As Covid restrictions moved past the initial promise of two weeks into months and waves, John Carpay and The Justice Centre have taken on significant prominence for individuals and businesses fighting against them. For those who believe their rights have been infringed by Covid restrictions the Justice Centre offers an extensive and free list of information on its website, including an entire ‘living’ book, constantly updated with the latest information on the rights and freedoms in respect to the various sets of Covid restrictions across Canada. Those facing legal challenges, are offered direct connection with members of their legal team.
This week the President of the Justice Centre, John Carpay suddenly stepped down. In his statement to the Board of Directors for the Justice Centre Carpay says he went too far when he decided to hire a private investigator to observe Manitoba Chief Justice Glenn Joyal. Carpay says he was trying to confirm information that certain members of Manitoba’s leadership responsible for enforcing strict restrictions, were violating those same restrictions.
Statement from the Board of Directors of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
On Monday July 12, 2021, the members of the Board of Directors of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (Justice Centre) were informed that a private investigator had been retained by Justice Centre President John Carpay to conduct surveillance on senior government officials, including Chief Justice Joyal of the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench, in regard to their compliance with Covid regulations.
No member of the Board had any prior notice or knowledge of this plan and had not been consulted on it. Had the Board been advised of the plan, it would have immediately brought it to an end. Mr. Carpay has acknowledged that he made the decision unilaterally. Apart from the Justice Centre’s Litigation Director, none of the Justice Centre’s lawyers or Board members were aware that this was occurring until July 12.
The Justice Centre’s mandate is to defend Canadians’ constitutional freedoms through litigation and education. Surveilling public officials is not what we do. We condemn what was done without reservation. We apologize to Chief Justice Joyal for the alarm, disturbance, and violation of privacy. All such activity has ceased and will not reoccur in future.
For years, Mr. Carpay has been a tireless advocate for Canadians’ constitutional rights and freedoms. With the integrity that we know him for, he has owned this mistake, openly, directly, and without reservation. Mr. Carpay has advised the Board that, effective today, he is taking an indefinite period of leave from his responsibilities at the Justice Centre. The Board will appoint an interim president to serve in his absence, and has instituted a comprehensive review of Justice Centre operations and decision-making.
Statement by John Carpay, President – July 12, 2021
As has been communicated in the media, I apologized this morning to Chief Justice Joyal in the Manitoba Court of Queen’s Bench for my decision to include him in passive observation conducted by a private investigator at my request, to hold government officials accountable. In an error of judgement, Chief Justice Joyal was included with the observation of government officials.
No other judges were included. Over the last 16 months, Canadians have faced unprecedented restrictions on their Charter-guaranteed freedoms to travel, assemble, associate with others, and worship. The Justice Centre’s mandate is to defend Canadians’ constitutional freedoms through litigation and education.
When public officials breach health orders, as we saw recently with Alberta Premier Kenney’s “Sky Palace” dinner, it is evidence that they do not feel compelled to abide by the same restrictions which they impose on other citizens, often with significant penalties. It was reported to the Justice Centre that Manitoba’s leadership were similarly breaching public health regulations. I made the decision to hire an investigator to ascertain whether this was true.
In no way was this intended to influence or impact the Justice Centre’s litigation efforts, or any of our court cases. This decision was my own initiative, and was not discussed with Justice Centre clients, staff lawyers or Board members.
After 15 years as a TV reporter with Global and CBC and as news director of RDTV in Red Deer, Duane set out on his own 2008 as a visual storyteller. During this period, he became fascinated with a burgeoning online world and how it could better serve local communities. This fascination led to Todayville, launched in 2016.
The Justice Centre is pleased to announce that Crown prosecutors have entered a stay of proceedings against an Ontario woman who was ticketed and fined $6,255 for not staying in a quarantine hotel upon her arrival into Canada.
The Ontario woman (who prefers to remain anonymous) was returning to Canada after a visit to New York on August 3, 2021. She suffers from chronic pain syndrome, which sometimes requires the assistance of a wheelchair and the assistance of friends and family for her personal care. Prior to her departure for New York, her chronic pain worsened and had not subsided by the time she returned to the Canadian border.
This Ontario woman was therefore not able to quarantine in any of the quarantine hotels designated by the Government of Canada. Quarantine regulations prohibited Canadians from returning directly to their own homes upon returning to Canada and required Canadians to pay out-of-pocket for a three-day hotel stay. Instead, she had made alternative arrangements to quarantine for 14 days in a separate area of her home, with the assistance of her mother. She believed she had established the safest quarantine plan–one that would prevent her from contracting or transmitting Covid. Her traveller intake form at the Canadian border indicated that she had established a suitable alternative quarantine plan.
For not staying in a government-designated quarantine location, she was ticketed and fined $6,255.
Lawyer Charlene Le Beau argued that her client should have qualified for a medical exemption under the Order in Council in effect at the time, and that, because she had established a suitable quarantine plan, the ticket should be dropped. Further, Ms. Le Beau also pointed out that 25 months had elapsed between the time the ticket had been issued and the trial date, and that this was an “unreasonable delay,” pursuant to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 11(b) of the Charter states that “[a]ny persons charged with an offence has the right to be tried within a reasonable time.”
Crown prosecutors entered a stay of proceedings, and the ticket and fine have been dropped.
Ms. Le Beau, a lawyer in the Justice Centre litigation network, stated, “The right to be tried for a charge within a reasonable time is a fundamental principle of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and a trial 25 months after the date of a charge would not have been reasonable.”
