March 15 marks the fourth anniversary of Canada’s provincial governments closing schools and locking down our society and economy in response to COVID-19.
Launched in March 2020 under the clever banner of “two weeks to flatten the curve,” the government’s violations of charter rights and freedoms continued for the next four years, with lockdowns and vaccine passports, right up to the present.
Yes, the present.
Contrary to popular opinion, the fanatical war waged against COVID-19 by governments is not over yet. In British Columbia, thousands of doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers are still prevented from returning to work because they did not get injected with the COVID vaccine in 2021.
Likewise in Ontario, hospitals today refuse to hire qualified, trained, and experienced nurses who declined the COVID vaccine. While preventing health-care workers from serving and treating patients, both the B.C. and Ontario governments complain publicly about a shortage of health-care workers.
Why in March 2024 would government health authorities in Ontario and B.C. continue to impose mandatory vaccination policies on health-care workers? On a superficial level, vindictiveness and ideological fanaticism are likely explanations. On a deeper level, the likely answer is fear: the same overwhelming, oppressive, and overpowering fear that gripped Canadian society in 2020, fuelled by dire predictions from Imperial College London.
Dr. Neil Ferguson of Imperial College London predicted in March 2020 that COVID would be like the Spanish Flu of 1918, killing tens of millions of people. Imperial College terrified politicians, media, the legal establishment, most of the medical establishment, and the public at large, by claiming that COVID would kill 40 million people in 2020, including 510,000 in Great Britain and 2.2 million in the United States. 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.
Alberta’s Chief Medical Officer of Health, and government health officials across Canada, claimed falsely that their policies were “evidence-based.” In fact, locking down the entire population for prolonged periods of time was a brand-new experiment, never tried before in all of human history. Experiments, by definition, are supported by theories and modelling, not evidence. But those who questioned this grand experiment were denounced as anti-science or lacking compassion, or both.
Desiring and seeking relevance, government-funded media reinforced the panic by showing continuous photo-loops of coffins, dying people, and overcrowded hospital wards, while running clips of terror-filled doctors and government officials proclaiming doom.
For 24 hours a day, seven days a week, Canada’s regime media generated fear of COVID, and did so for the next two years. The media and politicians claimed that COVID threatened everyone, not just elderly people with serious comorbidities, thereby encouraging the entire population to live in unfounded fear.
Facts emerged, but fear prevailed. By May 2020, barely two months into this worldwide lockdown experiment, government websites in every country showed that the all-cause mortality rate was a tiny fraction of what Imperial College had predicted. The virus had spread everywhere, but its infection fatality rate was only a small fraction of what Imperial College and the World Health Organization had asserted in March 2020.
Facts became clear, but facts could not quell the fear. It became known in 2020 that COVID posed a serious risk to those over 70, the obese, and people with severe comorbidities. Children were as likely to die from COVID as they were to die of lightning strikes. For Canadians under 70, the risk of death or injury from driving in a car was higher than the risk of death or injury from COVID. Yet it remained blasphemy of the highest order to suggest that COVID was like a bad annual flu, even when that is what the government’s own statistics and data were showing.
Once the fear set in, people stopped thinking and instead looked to authorities, wanting to be told what to do.
Contrary to the express requirement of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, governments in Canada have not made serious efforts to measure the full extent of lockdown harms: 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.
Dr. Ari Joffe of the University of Alberta provided a comprehensive assessment of lockdown policies in February 2021. Citing and relying on extensive data, Dr. Joffe explained how and why lockdowns were between five and ten times as deadly as COVID. He and others, like Dr. Douglas Allen at Simon Fraser University and Dr. Kevin Bardosh at the University of Washington, have shown that the cure was worse than the disease.
In spite of severe and obvious lockdown harms, many Canadians remained more afraid of COVID than of lockdowns. When governments offered the “safe and effective” vaccine in early 2021, falsely promising that it would stop the spread of COVID and prevent people from getting sick, millions of Canadians volunteered to get injected.
In September 2021, when employers first began to threaten their employees with losing their jobs unless they took the vaccine, there was no evidence that the vaccine would stop the spread. 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 of 2021, it was obvious that the vaccine had not stopped the spread of COVID. The Delta variant had spread everywhere, also in countries with very high vaccination rates, like Israel and Gibraltar.
Still, fear continued to prevail over reality and truth.
Our federal and provincial governments turned about six million Canadians into second-class citizens, denied their basic civil liberties because of their legitimate personal decision to refuse a brand-new vaccine. Many Canadians cheered as they saw their neighbours forced into unemployment and prevented from participating in sports, enjoying restaurants, and travelling by train or airplane.
Terminated employees were denied employment insurance benefits, even while this new vaccine, in the fall of 2021, was still in clinical trials.
Single mothers Mariana Costa and Crystal Love were in the final year of their respective programs at Seneca College and had expected to begin their new careers in April 2022, to secure better lives for themselves and their children. Seneca College effectively expelled both women.
At what point does it become reasonable to expect people to choose facts over fear? Under what circumstances, and to what extent, do people become morally culpable for embracing obvious falsehoods? These questions will be debated for years and decades to come.
But one thing in March 2024 should hopefully not require much debate: Government health authorities in Ontario and B.C. should be ashamed of themselves for continuing to keep doctors, nurses, and other health-care workers unemployed in 2024, punishing these Canadians for having legitimately exercised their charter right to bodily autonomy. These health-care workers should be welcomed back to work immediately.
