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

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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

Leaked documents: German gov’t lied about shots preventing COVID, knew lockdowns did more harm than good

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Berlin, Germany – 24 March 2020: The sign in front of the Robert Koch-Institut in Berlin.

From LifeSiteNews

By Andreas Wailzer

Germany’s top health agency privately admitted that the idea of a ‘pandemic of the unvaccinated’ is ‘not correct’ but supported it because it ‘serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated,’ leaked documents revealed.

Leaked documents from a top German health agency show that politicians knew the experimental COVID shots did not prevent the transmission of the virus but advocated for jab mandates anyway.

On July 23, independent journalist Aya Velázquez published the un-redacted miutes of the German Robert Koch Institut (RKI, comparable to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) from its meetings regarding the COVID crisis between 2020 and 2023. Velázquez said she received the un-redacted documents from a whistleblower who used to work for the RKI. Parts of the so-called “RKI files” had already been published in March this year, after the RKI was forced to publish them due to a lawsuit. However, many key parts of the files had been redacted.

Velázquez wrote that the now fully un-redacted files show “that the RKI unfortunately spoke out in favor of both facility-based and general compulsory vaccination despite the knowledge of the lack of protection from transmission and serious side effects.”

The minutes from an RKI meeting on November 5, 2021, demonstrate that the idea of a “pandemic of the unvaccinated” that was propagated by politicians and mainstream media members was made up and not based on any facts.

“The media are talking about a pandemic of the unvaccinated,” the minutes state. “From a factual point of view this is not correct, the entire population is contributing. Should this be taken up in communication?”

The document noted that this phrase, although factually incorrect, “serves as an appeal to all those who have not been vaccinated to get vaccinated.”

It furthermore states that the minister of health “says it at press conference, presumably deliberately, cannot be corrected.”

During the fall and winter months of 2021 and early 2022, German politicians repeatedly used the term “pandemic of the unvaccinated” to blame those who refused the experimental COVID jabs for “the pandemic” and all COVID-related measures. The government also used this line of reasoning to ban the unjabbed from participating in many parts of society, including having certain jobs, attending restaurants, shopping at stores, and many other areas.

Epoch Times Deutsch said that during this time, the unvaxxed faced “a level of exclusionary pressure that is unprecedented in the history of the Federal Republic of Germany.”

During the press conference held by the team around the journalist Aya Velázquez, Professor Stefan Homburg said an entry in the documents from March 19, 2021, showed that the RKI already knew that the AstraZeneca COVID shot had caused several cases of sinus vein thrombosis, barely 11 weeks into the “vaccination” campaign.

Homburg is an emeritus professor of economics who was the head of the public finance department of the Leibniz University in Hannover and who became one of the most well-known and formidable critics of the COVID tyranny in Germany.

Homburg furthermore said that the RKI files showed that the RKI and the Paul Ehrlich Institut (PEI) deliberately gave false testimony in court, for instance, in regard to protecting German soldiers against transmission of the virus. “In this respect, they could now be charged in court for unsworn testimony with reference to these minutes,” said Homburg.

According to the available data, Homburg said that the overall situation can be described as a “deception of the public.”

He told the Epoch Times that “the authorities deliberately deceived the public for years at the behest of politicians.”

Journalist Bastian Barucker told the Epoch Times that the documents showed that when Health Minister Jens Spahn announced school closures in November 2021, the RKI “had long known that this was not correct.”

In parts of the RKI files that were already released in March, the minutes of a meeting from January 11, 2023, show that the RKI knew that lockdowns cause more harm than good. “The consequences of the lockdown are sometimes more severe than Covid itself,” the document stated.

At the conclusion of the press conference, Velázquez said, “The RKI protocols prove it: Our corona policy was not based on rational, scientific considerations.”

“Numerous political decisions, such as 2G [full participation in society only given to vaxxed or recovered individuals], the facility-based and planned general vaccination mandate, or the vaccination of children, were purely political decisions for which the RKI, as an authority bound by instructions, provided an alleged scientific legitimation,” the journalist said

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Brownstone Institute

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

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From the Brownstone Institute

By IAN MILLER

By late 2020, the media and public health establishment had two obsessions. One of their obsessions involved forcing the public to wear masks, even though the mountains of data and several studies had already confirmed that they don’t stop the transmission of respiratory viruses. The second obsession was forcing everyone to take Covid vaccines, regardless of their actual efficacy, risk of side effects, age or underlying health, or the vaccines’ rapidly waning efficacy.

