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COVID-19

Post-pandemic: Canada desperately needs an impartial COVID-19 inquiry

Published

3 months ago

15 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Kevin Bardosh

PDF of Commentary

Now that the panic has subsided, it is time to move to a thoughtful and objective Covid evaluation to investigate the social harms created by government infection control policies.

Nearly four years after the Canadian government first imposed unprecedented Covid-19 policies, the nation still lacks a coherent plan for how to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies and their costs and consequences.

Sadly, recent efforts to promote a federal inquiry do very little to diminish concerns that key scientific and policy questions – about lockdowns, school closures, masks, contact tracing and vaccine mandates – will go unanswered. Rather than seriously questioning the dominant covid policy approach, these efforts toward an inquiry parrot a set of misguided axioms set on justifying and institutionalizing them for the future.

A series of articles in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) called for an independent Canadian Inquiry in mid-2023 (Clark et al. 2023). Supportive editorials were written by most Canadian media outlets and a launch event for the series was supported by the Royal Society of Canada. Yet, despite the BMJ series being entitled “Accountability for Canada’s Covid-19 response”, scientific data that contradict the necessity of government infection control policies as well as the social harms to Canadian society from these far-reaching policies were largely ignored.

The BMJ article series assumes a unique form of implicit bias and faulty logic that I have called Covidization, and which has predominated as the mainstream position in government, media, the courts, academia and medicine since 2020 (Bardosh, 2023a). ’Covidization’ over-states the evidence supporting Covid policies and downplays the evidence of their harm, or unintended consequences. It also assumes that more centralized government action was needed to control the virus and valorises population compliance. Take, for example, one of the most cited sentences in the BMJ series:

“What saved Canada was a largely willing and conforming populace that withstood stringent public health measures and achieved among the world’s highest levels of vaccination coverage. In other words, Canadians delivered on the pandemic response while its governments faltered.”

This mainstream position also inverts the burden of proof and contradicts key principles of public health ethics (Jamrozik, 2022): it is critical to appreciate that most Covid policies were not  recommended for use during a viral respiratory pandemic by the World Health Organization and most governments pre-2020 because the evidence was weak and the anticipated harms substantial (Bardosh, 2023a). Pre-2020, the various vaccine mandates and passports used during the pandemic were also generally believed to be unethical and against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Bardosh et al. 2022).

Yet the social atmosphere of fear and panic during the pandemic re-engineered axiomatic truths and governance models including accepted ethical standards (e.g. precautionary principle) and cost-benefit analysis in decision-making. Instead, a narrow logic that approaches infection control a priori as the highest moral goal reigned.

The BMJ series is worrying because it was modelled on a similar article series launched just before the UK began its own formal Covid Inquiry (McKee et al. 2022), which began in June 2023 (Bardosh, 2023b). The UK-focused BMJ articles were written, in part, by prominent advocates of Zero Covid, who, like China, promoted stricter containment believing the virus could be eliminated. This position went on to be reflected, in varying degree, in the biases and assumptions of the UK Public Inquiry itself.

The UK Inquiry will run until 2026 and is estimated to be the most expensive British public inquiry ever, costing taxpayers £300-500 million. Yet the structure of the inquiry has given preferential status to bereaved family groups through legal representation, who are set on blaming the government for the death of their family members. This means that key assumptions about the effectiveness and appropriateness of Covid measures are simply taken for granted. Prominent scientists who advised the government, especially epidemiological modellers, have also been given preferential treatment by the barristers and the few scientists providing an alternative position, such as one more aligned with the idea of focused protection outlined in the Great Barrington Declaration (Kulldorff et al. 2020), have been largely maligned and ignored (Bardosh, 2023c).

The convergence between the UK inquiry and a possible Canadian inquiry may be more likely than anticipated. According to Canadian journalist Paul Wells, rumour has it that Prof. Sir Mark Walport, who testified to the UK Inquiry and recently chaired a UK Royal Society review on Covid interventions that ignored key data and the costs and consequences to society (Bardosh, 2023d), could head a Canadian inquiry (Wells, 2023). This has yet to be confirmed or denied.

