CALGARY: The Justice Centre today released a new report, Are Lockdowns Worth Their Cost? exposing many of the harms caused by government-imposed lockdowns in the past 21 months.
It is possible that “lockdown(s) will go down as one of the greatest peacetime policy failures in Canada’s history,” stated Douglas Allen, an economics professor at BC’s Simon Fraser University. In a paper published April 2021, Allen reviewed more than 80 Covid cost/benefit studies published in the previous 12 months. He concluded that many relied upon false assumptions that tended to over-estimate the benefits of lockdown and underestimate its costs. “As a result, most of the early cost/benefit studies arrived at conclusions that were refuted later by data, and which rendered their cost/benefit findings incorrect. Research done over the past six months has shown that lockdowns have had, at best, a marginal effect on the number of Covid deaths…”
This Justice Centre report covers a partial catalogue of the unintended consequences of Canada’s lockdown policies. All were costly. Some were deadly, with the full cost in lives yet to be determined.
Are Lockdowns worth their Cost? addresses more than 60 different lockdown harms and examples including the ballooning government debt, forced unemployment of millions of Canadians and the closure of thousands of Canadian small businesses, heightened rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide even among youth, record levels of substance abuse, increased domestic violence, increased child abuse and sexual exploitation, and the cancellation of thousands of surgeries, cancer screenings, and other necessary medical treatments. (Statistics Canada removed material on their website due to a cyber security vulnerability. Some links may temporarily be unavailable.)
As this paper demonstrates, government lockdown harms have affected every aspect of Canadian life, under the broad categories of:
- Economic and financial harm to all Canadians
- Physical harms to adults, especially the rising death toll from non-Covid causes, including those from delayed or cancelled surgeries, and delayed or cancelled diagnosis for cancer and other deadly diseases
- Mental health harms to adults (especially increased drug abuse)
- Physical, mental health and economic harms to children
- Other societal harms, including loss of quality of life – the so-called ‘simple pleasures.’
“Governments have yet to provide evidence that societal lockdowns for the healthy population, experimental and never used in prior pandemics, have in fact reduced or stopped the spread of Covid, and there is growing evidence that lockdowns have actually caused more harm than good,” stated John Carpay, president of the Justice Centre.
“The most troubling aspect of government policy in the past 21 months has been the near-complete failure of governments to consider fully the cost of lockdowns. Further, Canada’s federal and provincial governments have claimed repeatedly that lockdowns have saved lives, but without putting forward hard data or other persuasive evidence to support this claim,” continues Carpay.
The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms requires governments to produce compelling evidence to justify their violation of Charter freedoms to move, travel, assemble, associate and worship, and the citizen’s Charter right to bodily autonomy, which includes the right to refuse new Covid vaccines that have not been subjected to long-term safety testing.
“In the past 21 months, governments have produced almost no documentation to suggest that they have seriously considered lockdown harms, which is an abject failure to comply with our Constitution,” notes Mr. Carpay.
“Our court actions are holding governments accountable to the Charter, as we compel them to provide actual evidence that the harms of lockdowns have been outweighed by the benefits, something that governments have not yet done,” continues Mr. Carpay.
“Lockdowns and vaccine passports risk becoming the permanent default government response to every virus and variant in the future,” concluded Mr. Carpay.
