Two individuals had challenged the province’s limit of 10 people at outdoor gatherings in 2021 ‘as violations of their Charter-protected freedoms of thought, belief, opinion and expression, association, and peaceful assembly.’
In a blow to Canadians’ freedom, a provincial court in Saskatchewan dismissed an appeal of a Charter challenge against COVID dictates from 2021 that limited outdoor gatherings to 10 people.
The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (JCCF) issued a press release expressing disappointment that the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal “dismissed” the Charter challenge from Jasmin Grandel and Darrell Mills.
“The unanimous decision was released on May 15, 2024, by Justice J.A. Kalmakoff writing for the three-panel hearing of the Court of Appeal for Saskatchewan,” the JCCF noted.
Andre Memauri, the attorney representing Grandel and Mills, said he is “carefully reviewing the Court’s decision and advising our clients accordingly.”
In February, there was hope for Grandel and Mills after the Saskatchewan Court of Appeal announced it would hear the appeal.
In 2021, the plaintiffs first challenged the government’s outdoor restrictions mandate with help from lawyers from the JCCF, saying they were “as violations of their Charter-protected freedoms of thought, belief, opinion and expression, association, and peaceful assembly.”
This challenge, however, was not successful. On September 20, 2022, Justice D.B. Konkin of the Court of King’s Bench of Saskatchewan upheld the government’s COVID dictates.
Memauri had said regarding the first ruling, “Our infectious disease specialist made it clear at the lower court that the outdoor transmission of COVID-19 was negligible, much like every other respiratory illness in history.”
“There was no compelling basis for the Saskatchewan government to impose such extreme restrictions on people’s rights to assemble, express themselves and associate outdoors. The rule of law means that laws should be enforced equally, but the Saskatchewan Government encouraged and supported Black Lives Matter protests outdoors in large numbers while ticketing people who six months later protested the violations of their Charter freedoms.”
The Saskatchewan government under Premier Scott Moe imposed a variety of COVID mandates and restrictions on outdoor gatherings to 10 people from March 17, 2020, to July 11, 2021. However, the government at the time allowed more than 10 people in certain indoor settings.
Grandel and Mills had attended various protests against the mandates that resulted in large fines for violating Public Health Orders.
The JCCF pointed out a double standard, noting that when the 10-person outdoor gathering limits were in place the government of Saskatchewan, “including Premier Scott Moe and Chief Medical Health Officer Saqib Shahab, publicly supported large Black Lives Matter protests in violation of outdoor gathering restrictions.”
“Meanwhile, Canadians attending protests against Covid gathering restrictions were targeted and fined only six months later by the same government,” the JCCF said.
COVID vaccine mandates split Canadian society. The mRNA shots themselves have been linked to a multitude of negative and often severe side effects in children.
As reported by LifeSiteNews, British Columbia still mandates COVID shots for healthcare workers who are not in a remote setting.
While all other provinces that had healthcare worker COVID jab mandates have lifted them, workers who were discriminated against for refusing to take the shots have had mixed results in legal battles.
Last month, LifeSiteNews reported that Canadian nurse Kristen Nagle, who was found guilty of violating Ontario’s COVID rules for participating in an anti-lockdown rally and speaking out against COVID mandates, recently had what she described as a “half-win” in court. Her fine was massively reduced, but she was still sentenced to two years’ probation that she said is designed to stop her from “speaking out or going against public health measures.”
Todayville is a digital media and technology company. We profile unique stories and events in our community. Register and promote your community event for free.
Dr. Anthony Fauci, testifies during a Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing about the federal response to monkeypox, on Capitol Hill September 14, 2022, in Washington, D.C. Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images
The records in question are relevant to a major First Amendment case alleging collusion between the government and tech companies, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which is currently in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) non-profit has sent a letter to Dr. Anthony Fauci and several medical and other U.S. officials, as well as to Google, making sure they are formally notified of their obligations to preserve communications records.