Herein lay a central problem: those who advocated for Covid policies are now called to evaluate them. Epidemiological models and observational studies have been given substantial weight by government and public health agencies despite confounding effects, data reliability issues, incorrect assumptions, circular reasoning and inappropriate claims of causality (Grant et al. 2022; Doidge et al. 2022; Vickers et al. 2023).

In a desperate failure to ‘follow the science’, too many individuals in the mainstream medical establishment continue to frame efforts to question Covid policies as ‘misinformation’ or ‘revisionism’ (Murdoch and Caulfield, 2023). This perspective cherry-picks the evidence and ignores the totality of data on policies such as school closures, mask mandates and lockdowns (Fitzpatrick et al. 2022; Vickers et al. 2022). It also ignores other factors that can explain Covid epidemiological trends: seasonality, innate immunity, voluntary risk reduction and herd immunity (Bardosh, 2023e).

Worryingly, provincial and federal governments are not required by law to evaluate the health, social or economic consequences of any emergency response in Canada, including Covid (Khoury et al. 2022). This leaves fundamental questions unanswered: Did government policies cause more harm than good? What should we do next time?

Now that the panic has subsided, it is time to move beyond the Covidization groupthink. Any thoughtful and objective Covid evaluation should be evidence-based and take as a starting position the investigation of social harms created by government infection control policies (Bardosh, 2023a).

This includes consequences on health and health services, such as an alarming mental health crisis (Agostino et al. 2021; Frounfelker et al. 2022; Jenkins et al. 2022) and rise in non-Covid excess mortality, for example due to drug overdoses among young people (Dmetrichuk et al. 2022; Lee et al. 2022). It includes a range of negative lifestyle changes that appear to be compounding risks for noncommunicable diseases: exercise, obesity, sleep, screen use, diet, addiction, frailty, and child development (Andreacchi et al. 2022; Colucci et al. 2022; Shillington et al. 2021; Potvin et al. 2022).

Pandemic policies closed businesses and shifted employment patterns, whilst also dramatically increasing government spending, debt and inflation (CFIB, 2021; Moran et al. 2022; Lemieux et al. 2020; Razak et al. 2022). What are the consequences and long-term legacy of these economic impacts? And, of course, economic consequences are likely to have had adverse effects on general well-being. It remains unclear how useful the vast government financial assistance programs really were (Kroebel et al. 2021).

The social fabric of Canada was also ruptured, with significant effects on domestic violence, child abuse, gender relations and social polarization (Baker et al. 2023; Smith, 2022; Wu et al. 2022; Wathen et al. 2022). Pandemic policies impacted children and teenagers at crucial points in their education and psychosocial development and are predicted to have various long-term consequences (Cost et al. 2022; Haeck and Larose, 2022). Studies on university students consistently show that well-being, social relationships, financial stress, quality of learning and optimism about future job prospects were impacted (Appleby et al. 2022; Houlden and Veletsianos, 2022).

Socio-economic groups were affected in different ways. A generational paradox emerged: the virus itself caused minimal mortality among younger people who were most severely impacted by pandemic disruptions (Ciotti et al. 2022). More marginalized and vulnerable social groups also experienced disproportionate mental health and socio-economic effects (Jenkins et al. 2022). The quality of social services diminished as a result of accommodating social distancing protocols (Baker et al. 2023; Wathens et al. 2022). And the elderly were often isolated and locked-up in care facilities under inhumane conditions (Saad et al. 2022; Chu et al. 2022; Rangel et al. 2022).

