just felt compelled to do something.

00:29:45.080 How helpful was it to have Sean to talk to you about it?

00:29:50.340 I mean, now there's two of you and not one, and so that's twice as many people.

00:29:54.140 It made a huge difference.

00:29:56.520 I mean, we've been a support group for one another since day one.

00:30:00.960 We've lost, we've all made, and just to clarify, we've all made huge sacrifices.

00:30:05.300 We've all lost friends throughout this process.

00:30:10.240 You know, certain family members begin to think you're a bit crazy.

00:30:14.640 But we've always had each other, and we were so in line, and it was like it was meant to be.

00:30:21.280 I said this the other day in Rupa's show.

00:30:23.360 You just said something very terrible there, you know, as far as I'm concerned, that you lost friends, and you were subject to the disruption of your familial cohesion.

00:30:35.200 And so one of the things Rupa pointed to in the beginning part of this conversation was the fact that Trudeau found a divisive wedge issue and exploited it for his own purposes.

00:30:45.660 And so what does that mean?

00:30:46.640 We want to make that concrete, because that's just abstract.

00:30:48.960 Yeah, well, it means that your friends turn your back on you, or vice versa, and that now you're at the throats of your family members.

00:30:57.000 And that's how civil society decays.

00:30:59.640 And so the story here, and this is why it's so absolutely appalling that the Canadian legacy media won't pick it up,

00:31:06.220 is that Trudeau was willing to sow that kind of personal level discord to say nothing of the utter economic and financial catastrophe that the policies produced,

00:31:16.680 to do nothing but not even really manage to cement his grip on power.

00:31:21.860 I think it's quite possible that Trudeau and the government, in doing what they've done, have very badly misread the numbers, if nothing else.

00:31:39.560 I think they maybe thought that people fell into one of two camps.

00:31:42.900 Either they would be people that would be pro-mandates or people that would be against them.

00:31:48.040 I think it's much more nuanced than that.

00:31:49.660 And certainly, my experience of doing this exercise has been that whilst, yeah, okay, I've lost a couple of friends,

00:31:56.240 but I've got a lot of family support for doing this, and a lot of support from people locally, and some surprising people.

00:32:04.100 And I think there's an element of a lot of folks who disagree with it, sort of going along with it, keeping their head down.

00:32:11.380 That's sort of an element of Canadian politeness, almost.

00:32:14.600 And I think that's a challenge going forward for Canada.

00:32:18.300 As Canada, perhaps, I mean, maybe Trudeau's done us all a favor by pushing Canada towards the end of what some might see as a political adolescence.

00:32:27.320 Well, I was thinking when Trudeau called the truckers, misogynists and bigots,

00:32:32.000 and said that they were fomenting a rebellion in Ottawa, let's say, financed by mega-Republicans of all the preposterous things,

00:32:39.440 because I was down in the States when that was happening, talking to Americans, telling them that this was the story.

00:32:45.940 And they were, like, open-jawed in amazement, including the Democrats, that anyone would ever possibly believe that.

00:32:52.800 And then I thought, well, you better give the devil his due.

00:32:55.580 Why would Canadians be willing to fall for that, let's say?

00:32:59.520 And then I thought, well, here's the story, man.

00:33:01.620 It's like, for 150 years, 150-odd years, we've really been able to evince a reasonable trust in our political institutions.

00:33:11.420 All three political parties, from right to left, governed with some degree of credibility and decency and predictability.

00:33:18.220 And then the legacy media did their job being responsible critics.

00:33:22.020 And I say you could even say that of the CBC for many years.

00:33:25.660 And the education system was reliable, and the legal system wasn't taken over by DEI warriors, and so forth.

00:33:32.400 And so, and now all that's, or a lot of that has changed.

00:33:36.220 And so now Canadians were being asked by their Prime Minister to accept one of two stories.

00:33:41.320 Either the truckers, for example, were misogynists and bigots, hell-bent on destabilizing Canadian democracy,

00:33:48.360 or you could no longer trust the government in a fundamental sense, or the legacy media,

00:33:54.460 and God only knows how much of the education system and the courts.

00:33:58.140 And so, in some sense, for a sensible and conservative people,

00:34:02.100 the logical choice there was to, well, assume the lesser devil,

00:34:06.420 and think that the truckers and the anti-vaxxers, so-called, and so forth,

00:34:11.240 were, you know, a fringe misogynist and bigot group,

00:34:14.780 and that everything in the background was really running as it should be.

00:34:18.460 But, as Rupa's story indicates, and as I said, I heard exactly the same story several months ago

00:34:24.680 from high-level consultants to provincial governments across Canada,

00:34:28.920 that they were doing the same thing, ruling by whole, post-hoc justifying it by science.

00:34:34.960 All right, so, Sam, you got involved in this, so tell us your story,

00:34:39.500 and flesh out what's been happening on the legal front and where this is going to go.

00:34:44.000 And I want to return to Carl, too, about the funding issue after that.

00:34:48.720 Sure, so good afternoon, and thanks as well for having me on the podcast.

00:34:53.080 You know, this is very much Terranova for me.

00:34:55.340 I'm not a constitutional lawyer.

00:34:57.580 I never saw myself getting involved in a constitutional case of this magnitude,

00:35:01.200 and I think I've said before elsewhere that constitutional law was my lowest mark ever in school,

00:35:05.880 and yet here I am at the forefront of this challenge.

00:35:07.760 You know, I think, like my clients, like Carl and like Sean, I also felt compelled to do something.

00:35:13.900 If you see there's a problematic trend happening and, you know, you have a means to affect some sort of a change

00:35:20.460 and you do nothing about it, I think in your own way you're contributing to the problem.

00:35:24.260 And everyone has a different threshold of getting involved, and quite frankly, my threshold,

00:35:28.980 I sort of crossed that threshold at the mandatory hotel quarantine,

00:35:32.760 which is a policy that I never would have imagined ever witnessing in a Western democracy.

00:35:38.640 The idea that somebody would have to quarantine pending a result of a virus that, quite frankly,

00:35:44.800 we've seen in some iteration before was, frankly, disturbing to me.

00:35:49.800 And that's really what propelled me, and I was very fortunate to get connected with Sean,

00:35:54.700 and then again with Carl, and it's true, you know, Sean, Carl, and I, in many ways,

00:35:58.080 have become our own little family, and we've been very fortunate to be supportive of one another

00:36:01.960 in what has been an extremely grueling seven, eight months.

00:36:05.240 This case really started Christmas Eve.

00:36:07.180 I suppose you made it a present to the government, and we're still in the midst of it,

00:36:12.260 and here we are in August, and we're, you know, just today,

00:36:14.920 I'm submitting my final materials to the court for the application.

00:36:18.100 So, it's been an extraordinary process, and we've learned, as you've come to learn,

00:36:22.800 very extraordinary things along the way.

00:36:24.800 Well, can you just, no one listening knows how a case like this proceeds.

00:36:29.820 So, could you walk us through the basis for the case, the nature of your challenge,

00:36:35.460 how the government lawyers are resisting this, and lay out the story of the court battle

00:36:41.760 and where it's headed?

00:36:43.140 Sure.

00:36:43.500 So, you know, fundamentally, there's sort of two ways in which litigation proceeds

00:36:48.460 through the court system.

00:36:49.600 The one way is an action, and an action is sort of what most people come to know

00:36:53.280 in, like, TV courtroom dramas, where you have a judge, and you have a witness,

00:36:56.160 and, you know, there's this idea that people are yelling and cross-examining,

00:36:59.580 and they're getting evidence orally, which is what we call vivo voce evidence.

00:37:02.980 That's not what's happening here.

00:37:04.580 This is proceeding by way of an application, and an application is largely a paper-based record.

00:37:09.620 So, what happens is people put in evidence to the court, and they do that by way of an affidavit.

00:37:14.720 And you can think of an affidavit as a story.

00:37:17.340 And you get stories from the applicants, like Sean and Carl, about how the mandates have

00:37:20.940 infringed their charter rights.

00:37:22.140 And you also get, you know, stories, I'll just call them a little bit more informally,

00:37:26.460 from experts who talk about the science and different policy considerations.

00:37:30.980 And then each side has to do that.

00:37:32.540 So, both sides have to produce their evidentiary record, which is, as I mentioned, exclusively done

00:37:37.760 by paper.

00:37:38.800 And then what happens is we participate in what is called the cross-examination.

00:37:43.240 In an action, the cross-examination is done live in front of a judge, and the judge is there

00:37:47.240 to assess the credibility of the witnesses and weigh testimony.

00:37:50.440 In an application, which is what we're doing, that is done with private, you know, privately

00:37:54.760 in a boardroom with a court reporter, and there's endless hours of cross-examinations

00:37:58.540 based on what people have said in their affidavits, their story.

00:38:02.060 And so, a lot of the evidence that Rupa is referring to came out in the process of that cross-examination,

00:38:06.720 because, as you know, our system, our justice system, is premised on the adversarial context

00:38:11.760 and the idea that if competing evidence is tested, the truth lies somewhere, and the

00:38:17.280 truth will come out.

00:38:18.340 And we spent May and June, literally two months, just exclusively in cross-examination.

00:38:24.360 We then take the affidavit records, and we take the cross-examination transcripts, we file

00:38:29.440 that with the court, and then we appear at a hearing.

00:38:32.040 And in that hearing, we make reference to the evidence both in the affidavits, in the

00:38:35.980 expert reports, and also in the cross-examination transcripts, and it's just submissions from

00:38:40.940 lawyers in front of a judge.

00:38:42.620 Okay, so what's the nature of the challenge?

00:38:45.040 The government put in these mandates, and they were mandated and required, and you're

00:38:51.020 objecting to that.

00:38:52.500 What exactly is the objection, and why are you even vaguely allowed to do this, let's say?

00:38:59.800 Well, I should hope we're allowed to do this, or else we have a much larger constitutional

00:39:03.780 crisis than I currently think we do.

00:39:05.520 But, you know, first and foremost, there is a prima facie infringement of Sean, Carl, and

00:39:11.520 those Canadians who are not vaccinated, a prima facie infringement of their Section 6

00:39:15.820 charter right, which is the right of mobility.

