Liberals determined to reject rule of law after Emergencies Act ruling: Aaron Wudrick

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

The government comforts itself in the fiction that the rules don’t apply to it

On Tuesday, The Federal Court of Canada released a decision that all Canadians should celebrate as an important victory for the rule of law in Canada.

In an application brought by two public interest law associations — the Canadian Constitution Foundation and the Canadian Civil Liberties Association — the court considered two questions. Whether the Trudeau government acted outside the law in invoking the Emergencies Act in February 2022 to put an end to the Freedom Convoy protests in Ottawa, and whether orders issued under the authority of the act violated the Charter. On both counts, the court answered unambiguously: yes, they did.

Perhaps the most striking thing about the court decision authored by Justice Richard Mosley is how straightforward much of the reasoning is. There is no tortured logic, no obscure line of argument, no abstract reasoning; the principles at stake are easily digestible by lawyers and non-lawyers alike. Justice Mosley does exactly what most Canadians probably expect courts to do: consider evidence; read what the law says; and draw conclusions that, for lack of a better phrase, reflect common sense.

Take for example the government’s insistence that the Freedom Convoy constituted a “threat to the security of Canada” — a phrase which is explicitly defined in the Emergencies Act as having the same meaning as it does in Section 2 of the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) Act. Unfortunately for the government, CSIS’s official determination was that the convoy did not constitute a threat to the security of Canada. This being a very inconvenient obstacle for a government that wanted to invoke the act, Cabinet simply came up with a new strategy: ignore the statutory requirement that the Section 2 CSIS Act definition be met, come up with an alternative definition that better fits their argument, and make the opposite finding! QED.

Understandably, Justice Mosley had none of this. The law says what the law says. Perhaps, as has been argued elsewhere, using the CSIS Act definition of “threat to the security of Canada” is a poor fit for the Emergencies Act. If so, Parliament is well within its rights to amend it. But it’s not what the law said in February 2022, and Cabinet cannot simply wave away the words because it happens to be inconvenient for their best-laid plans.

On issue after issue — the scope of the security threat; the claim that enforcement tools under existing laws being exhausted; the reasonableness of sweeping violations of Charter rights of free expression and against unreasonable search and seizure — Justice Mosley, after looking at all the evidence, disagreed with the government’s assertions. The government’s claims simply did not survive contact with a fulsome evidentiary record.

Nor was the ruling only damning to the government’s flimsy arguments. It was also an implicit rebuke to Justice Paul Rouleau, the head of the Public Order Emergency Commission, who made the unnecessary and ill-advised choice in his final report to muse about the legality of the act’s invocation, in spite of the fact that — by his own admission — it was not part of his mandate to do so, and he had not undertaken a formal analysis.

Perhaps most interesting of all was Justice Mosley’s candid admission towards the end of his decision that he had initially “been leaning to the view that the decision to invoke the (Emergencies Act) was reasonable” and acknowledged that it was only after taking the time to “carefully deliberate about the evidence and submissions” and the applicants’ “informed legal argument” did he conclude — unambiguously — that the government had acted outside the law.

And what of the political fallout? There is a world in which a government might, when confronted with a court ruling that they illegally invoked and abused the most draconian law on the books, simply accept the ruling with humility, apologize unreservedly for having overstepped, and resign on principle.

Clearly, we don’t live in that world: unrepentant as ever, and within an hour of the decision’s release, Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland announced that the government would be appealing it. This is completely in character for a government that has time and again sneered at the rule of law — e.g. their ethics violations both big and small, the SNC-Lavalin scandal — preferring to comfort itself with fiction that rules are for other people.

Canadians know better. Governments are obliged to follow the law, just like everyone else — and we owe Justice Mosley a debt of gratitude for the timely reminder of that fact.

Aaron Wudrick is a lawyer and the domestic policy director at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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COVID-19

New report warns Ottawa’s ‘nudge’ unit erodes democracy and public trust

Published on November 17, 2025

Todayville

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms has released a new report titled Manufacturing consent: Government behavioural engineering of Canadians, authored by veteran journalist and researcher Nigel Hannaford. The report warns that the federal government has embedded behavioural science tactics in its operations in order to shape Canadians’ beliefs, emotions, and behaviours—without transparency, debate, or consent.

The report details how the Impact and Innovation Unit (IIU) in Ottawa is increasingly using sophisticated behavioural psychology, such as “nudge theory,” and other message-testing tools to influence the behaviour of Canadians.

Modelled after the United Kingdom’s Behavioural Insights Team, the IIU was originally presented as an innocuous “innovation hub.” In practice, the report argues, it has become a mechanism for engineering public opinion to support government priorities.

With the arrival of Covid, the report explains, the IIU’s role expanded dramatically. Internal government documents reveal how the IIU worked alongside the Public Health Agency of Canada to test and design a national communications strategy aimed at increasing compliance with federal vaccination and other public health directives.

Among these strategies, the government tested fictitious news reports on thousands of Canadians to see how different emotional triggers would help reduce public anxiety about emerging reports of adverse events following immunization. These tactics were designed to help achieve at least 70 percent vaccination uptake, the target officials associated with reaching “herd immunity.”

IIU techniques included emotional framing—using fear, reassurance, or urgency to influence compliance with policies such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine requirements. The government also used message manipulation by emphasizing or omitting details to shape how Canadians interpreted adverse events after taking the Covid vaccine to make them appear less serious.

