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Peckford, Bernier take travel restrictions to Supreme Court of Canada

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News release from the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

The Justice Centre announces that the Honourable Brian Peckford, the Honourable Maxime Bernier, and other applicants seek to appeal their vaccine mandate challenge to the Supreme Court of Canada. These Applicants argue that vaccine mandates are an issue of national importance and that Canadians deserve to receive court rulings regarding any emergency orders that violate the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

In November 2021, the Government of Canada required all travelers of federally regulated transportation services (e.g., air, rail, and marine) to provide proof of Covid vaccination. These restrictions on the Charter freedom of mobility prevented approximately 5.2 million unvaccinated Canadians from traveling by air and rail.

In response to these restrictions, the Honourable Brian Peckford (last living signatory of the Charter and former Premier of Newfoundland), the Honourable Maxime Bernier (leader of the People’s Party of Canada), and other Canadians took the federal government to court in February 2022, arguing that the Charter freedoms of religion and conscience, assembly, democratic rights, mobility, security, privacy, and equality of Canadians were infringed by these restrictions. In addition, affidavits filed in this court action (e.g., the affidavit of Robert Belobaba at paragraph 19) attest that, in a country as large as Canada, prohibitions on domestic and international air travel have significant, negative impacts on Canadians.

In an affidavit (at paragraph 29), Jennifer Little, Director General of Covid Recovery at Transport Canada, provided her Covid Recovery Team’s October 2, 2021 presentation, entitled Implementing a Vaccine Mandate for the Transportation Sector. The presentation outlined options and considerations for the purposes of seeking the Minister of Transport’s approval of the travel vaccination mandate. Her presentation outlined (at pages 12 and 13) that the Canadian travel restrictions in question were “unique in the world in terms of strict vaccine mandate for domestic travel” and were coupled with “one of the strongest vaccination mandates for travelers in the world.” She admitted during cross examination (at paragraphs 162-163, PDF page 61) that she had never seen a recommendation from Health Canada or the Public Health Agency of Canada to the Ministry of Transport to implement a mandatory vaccination policy for travel.

At the same time, Dr. Lisa Waddell, a senior epidemiologist and the knowledge synthesis team lead at the Public Health Agency of Canada, admitted during a cross examination (at paragraphs 300-305, PDF pages 91-93) that there was no recommendation from the Public Health Agency of Canada to impose vaccination requirements on travelers.

In June 2022, the Government of Canada announced that it would suspend the travel vaccine restrictions, but that it would not hesitate to reinstate the mandates if the government considered it necessary.

As a result, the federal government (the Crown) moved to have Premier Peckford’s constitutional challenge struck for mootness (irrelevance). The Crown argued that the travel restrictions were no longer a live issue because they had been lifted and should not, therefore, take up further court resources. The Crown brought this motion after each side had produced expert evidence, called on experts to testify under oath, cross-examined the other side’s experts and witnesses daily for six weeks, conducted significant legal research, and prepared substantive written arguments. Lawyers for both sides spent hundreds of hours placing all the evidence and legal arguments before the Federal Court for its consideration. The only remaining step in the trial process was the presentation of oral argument, scheduled for October 31, 2022. The Federal Court was fully and properly equipped to render a thoughtful decision as to whether the travel restrictions had been a justified violation of Charterfreedoms.

Even though the federal government can impose these same travel restrictions on Canadians again, without notice, the Federal Court granted the Crown’s motion on November 9, 2023, and dismissed this Charter challenge as moot. The Federal Court of Appeal affirmed this lower court ruling on November 9, 2023. Effectively, the courts determined that a constitutional challenge to the use of unprecedented emergency powers was neither sufficiently interesting to the Canadian public nor an appropriate use of court resources.

Premier Peckford, Maxime Bernier, and other Canadians now seek to have the Supreme Court of Canada hear their case. This involves a two-step process, whereby the applicants first ask whether the Court is willing to hear the appeal. If so, the appeal will then be scheduled for a hearing several months later. The applicants in this case argue that the issues raised in their case are of national importance and that Canadians deserve access to court rulings about policies that violate the Charter freedoms of millions of Canadians.

(See the January 8, 2024 Leave Application of Premier Peckford here. See the January 8, 2024 Leave Application of Maxime Bernier here.)

Further, Premier Peckford and the other applicants warn that all challenges to emergency orders risk being deemed irrelevant due to the simple fact that emergency orders are normally implemented only for short periods of time. In most cases, emergency orders will be rescinded by the time a constitutional challenge makes its way through the court process and all the relevant evidence, along with legal arguments, has been put before the judge. For this reason, the Applicants argue that the courts should provide guidance on how emergency orders should be handled in the context of the mootness doctrine.

“If courts are going to affirm and uphold emergency orders that violate our Charter rights and freedoms whenever the emergency order is no longer in force, how can the Charter protect Canadians from government abuses?” asks John Carpay, President of the Justice Centre.

Emergency orders are not debated in, or approved by, federal Parliament or provincial legislatures. Rather, they are discussed confidentially in Cabinet such that ordinary Canadians are prevented from understanding the reasons for, or the legality of, emergency orders, such as mandatory vaccination policies that discriminated against Canadians who chose not to get injected. Therefore, it is only through court rulings that Canadians can learn whether a mandate or emergency order is constitutional.