00:39:18.380 And I think it's one of the most fundamental rights that we have in the charter.

00:39:21.760 It goes to the very essence of what it means to live a dignified existence, the notion that,

00:39:26.640 you know, a man or woman can get up and move about their country and leave their country

00:39:30.280 at their will.

00:39:31.320 And that's been directly engaged in this charter challenge.

00:39:34.860 And in a context, quite frankly, that I've never seen before, a lot of the Section 6 cases

00:39:40.300 deal with issues like extradition, deportation.

00:39:43.160 I've never seen a case like this, that a government policy in reference to a public health mandate

00:39:49.200 has had the effect of preventing their own citizens from moving between provinces or from

00:39:55.020 leaving their country.

00:39:55.900 In fact, I can tell you right now, I have not found a case like this other than a case

00:40:00.140 in Newfoundland in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.

00:40:03.400 And the second thing, which I think is also very novel here, is the government has effectively

00:40:08.720 created Sophie's Choice, right?

00:40:10.260 They're asking Canadians to do a little bit of horse trading with their charter rights.

00:40:14.580 You cannot simultaneously exercise your right to travel while also exercising your Section 7

00:40:22.140 right to protect your bodily autonomy.

00:40:23.860 What do I mean by that?

00:40:24.940 You need to make a decision.

00:40:26.680 You are either going to get on a plane and get vaccinated, or you are not going to get

00:40:31.240 vaccinated and you're going to forfeit your right to use federally regulated transportation

00:40:35.040 system.

00:40:36.620 I think that's actually constitutionally unprecedented.

00:40:39.420 I've never seen a scenario where a government policy has created such a direct conflict, such

00:40:46.580 that it coerces you to choose one over the other.

00:40:50.080 And let's be clear about that.

00:40:51.560 Sean and Carl were coerced into not traveling because they wanted to protect their decision

00:40:57.660 making over what is an inherently private choice, i.e. vaccination.

00:41:02.640 And so both of those issues are very much engaged.

00:41:06.040 And it's on this basis that we've brought this application.

00:41:08.740 Okay.

00:41:08.980 And so what's the...

00:41:09.880 Fine.

00:41:10.400 I got it.

00:41:11.000 So what's the government counterclaim?

00:41:13.400 Now, hypothetically, the emergency was such that the science indicated that the government

00:41:19.960 could suspend Canadian charter rights.

00:41:23.740 Okay.

00:41:24.140 What kind of evidence do you need?

00:41:25.820 When can you suspend rights?

00:41:27.320 And when you suspend rights, by what principles are you allowed to suspend them?

00:41:32.840 Well, we were on a quest to answer a lot of those questions.

00:41:40.200 As you know, obviously, no right is absolute.

00:41:42.900 And if the government has a compelling objective, such that they may need to infringe a charter

00:41:47.960 right, they're entitled to do so if they come to the table with the right type of evidence,

00:41:51.940 right?

00:41:52.240 There is a reverse onus.

00:41:53.480 I mean, once my clients show that their rights have been breached, the government then has

00:41:57.220 to go to court and convince the court that they were justified in doing so.

00:42:01.020 And that's where this fight is really happening.

00:42:03.440 What is the justification?

00:42:05.020 What is so compelling about the risk of the unvaccinated flying that you believe it is

00:42:13.200 permissible in our democratic society to force unvaccinated people into making the decision

00:42:17.660 that I just described?

00:42:19.200 And I can tell you that having been living this case for the last seven months, the approach

00:42:24.840 the government has seemed to take is the casual application of general scientific principles

00:42:30.600 to the transportation sector.

00:42:32.680 They reason that because vaccination is generally good and desirable, everybody should do it.

00:42:37.940 And because it provides some sort of a transient benefit, you should do it.

00:42:42.640 It's generally desirable.

00:42:43.880 It's good for public health policies.

00:42:46.620 And we're going to use means available to us to encourage and incentivize that behavior.

00:42:51.020 Well, there's a difference between should and must, let's say, not least.

00:42:59.580 And then, of course, we have the problem Rupa pointed out, which was the scientific evidence

00:43:04.620 for the utility of the travel ban itself was apparently entirely lacking.

00:43:09.840 So at the moment, and I don't know how this is playing out in court, but in the context of

00:43:14.260 this conversation and other conversations I've had that are similar, the evidence, legal and

00:43:19.600 scientific on the government, and let's also say moral, shall we, on the government side

00:43:24.640 seems pretty, well, how about we call it appallingly and unprecedentedly weak?

00:43:31.480 Well, it's interesting that you used the word morality there because I actually, in cross

00:43:35.140 examinations, I did ask the individual who was responsible for the development of the

00:43:39.420 policy whether there was an ethical consideration behind the vaccine mandate.

00:43:43.160 And the answer is that there was not, which is astounding because there's actually an ethical

00:43:47.260 frame.

00:43:48.200 No, it gets better.

00:43:49.380 There is actually an ethical framework available by the government online that is supposedly used

00:43:55.360 to guide ethical decision making in the context of the pandemic.

00:43:59.820 So.

00:44:01.720 And so that wasn't used either.

00:44:04.980 No.

00:44:07.500 No.

00:44:07.980 So if we, if we tried to give the devil his due, and so I'll speak as a critic of Rupa

00:44:14.140 here, her claim fundamentally is that this was nothing but blatant, cynical, narcissistic

00:44:20.260 politicking of the lowest order.

00:44:23.160 And we might say, well, no, that's probably an oversimplification.

00:44:27.220 There must have been some other justification generated, like in good faith, and then also

00:44:33.300 post hoc as, at least as a coverup.

00:44:35.700 But essentially, in some sense, what you seem to be saying is that you've uncovered very

00:44:40.760 little evidence of any of that in the, in the cross examinations.

00:44:44.500 So even as a scam, it wasn't a very good one.

00:44:47.900 There is evidence that, you know, vaccines can help protect against developing severe outcomes

00:44:52.780 and deaths.

00:44:54.120 The question is, how compelling is that evidence?

00:44:57.140 How long does that protection actually last?

00:44:59.720 But the bigger question is, why does that matter in the context of the transportation system?

00:45:03.300 When you're talking about the fact that travel contributes 1% or less by the government's

00:45:08.560 own data to COVID-19 transmission, and somehow this is the targeted industry that we're going

00:45:16.600 to focus on and impose a vaccination requirement as a precondition for travel, why isn't anyone

00:45:21.820 comparing that to the general epidemiological situation in the community?

00:45:25.760 And here's a surprise for you.

00:45:26.920 Nobody did that.

00:45:28.500 Nobody looked at, nobody looked to compare what's the positivity like in different settings

00:45:33.320 in the general community.

00:45:34.140 Because if you're not traveling, where are you?

00:45:35.760 You're at home.

00:45:36.580 You're in the supermarket.

00:45:37.660 You're watching soccer.

00:45:38.600 You're watching a basketball game, all of which, by the way, you can do without being

00:45:41.620 vaccinated, but you can't travel, which is also one of the safest places to be.

00:45:46.580 I mean, we have an expert, you know, who has testified that the, and this is public knowledge,

00:45:54.900 I mean, the filtration system in modern aircrafts are better than the filtration systems in

00:45:59.340 operating rooms.

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00:47:09.720 Okay, so you just dropped two bombshells there, eh?

00:47:13.600 Not that there haven't been any others dropped during this conversation, but two.

00:47:17.540 I'm going to highlight them.

00:47:18.500 The first is that by the government's own admission, travel was a vector for the transmission

00:47:25.440 of less than 1% of the virus.

00:47:27.740 So now we're talking at best about a 1% probability of contracting a disease that has something

00:47:34.220 approximating a 2% mortality rate, if that.

00:47:37.960 And that's particularly true only for people who are extremely ill or extremely elderly,

00:47:42.280 who have other compromising health conditions.

00:47:44.660 So it's a negligible risk of a negligible risk, but that justifies charter rights suspension.

00:47:51.780 And then you said something equally appalling, which was that anyone with any sense would

00:47:57.220 have rank-ordered transmission risks, right, across all the possible, let's say across the

00:48:04.340 range of 95% of the social interactions and activities that Canadians engage in.

00:48:10.620 We would have rank-ordered that in terms of danger.

00:48:12.760 One of the things we would have found out, by the way, is that locking people up together

00:48:16.360 was probably a dangerous thing to do rather than a good thing to do.

00:48:19.480 But in any case, that's what you do at the policy level, right?

00:48:22.100 Here's the dangers, rank-ordered.

00:48:24.260 Let's knock them off from the top down.

00:48:26.840 But you said none of that happened either.

00:48:28.580 There was no methodology for doing a comparative analysis.

00:48:32.100 And that's reminiscent to me of the fact that we locked down everybody at home and we

00:48:36.660 blew apart the supply chain.

00:48:38.400 We never did any analysis whatsoever to find out if the economic consequences of that were going

00:48:42.700 to be more devastating physically, psychologically, and in the long term than the epidemic itself.

00:48:48.920 And they certainly, they're going to end up being far more devastating than the epidemic,

00:48:52.800 I think, by all evidence generated to date.

00:48:55.720 So Bruce, maybe we'll turn over to you for a bit to get a bit of an overview.

00:48:59.520 And then I'm going to go back to talk about the funding situation.

00:49:04.480 Then we'll go back to Rupa.

00:49:05.440 Bruce, two questions come to mind for me right away.

00:49:10.600 The first is, if the government, let's say it more clearly, if the Mandarins in the Trudeau

00:49:18.700 cabinet violated the charter for the purposes of their instrumental politicking, how serious

00:49:27.780 is that offense in legal terms and what is the recourse?

00:49:34.240 Right.

00:49:34.460 Well, let's back up just a step before you get to the charter.

00:49:38.200 Even there's a principle in governance, which is this governments can't just create any policies

00:49:48.980 that they like.

00:49:49.820 There's a, there's a difference between the government and the legislature and anything

00:49:57.480 a government does in terms of making rules, it has to have authorization to do in a statute

00:50:04.460 that the legislature has passed.

00:50:06.660 And in this case, in the case of the, of the airline mandate, we're talking about the

00:50:11.600 Aeronautics Act.

