The people infringing on our rights admitted it.

But why can't the vaccine enthusiasts?

The most pernicious, despicable individuals are currently on display. Insisting, to ease their consciences, that no ones rights were infringed upon. At all. In fact, these people claim that we lack education and “never took civics”. On the latter point, they are correct about me, at least. I never took civics. It was never offered in the government grade schools I went to — is it normally? I have no idea. But I’ve voluntarily done my civic duty, which provided me with the context to reflect upon what it means to be a citizen. This is a question I suspect that many people here have spent a lot of time dwelling on in the past decade as we begin to smell the stench of rust and decay from our societal institutions. And, they can believe it or not, but I do understand the principles of governance (and far beyond the principles) in many contexts including from my professional experience.

I feel confident I can speak for everyone reading that we understand the division of powers between the different forms of governance. Yes, many of the rights being infringed upon are provincial infringements, but there are federal infringements as well. There is also, apparently and ironically unbeknown to the average Ottawa resident, interplay behind the scenes that allows the federal government to put pressure on provincial governments allowing it to, in a sense, enforce federal stances on provincial governments.

People are indeed carrying signs that say “F*ck Trudeau” and not “F*ck Ford” even though many of the mandates are provincial. But the point is that this is a Canada-wide infringement of rights. If you don’t think that the same federal government which has withheld health transfer payments to New Brunswick last year is influencing these mandates, then I would call you naïve at best. And indeed, many of the infringements of people’s rights are, in fact, federal and not provincial.

Yes, provinces are in charge of the vaccine mandates, unless people want to fly or work for federally regulated industries. We do not need to get into the wide variety of federal and provincial infringements. There are many on both sides, and most of them are being stoked by Trudeau’s divisive rhetoric and attitude. Provincial governments, for their part, have failed in their duties to protect rights. In places like Alberta, the Bill of Rights does not even allow for the “bending of the rules” that the Charter of Rights allows.

But here’s the rub: many of the people infringing upon Canadians’ rights admit they are doing so. I have no doubt that Trudeau has said no such thing, nor will I spend time to research it, as despite being Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s son and even rising to the position of Prime Minister himself, he seems to have scant knowledge of the Charter of Rights. He is a carbon-copy of the 21st century far-left politician who rules, hammer in hand, by dictates with little respect for the law. The myriad of examples of his knock-the-vase-over-and-apologize-later tendencies are tremendous, perhaps most notably in his dealing with Jody Wilson-Raybould in the SNC-Lavelin affair, but I suspect we are only scratching the surface of that iceberg. There is little reason to believe he would change he would suddenly change his ways during a pandemic.

Yet provincial governments and the rules governing public health measures have been upfront in their infringements of rights. In July, before he was for vaccine passports, Ontario’s Doug Ford called them a violation of the Charter of Rights. Alberta’s Jason Kenney publicly came out of the idea of vaccine passports for a long time because he knew it violates privacy rights. And even as Saskatchewan’s Scott Moe declared a pandemic of the unvaccinated, he refused to implement vaccine passports for the very reason that it infringed upon people’s rights. When he crab walked towards implementations of passports, he still acknowledged this infringement.

There are other examples in Canada of people enacting or enforcing lock-downs or other measures that admit these are violations, but let’s say you live in one of these three provinces, and the people implementing vaccine passports have admitted they are rights violations: can anyone honestly tell you your rights have not been violated?

We can talk about which rights are indeed violated, too. I would posit that at the very least these include, but are not limited to:

1. Freedom of conscience

2. Freedom to gain a livelihood in any province

3. The right to liberty and security of the person

4. The right not to be arbitrarily detained

5. The right not to be subjected to any cruel and unusual treatment or punishment

6. The right to equal treatment under the law (for religious exemptions, in particular)

There are probably more and certainly more in provincial Bills of Rights, but I feel like these are the obvious ones.

The more honest of the anti-rights groups argue that rights come with responsibilities. Apparently, there was a typo when they drafted up the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They must have meant Rights and Responsibilities. Oops. But the most honest anti-rights groups admit that yes, our rights are being infringed but the Charter allows this infringement!

That’s a fair point for someone that did not take civics. The Charter does allow “reasonable limits”, but that is not synonymous with arbitrary infringement. Rather, in line with previous Supreme Court interpretation, reasonable limits must have a

• Pressing and substantial objective; and,

• The means must be proportional; in other words,

  • The means must be rationally connected to the objective; and,

  • They must not be arbitrary, unfair, or based on irrational considerations; and,

  • There must be a proportionality between the effects of the measures which are responsible for limiting the Charter right or freedom, and the objective which has been identified as of "sufficient importance".

Long time readers may remember this as the Oakes test, and I still see absolutely no way in which lock-downs or mandates have passed the Oakes test at any point. Sure, they can argue there is a pressing and substantial objective all day long. But they have completely ignored proportionality.

Lock-downs have never been proven to work. Anywhere. Ever. Except maybe in totalitarian states like China that almost definitely release pre-constructed data. There was no science behind lock-downs and no rational reason to believe they would work. If the objective was to help, rather than destroy, public health, then lock-downs fail the Oakes test in every way.

Vaccine passports similarly are unfair as they are expecting individuals to take on personal risk for perceived societal benefit, even though no societal benefit has ever been shown to be achieved. Talking about irrational considerations? The idea was that vaccines would reduce transmission to a level in order to reach herd immunity, which was never possible. Indeed, vaccine passports were mostly enacted long after this was already known.

Nor is there any proportionality that can be claimed. For example, the number needed to vaccinate to prevent one death from the virus in the Pfizer randomized control trial was 22,000, and the deaths in the treatment group were higher than in the control group. But this number actually varies depending on age groups. For younger individuals, where the side effects of the vaccine are higher, the number needed to vaccinate is incomprehensible in the Canadian context and the side effects, which are not only relatively frequent, would cause irreparable harm (as I have witnessed first hand among friends). Simply put, there is no proportionality when you have a relatively high chance of irreparable harm on one hand for a minuscule benefit.

Furthermore, it would be logistically impossible for the government to enforce a vaccine passport system that was directed at high risk groups rather than widespread, so a passport system can never be proportional for a virus that only seems to harm high risk groups (and even the degree to which that happens from rather than with the virus is unclear) and a vaccine that has devastating and common side effects.

So no, there is absolutely no justification for rights to be violated under the Charter. And perhaps that is why the vaccine enthusiasts continue to deny that any rights were violated at all. Because admission implies guilt.