The civic infrastructure of democratic accountability also eroded (Baron and Van Geyn, 2023), with significant consequences for human rights, civil liberties, and checks on executive power (Joffe, 2021; Mykhalovskiy et al. 2022). Debate was, for the most part, abandoned at our institutions of higher education. An artificial ‘consensus’ was manufactured by the mainstream media (Capurro et al. 2021; Labbe et al. 2022; Norman et al. 2022). Science itself was politicised and a profound failure occurred in multidisciplinary scientific policy advice. The advice offered to policymakers focused almost exclusively on a pathogen-centric perspective (Bhatia et al. 2023) and disregarded the expertise of other relevant disciplines. Population compliance was supported through unprecedented laws on protest, data privacy and media freedom largely upheld by the courts (Ballard et al. 2021; CCLA, 2021; McClelland Luscombe, 2021). Growing public distrust culminated in the 2022 Ottawa Trucker Convoy protest while the biases of the Rouleau Commission that upheld the use of the Emergencies Act revealed similar failures in government accountability (Alford, 2023).

Despite these varied impacts on Canadians, no major scientific and institutional effort has emerged to collate and analyze the full data on these societal harms and explore their implications for pandemic policy. Two recent efforts are, nonetheless, worth mentioning. First, the new conservative premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, commissioned a public health emergency governance review which recommended, among other things, broader expertise in management and science advice and the need to better protect rights and freedoms (Kelly-Gagnon et al. 2023). Second, a grassroots independent movement recently completed a National Citizen Inquiry (2023), based on public testimony from a 7-city tour, and has released a final report focused on the varied impacts of Covid measures on society.

The Federal government can call for a national commission of inquiry at any time and set the scope and format. Such inquiries have had lasting institutional impact in the past; the Canadian blood services emerged from the stained blood scandal in the 1980s. And their tendency to keep an issue in the news cycle helps ensure institutional change (Stutz, 2008).

However, before any Canadian inquiry takes place, it is critical that a reversal of perspective occurs about the key questions (Norfolk Group, 2023). Scientific analysis about the effectiveness of Covid policies in Canada need to be approached in an attitude of impartiality and with a willingness for self-criticism. The data on policy harms need to be taken seriously. This is certainly within the remit of the Public Health Agency of Canada, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and many other government agencies.

All things considered, it would be wise to establish an independent scientific review with sufficient broad support, expertise and neutrality outside government. This could then inform the establishment of any future public inquiry. Otherwise, like the UK Covid Inquiry, we risk eschewing a critical and objective assessment of the evidence and the difficult policy trade-offs between infection control, social harm and civil liberties.

Canada needs a proper Covid inquiry but ensuring that the public gets one will require political acumen, scientific rigor and a correct orientation toward the key social, political, and medical questions at stake.

About the author

Kevin Bardosh, PhD is Director and Head of Research at Collateral Global, a research institute and educational charity based in the UK. He is also affiliated with the School of Public Health, University of Washington and Edinburgh Medical School. A Canadian, he has worked in more than 20 countries around the world on infectious disease research and control programs, including in the response to Zika and Ebola.

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COVID-19

Peckford: Hallelujah! Supreme Court of Canada to hear Newfoundland and Labrador charter case

Published on April 29, 2024

By

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Brian Peckford

This will allow the SCC to address novel questions about the scope of mobility rights in Canada and the extent to which the government can limit Canadians’ rights to move freely around the country.

In what can only be considered a surprise move the SCC has agreed to hear an appeal of a decision of the Supreme Court of Newfoundland. Surprise because the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal refused to hear the appeal of this exact case.

For the Appeal Court it was the all too familiar excuse of the whole thing being too moot for the Court.

But now the SCC has agreed to hear the case. The parties, Kimberly Taylor and The Canadian Civil Liberties Association appealed to the court.

Here is a copy of the Civil Liberties Press Release dated April 26, 2024:

“Arbitrary travel restrictions infringe on the mobility rights of Canadians. CCLA’s challenge of Newfoundland government’s Bill 38 will continue before the Supreme Court of Canada (SCC), so that Canadians have clear, predictable, and stable answers to fundamental questions affecting their basic mobility rights.”