00:50:13.140 Now the Aeronautics Act gives to cabinet and the minister of transportation.

00:50:18.260 The power to make all kinds of rules about all kinds of things that deal with flight,

00:50:25.680 with the airline industry.

00:50:28.220 But that's not an open-ended discretion.

00:50:31.620 The fact of the matter is that governments make policies that are politically motivated

00:50:36.000 all the time.

00:50:37.260 And they're allowed to do that as long as they can fit them within the authority that they

00:50:41.840 have in a statute.

00:50:43.480 But the problem for the government in this respect is this.

00:50:48.920 That the rationale that they've given, if they've given one at all, does not fit within

00:50:57.840 the authority that the Aeronautics Act gives.

00:51:01.060 So in other words, the minister is allowed to create interim orders that have to do with

00:51:07.100 the safety of the airline industry, of the passengers, of the crew, and so on.

00:51:13.200 And the premise of a vaccine mandate is that if you have the vaccine, then you won't get

00:51:22.860 infected.

00:51:24.400 And if you don't have the vaccine, then you will get infected.

00:51:27.520 But in the case of this vaccine, that has really never been the case.

00:51:32.780 It was pretended to be early on, but that has never been really the official claim, at least

00:51:38.920 from the manufacturers of this vaccine.

00:51:41.020 So if you don't have that excuse, if the vaccine will not prevent infection, then what else do you

00:51:47.400 have?

00:51:47.600 So is there, okay, so there's two issues here, then, I think, that you just delineated.

00:51:52.700 One is that, correct me if I'm wrong, that it isn't obvious that the Trudeau cabinet had

00:51:58.800 the proper governmental authority to impose this mandate because it exceeded the purview

00:52:04.040 of what would be generally acceptable practice on the legislative front.

00:52:09.300 So it was an overreach of power, independent of the fact that it violated the charter.

00:52:14.000 Have I got that right?

00:52:14.960 Just put aside the charter first, sure.

00:52:16.700 Just on the basis of pure authority and the way government works.

00:52:20.760 We have separation of powers, yes, governments and legislatures.

00:52:24.340 Now, I know to most people, those two things will look like the same thing because the same

00:52:29.280 people are heading both of these branches.

00:52:31.940 You know, the prime minister sits in the House of Commons and the cabinet does as well, and they

00:52:36.500 seem to run the show in the legislature, but they're two different things.

00:52:40.260 And the legislature must pass a statute that gives the authority to the executive branch,

00:52:45.840 which is what the cabinet heads, to make certain rules.

00:52:49.120 Now, that authority is limited according to its terms.

00:52:56.500 And those terms in this case are, you can make rules about safety.

00:53:01.340 But the problem is that if you don't have the prevention of infection as one of the

00:53:09.620 characteristics of the vaccine, then the next question is, well, okay, but then what's

00:53:15.220 the safety thing you're doing?

00:53:17.560 Well, Rupa and the plaintiffs and their representing lawyer have already made the claim that the

00:53:22.900 evidence on the safety front not only wasn't there to begin with, but couldn't even be

00:53:27.260 scrounged up post hoc.

00:53:28.680 So that just seems absurd on the face of it.

00:53:31.020 Well, right.

00:53:31.500 So if I may, so, I mean, what Rupa's article was about and what Sam's cross-examination

00:53:38.480 managed to achieve was essentially an admission that there wasn't really any solid scientific

00:53:49.040 recommendation from the health and science people to the transport people that this ought

00:53:56.720 to be done.

00:53:57.420 Should I, I think, I think the cross-examination was very well done and it might be interesting

00:54:02.380 just to, just to read you a very short sentence from Jennifer Little that Rupa was talking about

00:54:09.740 in her cross-examination.

00:54:11.780 All right.

00:54:11.960 So the question was, are there any emails, any briefs, any reports from Health Canada or

00:54:20.560 Public Health recommending the implementation of a mandatory vaccination policy for travel?

00:54:27.640 And after a long pause, the answer was this, I do not recall a document from the public health

00:54:37.680 agency or Health Canada to Transport Canada recommending that Transport Canada take this

00:54:44.440 approach.

00:54:44.940 In other words, there was, there was no solid written recommendation to do this.

00:54:53.980 And that sounds clear enough so that it's not even a matter of opinion.

00:54:59.580 Right.

00:55:00.100 Because we can always bandy about the objection that's opinion.

00:55:02.940 Rupa, you have a comment.

00:55:04.160 Yeah.

00:55:04.740 Just to quickly jump in here, Jordan, just picking up from what Bruce was saying, that,

00:55:11.040 you know, the damning email exchange that I mentioned in my story, it's about a senior

00:55:17.800 Transport Canada official who is emailing his counterpart at PHAC and asking this individual,

00:55:25.280 look, the mandate's going to be going into effect in a few days.

00:55:29.040 We need, we need some scientific rationale, some scientific evidence as soon as possible.

00:55:34.500 He doesn't hear from this individual for a few days.

00:55:37.020 Now it's like literally where the clock is ticking and he presses her and he says, we need

00:55:42.200 something fairly quick.

00:55:43.400 So please, could you get something to us soon?

00:55:45.900 And she eventually responds to him.

00:55:47.940 And it's just a generic homilies about how vaccines are good for you.

00:55:54.060 You should get vaccinated.

00:55:54.940 And we believe that vaccines prevent severe disease and so on and so forth.

00:55:59.860 The question is, what does this have to do with the transportation sector?

00:56:04.260 How is it preventing transmission?

00:56:06.000 How is it, how is it doing, how is it specific to the travel sector?

00:56:10.260 That's the question.

00:56:11.600 And I will also tell you one more thing that I couldn't get into my story.

00:56:15.760 Again, this goes back to Jennifer Little.

00:56:17.800 She's asked about the implementation of the mandate.

00:56:21.560 And she says, look, you know, had we done, had we implemented this mandate when 50% of

00:56:27.720 eligible Canadians had been vaccinated, it would have created, to use her own words,

00:56:32.580 chaos in the system.

00:56:33.900 If this were really about public policy, public health policy, shouldn't vaccination have been,

00:56:40.640 that should have been the primary consideration.

00:56:42.380 But what they do is they wait till 80% of Canadians have been vaccinated, where a high number of,

00:56:49.360 high percentage of Canadians are vaccinated to implement a vaccine mandate, which is just

00:56:54.080 extraordinary.

00:56:55.720 So, and I agree.

00:56:57.280 Just to finish off this thought, to go back to this idea that the rationale, let's just give them

00:57:05.200 the benefit of the doubt.

00:57:05.920 Let's say that the actual health-based scientific rationale is, as Rupert alludes to, that,

00:57:11.940 you know, vaccines are generally a good thing.

00:57:14.420 And that having a vaccine mandate will incentivize people to get a vaccine when they wouldn't

00:57:22.640 otherwise do so.

00:57:24.120 That is, it's not about being on the plane.

00:57:27.440 It's about the fact that people who want to be on a plane will have to get vaccinated.

00:57:32.220 Okay?

00:57:32.540 Here's the problem.

00:57:33.400 So, if that's the rationale, that is not about the safety of air travel.

00:57:39.820 And that means that is not an order authorized under the Act.

00:57:45.900 Uh-huh.

00:57:46.400 So that's the legal issue.

00:57:47.460 Well, the moral issue might be, well, if you have to use compulsion, then maybe that's a

00:57:53.120 sign that your policy is ill-formulated.

00:57:55.500 And also, I would say, from an epidemiological perspective, or in a psychological perspective,

00:58:01.940 in order for that argument to be credible, you'd have to have documentation showing that

00:58:08.040 if you added compulsion to the vaccination process, that that would actually produce

00:58:14.240 less resistance to the vaccine rather than more.

00:58:17.500 And that evidence would be very hard to come by because there's a certain number of people

00:58:22.460 that as soon as you force them to do anything, even if it's in their own good, for their own

00:58:27.660 good, even if that's documented, the mere fact that you're forcing them is going to convince

00:58:33.500 them to tell you to go to hell.

00:58:35.200 And I'm, for one, very happy that there is a minority of people like that.

00:58:40.280 So that, the evidence that, I don't think there's any good evidence for the use of compulsion

00:58:45.860 in public health, or at least there's no evidence suggesting that policy based on compulsion shouldn't

00:58:51.940 be regarded as inferior to policy based on rational dialogue and, let's say, positive motivation

00:58:59.840 and consensus, which is a much better grounds for, what would you say, the consent of the governed.

00:59:05.680 How about that?

00:59:06.820 So, can we turn, Bruce, to the charter issue then?

00:59:10.340 Have you elaborated out on the first one enough?

00:59:13.520 Well, yeah, sure.

00:59:14.400 So, as Sam alluded to, this weighing up of rationales will take place under a Section 1 analysis.

00:59:23.100 And you'll get to Section 1 only after the breach of the charter right, in this case, Section

00:59:28.920 6, has been established.

00:59:30.860 And so, I would say, in this case, I mean, this cross-examination is terrific for the

00:59:37.660 purpose of that Section 1 analysis.

00:59:39.700 Okay, tell us about, tell us what a Section 1 analysis means.

00:59:42.660 Right.

00:59:42.940 So, Section 1 analysis basically says, Section 1 says, you know, all of the rights and freedoms

00:59:48.180 in the charter are subject to reasonable limits.

00:59:53.740 If the government can demonstrate that the infringement of the right is justified in a free

01:00:01.780 and democratic society, then we're going to say, okay.

01:00:04.560 And in order to show that it's justified, the government has to show that the problem that

01:00:10.000 they were trying to solve was serious enough that it justified these measures, that they chose

01:00:14.420 a proportional way of doing so, that it caused an infringement as little as possible under

01:00:20.680 the circumstances, and so on.

01:00:22.040 So, to Sam's point, that charter rights and freedoms are not absolute, and of course they're

01:00:26.380 not, Section 1, over time, has shown to be a pretty large gate, wide enough for the

01:00:34.640 government to drive a, you know, to drive a truck through sometimes.

01:00:38.160 Yeah, truck, yeah.

01:00:39.520 Right.

