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COVID-19

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

Published

3 months ago

6 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Aaron Wudrick

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

Trudeau gov’t has paid out over $500k to employees denied COVID vaccine mandate exemptions

Published on April 26, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

The Department of Health paid $177,991, the Department of Foreign affairs paid $88,223, the Correctional Service of Canada paid $65,694, and Statistics Canada paid $33,240

Federal managers have paid out over $500,000 in settlements to employees that were suspended under the Trudeau government’s COVID vaccine mandate. 

According to information obtained April 24 by Blacklock’s Reporter, records have revealed that Canadian federal managers have paid a total of $509,746 in damages and compensation to employees who were denied vaccine mandate exemptions. 

“What are the total expenditures on compensation, severance packages and settlements to employees who were impacted by the government’s requirement during the COVID-19 pandemic that federal public servants provide proof of vaccination?” Conservative MP Ted Falk had questioned. 

According to the official numbers released by Blacklock’s, the Department of Health paid $177,991, the Department of Foreign affairs paid $88,223, the Correctional Service of Canada paid $65,694, and Statistics Canada paid $33,240. 

The Department of National Defence further revealed that it compensated three employees with “damages under the Canadian Human Rights Act on grounds of discrimination based on religion.”  

Beginning November 2021, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government mandated that a total of 275,983 employees from the RCMP, military and main federal departments provide proof of vaccination as a condition of employment.    

Those who failed to do so risked dismissal or suspension without pay. While there were provisions for medical and religious exemptions, these were rarely granted. According to internal information, at the time of the mandates 95 percent of employees had already received the COVID vaccine.  

When the federal mandate was lifted in June 2022, 2,560 employees had been suspended without pay for refusing to show proof of vaccination.    

Indeed, implementing the vaccine mandate for federal employees has proved costly for Canadian taxpayers as Trudeau budgeted $198 million to enforce the COVID jabs on federal employees.  

“Treasury Board officials told us it was for rapid testing purchases and distribution,” Conservative MP Kelly McCauley (Edmonton West) told the House of Commons in 2021.  

“The Treasury Board website shows there are about 3,400 unvaccinated employees,” he added. “That works out to about $24,000 per employee for rapid testing.” 

Additionally, the Trudeau government will likely have to pay out even more former employees due to ongoing lawsuits over the mandates.  

In October, LifeSiteNews reported on how over 700 vaccine-free Canadians negatively affected by federal COVID jab dictates have banded together to file a multimillion-dollar class-action lawsuit against the Trudeau government.  

Similarly, Canadian taxpayers have already paid over $6 million via Canada’s Vaccine Injury Program (VISP) to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled. 

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COVID-19

Pfizer reportedly withheld presence of cancer-linked DNA in COVID jabs from FDA, Health Canada

Published on April 26, 2024

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Clare Marie Merkowsky

According to information released by the Epoch Times, Pfizer purposefully failed to advise drug regulators, including Health Canada, the U.S. FDA and the European Medicines Agency, that the cancer-linked SV40 DNA enhancer was present in their experimental COVID shot.

Pharmaceutical giant Pfizer reportedly “chose not to” inform Health Canada, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other regulatory agencies that the cancer-linked Polyomavirus Simian Virus 40 (SV40) DNA sequence was in their widely distributed COVID-19 vaccine.  

According to information released April 23 by the Epoch Times, Pfizer purposefully failed to advise drug regulators, including Health Canada, the U.S. Food and Drugs Administration, and the European Medicines Agency, that SV40 was present in their experimental COVID shot.   

“I understand that there have been internal discussions at CBER [Center for Biologics Evaluation and Research] regarding the presents [sic] of an SV40 enhancer/promoter sequence, noting that its presence is unrelated to the purpose of the Pfizer’s plasmid as a transcription template for their mRNA COVID-19 vaccine,” Dr. Dean Smith, a senior scientific evaluator in Health Canada’s Vaccine Quality Division, wrote in an email to a colleague at the FDA about SV40. 

The August email was obtained by an access to information request by the Epoch Times.  

“Pfizer has communicated to us recently, that they apparently chose not to mention this information to EMA, FDA or HC at the time of their initial or subsequent submissions,” he added. 

Smith noted that Kevin McKernan, a microbiologist and former researcher and team leader for the MIT Human Genome project, and Dr. Phillip J. Buckhaults, who is a professor of cancer genomics as well as the director of the Cancer Genetics Lab at the University of South Carolina, had raised in a public manner earlier this year how SV40 was present in the jabs. 

While Health Canada originally told Canadians it was unaware of the SV40 enhancer’s presence, the agency has since confirmed the presence of the monkey-linked DNA sequence known to cause cancer when it was used in old polio vaccines. 

SV40 is used to enhance gene transcription when the shots are made. It has been linked to the spread of turbo cancers in those who have been exposed to the virus via contaminated injections.   

According to a 2002 study published in the Lancet, there is evidence that links the older polio vaccines, which were filed with SV40 contaminants, to certain forms of cancer.  

The authors of the 2002 study claim that the SV40-contaminated polio vaccine may have caused up to half of the 55,000 cases of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma diagnosed each year.  

SV40, according to the late vaccine developer Dr. Maurice Hilleman, was put in the polio vaccine and then put into wide circulation by Big Pharma company Merck inadvertently. 

Unfortunately, this is not the first evidence that Pfizer hid the presence of SV40 from drug regulators.  

According to Dr. Janci Lindsay, who works as the director of toxicology and molecular biology for Toxicology Support Services, Pfizer did not disclose the presence of SV40 “promoters” to both Health Canada and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, as well as the European Medicines Agency.  

She said, as reported in The Epoch Times, that the drug company “hid them.” 

“So it’s not just the fact that they’re there, it’s the fact that they were purposefully hidden from the regulators,” she noted. 

The news of Pfizer’s purposeful withholding of information comes as adverse effects from the first round of COVID shots have resulted in a growing number of Canadians who have filed for financial compensation over alleged injuries from the jabs, via Canada’s Vaccine Injury Program (VISP). 

Thus far, some VISP has already paid over $6 million to those injured by COVID injections, with some 2,000 claims remaining to be settled. 

Additionally, a recent study done by researchers with Canada-based Correlation Research in the Public Interest showed that 17 countries have found a “definite causal link” between peaks in all-cause mortality and the fast rollouts of the COVID shots as well as boosters. 

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