Six years ago, in mid-March 2020, Canada’s federal and provincial governments first started restricting our Charter freedoms of association, conscience, religion, peaceful assembly, movement and travel.
Most Canadians, myself included, supported the temporary “two weeks to flatten the curve” lockdown. It was sold to the public as necessary to slow viral spread temporarily, to prevent hospital overcrowding. Everyone understood that it was impossible to stop a virus from spreading to all people throughout society. No politician or health official called for a futile quest of trying to stop the spread.
Sadly, the “two weeks to flatten the curve” turned into years of lockdowns and mandatory vaccination policies, thanks to the wildly exaggerated claims by Professor Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London.
Ferguson said that Covid would kill as many people as the Spanish Flu of 1918. Ferguson’s computer modeling and his fearmongering about tens of millions of Covid deaths were proven false by May of 2020, just two months into the lockdown experiment. However, thanks to daily and hourly media fearmongering, Canadians remained terrified of Covid throughout 2020 and 2021, and into 2022. Canadians were willing to do anything to protect themselves and their loved ones from a virus which they believed to be a serious threat to all people. Therefore, most citizens complied with health orders that clearly violated Charter rights and freedoms, as was expressly admitted by governments in court actions that were launched against lockdowns.
The CBC, Global, CTV and other taxpayer-funded media largely ignored lockdown harms, preferring to keep Canadians in fear with daily and hourly reports about large numbers of Covid “cases” and “Covid deaths.”
No government-funded media outlet explained to Canadians that PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing merely detects remnants of a virus present in the body. PCR testing does not diagnose illness. The outcome of a PCR test depends on how many cycles are used to amplify a small sample of a viral remnant. The media did not report on how our provincial governments were running PCR tests at 40 or more cycles, thereby generating huge numbers of so-called Covid “cases” that kept people in perpetual fear. The Gateway v. Manitoba litigation exposed the fact that at least 40% of the government’s alleged “Covid cases” were people who were not sick with Covid.
There was no investigative journalism. Government-funded journalists accepted the government’s narrative as fact, no questions asked. Claims made by politicians about Covid “cases” and deaths were simply repeated as gospel truth.
Media also did not report on how the World Health Organization (WHO) changed its cause-of-death classification protocol in April 2020. This change produced high numbers of “Covid deaths” that vastly exceeded annual flu deaths in prior years. This made Covid sound like an unusually deadly killer. Canada’s provincial governments used PCR testing, as well as the new WHO cause-of-death classification protocol, to proclaim highly misleading numbers of Covid “cases” and deaths.
Terrified by media fearmongering about large numbers of Covid “cases” and Covid deaths, many Canadians paid little attention to the massive lockdown harms that were occurring: the deterioration in Canadians’ mental health; the alarming surge in opioid overdose deaths; the cancellation of hundreds of thousands of medically necessary surgeries and diagnostic procedures; more Canadians dying from liver diseases, diabetes, and hypertensive diseases; a significant rise in deaths among Canadians under the age of 45 that had nothing to do with Covid; rising rates of assisted suicide; increased rates of homicide, identity theft, fraud and online child sexual exploitation; unemployment and bankruptcy; and soaring government debt that must be repaid by our children and grandchildren.
Media did not report on the fact that cancer, heart disease and stroke continued to be the leading killers of Canadians, throughout lockdowns and vaccine passports. Media reported only on Covid deaths.
Government-funded media did not report on the fact that Covid was less deadly than the Asian Flu of 1957, and less deadly than the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. As a percentage of world population, each of these worldwide pandemics claimed more lives than Covid did. Yet a Canadian judge declared in his ruling that Covid was “the worst global pandemic in over a century.” It was a false claim that he had heard on the CBC or other government-funded media. The judge’s assertion was not supported by evidence placed before him in court.
Canadian judges, like most of their fellow citizens, were also corrupted by fear. The Canadian Charter of Rights of Freedoms requires governments to justify “demonstrably” with persuasive evidence any health order, vaccine mandate or other law that violates one or more of our Charter freedoms of conscience, association, religion, expression, mobility and peaceful assembly. The onus is on government to demonstrate that its health orders are actually producing more good than harm. Rather than holding governments to this high standard, Canadian judges lowered the bar for government, ignored evidence of lockdown harms, and simply wrote the media narrative into their court rulings.
For example, the expert report of Dr. Kevin Bardosh, which presented a persuasive case as to why and how lockdowns had harmed Canadians, was completely ignored by Justice Joseph Callaghan in his 2023 pro-lockdown ruling. In like manner, a Manitoba judge issued a pro-lockdowns ruling in which he completely ignored the expert report of Dr. Joel Kettner, former Chief Public Health Officer for Manitoba. Dr. Kettner’s report eviscerated the Manitoba government’s case for lockdowns. It was open to the judge to explain why he rejected Dr. Kettner’s evidence and why he accepted the government’s evidence as superior. But the judge did no such thing. He simply pretended that Dr. Kettner’s report didn’t exist.
Some Canadian judges went so far as to abdicate their solemn duty to weigh and consider evidence, by openly declaring in their judgments that they were “neither equipped nor inclined to resolve scientific debates and controversy surrounding Covid-19.” Only fear would drive an otherwise intelligent professional to insult herself so publicly, and abandon her responsibility as a judge to tackle scientific disputes.
Fear impairs our thinking, blinds us from seeing facts, and drives us to unquestioning obedience. Fear explains why so many Canadians unthinkingly complied with nonsensical and highly toxic policies that were not grounded in science. Fear explains why Canadian judges condoned the violations of our Charter rights and freedoms by our federal and provincial governments.
Still, fear is no excuse. We are people, not sheep. We should use our God-given brains to think.
The next time that governments assault our Charter rights and freedoms, will Canadians once again believe whatever the politicians and the government-funded media tell them?
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B., is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca).