Back in May 2020, CCLA challenged the constitutionality of the Newfoundland government’s Bill 38 before the province’s Supreme Court. This Bill provided for a travel ban between provinces and other restrictive measures in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. CCLA asked the Court to declare Bill 38 in violation of s.6 (mobility rights), as well as other Charter rights. CCLA also argued that the law could not be saved by s.1, which says that limits on rights must be reasonable and demonstrably justified. In September of 2020, the province’s Supreme Court found that the travel ban did violate the s.6 Charter right to mobility, but that such infringement could be justified under s.1. CCLA pursued this case before the Newfoundland and Labrador Court of Appeal. In August of 2023, the Court of Appeal refused to settle the merits of the appeal under the motive that it was moot, since the ban had been lifted. This was done despite all the parties urging the Court of Appeal to decide the appeal on the merits.

CCLA is pleased to learn that the SCC just granted its application seeking leave to appeal in this case. This will allow the SCC to address novel questions about the scope of mobility rights in Canada and the extent to which the government can limit Canadians’ rights to move freely around the country. CCLA is grateful for the excellent pro bono work of Paul Pape, Shantona Chaudhury and Mitchell McGowan from Pape Chaudry LLP in this file.”

Like the Association I am pleased that the highest court is going to hear the case. One can only assume that it will not just issue a silly moot decision given that they could have let the Court of Appeal decision of Newfoundland stand and not hear the case.

I hope the highest court considers the following given it is high time for the Constitution of This Country to be fairly applied and interpreted as written.

Courts have not the power to rewrite this sacred document. They are not omnipotent. That is for the people through its elected representatives as expressed in Section 38 of the Constitution Act 1982 in which the Charter is located—the Amending Formula.

The intent of Section 1 Of the Charter was that it could only be applied in a war, insurrection, the state being threatened circumstance. As one of the First Ministers involved and whose signature is on the original Patriation Agreement I submit this point of view was what was operative at the time of the construction of this section. All remaining First Ministers whose names are on that document are no longer with us. Sadly, no court has called me to provide my view.

This intent is clear In Section 4 (2) of the Charter:

 “In time of real or apprehended war, invasion or insurrection, a House of Commons may be continued by Parliament and a legislative assembly may be continued by the legislature beyond five years if such continuation is not opposed by the votes of more than one-third of the members of the House of Commons or the legislative assembly, as the case may be.”

So, decisions that have been made concerning the Charter should only be made in this context. Numerous court deliberations here and in many western jurisdictions have considered intent in determining the legitimacy of legislation. This is not novel or new.

Hence, a glaring, fundamental mistake has occurred in interpreting our Charter. The blatant omission of considering the opening words of the Charter in any interpretation of legislation by the Courts is an abuse of the Charter, our Constitution. Where is the power provided the courts to engage is such omission? Those words are:

“Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law:”

The one reference of which I am aware in the Courts literature to any consideration of the opening words relating to God was by an Alberta Judge in a lower court foolishly indicated that the creators of the words did not identify God as being a Christian God. All the creators, the First Ministers, were Christians —that’s all. What an insult to our history and traditions and the authors?

And this has been allowed to stand?

And what about the rule of law? Little if anything has been done in considering and interpreting this point.

As for Section 1 itself of the Charter. If one can get past the previous points, which is impossible, but let’s speculate: the court in question in Newfoundland, like the courts across the land, have disfigured, misinterpreted the wording of this section —-

Rights and freedoms in Canada

The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.

What is of crucial importance is ‘demonstrably justify ‘and a free and democratic society ‘—-is it not? Many try and evade confronting these concepts by emphasizing ‘reasonable ‘. But ‘reasonable ‘is qualified, if you will, with ‘as can be demonstrably justified ‘and ‘in a free and democratic society.’ This was deliberate by the creators and authors of this section.

So, as we all know such reasonable demonstration would be a cost benefit analysis, a tool used frequently by Government in considering new policies or programs —and this case especially when sacred rights enshrined in the constitution were to be taken way!!! Yet, there was none!  And what about the Provincial Emergency Management organizations that were already established in all the provinces with immediate expertise. Were they consulted? Not one!

No such attempt was made, and the Governments did not conduct even a cursory cost benefit review and the courts eagerly accepted the one-sided Government narrative.  Yet experts like Lt. Colonel David Redman, who had been involved in Emergency Management and had written extensively on it were never consulted!