The records in question are relevant to a major First Amendment case alleging collusion between the government and tech companies, Murthy v. Missouri (formerly Missouri v. Biden), which is currently in the U.S. Supreme Court.
The NCLA letter specified that the request pertains to all documents and electronically stored information, under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 34.
Those named in the letter are former chief medical adviser to President Biden Dr. Anthony Fauci, his colleague from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (that Fauci headed during the pandemic) Dr. David Morens, Adam Kirschner of the U.S. State Department, and Google General Counsel Halimah DeLaine Prado, among others.
The letter recalled that Fauci is a defendant in the landmark First Amendment case, alleging that he and other government officials named in Murthy v. Missouri – including the president himself – engaged in unconstitutional censorship of social media around Covid issues such as lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccines.
NCLA has joined the plaintiffs in Murthy v. Missouri and is now in that capacity requesting that Fauci, Morens, and others preserve all documents, including drafts and copies, and paper files maintained by their staff that are relevant to the case.
The letter lists examples of the sort of communications that, if deleted to further the interests of the defendants, would in effect unfairly influence the outcome of this pivotal case.
Additionally, the letter warns that Fauci and Morens were using private emails unlawfully, but that an act or attempt of deleting those messages would in itself be illegal.
In line with that, the letter says the request to preserve documents applies not only to communications made through official but also unofficial channels – including third-party messaging and social media apps.
NCLA’s own, direct “skin in the game” is spelled out in a statement that says, “Our clients, who include top doctors and scientists, were censored for social media posts that turned out to be factually accurate, depriving the public of valuable perspectives during a public health crisis.”
This refers to epidemiologists and co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, Jayanta Bhattacharya and Martin Kulldorff, Aaron Kheriaty, and Jill Hines. The statement added:
We’re optimistic that the majority will look at the record and recognize that this was a sprawling government censorship enterprise without precedent in this country, and that this cannot be permitted to continue if the First Amendment is to survive.
Deborah Birx is at it again, urging mass testing for the detection of bird flu. She wants cows and dairy workers examined to ferret out asymptomatic infections and exposures in animals and people. We have the technology so why not use it, she demands to know. We are making the same mistake we made with Covid early on, she argues.
The role of testing is relatively uncontroversial but it probably should be. Early on in the Covid crisis, though completely against the lockdowns, I was an enthusiast for testing simply because I thought doing so would overcome the epistemic void that was driving public panic.
If you are scared of a disease and have no means to discover whether or not you have it, what is your choice but to hop around in a frenzy and comply with every edict? That was my thinking in any case. We live and learn.
What’s left out of the testing issue is the great question of why. Is it track, trace, and isolate? That has been proven impossible – and long known to be impossible – in the case of a fast-spreading and fast-mutating respiratory virus with a zoonotic reservoir. They tried it anyway with many states quickly hiring tens of thousands of contact tracers.
The iTunes and Google app stores had contact tracing programs you could download. That way if you came close to someone who had tested positive, you would be alerted. It worked like a digital leper’s bell. In fact, even now, the airlines are still doing Covid contact tracing for flying in and out of the country.
Another possible rationale is likely the one in the mind of Birx. She was formed in the AIDS era where the goal was zero infections. Early on, she was a proponent of zero Covid and made that very clear. She is a virus exterminationist: every policy is structured to drive infections, cases, and even exposure to zero, despite the utter impossibility of this goal.
Another possible rationale would be to discern early intervention therapies for people who need them. But realizing that goal is contingent on two other conditions: having therapeutics available and knowing with some sense of confidence that an asymptomatic infection is certainly going to get worse.
Think of the movie Contagion (2011) in this way. It was a killer virus that you get and get worse and then die, all rather quickly. In the movie, the job of the health authorities was always to find the infected and notify everyone with whom they had contact. By the way, this didn’t even work in the film but we are presented with some impressive disease forensics that ended up isolating patient zero.