John Carpay, President of the Justice Centre, stated, “We are happy that justice has been achieved in this particular case, even if it took too long. However, this victory does not undo the damage which the federal government inflicted on thousands of Canadians through its dangerous and utterly unscientific policy of locking Canadians up in prison hotels, thereby causing more contact and more interactions with more people.”
There is an old expression: “Success has a thousand fathers but failure is always an orphan.”
It’s a spin on Tacitus: “This is an unfair thing about war: victory is claimed by all, failure to one alone.”
We can judge the results of the pandemic response, then, by the number of people who claim it as their own. So far the answer seems to be: none.
These days, if you listen to the rhetoric, you would think that absolutely no one forced anyone to do anything, not even take the jab. There were no mask mandates. No one was ever locked down. There were some mistakes, sure, but those came only from doing the best we could with the knowledge we had.
Other than make well-considered recommendations, they didn’t force anyone to do anything.
Even from 2021, the media routinely referred to the “pandemic” and not the pandemic policies as responsible for learning losses, depression, business failures, and poor economic conditions. This has been deliberate. It’s designed to normalize lockdowns as if they are just something one does to deal with infectious disease, even though lockdowns have no precedent on that scale in the West.
More recently, this denialism has taken a strange turn. Now the people who actually did pull the trigger on the loss of liberty are routinely refusing to admit that they forced anything.
We’ve heard Donald Trump make this claim for a good part of this year. Mr. “I left it to the states” has yet to be publicly confronted with his decisions from March 10, 2020 and throughout the rest of his presidency. Interviewers don’t press him on the subject for fear of having access cut off later. And yet the record is very clear.
Then Anthony Fauci joined in, claiming that he never recommended the lockdowns at all.
But the pandemic of lockdown dentialism has gotten worse, to the point that the head of Health and Human Services plus the head of Occupational Safety and Health Commision are doing the same, even though the Supreme Court actually ruled against their edicts.
Ah, what a difference time and events make.
It gets worse. One of the most imperial and invasive of the governors was Andrew Cuomo of New York. He issued a massive number of edicts that he enforced with police power, including even dictating that bars couldn’t sell drinks alone but also mandating the selling of food, even to the point of spelling out the quantity of food. This resulted in the infamous Cuomo Fries served around the state.
But to hear him talk now, he didn’t do a thing and no one had to comply with anything.
“Government had no capacity to enforce any of this,” he says now. “You must wear a mask and people wore masks in New York. But if they said I’m not wearing a mask there was nothing I could do about it. You must close your private business. I won’t. Well there was nothing I could really do about it.It was really all voluntary. It was extraordinary when you think about it. Society acted with that uniformity voluntarily because I had no enforcement capacity.”
And that’s why hundreds of thousands of people fled the city and state? It was all voluntary?
In fact, the “New York State on PAUSE” executive order Mr. Cuomo signed on Friday, March 20, 2020, included a directive that all businesses in the state deemed non-essential by the government must cease employee activities within their offices before the following Monday. That December, an army of police sheriffs shut down a popular bar and restaurant on Staten Island that responded “I won’t” and arrested its general manager for defying coronavirus restrictions by remaining open for indoor business, in just one example of enforcement of lockdowns in the state.
Cuomo’s dissembling rhetoric is simply incredible. And it speaks to why we’ve seen no justice for what they have done. It’s simply because not one pandemic leader has admitted to having done anything at all. The entire pandemic response was so brutal, so outlandish, and so utterly wrong even according to their own goals, whatever they were, that no one wants to take credit for any of it.
All of which reminds me of Dr. Carter Mecher, who Michael Lewis in The Premonition celebrates as the key architect of lockdowns. In the Red Dawn emails of 2020, he pauses from his frenzied push for lockdowns with a winsome comment. He says that if everything goes well with the lockdowns, they will have saved society from a deadly disease. The irony, he says, is that if their strategy works, everyone will be saying: look it wasn’t bad after all, so why did we lock down?
So either way, he predicted, they are doomed.
This was the real premonition. Today, no one likes these people. The public is furious beyond measure. The leaders of the response all over the world are being toppled and fleeing offices with as much dignity as they can muster, which usually means landing in the Ivy League (Jacinda Ardern, Lori Lightfoot, Yoel Roth. and Cuomo).
The one thing they will not do is admit that they were completely wrong and only caused massive wreckage from which we are still suffering, plus completely discredited public health and government for a generation or two.
Early on, I and many others were accused of Covid denialism for citing the data on the age disparities of risk. The alarmists and lockdowners were said to be the realistic ones. Three years later, this has completely flipped. Reality bit back. Now the denialists are those who actively promoted and enforced lockdowns, and now implausibly deny that anything happened at all.
All of this gives new meaning to the word gaslighting. Indeed, it is enough to drive one crazy. We encounter it everywhere, even in the second Republican debate where not even one question was about the lockdowns, much less the surveillance, censorship, vaccine mandates, or the failures of the shot. Here we have the greatest failure of government in my lifetime or any living lifetime and we don’t have official institutions out there even willing to talk about it.
The major media is tacitly conspiring with the political establishment, the corporate sector, and the administrative state to pretend like that fiasco was completely normal and also entirely forgettable, not even worth naming. We did the best we could with the information we had so just stop complaining about it!
This is not going to work. It is too close to living memory for this level of gaslighting to be effective. The more these official institutions engage in this crazy form of denialism, the more they discredit themselves.
Jeffrey A. Tucker is Founder and President of the Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Liberty or Lockdown, and thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
But to hear him 