01:00:39.660 Well, Brian Peckford, a former Premier of Canada and one of the founders of the charter,

01:00:46.960 has vociferously objected to the government's use of Section 1, saying that he knows perfectly

01:00:54.840 well, as a consequence of discussing the issue with the people who designed the charter to

01:01:00.040 begin with back in the 1980s, that none of them intended that Section 1 be used in a circumstance

01:01:06.560 as trivial and uncertain as this one.

01:01:08.760 Right, but so to give the courts in this particular moment the benefit of the doubt, that's not

01:01:16.000 actually what Section 1 says.

01:01:17.920 I mean, if Section 1 had been intended to apply, you know, only in the most extreme existential

01:01:22.780 emergency situation, like, it could have worked that way if that is what it had said.

01:01:28.600 But the way it is worded, it's at least possible to interpret Section 1 as giving, you know,

01:01:36.040 pretty loosey-goosey leeway for figuring out whether or not it's justified in any particular

01:01:40.660 case.

01:01:41.720 Yeah, well, maybe Section 1 needs to be revisited in a really serious manner.

01:01:46.380 Listen, the whole charter needs to be revisited.

01:01:48.820 But unfortunately, we have created now such an onerous amending formula that that becomes

01:01:57.100 almost politically impossible to do.

01:02:00.200 And even if it wasn't, I'm afraid that the political circumstances right now is such that

01:02:05.180 if you opened up the charter and the Constitution, you'd have a good constituency, size constituency

01:02:12.160 on the other side, trying to make things worse, from our point of view.

01:02:16.600 Right.

01:02:17.160 So, okay, so let's talk about the courts momentarily.

01:02:21.120 So, Bruce, I know you have some concerns about the politicization of courts in Canada, politicization

01:02:27.480 of the legal enterprise and the judiciary, and you're certainly not alone in that.

01:02:33.520 Do you have any faith that this case can receive a fair trial?

01:02:43.200 Oh, I would like to think so, sure.

01:02:45.440 Yes, listen, we have a lot of good judges in this country, a lot of very fine jurists

01:02:52.040 with terrific legal minds.

01:02:54.260 And yes, we have seen signs of what I would say ideological bias.

01:02:59.480 For example, this is one small example, at his first press conference, when he became

01:03:04.480 the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Wagner held a press conference, and

01:03:10.620 he was asked by a reporter if he agreed that the Supreme Court of Canada was the most progressive

01:03:15.160 in the world.

01:03:16.680 And he agreed with the statement, and he said he was very proud of that fact, the most progressive

01:03:22.040 court in the world in a progressive country, which is the way things ought to be.

01:03:26.360 Now, that is an expression of an ideological preference, and that's not what neutrality is

01:03:36.700 supposed to mean inside a courtroom.

01:03:39.200 But on the other hand, we have good judges who are able to carry out what I believe to

01:03:45.960 be the proper judicial role.

01:03:47.320 We saw it, for example, a short time ago, when in her bail review, for the bail review

01:03:55.960 of Tamara Leach, a Supreme Court justice reviewed the facts and the law in a meticulous and careful

01:04:04.060 and proper way, and set her out on bail, because that was the right decision.

01:04:09.400 Okay, so if a judge is acting properly, tell me if I've got this right.

01:04:13.960 First of all, under the English common law system and its variants, let's say, that operate

01:04:20.800 in Canada, a judge is supposed to take the current circumstances of polity and individuality

01:04:27.980 and social change into account, but fundamentally remain within the framework evolved as a consequence

01:04:36.460 of precedent and previous law.

01:04:38.520 And so every decision is supposed to be tied back to a network of previous decisions, even

01:04:44.180 though there has to be some transformation, let's say, on the edges.

01:04:47.520 Is that a reasonable way of looking at it?

01:04:49.340 See, well, yes, exactly so.

01:04:51.080 So one way it's been put is that we have a common law system, right?

01:04:55.360 So there's going to be some evolution over time.

01:04:57.480 But the way they put it is, it's supposed to be evolution and not revolution.

01:05:02.180 You're not supposed to have the law being sort of handed down by the courts.

01:05:05.920 The law making role is that of the legislature, not the courts.

01:05:12.160 Yes, well, and we've seen some decay of that in Canada as legislatures have abandoned their

01:05:16.860 duty and left difficult decisions to a more activist judiciary.

01:05:21.340 And this is a very bad thing.

01:05:23.420 Okay, okay.

01:05:24.120 So, but you think in this case, at least, and perhaps in most court proceedings in Canada,

01:05:29.180 that the judiciary is sufficiently intact so that a ruling on a case like this could be trusted?

01:05:34.800 Well, you see, it's impossible to tell because you don't know who you're going to get or what's

01:05:39.040 going to happen.

01:05:39.880 So the track record during COVID hasn't been all that great because one thing that courts

01:05:45.720 have demonstrated is not to every single judge, but as a pattern, is an unwavering commitment

01:05:57.180 to the government's COVID narrative so far as to allow some judges to take judicial notice of,

01:06:07.260 for example, the safety and benefit of the vaccine and the risk of the virus without any evidence.

01:06:15.400 And so it's neither black or white one way or the other.

01:06:18.560 Okay, okay.

01:06:20.200 Sam, Sam, Carl, Sean, do you guys feel that, you've been through this now for about eight

01:06:26.680 or nine months, do you feel that as you've observed the wheels of justice grinding slowly

01:06:32.240 forward that you, that your sense of justice has been served?

01:06:37.240 I know the outcome hasn't occurred yet, but how are you feeling about the process?

01:06:41.480 I think it did earlier on.

01:06:45.480 It seems to have, this is just my opinion, of course, but it seems to have deteriorated

01:06:50.720 a little bit in the last few months.

01:06:53.100 But I don't know, just the attitude.

01:07:00.120 I'll probably let Sam speak to this more.

01:07:03.080 But like early on, we, the government are famous, you know, just to get this out there

01:07:09.160 for throwing, throwing us curveballs right off the bat.

01:07:13.500 They tried, they filed a motion out of the blue.

01:07:17.420 And we wondered why they didn't want to cross-examine us.

01:07:19.600 And then we found out a few days later, why is they filed a motion to have our affidavits

01:07:25.640 struck.

01:07:28.420 So, and I'll let Sam explain that a little bit better to you.

01:07:32.120 So these are difficult cases for obvious reasons.

01:07:35.960 And I also think there are difficult cases in the social political climate that they

01:07:39.880 happen in.

01:07:41.240 But I'm confident that with the record that we've produced, with the approach that we've

01:07:46.200 taken, which is a very no-nonsense, nitty-gritty, pay attention to details, be very, you know,

01:07:53.860 be very thorough approach.

01:07:56.220 I think we have a, quite frankly, very good shot at winning.

01:07:59.400 And I have faith that we will get a fair and impartial hearing before the federal court.

01:08:03.600 Um, and I, and I think to a large extent, you know, we are, and we have been in this

01:08:09.180 case very resilient and you have to be, I mean, there are, there are some cross-examination

01:08:13.380 transcripts where I have probably had to spend close to an hour to get an answer.

01:08:19.120 And it wears you, it wears you out, right?

01:08:21.920 I, I, it's the first time ever.

01:08:23.500 And, you know, I'm, I'm frequently in the commercial list with, with big players trying

01:08:27.620 to, you know, resolve multimillion dollar litigation disputes.

01:08:30.500 And I can tell you, the government is way more resilient, trying to get a straight answer,

01:08:36.040 uh, trying to get a sense of what's happening, why it happened, when it happened and who was

01:08:40.240 involved.

01:08:40.900 It's, it's, it's a tough process, but I think like anything else, if, if you do your homework

01:08:45.760 and you're prepared and you're willing to, you know, do, you know, take difficult steps.

01:08:51.220 I mean, we have brought so many interim motions, uh, to ensure that procedurally this moved in

01:08:56.360 a way that we thought was fair and appropriate, um, it, it, it, it, it, it extracts a big sacrifice

01:09:02.160 from you and it's a very resource intensive process, but I'm very confident that the commitment

01:09:06.520 we've made and the dedication we've made is going to yield a good result for us.

01:09:09.700 Okay.

01:09:10.000 Well, that's, that's very heartening to hear, you know, because your story basically is

01:09:14.320 that this is very difficult and it, it requires painstaking effort, but if you do it properly,

01:09:19.200 it's still a fair game and thank God for that.

01:09:22.360 And so maybe I could ask you guys too, if you wouldn't mind, let's, let's go to the

01:09:25.600 funding side of this.

01:09:26.780 How much has this action cost?

01:09:29.540 And let's look at that two ways.

01:09:31.100 There's the outright costs, right?

01:09:32.940 So let's say the legal costs, but then there's also the costs in terms of time and involvement

01:09:37.600 because Sean, you and Carl must've been spending untold hours on this, I would think on a daily

01:09:43.220 basis.

01:09:43.640 And so there's a huge personal cost there.

01:09:45.560 So, Carl, yeah, let's, what's, what's happening on the funding front?

01:09:52.180 How much has this cost and what has it cost you and Sean personally?

01:09:56.940 Well, I mean, actions like this are always going to cost, you know, at least hundreds

01:10:03.380 of thousands of dollars, right?

01:10:05.900 That's, that's the reality of it.

01:10:07.580 Um, and, um, and, and, and if you lose and suffer adverse costs awards, then, then worse

01:10:16.080 again, you know, so it's a, it's going to be an expensive action.

01:10:20.480 However, you try and do it, the cost of, um, the cost of the work that a lawyer has to do

01:10:26.280 is, you know, is going to be in there.

01:10:28.140 The cost of, um, working with, um, you know, expert witnesses and, and as the intensity of

01:10:35.420 the case builds and more motions are submitted, then of course the cost builds.

01:10:39.940 Now, anybody who's, you know, had the unfortunate pleasure of suing government in the past knows

01:10:46.560 that one government tactic in the same way as many, uh, uh, larger aggressive litigants

01:10:52.980 is to try and drown the smaller guy in costs.

01:10:55.700 Okay.

01:10:56.000 Well, so we have an answer to one earlier question, which is, well, why don't more people stand

01:11:00.640 up?

