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WHO health treaty a convenient cover for more government overreach: Bruce Pardy

Published

1 year ago

8 minute read

From the MacDonald Laurier Institute

By Bruce Pardy

The updated regulations will transform the WHO from an advisory body to the directing mind and will of global health.

Last September, the CBC ran a hit piece on Conservative MP Leslyn Lewis after she warned that a new international pandemic treaty could undermine Canadian sovereignty over public health.

Catherine Cullen, the CBC journalist, quoted three academics to debunk Lewis’ claims. It’s nonsense, said Stephen Hoffman of York University. “So far from the truth that it’s actually hard to know where to begin,” said Kelley Lee of Simon Fraser University. It’s fearmongering, said Timothy Caulfield of the University of Alberta, as no treaty can suspend the Canadian Constitution. That last part is correct, but Lewis is right to be concerned. Under the guise of international cooperation, governments are devising a cover to enact even tougher public health restrictions next time a crisis is declared.

The World Health Organization (WHO) is drafting a new pandemic agreement and amendments to the International Health Regulations, which since 2005 have set out countries’ obligations for managing the international spread of disease. Member countries of the World Health Assembly are expected to approve both in May. The agreement would establish governing principles for an international pandemic management regime, and the updated regulations will transform the WHO from an advisory body to the directing mind and will of global health.

Technocrats learned a lot from COVID. Not how to avoid policy mistakes, but how to exercise control. Public authorities discovered that they could tell people what to do. They locked people down, closed their businesses, made them wear masks and herded them to vaccination clinics. In Canada and elsewhere, people endured the most extreme restrictions on civil liberties in peacetime history. If the new proposals are anything to go by, next time may be worse.

Under the new health regulations, the WHO will have the authority to declare public health emergencies. Countries will “undertake to follow WHO’s recommendations.” WHO measures “shall be initiated and completed without delay by all State Parties … (who) shall also take measures to ensure Non-State Actors operating in their respective territories comply with such measures.”

In other words, governments will promise to do as the WHO directs. They will make private citizens and domestic businesses comply too. Lockdowns, quarantine, vaccines, surveillance, travel restrictions and more will be on the table. Under the draft agreement, countries would commit to censoring “false, misleading, misinformation or disinformation.” During COVID, despite governments’ best efforts, dissidents managed to seed doubts about the mainstream pandemic narrative. In the future, things may be different.

WHO officials and proponents of the proposals won’t admit to any of this out loud, of course, and you won’t hear much about these plans in the mainstream press. But the draft proposals, at least the ones released, say so in black and white.

Many national governments will be on board with the plan. That may seem counterintuitive since it appears to diminish their control, but more valuable to them is the cover that WHO directives will provide for their own heavy hands. Officials will be able to justify restrictions by citing international obligations. Binding WHO recommendations leave them no choice, they will say. “The WHO has called for lockdowns, so we must order you to stay in your home. Sorry, but it’s not our call.”

That sounds like a loss of sovereignty, but it is not. Sovereign states have exclusive jurisdiction in their own territory. WHO directives would not be directly enforceable in Canadian courts. But national governments can agree to follow the authority of international organizations. They can craft domestic laws accordingly. That too is an exercise of sovereignty. They can undertake to tie their own hands.

Provinces might decide to go along also. Provinces have jurisdiction over many orders that the WHO might recommend. Lockdowns, vaccine mandates, quarantine orders and other public health restrictions are primarily provincial matters. The feds control air travel, international borders, the military, drug approvals and the federal workforce. The federal government’s power to make treaties cannot oust provincial legislative jurisdiction, but WHO cover for restrictive measures would appeal to provinces as well.

The WHO cannot suspend the Constitution. International norms, however, can influence how courts read constitutional provisions, and the meaning of the Constitution is fluid, as our Supreme Court is fond of insisting. If norms change, so might the court’s interpretation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The WHO’s proposals can’t define Canadian constitutional rights, but they aren’t irrelevant either.

Proponents would deny that the WHO is seizing control or undermining democracy. Technically they are correct. National governments must approve the new international pandemic plan. Without their agreement, the WHO has no power to impose its dictates. And not all countries may be keen on all the details. The WHO proposals call for massive financial and technical transfers to developing countries. But climate change pacts do too, and these were embraced by rich countries, unable to resist the virtue signaling and validation of their own climate boondoggles.