The report further explains that the government adopted its core vaccine message—“safe and effective”—before conclusive clinical or real-world data even existed. The government then continued promoting that message despite early reports of adverse reactions to the injections.

Government reliance on behavioural science tactics—tools designed to steer people’s emotions and decisions without open discussion—ultimately substituted genuine public debate with subtle behavioural conditioning, making these practices undemocratic. Instead of understanding the science first, the government focused primarily on persuading Canadians to accept its narrative. In response to these findings, the Justice Centre is calling for immediate safeguards to protect Canadians from covert psychological manipulation by their own government.

The report urges:

Parliamentary oversight of all behavioural science uses within federal departments, ensuring elected representatives retain oversight of national policy.
Public disclosure of all behavioural research conducted with taxpayer funds, creating transparency of government influence on Canadians’ beliefs and decisions.
Independent ethical review of any behavioural interventions affecting public opinion or individual autonomy, ensuring accountability and informed consent.

Report author Mr. Hannaford said, “No democratic government should run psychological operations on its own citizens without oversight. If behavioural science is being used to influence public attitudes, then elected representatives—not unelected strategists—must set the boundaries.”

COVID-19

Major new studies link COVID shots to kidney disease, respiratory problems

Published on November 13, 2025

Todayville

From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Receiving four or more COVID shots was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold in children, a new study found, and another one linked the shots to higher risk of renal dysfunction.

Two major new studies have been published sounding the alarm about the COVID-19 shots potentially carrying risks of not only respiratory diseases but even kidney injury.

The Washington Stand first drew attention to the studies, published in the International Journal of Infectious Diseases (IJID) and International Journal of Medical Science (IJMS), respectively.

The first examined insurance claims and vaccination records for the entire population of South Korea, filtering out cases of infection prior to the start of the outbreak for a pool of more than 39 million people. It reported that the COVID shots correlated with mixed impacts on other respiratory conditions. A “temporary decline followed by a resurgence of URI [upper respiratory infections] and common cold was observed during and after the COVID-19 pandemic,” it concluded. “In the Post-pandemic period (January 2023–September 2024), the risk of URI and common cold increased with higher COVID-19 vaccine doses,” it noted.

Children in particular, who are known to face the lowest risk from COVID itself, had dramatically higher odds of adverse events the more shots they took. Receiving four or more was associated with 559% higher likelihood of cold, 91% higher likelihood of pneumonia, 83% higher likelihood of URI, and 35% higher likelihood of tuberculosis.

The second study examined records of 2.9 million American adults, half of whom received at least one COVID shot and half of whom did not.

“COVID-19 vaccination was associated with a higher risk of subsequent renal dysfunction, including AKI [acute kidney injury] and dialysis treatment,” it found, citing 15,809 cases versus 11,081. “The cumulative incidence of renal dysfunction was significantly higher in vaccinated than in unvaccinated patients […] At the one-year follow-up, the number of deaths among vaccinated individuals was 7,693, while the number of deaths among unvaccinated individuals was 7,364.” Notably, the study did not find a difference in the “type of COVID-19 vaccine administered.”

The researchers note that this is not simply a matter of correlation, but that a causal mechanism for such results has already been indicated.

“Prior studies have indicated that COVID-19 vaccines can damage several tissues,” they explain.

“The main pathophysiological mechanism of COVID-19 vaccine-related complications involve vascular disruption. COVID-19 vaccination can induce inflammation through interleukins and the nod-like receptor family pyrin domain-containing 3, an inflammatory biomarker. In another study, thrombosis episodes were observed in patients who received different COVID-19 vaccines. Additionally, mRNA COVID-19 vaccines have been associated with the development of myocarditis and related complications […] The development of renal dysfunction can be affected by several biochemical factors [26]. In turn, AKI can increase systemic inflammation and impair the vasculature and red blood cell aggregation. Given that the mechanism underlying COVID-19 vaccine-related complications corresponds to the pathophysiology of kidney disease, we hypothesized that COVID-19 vaccination may cause renal dysfunction, which was supported by the results of this study.”

Launched in the final year of President Donald Trump’s first term in response to COVID-19, Operation Warp Speed (OWS) had the COVID shots ready for use in a fraction of the time any previous vaccine had ever been developed and tested. As LifeSiteNews has extensively covered, a body of evidence steadily accumulated over the following years that they failed to prevent transmission and, more importantly, carried severe risks of their own. COVID was a sticking point for many in Trump’s base, yet he doggedly refused to disavow OWS.

So far, Trump’s second administration has rolled back several recommendations for the shots but not yet pulled them from the market, despite hiring several vocal critics of the COVID establishment and putting the Department of Health & Human Services under the leadership of America’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Most recently, the administration has settled on leaving the current vaccines optional but not supporting work to develop successors.

In early August, Kennedy announced the government would be “winding down” almost $500 million worth of mRNA vaccine projects and rejecting future exploration of the technology in favor of more conventional vaccines. Last week, HHS revoked emergency use authorizations (EUA) for the COVID shots, which were used to justify the long-since-rescinded mandates and sidestep other procedural hurdles, and in its place issued “marketing authorization” for those who meet a minimum risk threshold for the following mRNA vaccines: Moderna (6+ months), Pfizer (5+), and Novavax (12+).

“These vaccines are available for all patients who choose them after consulting with their doctors,” Kennedy said, making good on his pledge to “end COVID vaccine mandates, keep vaccines available to people who want them, especially the vulnerable, demand placebo-controlled trials from companies,” and “end the emergency.”