01:11:01.000 And the answer to that is, well, because it's unbelievably expensive and it, yeah, and it

01:11:05.680 consumes your whole life.

01:11:06.960 And so, first of all, that means most people literally cannot do it.

01:11:11.820 They don't have the time because they don't have, they don't have the excess resources in

01:11:16.700 some sense that allows for the time.

01:11:19.060 Uh, I, I'm not suggesting you guys were sitting around on your laurels, but you at least

01:11:22.940 had the financial acumen and resources to make something like this vaguely possible.

01:11:27.980 And that would put you in a small percentage of people to begin with.

01:11:31.200 And then you'd have to be willing to do it.

01:11:33.040 And then you'd have to find the right lawyer.

01:11:35.560 And then you'd have to be able to withstand eight months of, well, and that's a lot of

01:11:40.440 trouble on the personal and the, and the judicial and the cognitive front.

01:11:45.020 So it's a very difficult undertaking.

01:11:47.020 How have you funded it so far?

01:11:49.060 And what's been the story on that front?

01:11:51.100 Um, it's been a mix of two things.

01:11:54.720 Um, it's been a mix of personal funding, um, and, um, also some, you know, helpful donors

01:12:02.880 that have, you know, offered to come forward.

01:12:05.620 But the majority of it ultimately is in our case is going to be personal funding at this

01:12:10.180 time.

01:12:10.620 Uh, and I think the funding of these cases is a very interesting aspect in itself.

01:12:14.820 And I think the structure of the organizations that do this work in Canada is something that's

01:12:19.600 worth, um, you know, discussing.

01:12:21.520 Um, from my perspective, I don't see that the freedoms guaranteed by the charter should

01:12:27.340 be, uh, political.

01:12:29.440 But there seems to be a tendency that organizations, perhaps more to the right of center, are left

01:12:35.920 with the battle of fighting for them.

01:12:37.740 And I find that curious because the loss of freedoms affects everybody in Canada, wherever

01:12:42.540 you sit in the political spectrum.

01:12:44.380 So we have in Canada, a small group of organizations that take on this kind of work and they rely

01:12:49.780 on lots and lots of small donors, occasionally large donors, perhaps, you know, just in center

01:12:54.180 for constitutional freedoms, Canadian constitutional foundation, and some recent new entrants, um,

01:13:00.040 you know, such as, uh, you know, the democracy fund and so on and so forth.

01:13:03.540 And indeed, we're putting together a, um, a charitable foundation, which will be up and

01:13:08.680 running shortly called the Institute for Freedom and Justice, which we're hoping to fund in

01:13:13.160 slightly different way.

01:13:14.400 So it can take on two issues, one being key areas of litigation in relation to this kind

01:13:20.380 of constitutional challenge.

01:13:21.660 And equally as importantly, I think is, you know, supporting people who want to provide

01:13:27.780 additional education to Canadians regarding the freedoms that should be protected by the

01:13:32.880 charter in the first place.

01:13:34.360 And a few people know about their, the, the charter and about the content of, and in

01:13:39.260 fact, I'd say one more thing, uh, Jordan, if I can, we were talking about section one

01:13:43.180 earlier and Bruce and I have had one or two conversations over time about this.

01:13:47.460 Um, and I've been fishing around from the start, trying to find out where section one even

01:13:51.340 came from.

01:13:52.180 And what I found was that it was very difficult to find anybody who knew.

01:13:56.140 And I asked some people that we asked some people that you'd know.

01:13:59.320 I mean, you know, we asked Preston Manning, for example, and is really interested in this.

01:14:04.480 And he said, that's a great question.

01:14:06.020 I've no idea.

01:14:06.780 I asked Brian Beckford, um, Brian and I've had some emails about this and, um, and Brian

01:14:13.180 doesn't really know where section one comes from.

01:14:15.160 I, you know, it's, it's there, but who wrote it, who drafted it?

01:14:19.500 But I don't know, section 33, we know has a connection to Peter Lougheed, but where does

01:14:26.100 section one come from?

01:14:27.400 Um, and I've been grubbing around trying to find out why I've had people in the parliamentary

01:14:31.700 library looking at this.

01:14:33.660 Suppose it was a concession to Quebec claims for sovereignty?

01:14:37.600 Um, no, I don't think so.

01:14:39.260 I think that's more, I mean, section 33 is interesting because that was in the, that

01:14:43.960 was put forward.

01:14:44.940 And from what I can see connected with Peter, Peter Lougheed, and then Pierre Trudeau seemed

01:14:50.920 to want a sunset clause in there.

01:14:53.080 And that seemed to be the concession.

01:14:54.500 But section 33, as Sam will tell you, doesn't apply to mobility rights, um, in the charter.

01:14:59.860 And, um, but section one, the best I can think, and I can find out so far is I think you have

01:15:05.420 to look to the mid 1970s and possibly the, uh, international covenant on civil and political

01:15:11.200 rights, which is binding on Canada.

01:15:13.440 Um, but if you read that carefully, there, section one could possibly be an attempt at

01:15:19.280 a sweep up clause to catch some of the issues that arise out of that document.

01:15:24.200 And at the time, at the timing, 1982, that would seem to fit that some consideration after

01:15:30.420 the, uh, ICCPR came in.

01:15:32.280 Well, that's a great mystery.

01:15:33.620 You know, the fact that the, the biggest, the biggest set of possible restrictions on our

01:15:39.040 most fundamental rights is based on a clause whose authorship is unclear and whose intent

01:15:45.000 is unspecified.

01:15:47.000 Sean, do you have anything else to say on the, uh, funding front before we return to Rupa?

01:15:53.920 I'd like to take this opportunity to, I mean, early on, I, I, as I said, I started the GoFundMe.

01:15:59.740 We, we, we, we closed that down with the Freedom Convoy run into problems and GoFundMe, um, sort

01:16:05.740 of, um, you know, uh, stuck a knife in their back, so to speak.

01:16:11.200 So I, I, I, I shut it down and I moved it over to Give, Send, Go.

01:16:16.900 Um, but I, but I just quickly wanted to say thank you to all of the, we have supporters

01:16:21.780 on social media and so on that have, that have supported us through Give, Send, Go.

01:16:25.820 And I wanted to thank everybody that's donated thus far.

01:16:30.080 In today's chaotic world, many of us are searching for a way to aim higher and find spiritual

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01:17:46.140 And is that still operating?

01:17:51.520 Yes, it is.

01:17:52.520 The Give, Send, Go.

01:17:53.780 It's the Canadian Freedom Litigation Fund.

01:17:57.520 So if people want to donate to your cause, it's the Canadian Freedom Litigation Fund at

01:18:03.060 Give, Send, Go.

01:18:04.540 That's correct, yes.

01:18:05.720 And also, that'll be funding another case that I'll be running is filing an application

01:18:12.520 and injunction against ArriveCAN and the quarantine.

01:18:15.660 Oh, yes, there's a good idea.

01:18:17.560 So, yes, so everyone who's listening, some of you are going to be thinking, well, what

01:18:21.040 can I do about this?

01:18:22.160 And, well, there is something you can do.

01:18:24.180 There's two lawsuits pending.

01:18:25.960 They're both going to be very expensive.

01:18:27.500 I'm sure many of you who are watching and listening are somewhat perturbed and annoyed,

01:18:32.040 let's say, about that bloody ArriveCAN app, which is a complete disaster and an unnecessary

01:18:37.180 addition to the passports, which we also can't get.

01:18:40.660 And so, Rupa, one thing we might derive from this conversation, especially in relationship

01:18:46.000 to Carl's last comments, was that if the press was doing its damn job, then maybe private

01:18:50.880 citizens wouldn't have to be taken on the government.

01:18:53.060 So now you have this story.

01:18:55.060 It's a red-hot story, as far as I can tell.

01:18:58.480 It's a blazing hot story.

01:19:00.300 And you can't get people to publish it in Canada in the mainstream journals or newspapers.

01:19:06.820 And this is even the case, despite the fact that you're actually a columnist for the National

01:19:12.740 Post.

01:19:13.620 And the National Post is a conservative newspaper.

01:19:15.760 I have some associations with it.

01:19:17.140 They'll publish my work fairly frequently.

01:19:21.920 And I've had a good working relationship with them.

01:19:24.140 But, like, why are no Canadian newspapers of note?

01:19:29.260 We won't even talk about the TV stations, but especially not the CBC.

01:19:34.560 But why are no Canadian newspapers of note picking this up?

01:19:37.760 And why in the world do you have to deal with the Englishman instead?

01:19:41.640 And the Telegraph, let's say.

01:19:43.220 That'll be better for the story anyways.

01:19:45.080 But it's still appalling.

01:19:46.240 And so tell us about your experience with this.

01:19:48.600 Yeah, it's a great question, Jordan.

01:19:50.700 I, you know, I'd worked with Barry Wise and Peter Savodnik, my editor, before when I wrote

01:19:57.400 a piece on the truckers' protest back in February.

01:20:01.400 And it, you know, had a great impact, I think.

01:20:04.940 It was an important contribution at that time to dent what I felt was an incredibly corrosive

01:20:11.720 narrative that had been in place at that time, which characterized the protesters as white

01:20:16.540 supremacists, racists and bigots and so on and so forth.

01:20:19.740 And you were with the truckers, weren't you?

01:20:22.020 You actually went, you went there like a journalist, sort of.

01:20:25.420 Yeah, I live in the area and I really went out of curiosity.

01:20:29.480 I just wanted to see what this was about.

01:20:31.680 On the first day, that first weekend, I spent about 10, 8, 10 hours in the freezing cold.

01:20:37.220 It was one of the coldest days of the winter at that time.

01:20:40.660 And I walked everywhere and I was pleasantly surprised.

01:20:44.460 In fact, it was a very, it was, it felt like Canada Day.

01:20:48.700 And I even tweeted about it and said, you know, it's like, it feels like Canada Day in

01:20:52.640 the winter.

01:20:53.760 And I was immediately criticized for it, for romanticizing what was, what is, what was supposed

01:21:01.740 to be and would be insurrection.

01:21:03.660 And I just didn't get that impression at all.