Neither of those obsessions has abated, though even the most extreme, hardened Covid extremists have acknowledged that the vaccines were flawed, mandates were a mistake, and side effects should be acknowledged.

The media, unwilling to give up on the increased power, influence, and moral judgment it gained during the pandemic, has refused to accept that it effectively ended years ago.

So it’s no surprise that media outlets have noticed that, as we’ve seen every single summer since 2020, cases have increased, predominantly across the Western and Southern United States. Thankfully though, Los Angeles media, of course it had to be Los Angeles, has determined the culprit.

The Media Refuses to Accept Covid Reality

Turns out it’s not seasonality causing the increase, it’s outdated Covid vaccines and a lack of public masking, of course!

NBC Los Angeles “reported” that Covid cases in California and Los Angeles have “doubled” in the last month. This sounds horrifying and scary, doesn’t it? Yet it again, as is so often the case with Covid coverage, is misleading.

Let’s take a look at the current daily average of new cases in Los Angeles County:

Cases are so low they’re functionally indistinguishable from zero.

You can see why the media is scared, given how dramatic this surge appears to be compared to those in the previous four years. And thanks to NBC’s crack reporting and expert analysis, we know why this terrifying increase is happening. Spoiler alert: it’s all your fault that you haven’t controlled an uncontrollable respiratory virus with individual behavior that has no impact whatsoever on the spread of the coronavirus.

“People aren’t necessarily wearing masks; they’re not required to in certain places,” nurse practitioner Alice Benjamin, referenced as an expert by NBA LA said. “We’re traveling, we’re getting out for the summer. We also do have some reduced immunity. The vaccines will wane over time.”

Nowhere in the story is it mentioned that the massive jump in Covid cases in late 2021 and early 2022 happened immediately after LA County Public Health issued a press release celebrating the county for achieving 95+ percent masking rates at indoor businesses. No one seems willing or able to ask this nurse practitioner why she believes wearing masks would reduce this “surge,” if it failed so spectacularly in previous surges.

Endless Misinformation from ‘Experts’

She wasn’t done with the misinformation though. Benjamin warned that not enough Angelenos are getting the “updated” vaccine, which explains the summer increase.

“If you got it in October and later, that’s generally the updated vaccine,” Benjamin said. “If you got it prior to October, double check because if you did get the bivalent which has not been phased out, we recommend you do get an updated vaccine.”

And according to her, everyone should get it. Because the CDC said so.

“Per CDC recommendations, anyone 6 months or older should have at least one of the updated Covid vaccines,” Benjamin said.

Though, of course, no one on the crack NBC Los Angeles team thought to ask Benjamin why the “updated” October vaccine would help against the now common FLiRT variant when it emerged six months after the “updated” vaccine was released. Especially when the “study” process for booster doses is effectively nonexistent anyway. Pfizer and Moderna churn out a “targeted” dose that is supposed to protect against a variant that’s no longer circulating, never has to show any real-world benefit, and the regulatory agencies sign off on it, while the CDC recommends everyone get it.

Rinse, repeat.

Nor did anyone ask her what possible rationale there could be for forcing six-month-old babies to get vaccinated with a booster that has no studied efficacy against the currently circulating variant.

Her comments and the media reaction exemplify the problems with Covid discourse that started in 2020 and will apparently continue forever. A complete and purposeful ignorance of the facts, the data, and the evidence base. A willingness to advocate for the same sort of restrictions and interventions that have already failed. Ignorance of the booster process and endless appeals to public health authorities. Even though those authorities have made countless mistakes and refused to update their findings after being proven wrong.

The obvious question is: How does this type of absurdist discourse ever end? The answer, as we continue to see, is it doesn’t.

Republished from the author’s Substack

Author

Ian Miller is the author of “Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates.” His work has been featured on national television broadcasts, national and international news publications and referenced in multiple best selling books covering the pandemic. He writes a Substack newsletter, also titled “Unmasked.”

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