“The Supreme Court of Canada has an opportunity to create an important precedent for how Canadian courts deal with all so-called ‘moot’ cases involving questions about the constitutionality of emergency orders,” stated lawyer Allison Pejovic, who represents Premier Peckford and Maxime Bernier.

“The public interest in this case is staggering. Canadians need to know whether it is lawful for the federal government to prevent them from travelling across Canada, or from leaving and re-entering their own country, based upon whether they have taken a novel medication,” continued Ms. Pejovic.

“The Court’s dismissal of constitutional challenges to Covid orders for ‘mootness’ has deprived thousands of Canadians from knowing whether their governments’ emergency orders were lawful or not. It is time for the Supreme Court of Canada to expand the legal test for mootness to account for governments’ use of emergency orders, which are devoid of transparency and accountability. Canadians have a right to know whether unprecedented mandatory vaccination policies, which turned millions of Canadians into second-class citizens, were valid under our Constitution,” concluded Ms. Pejovic.

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Alberta

Red Deer Doctor critical of Alberta’s COVID response to submit report to Danielle Smith this May

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From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Leading the task force is Dr. Gary Davidson, who was skeptical of mandates at the time.

Alberta Premier Danielle Smith will soon be receiving a little-known report she commissioned which tasked an Alberta doctor who was critical of the previous administration’s handling of COVID to look into how accurate the province’s COVID data collection was, as well as the previous administration’s decision-making process and effectiveness. 

As noted in a recent Globe and Mail report, records it obtained show that just less than one month after becoming Premier of Alberta in November of 2022, Smith tasked then-health minister Jason Copping to create the COVID data task force. 

Documents show that the Alberta government under Smith gave the new task force, led by Dr. Gary Davidson – who used to work as an emergency doctor in Red Deer, Alberta – a sweeping mandate to look at whether the “right data” was obtained during COVID as well as to assess the “integrity, validity, reliability and quality of the data/information used to inform pandemic decisions” by members of Alberta Health Services (AHS).  

As reported by LifeSiteNews in 2021, Davidson said during the height of COVID that the hospital capacity crisis in his province was “created,” was not a new phenomenon, and had nothing to do with COVID.

“We have a crisis, and we have a crisis because we have no staff, because our staff quit, because they’re burned out, they’re not burnt out from COVID,” Davidson said at the time. 

Davidson also claimed that the previous United Conservative Party government under former Premier Jason Kenney had been manipulating COVID statistics.  

In comments sent to the media, Smith said that in her view it was a good idea to have a “contrarian perspective” with Davidson looking at “everything that happened with some fresh eyes.” 

“I needed somebody who was going to look at everything that happened with some fresh eyes and maybe with a little bit of a contrarian perspective because we’ve only ever been given one perspective,” she told reporters Tuesday. 

“I left it to [Davidson] to assemble the panel with the guidance that I would like to have a broad range of perspectives.” 

After assuming her role as premier, Smith promptly fired the province’s top doctor, Deena Hinshaw, and the entire AHS board of directors, all of whom oversaw the implementation of COVID mandates. 

Under Kenney, thousands of nurses, doctors, and other healthcare and government workers lost their jobs for choosing to not get the jabs, leading Smith to say – only minutes after being sworn in – that over the past year the “unvaccinated” were the “most discriminated against” group of people in her lifetime. 

As for AHS, it still is promoting the COVID shots, for babies as young as six months old, as recently reported by LifeSiteNews.  

Task force made up of doctors both for and against COVID mandates  

In addition to COVID skeptic Dr. Gary Davidson, the rather secretive COVID task force includes other health professionals who were critical of COVID mandates and health restrictions, including vaccine mandates.  

The task force was given about $2 million to conduct its review, according to The Globe and Mail, and is completely separate from another task force headed by former Canadian MP Preston Manning, who led the Reform Party for years before it merged with another party to form the modern-day Conservative Party of Canada. 

Manning’s task force, known as the Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel (PHEGRP), released its findings last year. It recommend that many pro-freedom policies be implemented, such as strengthening personal medical freedoms via legislation so that one does not lose their job for refusing a vaccine, as well as concluding that Albertans’ rights were indeed infringed upon. 

The Smith government task force is run through the Health Quality Council of Alberta (HQCA) which is a provincial agency involved in healthcare research.  

Last March, Davidson was given a project description and terms of reference and was told to have a final report delivered to Alberta’s Health Minister by December of 2023. 

As of now, the task force’s final report won’t be available until May, as per Andrea Smith, press secretary to Health Minister Adriana LaGrange, who noted that the goal of the task force is to look at Alberta’s COVID response compared to other provinces.  

According to the Globe and Mail report, another person working on the task force is anesthetist Blaine Achen, who was part of a group of doctors that legally challenged AHS’s now-rescinded mandatory COVID jab policy for workers. 

Some doctors on the task force, whom the Globe and Mail noted held “more conventional views regarding the pandemic,” left it only after a few meetings. 

In a seeming attempt to prevent another draconian crackdown on civil liberties, the UCP government under Smith has already taken concrete action.

The Smith government late last year passed a new law, Bill 6, or the Public Health Amendment Act, that holds politicians accountable in times of a health crisis by putting sole decision-making on them for health matters instead of unelected medical officers. 

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COVID-19

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

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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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