01:21:06.980 I met some of the nicest people and I spent two weeks or three weeks during the course

01:21:13.840 of the protests speaking to everybody, the truckers, the protesters, anybody who wanted

01:21:18.480 to chat with me.

01:21:19.540 I managed to have a conversation with them.

01:21:22.080 Sometimes these were long conversations.

01:21:23.840 I would be up till two, three in the morning speaking to people.

01:21:26.640 And, and then I wrote this piece for Barry Wise's Substack at that time.

01:21:33.200 And she reached out to me and she's, she'd seen my tweets and she wanted me to do something

01:21:37.520 for them.

01:21:38.120 I really enjoyed their professionalism.

01:21:40.320 I, and my piece had a great impact and I wanted to continue that relationship with them.

01:21:46.220 So for me, it was not necessarily, you know, is it Canadian media versus someone else?

01:21:52.060 I just, I really just enjoyed the experience, the learning experience that I, and I just

01:21:56.920 wanted to continue to learn by, you know, by, through working with them.

01:22:01.680 But having said that, your question is a good one.

01:22:06.080 Why isn't anybody in the mainstream media picking this up?

01:22:09.580 Why is it that, you know, no, no one wants to talk about it?

01:22:15.260 There isn't, there hasn't even been an acknowledgement of the piece so far.

01:22:18.880 I haven't even been trolled by anybody, by any of the mainstream commentators for writing

01:22:24.520 this piece.

01:22:25.120 There has been literally no response.

01:22:27.080 It's silence.

01:22:27.760 It's looking the other way.

01:22:28.860 They're talking about everything else under the sun.

01:22:31.620 And it's extraordinary.

01:22:33.160 And I don't quite know what to make of it.

01:22:35.180 Well, I think it turns back to something we talked about earlier.

01:22:38.620 I think that the bitter pill that Canadians are being asked to swallow is so large that they're

01:22:44.100 choking on it.

01:22:45.200 And I can understand that.

01:22:46.540 You can have some sympathy for that.

01:22:48.040 But, you know, I mean, some of us, Bruce and I, for example, and I know Bruce quite

01:22:53.320 well, we've been observing this sort of thing developing for like eight years, something

01:22:58.020 like that, or longer than that.

01:22:59.520 Oh, longer.

01:23:00.140 Longer than that.

01:23:00.920 Longer than that.

01:23:01.740 Quite a while, yeah.

01:23:02.500 How long?

01:23:03.060 How long?

01:23:03.540 Ten years?

01:23:04.160 How long?

01:23:04.980 At least a decade in concrete terms.

01:23:07.840 But it's been, I think it's been in development for decades.

01:23:12.780 Yes, yes, yes.

01:23:13.740 Well, it's sort of gone like this, right?

01:23:15.480 It's been accelerating.

01:23:17.220 But I think most people, and most people don't think about political issues that often,

01:23:21.900 and that's because they're busy with their lives.

01:23:24.180 And they also don't know what to believe or who to believe.

01:23:28.460 And that's certainly being scrambled now.

01:23:30.300 And so I think that's why your story, this is what stunned me so much about the continual

01:23:37.320 scandalous behavior of the liberals.

01:23:39.100 I don't think that people can process it, because my sense of it, looking at it, is

01:23:44.040 that every week, and that was certainly the case earlier this year, particularly, especially

01:23:50.640 when the Emergencies Act was brought about.

01:23:53.300 Every week, something so scandalous is produced by the federal government that under normal

01:23:59.780 conditions, it would immediately produce the dissolution of a reasonable parliamentary

01:24:05.760 government.

01:24:07.060 And it just happens one week after another.

01:24:10.180 And I don't think people can, and then the media covers it very badly, but I don't think

01:24:14.500 people can believe it.

01:24:15.560 Plus, of course, the CBC, for example, is 100% in the hip pocket of the liberals, not least

01:24:21.040 as a consequence of the $1.2 billion a year subsidy, which enables them to report no news

01:24:28.560 to no viewers.

01:24:30.840 And so I think that's this wall of ignorance that you're running into.

01:24:36.160 You said, it's got to be something like that, Rupa, because why at least aren't the progressives

01:24:41.040 hassling you, let's say?

01:24:43.160 Even that's not happening.

01:24:44.600 No, I'm just being attacked by a bunch of bots, a bunch of nameless trolls who've, you

01:24:51.860 know, who are going around calling me a Russian agent.

01:24:54.420 I've been called a seditionist, that these, no, first of all, they said the documents

01:24:59.960 didn't even exist and that I was making it all up.

01:25:02.800 And then the federal court sends out a tweet a couple of days later saying, given the interest

01:25:07.720 in this case, we're actually making these documents more easily available to the public.

01:25:12.160 So that shut them up.

01:25:13.580 But then they had to move to something else, that I was some, you know, a Russian agent

01:25:17.620 or, you know, I'm lying about this and I'm...

01:25:21.160 I think you've just, I think you've just internalized your oppression.

01:25:25.220 That's my, that's my sense of the situation.

01:25:27.980 So, so in any case, you haven't been able to promote this story in any of the normative

01:25:33.380 channels.

01:25:33.900 I mean, Barry Weiss's substack is not a minor league operation.

01:25:37.920 It's very influential.

01:25:39.120 So that's, that's definitely something.

01:25:40.620 But it's, but it's definitely outside the normative structure of media discourse, particularly

01:25:45.840 in Canada.

01:25:46.600 And I think it's quite striking that the Telegraph has at least opened up an invitation

01:25:51.500 to you to continue this kind of investigative work and that that isn't happening in Canada.

01:25:56.340 It's like, why are newspapers not willing to jump on a hot story?

01:26:01.000 Well, this is extraordinary, Jordan.

01:26:02.820 So I was speaking to a journalist and she told me that, you know, you know, newsrooms are just,

01:26:09.400 you know, just don't have the money anymore.

01:26:11.260 They just don't have the resources to put together a bunch of people.

01:26:13.960 And I said, wait a second, the way, yeah, I said, wait a second, I'm a freelance columnist.

01:26:21.600 I did this entirely on my own.

01:26:23.420 I read through over a thousand pages of transcripts over a few days.

01:26:27.880 I spent, you know, I was, I was up late into the night working through them and thinking

01:26:33.120 about the, you know, how I could frame this story.

01:26:36.220 If I can do it, you can do it.

01:26:38.980 You can so easily do it.

01:26:40.680 You know, you just, you just need one other person maybe, you know, to work with you.

01:26:46.460 I just don't buy this excuse at all.

01:26:49.100 Initially, I wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt.

01:26:51.620 You know, they've only now discovered the documents.

01:26:54.260 Let them go through it and, and maybe they will eventually get to it.

01:26:58.740 It's now been more than a week since the story broke.

01:27:01.580 It's been about three weeks since the documents have been out.

01:27:04.880 And it's just extraordinary that no one's really touched it.

01:27:08.820 I will also point this out to you that it's even the independent media, the independent

01:27:13.560 media, which constantly rails against the mainstream media, rightly so, even they haven't

01:27:20.160 gone to town on the story.

01:27:22.320 And I can't figure out why.

01:27:26.240 What exactly is going on?

01:27:28.840 Okay.

01:27:29.200 Well, we're all trying to figure out what's going on.

01:27:31.700 That's, that's for sure.

01:27:33.600 Rupa wrote this story for everyone who's listening, just so we're, we remember what

01:27:37.580 we're doing here.

01:27:38.580 Rupa wrote a story about a week ago that she published with Barry Weiss.

01:27:43.380 Court documents reveal Canada's travel ban had no scientific basis.

01:27:49.380 And so that's quite the headline.

01:27:51.540 And so I read that and thought, well, this probably needs to be talked about.

01:27:55.880 And so you referred to Bruce Barty, who's a constitutional lawyer, and to Carl Harrison and Sean

01:28:01.620 Rickard, who've taken out a court case against the Canadian government and their legal counsel,

01:28:06.080 Sam Presfalos.

01:28:08.320 And we've walked through the story.

01:28:10.120 And so what are you hoping to have happen?

01:28:11.840 That's another thing I'd like to know.

01:28:13.720 Yeah, no, good question.

01:28:15.040 I guess the most important thing for me right now, and well, for all of us as a group, and

01:28:21.260 anybody who's following along for the ride, is that this case be heard.

01:28:25.560 But right now, they filed a mootness motion against us, as you know, because the travel

01:28:30.420 ban has been suspended, hasn't been revoked, it's been suspended.

01:28:34.620 And they've made it quite clear that they can bring it back at any time that they so choose.

01:28:40.360 And the Attorney General of Canada has filed a mootness motion against us.

01:28:44.780 So on September 19th, we are all heading down to Ottawa for a public hearing.

01:28:50.240 Sam's actually in the process of filing all of our final submissions and everything, just

01:28:56.060 to fight that battle before we even get to our end game, which is the hearing in late

01:29:01.700 October.

01:29:03.160 So to me, you know, all the support has been absolutely amazing.

01:29:09.300 And we hope that continues.

01:29:10.940 Okay, well, let's stop with that again.

01:29:12.680 And so I want you to say again, exactly what the listeners and viewers can do to help you

01:29:19.440 continue this battle.

01:29:20.480 So they can go to Give, Send, Go.

01:29:23.020 That's Give, Send, Go.

01:29:24.600 And what are they looking up?

01:29:26.300 They're looking at the Canadian Freedom Litigation Fund.

01:29:31.060 Canadian Freedom Litigation Fund.

01:29:34.900 Okay, so if those of you who are watching find this compelling, and you'd like to do something

01:29:38.820 about the fact that your rights are being abrogated by a government hell-bent on instrumental

01:29:44.660 partial tyranny, then there's something you can do.

01:29:49.040 You can send some money.

01:29:50.240 They can also find me on social media.

01:29:52.780 My name will be on the screen here somewhere in the bottom notes.

01:29:56.540 And yeah, we'll be more than happy to have people follow along and support us.

01:30:00.520 And I really appreciate what you've done, Jordan, in getting this story out to as many people

01:30:06.340 as...

01:30:06.820 Well, I think it's a privilege.