States that sign on to the WHO proposals retain the sovereignty to change their minds, but leaving international regimes can be hellishly difficult. When the United Kingdom belonged to the European Union, it agreed to be subject to EU rules on all manner of things. It remained a sovereign country and could decide to get out from under the EU’s thumb. Brexit threatened to tear the country apart. Having the legal authority to withdraw does not mean that a country is politically able to do so. Or that its elites are willing, even if that’s what its people want.

The WHO proposals prescribe authority without accountability, but they do not eliminate sovereignty. Instead, national governments are in on the game. When your own government aims to manage you, national sovereignty is no protection anyway.

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe, professor of law at Queen’s University and senior fellow at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.

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International

Pentagon agency to simulate lockdowns, mass vaccinations, public compliance messaging

Published on June 12, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Tim Hinchliffe

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

DARPA is getting into the business of simulating disease outbreaks, including modeling interventions such as mass vaccination campaigns, lockdowns, and communication strategies.

At the end of May, the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) put out a Request for Information (RFI) seeking information regarding “state-of-the-art capabilities in the simulation of disease outbreaks.”

The Pentagon’s research and development funding arm wants to hear from academic, industry, commercial, and startup communities on how to develop “advanced capabilities that drive technical innovation and identify critical gaps in bio-surveillance, diagnostics, and medical countermeasures” in order to “improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.”

As if masks, social distancing, lockdowns, and vaccination mandates under the unscientific guise of slowing the spread and preventing the transmission of COVID weren’t harmful enough, the U.S. military wants to model the effects of these exact same countermeasures for future outbreaks.

The RFI also asks participants “Fatality Rate & Immune Status: How are fatality rates and varying levels of population immunity (natural or vaccine-induced) incorporated into your simulations?“

Does “natural or vaccine-induced” relate to “population immunity” or “fatality rates” or both?

Moving on, the RFI gets into modeling lockdowns, social distancing, and mass vaccination campaigns, along with communication strategies:

Intervention Strategies: Detail the range of intervention strategies that can be modeled, including (but not limited to) vaccination campaigns, social distancing measures, quarantine protocols, treatments, and public health communication strategies. Specifically, describe the ability to model early intervention and its impact on outbreak trajectory.

The fact that DARPA wants to model these so-called intervention strategies just after the entire world experienced them suggests that these exact same measures will most likely be used again in the future:

“We are committed to developing advanced modeling capabilities to optimize response strategies and inform the next generation of (bio)technology innovations to protect the population from biological threats. We are particularly focused on understanding the complex interplay of factors that drive outbreak spread and evaluating the effectiveness of potential interventions.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

“Identification of optimal timelines and capabilities to detect, identify, attribute, and respond to disease outbreaks, including but not limited to biosensor density deployment achieving optimal detection timelines, are of interest.” ­— DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

With lockdowns, mass vaccination campaigns, and social distancing still on the table from the last around, it appears that AI and Machine Learning will play a much bigger role in the next.

For future innovation, the DARPA RFI asks applicants to: “Please describe any novel technical approaches – or applications of diverse technical fields (e.g., machine learning, artificial intelligence, complex systems theory, behavioral science) – that you believe would significantly enhance the state-of-the-art capabilities in this field or simulation of biological systems wholistically.”

Instead of putting a Dr. Fauci, a Dr. Birx, a replaceable CDC director, a TV doctor, a big pharma CEO, or a Cuomo brother out there to lie to your face about how they were all just following The ScienceTM, why not use AI and ML and combine them with behavioral sciences in order to concoct your “public health communications strategies?”

When you look at recently announced DARPA programs like Kallisti and MAGICS, which are aimed at creating an algorithmic Theory of Mind to model, predict, and influence collective human behavior, you start to get a sense of how all these programs can interweave:

“The MAGICS ARC calls for paradigm-shifting approaches for modeling complex, dynamic systems for predicting collective human behaviour.” — DARPA, MAGICS ARC, April 2025

On April 8, DARPA issued an Advanced Research Concepts (ARC) opportunity for a new program called “Methodological Advancements for Generalizable Insights into Complex Systems (MAGICS)” that seeks “new methods and paradigms for modeling collective human behavior.”

Nowhere in the MAGICS description does it mention modeling or predicting the behavior of “adversaries,” as is DARPA’s custom.

Instead, it talks at length about “modeling human systems,” along with anticipating, predicting, understanding, and forecasting “collective human behavior” and “complex social phenomena” derived from “sociotechnical data sets.”

Could DARPA’s MAGICS program be applied to simulating collective human behavior when it comes to the next public health emergency, be it real or perceived?

