COVID-19
Government’s totalitarian Covid Response a turning point in Canada’s history
From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
A lawyer and former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in Newfoundland has told the world that mishandling of COVID-19 deserves a reckoning before the world slides into totalitarianism.
In a half-hour interview with Dr. John Campbell on the latter’s YouTube channel, Ches Crosbie complained governments wanted the public to forget their “gigantic assault on the rights and liberties of Canadians.”
“No government seems to be interested in having a look back to learn lessons or to see what might be adjusted in order to make the response to any future pandemic, a more seamless, flawless and effective response. They just don’t want to do it. They have no interest in it,” Crosbie said.
Campbell, a retired nurse educator with almost three million YouTube subscribers, dryly quipped, “Presumably they’d want to do an inquiry to exonerate themselves and show how brilliant their performance was throughout the entire pandemic.”
Crosbie, an administrator for the National Citizens Inquiry on COVID-19, complained the 63 subpoenaed by the NCI to testify “want to run and hide” and never showed up.
“They think they have impunity. They don’t have to explain themselves or answer anything. It also speaks to their sense of embarrassment about what they did, that they don’t think they can defend themselves, even in a sympathetic environment,” Crosbie said.
The NCI report said Canada was put into “virtual state of terror.” Crosbie agreed and said “society went virtually mad” as it abandoned “principles of bodily integrity and personal sovereignty and the right of informed consent” and also Charter rights.
Crosbie pointed to the late Sheila Lewis who could not get an organ transplant due to refusing a COVID-19 vaccine.
“She passed away as a result. That is an incredible professional cruelty on the part of a branch of the medical profession which deserves to be roundly condemned. And those people need to account for it,” Crosbie said.
“The problem in Canada, maybe elsewhere, is that virtually every institution that we expected to defend our rights and freedoms and what we thought was normal life, failed us,” Crosbie explained.”
“That’s what the citizens of Canada told us. You can’t have that kind of gargantuan multi-institutional failure without deep self-reflection about what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The Rhodes scholar said by the end of the first two weeks of 2020 lockdowns, it was already apparent the “very old and those with comorbidities” had a “thousand-fold” higher risk of a COVID-19 fatality than “the young.”
“If you did want to justify that two weeks to stop the spread, then we had enough information at the end of that to know that this was not the answer, and the COVID 19 virus was not the threat to life on Earth that had been portrayed,” Crosbie said.
“That turned out to have and was argued by many at the time to have no greater case fatality rate than a seasonal influenza.”
Even so, lockdowns continued, followed by mandates for masks and vaccines, something Crosbie said demands an accounting.
“You can’t have reconciliation when those who perpetrated what the citizens of the country believe to be an unwarranted invasion of their economic, social, political and legal rights and freedoms, refuse to explain why they did it, or in any respect to account for it.
“And this is why I think that there will eventually be criminal proceedings because they are necessary, given the enormity of what’s occurred.”
Crosbie said documentation the NCI put on public record contributed to a “a tipping point” where “the truth is constantly coming out.”
Campbell agreed and said allegations of gain of function research and the origins of the virus that “appeared ridiculous, appeared conspiratorial” have been “essentially confirmed.”
Crosbie said a public shift was evident in the election of new governments in Europe with a “more critical point of view on the events of the last few years, and…the WHO power grab.” He added Canada also needed a change of government and the COVID-19 “injectable products” banned.
“How can it be safe and effective when there’s foreign DNA and simian virus in this stuff, and there are other facts beyond dispute that can be added up here to say that no one would have agreed in the right mind to receive these in the first place, had they known about it?” Crosbie said.
Campbell chidingly said, “I assume the mainstream media in Canada’s been keen to pick this up as well.” Crosbie said it was a “major problem” that they had not.
“The bottom line is you can’t have a free country if you don’t have a free press. You don’t have democracy. And that’s where we are right now, not just in Canada, but in other countries like the United States, like the United Kingdom, in Europe,” explained Crosbie.
“We’re at a crisis point in history where we were either going to have a liberal democracy with constitutional rights and freedoms, or we’re going to have totalitarianism.”
Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
From the Daily Caller News Foundation
By Emily Kopp
The Office of the Director of National Intelligence’s (ODNI) hub for foreign biological threats dismissed the intelligence pointing to a lab accident in Wuhan as “misinformation” in January 2021, two former government sources who requested anonymity to discuss sensitive internal meetings told the Daily Caller News Foundation. New documents show that intelligence risked implicating ODNI’s own bioengineering advisor — University of North Carolina professor Ralph Baric.
Baric, who engineered novel coronaviruses with the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), advised ODNI four times a year on biological threats, according to documents released Oct. 30 by Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul.
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Baric did not respond to the DCNF’s requests for comment.
The professor’s ties to American intelligence may run even deeper, the documents reveal, as ODNI facilitated a meeting between the CIA and Baric about a project on coronaviruses in September 2015.
The email exchange with the subject line “Request for Your Expertise” shows an unnamed government official with a CIA-affiliated email address pitching a “possible project” to Baric relating to “[c]oronavirus evolution and possible natural human adaptation.”
The new documents shed a bit of light on a question members of Congress have posed for years: Whether our own intelligence agencies knew more about the likelihood of a lab origin of COVID than they told the public.
“Director Ratcliffe has been on the forefront of this issue since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been committed to transparency and accountability on this issue,” a CIA spokesperson said in a statement. “In January – as one of the Director’s first actions at Langley – CIA made public its assessment that a research-related origin of the COVID-19 pandemic is more likely than a natural origin. CIA will continue to evaluate any available credible new intelligence reporting as appropriate.”
Paul is seeking more documents from ODNI on potential ties between U.S. intelligence and the research in Wuhan as part of an ongoing investigation by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and has promised public hearings in the coming months.
Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Tulsi Gabbard disbanded the ODNI biological threats office earlier this year following questions from the DCNF about its suppression of COVID origins intelligence in August. Gabbard and a dedicated working group have also been quietly investigating the origins of COVID.
Protecting Their Own
Baric gave a presentation to the ODNI in January 2020 showing that he advised American intelligence that COVID may have emerged from a lab, the documents also indicate. Baric shared that the WIV had sequenced thousands of SARS-like coronaviruses, including strains capable of epidemics, the slides show.
Baric noted that the Wuhan lab does this work under low biosafety levels despite the ability of some of these viruses to infect and grow in human lung cells.
What Baric omitted: He had submitted a grant application in 2018 with intentions to conduct research to make coronaviruses with the same rare features seen in COVID while concealing the Wuhan lab’s low biosafety level, jotting in the margins of a draft of the grant application that Americans would “freak out” if they knew about the shoddy standards.
One year after Baric’s presentation, ODNI had hardened against the lab leak hypothesis.
When State Department officials pushed to declassify certain intelligence related to a plausible lab leak in January 2021, the ODNI expressed concerns that it would “call out actions that we ourselves are doing.”
Former ODNI National Counterproliferation and Biosecurity Center (NCBC) Director Kathryn Brinsfield, a medical doctor, also dismissed a January 2021 presentation by government officials about a plausible lab origin of COVID as “misinformation,” two sources told the DCNF. Her top aide Zach Bernstein, who possesses a master’s degree in security studies but no scientific credentials, also dismissed the presentation, according to three sources.
Gabbard disbanded NCBC in August following questions from the DCNF about its role in suppressing COVID origins intelligence.
But in the years preceding Gabbard’s takeover of the intelligence community’s central office, the ODNI’s public reports omitted any analysis of COVID’s viral genome. One intelligence agency filed a formal complaint about this glaring omission, the DCNF reported.
Scientists often received fierce pushback from former National Intelligence Council official Adrienne Keen, who helped steward former President Joe Biden’s 90-day review into COVID’s origins, an official told the DCNF. Paul’s request for records from ODNI includes a request for some of Keen’s communications.
Brinsfield and Keen did not respond to requests for comment.
Unanswered Questions
Despite the new disclosures, the precise nature of the CIA’s interest in Baric’s coronavirus work remains unknown. The documents do not include any further details about the work that the CIA and Baric may or may not have undertaken.
The U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) funded the discovery of novel coronaviruses and shipped the samples to Wuhan through a 2009-2020 program called PREDICT, the DCNF reported in July. USAID sometimes acted as a CIA front before Trump dismantled it earlier this year — but no evidence exists that the CIA directed PREDICT.
An unnamed FBI special agent was in communication with Baric about responding to public requests for his research and emails with the Wuhan lab through the North Carolina Freedom of Information Act, according to a 2024 congressional letter, but details about the contact between the FBI and Baric also remain uncertain.
The CIA was slow to acknowledge that a lab was the pandemic’s most likely source, an assessment that the CIA made public more than five years after the pandemic emerged and well after the FBI and the Department of Energy.
In early 2020, when Trump’s Deputy National Security Advisor Matt Pottinger tasked CIA analysts to dig into the matter, they came up empty, according to a New York Times report. Instead, anonymous sources smeared Pottinger as having a “conspiratorial view” of the Chinese Communist Party.
Trump’s current CIA Director John Ratcliffe, who served as the DNI from May 2020 to January 2021, revealed in a 2023 Wall Street Journal op-ed that he had pushed for the declassification of COVID origins intelligence as the DNI but that he “faced constant opposition, particularly from Langley.”
From LifeSiteNews
The Crown’s appeal claims the judge made a mistake in her verdict on the intimidation charges, and also in how she treated aggravating and mitigating factors regarding sentencing.
Government lawyers for the Crown have filed an appeal the acquittals of Freedom Convoy leaders Tamara Lich and Chris Barber on intimidation charges.
The Crown also wants their recent 18-month conditional sentence on mischief charges replaced with harsher penalties, which could include possible jail time.
According to the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF), it is “asking the Ontario Court of Appeal to enter a conviction on the intimidation charge or order a new trial on that count,” for Barber’s charges.
Specifically, the Crown’s appeal claims that the judge made a mistake in her verdict on the intimidation charges, and also in how she treated aggravating and mitigating factors regarding sentencing.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, both Lich and Barber have filed appeals of their own against their house arrest sentences, arguing that the trial judge did not correctly apply the law on their mischief charges.
Barber’s lawyer, Diane Magas, said that her client “relied in good faith on police and court direction during the protest. The principles of fairness and justice require that citizens not be punished for following the advice of authorities. We look forward to presenting our arguments before the Court.”
On October 7, Ontario Court Justice Heather Perkins-McVey sentenced Lich and Chris Barber to 18 months’ house arrest after being convicted earlier in the year of “mischief.”
Lich was given 18 months less time already spent in custody, amounting to 15 1/2 months.
Lich and Barber were declared guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the protest against COVID mandates in April 2022, and as social media influencers. The conviction came after a nearly two-year trial despite the non-violent nature of the popular movement.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September 2024, more than a year after it began. It was originally scheduled to last 16 days.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, the Canadian government was hoping to put Lich in jail for no less than seven years and Barber for eight years.
LifeSiteNews recently reported that Lich detailed her restrictive house arrest conditions, revealing she is “not” able to leave her house or even pick up her grandchildren from school without permission from the state.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, Lich, reflecting on her recent house arrest verdict, said she has no “remorse” and will not “apologize” for leading a movement that demanded an end to all COVID mandates.
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