01:30:08.120 I look at this and I think, well, unless I'm completely out of my mind, and lots of

01:30:12.440 people think I am, this is like the hottest news story that's hit Canada in 15 years,

01:30:17.420 and I get to tell everybody about it.

01:30:19.620 So why is that not a good deal, apart from the fact that it's utterly horrible and contemptible

01:30:24.140 and appalling and pathetic and weaselly and deceitful and instrumental and what?

01:30:32.520 Traumatically unbelievable.

01:30:34.380 Okay, Carl.

01:30:35.340 You're right on the money.

01:30:36.440 Oh, man.

01:30:37.460 It's something.

01:30:38.240 Man, what a world.

01:30:39.660 Carl.

01:30:40.940 Yeah, I mean, I echo Sean's comment that, you know, when you start these actions, you

01:30:46.280 want them to be heard.

01:30:47.520 And this is so important in that regard.

01:30:50.280 It's such an enormous matter of public interest.

01:30:52.480 It has huge ramifications and repercussions and risks if a Canadian government can get away with this kind of behaviour, where it makes routine health choices, coerces people to make routine health choices in order for them to take part in normal aspects of Canadian society and to exercise the sort of freedoms that everybody would expect in a modern liberal democracy in the West.

01:31:18.500 And that's hugely important.

01:31:19.720 hugely important to get it heard.

01:31:21.560 I'm sure Sam can say something about the issues with the mootness motion.

01:31:27.180 And that comes up, I think, on September 19th or 21st, as Sean has said.

01:31:31.560 And if we're successful in persuading the court that this matter isn't moot and should be heard, then there's a five-day hearing in Ottawa, a public hearing in person in Ottawa in the federal court from October the 31st.

01:31:46.620 And that's an opportunity for the media to actually finally engage with, as you say, perhaps the biggest story in Canada in a decade, about how the government has behaved around this particular issue.

01:31:59.140 On what possible grounds could they find it moot?

01:32:02.420 I'll let Sam deal with the detail, but essentially, I'll say this, right?

01:32:06.360 I'll say this, because I found this, this isn't really a legal point, but it's curious, I found.

01:32:09.980 I find it odd that the Attorney General of Canada is saying to the Canadian people, please ignore my Cabinet colleagues, please ignore Mr. Al-Gabra, please ignore Mr. Duclos, when they say to you in a formal public statement that these measures have been suspended and we've got every intention of bringing them back in the fall if we feel like it.

01:32:31.460 And David Lametti, the Attorney General of Canada, is saying, please ignore these guys.

01:32:35.820 They happen to be my Cabinet colleagues, and one of them happens to run the Transport Ministry, and one of them happens to run the Ministry of Health, but please ignore them.

01:32:44.940 Take no notice, because they haven't been suspended, these measures have been lifted for good, and that's why the issue is moot.

01:32:51.700 And clearly it's not. That's not moot at all.

01:32:54.300 And mootness in Canada, something Sam can come on to, peculiar here, not the same in the UK, not the same in the US.

01:33:02.040 This is an issue which can be repeated in the short term and is worthy of review.

01:33:08.260 Well, you'd think, even if it's moot now, which it isn't, that doesn't mean that there's not something to be said about what happened.

01:33:16.440 So what happened is unconscionable.

01:33:18.680 All right, Sam, over to you.

01:33:20.740 Well, mootness is a funny thing, especially in the context of a pandemic.

01:33:24.300 Mootness in the context of a pandemic is a very different consideration, I think, than mootness ordinarily.

01:33:29.480 And I'll give you a very concrete example of that.

01:33:31.640 A couple of months ago, before the Interior Court of Appeal, I was doing a constitutional challenge on the restrictions on outdoor gathering.

01:33:38.060 As you know, being outdoor is one of the safest places, probably the safest place to be with the COVID-19 pandemic.

01:33:43.380 And at the time I had filed my materials for appeal, there were still restrictions outdoor.

01:33:48.860 By the time the Attorney General gave me the responding materials, the restrictions were lifted.

01:33:53.400 Several months later, the restrictions were back in.

01:33:56.640 And a couple of weeks before the hearing, the restrictions had been repealed.

01:33:59.580 The Court of Appeal dismissed it as moot.

01:34:02.060 And so you're left in this very unfortunate and precarious and quite unpredictable situation of, you know, timing.

01:34:09.200 And it's, I don't agree that the issue of timing, especially in the context of a very fluid pandemic where the government has demonstrated its willingness to turn on and off various, and quite frankly, recycle through various different public health measures, timing shouldn't play a role in this.

01:34:25.740 This is not moot in the sense of, you know, the government, a court in another area has already made a decision, has already said this is unconstitutional.

01:34:34.160 This is mootness in the context of very fluid public health measures.

01:34:38.400 And so regardless of whether or not those public health measures are activated, and that's what I'm going to say, because we all know they can be activated and reactivated at the Women's Cabinet, right?

01:34:46.540 Regardless of whether they're presently activated, the manner in which these decisions are being made and the tools that are available in the context of a public health crisis are critical.

01:34:57.700 We've established a very dangerous precedent here because God only knows what's going to happen, for example, when the next serious flu comes around, because it's going to be indistinguishable in many ways from the mortality rates, say, of COVID by all evidence, especially if it's a serious flu.

01:35:14.260 And it's likely to be because we haven't had one for a while.

01:35:16.740 And so why wouldn't we go down the same road immediately?

01:35:19.820 Because I think that's probably what we'll do.

01:35:22.320 So, okay, Sam, anything else to say more generally about the situation?

01:35:27.280 What's going to happen over the next couple of months, as far as you can tell?

01:35:30.760 And what are you hoping will happen?

01:35:32.600 Well, you know, obviously, I'm hoping that, as Sean and Carl alluded to, I'm hoping that we succeed in our mootness motion, which is going to be heard in September, not about the federal court.

01:35:40.860 I think we have very cogent reasons why the matter deserves its day in court and to be heard and decided on the evidentiary record that we have spent, you know, the better part of a year and significant resources investing so that the truth can come out.

01:35:53.040 But more broadly, there's two statements I'd like to make to everyone who's going to be watching and listening to this segment.

01:35:59.800 The first one is, our case is not political.

01:36:02.740 You know, even though we make a lot of reference to the liberal government, it's actually not political.

01:36:06.940 And the reason why I'm saying this is because democracy should not be political.

01:36:09.760 Transparency in the decision-making of the people that we have trusted to govern us, according to a basic set of immutable principles that are, frankly, based on, you know, decency and liberty.

01:36:21.620 That's not a political thing.

01:36:23.260 Well, it's not as if, just to point this out, it's not as if the conservative governments at the provincial level haven't done exactly the same thing.

01:36:31.220 It's not as if Erin O'Toole didn't roll over instantly when these sorts of things came along.

01:36:35.680 So, if it's political, it's not partisan.

01:36:39.120 Right.

01:36:39.760 Right.

01:36:40.520 Exactly.

01:36:41.300 Right.

01:36:41.460 And I think that's probably a better way to put it.

01:36:44.040 It should not be a partisan issue because today you might be on one side of the vaccine debate.

01:36:48.340 And tomorrow you'll find yourself on the different side of a wholly separate debate.

01:36:51.260 And you hope that as a citizen of a democratic country, the government is going to show you a basic level of respect and decency and dignity.

01:36:58.620 And the second thing that I wanted to mention is, you know, it's very important that in the times of crises like now, in a pandemic, in an unprecedented pandemic in recent history, we need to remind ourselves that this should never serve as a carte blanche

01:37:09.120 for the government to do whatever it wants.

01:37:10.520 God.

01:37:11.260 Yeah.

01:37:11.480 Circumstances of uncertainty.

01:37:13.480 The absence of evidence is not evidence, you know, that anything should and can be done.

01:37:18.600 And we must remain vigilant now more than ever.

01:37:22.140 And we need to refer back to the principles that we know are true.

01:37:26.160 And as the evidentiary record will show, the government had principles, principles that were developed in the context of influenza, influenza pandemic.

01:37:33.960 And we need to avail ourselves of those principles.

01:37:37.060 You know, we don't throw them outside the window, which, you know, seems by a large measure was done here.

01:37:41.200 I really want to thank Sean and Carl, two people who made extraordinary sacrifices, as you've mentioned earlier.

01:37:46.000 I can't imagine the toll this has had on their personal and private life.

01:37:49.800 I know I speak with them more often than I speak with my fiance.

01:37:53.160 So I can't imagine what that has resulted on the home front.

01:37:56.820 And, you know, it's Canadians like Sean and like Carl who are taking their civic duty seriously.

01:38:02.100 And it's because of the work that they have really undertaken in this case that millions of Canadians and hopefully people around the world are going to see what's going on here.

01:38:08.620 And we'll learn and be better because of it.

01:38:10.480 Well, let's hope that's the plan.

01:38:12.900 Bruce, we'll turn to you and then we'll let Rupert wrap up, I think.

01:38:17.400 So what have you got to say from the overview perspective?

01:38:20.300 Well, first, let me say my hat's off to these gents for having the stuffing to do this.

01:38:25.260 It takes a lot of courage and determination, so good on you.

01:38:28.720 Let's not fail to acknowledge how dangerous this story and this development is to a lot of people, to a lot of institutions.

01:38:39.800 This is a threat.

01:38:41.260 It's a threat both to the COVID narrative, but it's also a threat in a bigger sense because we seem to have in this country a prevailing belief that,

01:38:55.260 that governments are benevolent and act in our interests all the time.

01:39:01.600 Now, sometimes they may make mistakes and you might prefer one color to the other color,

01:39:05.180 but essentially there's a belief in the good faith of governments to do their best and to do the right thing.

01:39:12.760 And stories like this threaten that belief.

01:39:18.340 They put into place the possibility that that is not true, that instead we're being played by our own governments.

01:39:28.340 And that's partly why I think the political class is so resistant to this and similar stories because it does represent a kind of threat to the foundation of what we think we're about as a country and as a culture.

01:39:45.460 You know, in some ways, our biggest liability as a population is our disbelief, our inclination to not believe facts when they threaten the furniture in our heads.

01:40:05.440 And you would know more about this than me, Jordan.