And ‘free and democratic society? Was there any meaningful engagement of the Parliament of Canada or the Legislative Assemblies —-not really, ——only to delegate power to unelected bureaucrats and relieve the politicians of direct responsibility. Where were the Parliamentary Committees? The sober consideration of all points of view in an open public session? Of independent science? Does not free and democratic society entail such deliberations?

And to those courts / governments who talk about little time—in this Newfoundland case it was 6 months before The Supreme Court of the Province ruled and 15 months for the Court of Appeal to issue a non-decision! So much for serving the people!

As for the concept of ‘mootness ‘that has been most dramatically used by the Federal Court and the Federal Court of Appeal and The Court of Appeal in Newfoundland? This is a construct of the court not the Constitution.

It denies a citizen the right to know whether a government action to which a citizen was subjected violates the Charter.  Should a court idea of mootness, refusing to rule on whether a government action of only months before overruling the people’s right to know if their rights and freedoms were violated? Is this not the role of the Court? To protect the rights and freedoms of the citizens from Government overreach? That was and is the whole point of the Charter.

Whether the Government action is presently operative or not should be irrelevant, especially when millions of citizens were involved and especially when it involved rights and freedoms protected under the Charter, our Constitution. There may be a role for mootness if a frivolous matter is established but by any measure what we are discussing is anything but a frivolous matter, even though The Newfoundland Court of Appeal in calling the whole thing ‘moot ‘had the gall to find the Government’s action of denying rights ‘fleeting.’ Courts have abdicated their solemn responsibilities to the people in the exaggerated use of such Court constructed procedures.

So the highest court can go back to ‘first principles’, and examine intent and the opening words of the Charter and place them in full context in any interpretation of the Charter. If this were done then Section 1 of the Charter would not even be in play. Constructing a hypothetical i.e. considering Section 1 of the Charter during the so called ‘covid emergency’, well, even if we do, the Government and Court reasoning would have failed as demonstrated above.

There is an opportunity through this case as well as the one in which I am involved for our highest court to get it right——to return to the full constitution and re-establish the ‘supremacy of God and the rule of law, ‘the legitimate role of Parliament, to the plain meaning of demonstrably justify, and the importance of intent in interpreting our Charter.

Is the Supreme Court of Canada up to the challenge?

Will our Constitution, our democracy be restored?

The Honourable A. Brian Peckford P.C. is the last living First Minister who helped craft the Canadian Charter of Rights

Watch –  Leaders on the Frontier: Brian Peckford on Saving Canada’s Democracy | Frontier Centre For Public Policy (fcpp.org)  January 20, 2022

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COVID-19

Former Canadian lawmaker has no regrets about refusing COVID shot despite losing his job

Published on April 29, 2024

By

Ontario MPP Rick Nicholls

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

MPP Rick Nicholls was ousted from the Progressive Conservative Party by Doug Ford, but he said he has talked to party people who have told him, ‘Rick, I was against what you did, but you did the right thing.’

Former Ontario MPP Rick Nicholls, who was once an elite member of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative (PC) Party before Premier Doug Ford kicked him out for refusing to take the COVID shot, says he has no “regrets” for refusing to bow to pressure to get COVID jabbed, noting he feels justified for his actions for going against the party leader’s demands.

Nicholls, who once served as the deputy speaker of the Ontario legislative assembly, noted, as per an Epoch Times  report, that as increased information comes out about the COVID shots, he has talked to party people who have told him, “Rick, I was against what you did, but you did the right thing.”

Nicholls had been an MPP since 2011 but was booted from Ford’s ruling PCs in August 2021. In the same month and year, Ford mandated that all of his MPPs have the COVID jabs. At the time, Nicholls said he voiced his “concerns about our policy privately to the premier and to the Ontario PC caucus.”

He observed that from the get-go he did not call the COVID injection a “vaccine” but instead a “jab, or the shot,” noting how a vaccine should not need multiple boosters.

“That’s not a vaccine,” he said.

Nicholls also blamed the legacy media for promoting the shots at the behest of federal and provincial governments despite not having any long-term data on the effectiveness or safety of the jabs.