Again, the question beckons: why are we doing all this? The goals of stopping the spread, driving exposure to zero, and actually treating the sick (if they are sick versus just exposed) are certainly in tension with each other. If you are going to embark on an elaborate and invasive scheme to find and isolate every instance of the pathogen, it’s a good idea to know what precisely you are trying to achieve with the effort. No interviewer has been smart enough to ask this fundamental question of Birx.
And keep in mind that Birx does not want to limit testing to people. She wants cows and chickens tested too, and there’s no particular reason to limit it to that. It could include every member of the animal kingdom, every four-legged creature, and every fish and foul. The expense would be enormous and truly unthinkable, driving the cost of meat production sky-high, especially given the inevitable slaughters that would be mandated.
This is made worse, as we learned last time, by PCR tests that can be set at any cycle rate to discover the mere presence of a virus in just about anything. The last time, this led to unwarranted assumptions of contagiousness, up to 90 percent in 2020, as reported by the New York Times. Because there was and is so much confusion about this piece, let’s quote it directly.
The PCR test amplifies genetic matter from the virus in cycles; the fewer cycles required, the greater the amount of virus, or viral load, in the sample. The greater the viral load, the more likely the patient is to be contagious.
This number of amplification cycles needed to find the virus, called the cycle threshold, is never included in the results sent to doctors and coronavirus patients, although it could tell them how infectious the patients are.
In three sets of testing data that include cycle thresholds, compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York and Nevada, up to 90 percent of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by The Times found.
On Thursday, the United States recorded 45,604 new coronavirus cases, according to a database maintained by The Times. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
While it’s not quite precise to say that the PCR tests generate 90% false positives, it is correct to say that in those tests looked at by the NYT at the height of the pandemic, 90 percent of positive results did not warrant concern at all. They should have been thrown out entirely.
That’s a serious problem for the test, track, trace, and isolate regime that Birx is proposing. Is it any wonder that people today are highly suspicious of this entire idea? Rightly so. Nothing is to be gained by throwing the whole of society into a mysophobic panic when the tests themselves are so poor at discerning the difference between a mild exposure and a medically significant case.
For more on this, see my interview with Jay Bhattacharya, who was onto this problem very early on.
Indeed it was precisely the PCR tests that created this wild confusion between an exposure, an infection, and an actual case. The word case in the past had been reserved for someone actually sick and needing some medical intervention. For reasons never explained, that entire language was blown up, such that OurWorldinData suddenly started listing every documented PCR exposure as a case, creating the feeling of disaster when actually life was functioning entirely normally. The better the authorities got at testing, and the more universal the testing mandates, the sicker the population seemed to be getting.
This all depends on the conflation of exposure, infection, and cases.
Once the disease panic is created, what’s left to do about it remains entirely within the realm of public health authorities. Already last week, the authorities ordered 4 million chickens to be slaughtered. Already more than 90 million birds have been killed since 2022.
As Joe Salatin points out: “The policy of mass extermination without regard to immunity, without even researching why some birds flourish while all around are dying, is insane. The most fundamental principles of animal husbandry and breeding demand that farmers select for healthy immune systems. We farmers have been doing that for millennia. We pick the most robust specimens as genetic material to propagate, whether it’s plants, animals, or microbes.”
This is precisely where this obsession with testing gets us. Whether it is animals or humans, the power of government to compel disease tests and act on the results has led to destructive policies in every instance. You might think we would have learned. Instead, reporters just let Birx ramble on without asking fundamental questions about severity, purpose, viability, or consequences.
There has probably in the history of government never been a more presumptuous aspiration than for bureaucrats to seek to manage the whole of the microbial kingdom. But that is where we are. There’s never been a better time for every citizen of a would-be free nation to proclaim: my biology is none of the government’s business.
Jeffrey Tucker is Founder, Author, and President at Brownstone Institute. He is also Senior Economics Columnist for Epoch Times, author of 10 books, including Life After Lockdown, and many thousands of articles in the scholarly and popular press. He speaks widely on topics of economics, technology, social philosophy, and culture.
