Friday, March 15, marks the fourth anniversary of Canada’s provincial and federal governments starting their massive assault on our Charter rights and freedoms. On or about March 15, 2020, every Canadian province announced school closures and other lockdown measures.Like most Canadians, I was fine with “two weeks to flatten the curve.” It made sense to manage the speed at which the virus would inevitably spread. I vividly recall supporters of this temporary lockdown saying, “Of course you cannot stop a virus from ultimately spreading throughout society, we’re not even going to try that. This is just to control the speed of the inevitable spread, so that our hospitals will not be swamped by too many patients all arriving at the same time.”With the kids at home and away from school, we enjoyed family time together. It was fun, exciting and eerie to walk with my kids through a nearly empty Chinook Centre mall. I had a valid excuse for not working out: the government closed my gym.I do not believe that “two weeks to flatten the curve” inflicted serious harm on millions of Canadians or on billions of less fortunate people in third world countries. Shutting down the economy and society for only two weeks is not likely to cause significant unemployment, bankruptcies, poverty, isolation, loneliness, despair, depression, anxiety, drug overdoses, suicides, cancelled surgeries, alcohol and drug abuse, domestic violence, cancelled cancer screenings and harm to children’s mental, social and psychological development.Sadly, the two weeks to flatten the curve turned into four years of human rights violations which continue to this day. In March 2024, thousands of doctors, nurses and other health-care workers in BC are still prevented from returning to work, only because they did not get injected with the COVID-19 vaccine in 2021. Likewise in Ontario, hospitals today refuse to hire qualified, trained and experienced nurses who declined the COVID-19 vaccine. All while both the BC and Ontario governments whine about too few health-care workers! The University of Manitoba medical school, today in 2024, requires students to receive two injections.After the “two weeks to flatten the curve” were over, governments persisted in violating our freedoms of association, religion, conscience, expression, peaceful assembly, mobility and travel.Slowly and almost imperceptibly, governments abandoned their temporary measure to control the speed of COVID-19’s inevitable spread. Instead, governments replaced this reasonable temporary measure with a permanent and futile mission to stop the virus entirely. This impossible mission was doomed to failure.Four years later, we know that lockdowns failed to stop the spread of COVID-19 throughout society. COVID went everywhere, including into nursing homes, where this virus took 80% of its victims: elderly people already suffering from emphysema, heart disease, diabetes, cancer and other comorbidities. Rather than protecting the small minority of Canadians who were actually threatened by COVID-19, our governments instead imposed lockdowns that inflicted massive harm on the well-being of the entire population.The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms requires governments to evaluate carefully both the harms and the benefits of any law that violates one or more of our Charter rights and freedoms. In violation of the Charter, Canada’s federal and provincial governments deliberately refused to study carefully all of the economic, financial, social, mental, spiritual and physical harms that lockdowns inflicted on Canadians.Four years of lockdowns and mandatory vaccination policies were — and remain — based on an exaggerated and unwarranted fear of COVID-19. Canada is still under the spell of Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London, who terrified politicians, the government-funded media, the legal establishment, most of the medical establishment and the public at large, by claiming that COVID-19 would kill 40 million people in 2020. Alberta Premier Jason Kenney claimed that this virus would kill as many as 32,000 Albertans, a number higher than total annual deaths in Alberta from all causes. These hysterical predictions were proven false in early 2020, yet in some circles it remains blasphemy to suggest that COVID-19 was like a bad annual flu, even when that is what the government’s own statistics and data indicate.In September 2021, when employers first began to threaten their employees with losing their jobs unless they took the COVID-19 vaccine, there was no evidence that this vaccine would stop the spread of COVID-19. In former Newfoundland premier Brian Peckford’s court challenge to the federal policy of preventing non-injected Canadians from travelling on airplanes, government officials admitted under oath that there was no medical or scientific basis to justify this discrimination. By Christmas 2021, it was obvious that the vaccine had not stopped the spread of COVID-19. The Delta variant had spread everywhere, even in countries with very high vaccination rates, such as Israel and Gibraltar.Still, fear prevailed over facts. Many Canadians cheered mandatory vaccination policies that turned about six million of their neighbours into second-class citizens, denied their basic civil liberties because of their legitimate personal decision to refuse a brand-new vaccine, which in 2021 was still in clinical trials.In the future, March 15 will become a day on which Canadians remember with disappointment their compliance with destructive and unscientific government policies that inflicted immense suffering and harm on millions. That day is far away. But we must move towards it by choosing facts over fear, reality over ideology, and freedom over tyranny.John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms (jccf.ca)
