Posted on 11/21/2021 7:46:20 AM PST by canuck_conservative
Late last week, three colleagues and I launched the Free North Declaration , a call to defend civil liberties in this country, which lawyers and members of the public are invited to endorse. So far more than 6,000 have done so, including over 100 lawyers. The declaration outlines the ways in which legal authorities — legislatures, governments, public health officials, professional regulators, administrative bodies and public institutions — have restricted Canadians’ liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic. They have done so shrewdly, to attempt to remain inside the strict letter of the law and to avoid triggering protections in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Over the past year and a half, legal challenges to lockdowns and quarantines have mostly failed in the courts, whose decisions have largely embraced governments’ COVID narratives.
Canada was in trouble as soon as COVID hit. “Crises are an ideal time for the state to advance into territory from which it will not wish to retreat,” I wrote in the Financial Post in April 2020. “In this new era, we will discover that leaders of all political stripes have more than a little Lenin in them.” It is 20 months since “two weeks to flatten the curve,” and Canadians’ liberties are under siege like never before....
The purpose of vaccine passports, authorities have acknowledged, is not to control spread of the virus, which vaccinated and unvaccinated both can do, but to pressure people to get jabbed. How much and for how long vaccines reduce the risk of infection are in dispute. Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has no record of any unvaccinated person spreading COVID after recovering from it....
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalpost.com ...
Declaration below (long, but a good read, and hits many of the same points FReepers have been making for the last 18 months)
Good to see Canada is slowly awakening (but boy are there a lot of unthinking sheep out there)
The Free North Declaration
We are Canadian lawyers. In our country, civil liberties are under unprecedented attack. Governments, public health authorities, universities, public and private employers, municipalities, and businesses are trampling Canadians’ rights and freedoms. Our free society is at risk.
COVID rules restrict citizens’ abilities to work, shop, travel and socialize. They erode civil liberties strategically, attempting to not run afoul of the law or to trigger protections in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms such as liberty and security of the person, the freedoms of association, assembly, expression, conscience, religion, and mobility rights. Where COVID rules appear to have violated the Charter, courts have deferred to the state to take whatever measures it deems necessary, whether demonstrably justifiable or not.
Legislatures have passed statutes that delegate broad discretionary powers to unelected public health officials, who then create draconian legal restrictions by fiat, without public scrutiny or open debate. These directives give private and public employers cover to suspend and dismiss workers who insist on their right to decide their own medical treatments. In our system of law, no principle is more important than the right to control your own body and to make your own medical and health decisions. An anxious populace, swept up in a deliberate campaign of fear, now believes that individual liberties upon which our liberal democracy is founded are dangerous and selfish. A growing collectivism that demands safety at the expense of autonomy shapes public policy.
Courts have embraced the pandemic narrative, some taking judicial notice of the nature of risks of the virus and safety of vaccines to adults and children. But the facts are anything but settled. Courts are supposed to be neutral. On COVID, as on any other contentious subject, their mandate is to find facts exclusively upon the evidence adduced by the parties in the courtroom. Instead, courts appear to have taken a side on COVID. Access to justice and the rule of law are now at risk. Unvaccinated persons are banned from juries, throwing into question the ability of all to obtain a fair trial heard by a jury of their peers. Irrational policies born of panic affect no one more than disadvantaged communities who already suffer from lack of access to justice.
The right to privacy and control of personal medical information has been abandoned. Disclosure of vaccination status is becoming a requirement for working, travelling, entering public and private establishments, crossing the border, and sometimes medical treatment. Those who cannot or will not disclose face aggressive social disapprobation. Vaccine passports create the infrastructure for a global digital surveillance system. Institutions that last year were prohibited from collecting individual medical history now demand it as a condition of employment or admission. University and college students are being denied their education for refusing to disclose their own medical choices.
Medical regulators have become dictatorial. They have warned doctors not to express medical opinions that might conflict with official COVID policies, effectively censoring them, and directed them not to certify grounds for medical exemptions from vaccination requirements, rupturing the physician-patient relationship and breaching the principle that only a practitioner who has examined a patient is equipped to give a diagnosis. Human rights commissions, which until recently championed expansive interpretations of human rights, have issued edicts narrowing grounds for accommodations.