01:40:07.060 Yeah, well, it's no wonder, you know, because the sorts of things, the principles that you're describing.

01:40:12.020 So you imagine that here's a rule is the, the more fundamental a principle is, the more other principles depend on it.

01:40:20.900 And then each of those principles encapsulates a lot of chaos.

01:40:25.760 And so when you're asked to, and chaos produces anxiety and desperation and disunity and conflict, it's real and it's deadly psychologically and socially.

01:40:35.000 And so when you're asked to revisit your faith in a fundamental presupposition, which is, well, accounting for human error, the government is acting in good faith because that's what's being questioned here.

01:40:49.320 Well, no, they're not.

01:40:50.800 Okay, well, how many snakes have you just left, let, let out of the closet?

01:40:54.740 And the question is, well, hopefully not all of them, but we don't really know.

01:40:59.560 And it's a reasonable response to say, I'm not going to believe that without exceptional evidence.

01:41:04.340 But the problem is, is that Rupa and the gentleman that we've been talking to have showed that there's every reason to believe that this happens to be the case.

01:41:14.620 And so it's no wonder it's taking Canadians a long time to, to swallow this.

01:41:21.280 It's a large and bitter pill.

01:41:23.980 So, but not as large and bitter as the pill we will all be required to swallow if we don't wake up to what's happened.

01:41:31.260 I agree.

01:41:31.460 So that, yeah.

01:41:32.560 Okay.

01:41:32.780 And so, Bruce, if the government has, in fact, exceeded their political mandate, their moral political mandate,

01:41:41.840 and if they have violated the charter in at least this instance, and I would say many, many others,

01:41:47.940 then what should that imply and what recourse is there apart from at the voting booth?

01:41:55.920 Well, the voting booth becomes very important in this.

01:41:59.160 I mean, what you're essentially, what you essentially need is a cultural change on the part of a critical mass of people who say,

01:42:08.520 you know what, no, this is not okay.

01:42:13.340 And we will not go along with this now and the next time this happens, which is going to be very soon.

01:42:19.180 Unless you have that kind of critical mass, you're not going to see changes in the behavior of the press, of the government, maybe the courts.

01:42:30.180 All our institutions, all our institutions, in spite of themselves, are influenced by popular opinion.

01:42:39.040 They deny it, but that doesn't make it not true.

01:42:42.500 Well, you know, as I've been going around on my tour, one of the things I've sort of added is a suggestion to people for what it's worth,

01:42:50.240 but I've talked to, I don't know how many people, 60, 200,000 people, I guess, in the last four months.

01:42:57.700 One of the things I've tried to suggest to people is that they pick up their civic duty a bit.

01:43:02.700 It's like, look, and again, those of you who are listening and watching and thinking there's nothing I can do,

01:43:07.400 it's like, yes, you can.

01:43:08.580 You can join a political party.

01:43:10.660 You can join the conservatives.

01:43:11.740 You could join the liberals.

01:43:13.540 You could join the NDP, although I don't know why you would, because they just look like liberals to me,

01:43:18.340 and I don't think you should join the liberals.

01:43:20.040 But in any case, you can do all of that.

01:43:22.880 And that's not nothing.

01:43:24.780 And you could get involved, and you could start to move the political landscape

01:43:29.180 in accordance with your own needs and wants, and become more articulate doing so,

01:43:35.400 and learn to play a role in the political process.

01:43:37.340 And if you don't, then what's happening is going to continue to happen, because we do have a system where sovereignty inheres in the people.

01:43:47.300 And that means if the people abdicate their civic responsibility, then the delusional and terrified instrumental tyrants will have their way.

01:43:56.100 People should not underestimate the effect that they can have on their own and in small groups.

01:44:02.800 I mean, that's what these three guys are doing on their own, for example.

01:44:07.940 But if we had more people doing more things in the way you're describing, the change would be significant.

01:44:14.140 Yeah, so if you're listening and watching, and you're not a member of a Canadian political party,

01:44:18.800 then you've got to ask yourself, you know, what right do you have to your outrage?

01:44:23.240 So, because you're not pulling your weight, man.

01:44:25.660 And if you're not in any civic institution at all, you're not in a church, you're not in a business organization,

01:44:30.520 you're not on a sports team, you're not engaged actively in the civic discussion,

01:44:35.040 then it's no wonder that you're being blown by the wind every way,

01:44:38.880 because, well, that's this position you've left yourself in.

01:44:42.560 And when you join these places, don't just go along.

01:44:46.460 You're there to change the course.

01:44:48.560 Yeah, well, and to learn.

01:44:49.720 You know, if you're young, you think, well, what can I do?

01:44:51.740 It's like, well, first of all, you can volunteer.

01:44:54.340 You can learn to serve the people who have a little bit more authority than you.

01:44:58.320 And you will learn doing that.

01:44:59.940 And if you're good at it, you'll rise up the ranks unbelievably quickly.

01:45:03.520 Because one thing you can say, because people have abdicated their political responsibility,

01:45:08.060 is that there's kind of a responsibility void there.

01:45:10.360 And so if you're halfway as competent and willing to put in some time and effort,

01:45:14.480 the rewards can be incommensurate in relationship to the effort.

01:45:18.620 So, okay, Rupa, maybe you can just walk us through what you hope to have happen next,

01:45:24.280 what you think should happen.

01:45:25.980 Yeah, well, I can't really top Bruce, but I'll try my best, Jordan.

01:45:29.900 And, you know, just to sum up this story, you know, for your viewers and listeners,

01:45:38.380 basically, this government appeared to have made this policy by firing from the hip without

01:45:43.860 any recourse to a scientific rationale.

01:45:47.900 We know this rationale was probably concocted on the flight after the policy decision had been

01:45:52.980 made.

01:45:53.300 And it's also interesting that the Trudeau government announced this vaccine mandate in

01:45:58.160 the lead up to an election, as it proved to be an important wedge issue for him to get

01:46:04.180 reelected, even though they lost the popular vote in the end and they only got a minority

01:46:08.460 government.

01:46:09.520 Basically, what is unfortunate about all of this is that sound public policy was held hostage

01:46:14.780 to politics with the government, with the Trudeau government pushing these divisive vaccine

01:46:21.200 mandates in the few areas where they had jurisdiction, which is namely the travel sector and the federal

01:46:27.600 workforce.

01:46:29.280 Also, I would like to point out that the, you know, that it's odd, it's incredibly odd that

01:46:34.620 Trudeau would promise vaccine mandates as part of an election campaign rather than just simply

01:46:41.680 implement them as a country serving prime minister.

01:46:45.760 If this was indeed about public health policy, why would you have to make it a campaign issue?

01:46:50.060 It really, really is bizarre.

01:46:52.760 And, you know, you would ask me earlier at the beginning of the show about civil servants

01:46:57.760 citing cabinet confidentiality.

01:47:00.140 And I've been thinking about this.

01:47:02.780 Exactly why, you know, why should something like a public health mandate, you know, why is

01:47:09.620 it so confidential?

01:47:10.780 Why is the rationale for a public health mandate, why should it be so confidential?

01:47:15.880 And this is a very puzzling question.

01:47:19.200 And for me, it raises a disturbing possibility that there really was no rationale at all.

01:47:26.000 And in the end, the emperor has no clothes.

01:47:29.220 And I think going forward, I really, you know, I very much agree with what Bruce was saying

01:47:34.720 and what you said, change is going to have to come in some form or the other.

01:47:39.660 The truckers' protest, I think, moved the needle or the dial a little bit.

01:47:45.700 And I know a lot of people came around and started asking these questions.

01:47:51.380 Certainly polls right now show that where previously 70 percent of those polled supported vaccine

01:47:57.980 mandates, right now that number stands at 20 percent.

01:48:00.680 So people are starting to rethink mandates.

01:48:04.300 They're starting to ask these questions.

01:48:07.460 You know, they're starting to ask questions of their elected officials.

01:48:11.420 They're asking, hey, you know, you told us with vaccination we'd go back to our lives.

01:48:17.800 But yet, you know, we're still facing restrictions.

01:48:21.300 We're still looking at mask mandates.

01:48:23.760 What is going on?

01:48:24.880 I would also like to point out to the fact that the booster uptake in this country has

01:48:29.560 been pretty low compared to most other places.

01:48:32.560 And that shows that people are, you know, starting to have a rethink.

01:48:36.320 You know, if the boosters are not preventing transmission, what is the point in me getting

01:48:42.900 it?

01:48:43.660 And, you know, so perhaps why should a 20-year-old get a booster?

01:48:49.540 What's the point in that?

01:48:50.960 Maybe it makes sense for someone else.

01:48:52.680 Or a child.

01:48:52.740 Yeah, or a child for that matter.

01:48:55.160 So I think people are starting to ask questions.

01:48:57.180 We may not necessarily see the kind of outrage that we would like to see.

01:49:01.400 But I do think that change is certainly happening.

01:49:04.840 Well, maybe we'll get lucky and we'll see change instead of outrage, you know.

01:49:09.580 And maybe that's a more Canadian way of doing things.

01:49:12.540 We're slow to wake up, but maybe when we wake up, we will move in the right direction.

01:49:16.880 Absolutely.

01:49:17.860 That is my hope as well.

01:49:19.640 Yeah.

01:49:19.840 But, all right, well, I've been talking today to Rupa Subramania, Bruce Pardy, Sam Presfalos,

01:49:27.920 Carl Harrison, and Sean Rickard.

01:49:30.660 They're all in their own way attempting to bring some clarity to what's a very murky and

01:49:35.720 dismal situation, let's say, with hopefully some light shining in the distance.

01:49:40.080 And so, appreciate you very much, all of you, for being willing to participate in this conversation

01:49:46.420 and for all the diligent work that you've done and the sacrifices that you've made.

01:49:50.940 I'm going to continue my talk with Rupa over at The Daily Wire Plus, where we go behind the

01:49:57.500 scenes a bit and look at the details of her career and her life and what's put her in a

01:50:02.680 position that she's able to do the sorts of things that we talked about today.

01:50:05.740 Hello, everyone.

01:50:07.600 I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com.

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - August 23, 2022

281. Trudeau, Travel, and “The Science”

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