John Carpay, The Interim

With a religious fervour, fear of COVID-19 is permeating and shaping our laws, policies, and culture. The job-killing, economy-destroying, soul-deadening, anxiety-producing, loneliness-creating, debt-incurring lockdowns, imposed on us since March 2020, have now become permanent restrictions on our Charter freedoms to move, travel, associate, assemble, and worship.

Prior to Thanksgiving, Quebec’s health minister prohibited celebrating with family and friends. Fortunately, the magnanimous Christian Dubé said that he might allow Quebecers to enjoy “a nice Christmas” if citizens were sufficiently submissive to his Thanksgiving decrees. Quebec has given police the ability to obtain “telewarrants” allowing them to enter people’s private homes quickly and easily. Gone are the bad old days of needing to submit a hard-copy sworn-and-signed affidavit to a judge, a process which made it so cumbersome for police to barge into citizens’ homes.

Saskatchewan and other provinces have also imposed restrictions on celebrating Thanksgiving, Halloween, and Remembrance Day.

It has now become largely illegal to feed our souls and spirits by socializing freely with other people in pubs, clubs, restaurants, curling rinks, football stadiums, churches, theatres, and concert halls. We must avoid handshakes, hugs, in-person meetings, and meaningful human contact at weddings, funerals, children’s school plays, music recitals, 12-step programs, and political gatherings. We should wear a mask while having sex. I shudder to think about the tsunami of mental illness, psychiatric disorders and suicides that will surely flood Canada in the months ahead, as a direct result of this inhumane approach.

Media are driving the fear that has turned lockdowns into permanent violations of our rights, freedoms and human dignity. They do this by hyping the number of COVID-19 “cases” without providing relevant context.

For the sake of accuracy and truth, the courtroom oath asks the witness to tell “the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.” Even a news story that is devoid of errors and lies becomes misleading when vital, crucial, relevant facts are omitted. The COVID-19 death data that are readily available on government websites make it abundantly clear that the latest “cases” are harmless to more than 99 per cent of Canadians; COVID-19 death numbers are not returning to the peaks they reached this past April and May; there is no “second wave” of COVID-19 deaths.

Headlines like “COVID cases jump 40 per cent in Canada in one week, with Quebec and Ontario hardest hit” (Canadian Press, 7 Oct. 2020) make no mention of the fact that COVID-19 deaths are down to a mere trickle of their peak in April and May. You won’t catch the media reporting on COVID-19 deaths in September being approximately one tenth of the deaths in April. Government data show that there has been only one “wave” of COVID deaths, and that the new “cases” this fall are harmless to roughly 99.85 per cent of Canadians.

When trumpeting new “cases,” media say little about the way the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) test is set at a level of cycles designed to pick up even the tiniest traces of viral RNA, which could be from a past illness, or unrelated cold virus. What media refer to as “cases” are more accurately described as “positive tests” without illness.

Media rarely mention that governments are conducting far more tests than they did a few months ago. Unsurprisingly, the more testing that is done, the greater the number of cases. But media seek to keep matters very simple and very scary.
By hyping data about “cases” and refusing to report on the nearly non-existent fatalities from those cases, the media become lobbyists and evangelists for harmful lockdown measures that violate our human rights and Charter freedoms.
What is driving this dishonesty?

Charter-violating lockdown policies are based on the following beliefs: life’s central and highest purpose is to make our physical bodies live as long as possible; our minds, souls and spirits (if these exist at all) are vastly inferior to the physical body and require little care or attention; dying of COVID is so much worse than dying by way of suicide, undiagnosed cancer, cancelled surgery, neglect in a nursing home, a drug overdose, and other lockdown consequences.

As always, the antidote is truth. There is more to life than avoiding a virus; we should care for our souls and spirits as much as we care about our bodies; death is sad whether caused by COVID-19 or by something else; we should not join the ranks of those who are so terrified of dying that they have forgotten how to live.

Lawyer John Carpay is president of the Justice Centre, which acts for Mill Stream Bible Camp in its court action against the federal government.