COVID rules are inconsistent and irrational. Authorities enforce them selectively and preferentially, coming down hard on common people while turning a blind eye to the privileged. COVID vaccines do not prevent people from becoming infected or from transmitting the virus to others, but only unvaccinated persons are banned or required to undergo testing. People who have recovered from COVID and therefore have natural immunity are still subject to vaccination mandates even though the purpose of vaccination is to mimic natural immunity. Governments, public health authorities and employers advise that COVID vaccinations are safe, but pharmaceutical companies have been granted immunity from liability and no employers will accept legal responsibility for side-effects or adverse events, whether minor or serious, suffered by their employees who take a vaccine that they do not want. The risks posed by COVID vaccines may be in dispute, but they are not zero. Particularly for children and healthy young adults, they may be riskier than the virus.
We fear the erosion of our free society. We question the single-minded fixation on a virus that poses little risk to most people. We protest the uncalculated harms that COVID policies are causing to people’s health, livelihoods, relationships, and mental states. We oppose the mass hysteria and anxiety that governments and the media are fuelling. Most of all, we object to the deterioration of our civil liberties and the failure of our legal institutions — legislatures, governments, administrative bodies, and courts — to protect them.
We are appalled by what is happening in our country. We call for the immediate end of vaccine passports and mandates. We propose a public inquiry into the handling of all aspects of the declared pandemic. Canadians should have control of their own lives and have the right to make their own decisions about their health, medical treatments, personal information, travels, and associations. Canada is supposed to be a free country governed by the rule of law. Restore it now or risk losing it for good.
Original signatories:
Bruce Pardy, LLB, LLM.
Lisa Bildy, JD, BA.
W. Christopher Nunn, BA (Hons), LLB.
Stephen J.W. Penney, JD, MA.
To inspect the full list of lawyer signatories, or to sign the Declaration, visit https://www.freenorthdeclaration.ca
Stand by for a nasty phone call from Justine true-DOH.
All this for a virus well over 95% survive and for a vaccine that is worse than the disease.
I can’t believe they’ve pulled it off.... but one thing is clear - the government is our enemy.
The whole purpose of the pandemic was to restrict freedoms so they can Build Back Better.
Unless Canadians take Women’s right to vote away, the only hope is a candidate that looks like Tom Brady who believes in Freedom.
Without a Conservative Tom Brady looking candidate, Canada will be the “Nice USSR” in 5 years with full gulag’s for dissenters in 15.
99.5% under 65 survive, even including the Morbidly Obese.
I was at an International’s Conference in Phoenix two weeks ago. The Canadians attended via Zoom - when asked why they weren’t there, one guy actually said that the Government advised against going.
These guys were a complete bunch of spineless cowards who did as they were told by their Masters
Thank you for the post.
Canadia is all liberal, they will have COVID forever, except maybe Newfies
I think a lot of people wanted to hear it
And I’m glad it was written by a smart lawyers, they said everything more clearly & succinctly than any of us could have done
the disturbing thing is, all the points they made, they could apply in just about ANY Western country now - US, UK, Europe, Australia - the oppression is everywhere!
hopefully this will inspire other lawyers in other countries to speak out too ... there’s been a way too much silence so far
“Shout it from the mountain on out to the sea
No two ways about it, people have to be free
Ask me my opinion, my opinion will be
Nat’ral situation for a man to be free”
Canadians want the tyranny. They voted for it
Call them Europeans, it's a more accurate description. They never managed to wean themselves off of royalty. They want to be ruled. Simple as that.
We saw the same reactions to showing ID to board a plan as we are now seeing to these vaccines.
Let’s Go Trudeau 🤪
Yes, and Covid isn’t the only thing their government uses to control them. Canada has draconian hate speech laws, and I think Canadians have little freedom in general. When government controls your health care and keeps most people from owning guns, then people are already in chains.
Just wait until Trudeau starts up Parliament next month he plans to WILD , COVID , Global Warming , Electric Cars etc etc
You don’t have a 2nd. Amendment.
How can you call yourself free if your government , your police and your military are the only armed entities in Canada?
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