Gerald Heinrichs is a lawyer in Regina Saskatchewan
Canadians remain broken, hurt and angry from government orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Alberta's COVID-19 Task Force Report, released in January, shows that division well.
Many Canadians applauded the Alberta report. It found errors in government vaccine policies like uninformed consent and injection mandates to pregnant women and healthy young people. But to others, the report was hogwash.
The Canadian Medical Association said the report "promotes misinformation and has the potential to create mistrust of the medical and scientific communities." And former Alberta NDP leader Rachel Notley compared the report to flat-earth thinking.
It is obvious that Canadians remain deeply irreconcilable.
John Carpay's book Corrupted by Fear, also released in January, could be called a task-force report on Canadian freedom during the COVID pandemic. Carpay's subtitle puts it this way: "How the Charter was betrayed".
First, Carpay says that during the pandemic, those in power adopted straightjacket thinking. Society demanded compliance with any and all government orders, no matter what, and Carpay says we lived in a world of “an ongoing battle between freedom for the individual on one side, and the forces of collectivism, authoritarianism, and tyranny on the other.”
Carpay holds no punches saying “the lockdown regime made great strides towards becoming what Mussolini described as fascism: 'Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.'" He calls this the ideology of Covidism.
Carpay scrutinizes a project called the Action Committee on Court Operations. This was a joint committee between judges and government officials early in the pandemic.
Carpay questions how and why “Judges received the science about Covid and vaccines from experts at the Public Health Agency of Canada and the National Microbiology Lab in Winnipeg, among others.”
Carpay asks, “Did the 'best possible' health and safety information include information about the harmful impacts lockdowns inflicted on millions of Canadian men, women and children?" And furthermore was this committee to blame for later infringements of freedom?
The book examines many COVID prosecutions including the court sentence passed on Pastor Artur Pawlowski. The outspoken pastor was given a startling sentence. He was ordered to proclaim specific words about mask wearing and also to declare that vaccines were safe and effective.
Carpay says, "The only reasonable explanation is that the judge believed whatever the government-funded media said was true." He examines another troublesome case called O.M.S. v. E.J.S. There a Saskatchewan judge "declared the Covid vaccine to be 'safe and effective'" and "ordered a 12-year-old girl to be injected with the Covid vaccine, against her will and against the will of her mother."
Both these cases were reversed on appeal. But Carpay contends that the lower-court decisions demand attention. Regarding the Pawlowski sentence, Carpay says it "is what one would have expected in the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany or in Communist China, not in Canada."
Regarding the Saskatchewan case, Carpay further exclaims that it was, "A dangerous pro-government bias". He reviews many other cases and argues that when judges choose to posit the government and media COVID narrative, then evidence and Charter freedoms appear to be swept aside.
Carpay contends that Hitler's Germany has disturbing parallels with our own society during the pandemic. He writes that in Germany, "the media consistently promoted Nazi propaganda influencing everyone including judges and lawyers." And Carpay argues that, in both eras, prosecution of citizens was widely accepted when it was done in the name of safety, security and public health. He calls it a demonizing of the bad minority.
Near the end of his book, Carpay lists "Twelve Steps to Restoring Freedom in Canada".
Whether or not Canadians stand up for freedom, he says, is largely a cultural decision. So Carpay urges his readers to promote a Canadian culture that highly values Charter freedoms.
He says, “Love truth. Seek truth. Speak truth.”
In April, the Ontario Court of Appeal struck down the pandemic law that was used to prosecute Randy Hillier. The court ruled that Ontario's lockdown law completely ignored the constitutional right of “freedom of peaceful assembly”.
The court as good as condemned the Ford government saying “there is no evidence that Ontario ever considered an exemption for peaceful assembly for outdoor political protests.”
This important ruling, however, arrived after the arrests and prohibitions had long passed.
Will Canada's culture of freedom grow stronger in the coming years? To make that happen, Carpay says we must choose leaders "who are passionate defenders of Charter rights." Otherwise when the next crisis comes, freedom will fare no better.
Gerald Heinrichs is a lawyer in Regina Saskatchewan.