“I blame the legacy media for not printing the truth,” he said.

As reported by LifeSiteNews, Nicholls in 2021 said people should not be “penalized for their choice” to refuse the COVID jabs, the safety of which he questioned, while having to announce he was forced to step down as deputy speaker of the Ontario Legislature. He then sat as an independent MPP for a time before joining the Ontario Party to serve as their only sitting member until the 2022 election.

Draconian COVID mandates, including those surrounding the experimental mRNA vaccines, were imposed by the provincial Ford government as well as the federal Liberal government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

LifeSiteNews has published an extensive amount of research on the dangers of receiving the experimental COVID mRNA jabs, which include heart damage and blood clots.

Last week, LifeSiteNews reported that the shots were heavily promoted on social media by the federal government. Indeed, a recent Inquiry of Ministry request revealed that Canada’s Public Health Agency (PHAC) along with Health Canada have combined to spend approximately $9.9 million on social media advertising to promote the experimental COVID injections since 2020.

Ford asked former MPP to do him a ‘favor’ by getting the shot

Nicholls observed as per The Epoch Times that while he had early in the COVID crisis, albeit with caution, gone along with Ford’s government position regarding COVID mandates and lockdowns, it was not until August 2021 that Ford demanded he either get the jab or he would get the boot.

Ford called Nicholls and said, “I need you to do me a favor,” adding “I need you to get vaccinated.’”

The request from Ford came after he told media that he would make it so that all his caucus members had the shot. Nicholls told Ford that media pressure to get the shots was not a good reason for him to bow to pressure and get injected.

After being told to think about getting the shots by Ford, Nicholls noted that he got many calls from party insiders and other MPPs urging him to get the jabs.

In one direct call to Nicholls from the PC’s campaign manager, he was told, “Rick, you’ve got 72 hours. You either get vaccinated or I’m removing you from caucus.”

Despite the pressure, Nicholls did not waver, and on August 19, 2021, he told the media he would not be getting the shot. He noted how he had taken Ford’s “word” that “vaccination is a choice and that all Ontarians have a constitutional right to make such a choice” to the media at the time.

“I stand strong in my personal choice not to be vaccinated, which ultimately led to (my) decision to step down. I oppose mandatory vaccines. I believe in personal choice when it comes to having a foreign substance injected and that an individual should not be punished for CHOICE,” he told reporters.

Nicholls said he received notification that he was being removed as deputy speaker not from Ford but through media reports.

“I want to thank the media for letting me know that the government has actually already selected a replacement for me. Yes, that’s correct. The government didn’t let me know,” Nicholls said.

Nicholls noted, according to The Epoch Times, that had he gotten the COVID shot there was an exceptionally good chance he would have been re-elected in 2022.

“I knew that had I stayed and got the shot — and survived the shot I might add — I knew that I had an excellent chance of being re-elected again (to a) fourth term,” he said.

While sitting as an independent, he was able to ask challenging questions to the minister of health and Ford himself regarding the COVID shots “and the vaccine and information that I’m getting that they were denying.”

“And if I had a dollar for every time that former Minister of Health Christine Elliot said these vaccines are safe and effective, I’d be a rich guy,” he said.

COVID vaccine mandates, which came from provincial governments with the support of Trudeau’s federal government, split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.

The jabs also have connections to cell lines derived from aborted babies. As a result of this, many Catholics and other Christians refused to take them.

As reported by LifeSiteNews recently, the Trudeau government is still under contract to purchase multiple shipments of COVID shots while at the same time throwing away $1.5 billion worth of expired shots.

The continued purchase of COVID jabs comes despite the fact the government’s own data shows that most Canadians are flat-out refusing a COVID booster injection. It also comes as the government has had to increase spending on Canada’s Vaccine Injury Program (VISP), as reported by LifeSiteNews last week.

Canadians’ decision to refuse the shots also comes as a Statistic Canada report revealed that deaths from COVID-19 and “unspecified causes” rose after the release of the so-called “safe and effective” jabs.

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