“The goal of an upcoming program will be to develop an algorithmic theory of mind to model adversaries’ situational awareness and predict future behaviour.” — DARPA, Theory of Mind Special Notice, December 2024.

In December 2024, DARPA launched a similar program called Theory of Mind, which was renamed Kallisti a month later.

The goal of Theory of Mind is to develop “new capabilities to enable national security decisionmakers to optimize strategies for deterring or incentivizing actions by adversaries,” according to a very brief special announcement.

DARPA never mentions who those “adversaries” are. In the case of a public health emergency, an adversary could be anyone who questions authoritative messaging.

The Theory of Mind program will also:

… seek to combine algorithms with human expertise to explore, in a modeling and simulation environment, potential courses of action in national security scenarios with far greater breadth and efficiency than is currently possible.

This would provide decisionmakers with more options for incentive frameworks while preventing unwanted escalation.

We are interested in a comprehensive overview of current and emerging technologies for disease outbreak simulation, how simulation approaches could be extended beyond standard modeling methods, and to understand how diseases spread within and between individuals including population level dynamics.

They say that all the modeling and simulating across programs is for “national security,” but that is a very broad term.

DARPA is in the business of research and development for national security purposes, so why is the Pentagon modeling disease outbreaks and intervention strategies while simultaneously looking to predict and manipulate collective human behavior?

If and when the next outbreak occurs, the same draconian and Orwellian measures that governments and corporations deployed in the name of combating COVID are still on the table.

And AI, Machine Learning, and the military will play an even bigger role than the last time around.

From analyzing wastewater to learning about disease spread; from developing pharmaceuticals to measuring the effects of lockdowns and vaccine passports, from modeling and predicting human behavior to coming up with messaging strategies to keep everyone in compliance – “improving preparedness for future public health emergencies” is becoming more militaristically algorithmic by the day.

“We are exploring innovative solutions to enhance our understanding of outbreak dynamics and to improve preparedness for future public health emergencies.” — DARPA, Advanced Disease Outbreak Simulation Capabilities RFI, May 2025.

Reprinted with permission from The Sociable.

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Business

Audit report reveals Canada’s controversial COVID travel app violated multiple rules

Published on June 11, 2025

By

From LifeSiteNews

By Anthony Murdoch

Canada’s Auditor General found that government procurement rules were not followed in creating the ArriveCAN app.

Canada’s Auditor General revealed that the former Liberal government under Prime Minister Justin Trudeau failed multiple times by violating contract procurement rules to create ArriveCAN, its controversial COVID travel app.

In a report released Tuesday, Auditor General Karen Hogan noted that between April 2015 to March 2024, the Trudeau government gave out 106 professional service contracts to GC Strategies Inc. This is the same company that made the ArriveCAN app.

The contracts were worth $92.7 million, with $64.5 million being paid out.

According to Hogan, Canada’s Border Services Agency gave four contracts to GC Strategies valued at $49.9 million. She noted that only 54 percent of the contracts delivered any goods.

“We concluded that professional services contracts awarded and payments made by federal organizations to GC Strategies and other companies incorporated by its co-founders were not in accordance with applicable policy instruments and that value for money for these contracts was not obtained,” Hogan said.

She continued, “Despite this, federal government officials consistently authorized payments.”

The report concluded that “Federal organizations need to ensure that public funds are spent with due regard for value for money, including in decisions about the procurement of professional services contracts.”

Hogan announced an investigation of ArriveCAN in November 2022 after the House of Commons voted 173-149 for a full audit of the controversial app.

Last year, Hogan published an audit of ArriveCAN and on Tuesday published a larger audit of the 106 contracts awarded to GC Strategies by 31 federal organizations under Trudeau’s watch.

‘Massive scandal,’ says Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre

Conservative Party leader Pierre Poilievre said Hogan’s report on the audit exposed multiple improprieties.

“This is a massive scandal,” he told reporters Tuesday.

“The facts are extraordinary. There was no evidence of added value. In a case where you see no added value, why are you paying the bill?”

ArriveCAN was introduced in April 2020 by the Trudeau government and made mandatory in November 2020. The app was used by the federal government to track the COVID jab status of those entering the country and enforce quarantines when deemed necessary.

ArriveCAN was supposed to have cost $80,000, but the number quickly ballooned to $54 million, with the latest figures showing it cost $59.5 million.

As for the app itself, it was riddled with technical glitches along with privacy concerns from users.

LifeSiteNews has published a wide variety of reports related to the ArriveCAN travel app.

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