Government overreach and the loss of civil liberties during the COVID-19 pandemic take centre stage in a newly released book that documents an unprecedented time in Canadian history.
“Pandemic Panic: How Canadian Government Responses to COVID-19 Changed Civil Liberties Forever“ focuses on setting the record straight in a time of chaos, the authors told The Epoch Times.
Co-written by litigation director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation (CCF) Christine Van Geyn and Joanna Baron, executive director of the organization, the book also talks about why freedoms laid out in the Constitution of Canada matter. The CCF is a charity dedicated to defending constitutional rights and freedoms.
“Things were changing really quickly. There were different levels of lockdowns and mask mandates and school lockdowns, and we were all finding it very difficult to keep it from getting jumbled in our heads,” Ms. Baron said.
Ms. Baron added that they didn’t want Canadians to forget how the pandemic played out.
“So we decided it was important to put together a record of what happened, an accounting, so that people could collectively hold our governments to account,” she said.
“Without a record, you’re bound to forget what happened,” Ms. Van Geyn said. “And then the government is bound to repeat it.”
Government Overreach
Ms. Van Geyn said she was surprised at how much the courts let the government get away with.“In crises, governments are very willing to overstep,” she said. “We are concerned about an overly deferential court during times of crises, when governments were more likely to overstep and violate rights in the name of expediency or public safety.”
She said they documented real-life examples of government overreach during the pandemic.
“There’s high watermarks of real ... government overreach,” Ms. Van Geyn said. “And examples of that are the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act in response to the convoy, [the] Ford government’s creation of sweeping police powers to enforce stay-at-home orders, the curfew in Quebec.”
“Another example is the British Columbia government’s failure to create workable medical exemptions for unvaccinated people for their vaccine passport program.”
She said one of the biggest oversteps by the government was the use of the Emergencies Act.
“It was carefully designed with guardrails in place, because of the abuses of governments of its predecessor, the War Measures Act,” Ms. Van Geyn said, adding that it was misused by former prime minister Pierre Trudeau during the 1970 October crisis that led to the arrest of 405 people.
“Now that the glass has been broken, we’re very concerned about how it could be used again in the future for other protests. So I think that that is an example of a forever change.”
She said there were also cultural changes that Canadians experienced during the pandemic.
“I think we saw that citizens across our country were very willing to cede fundamental freedoms in the name of public safety, and there were many people who were insistent on only one approved narrative about the pandemic,” Ms. Van Geyn said. “Anyone who stepped outside of that could be subjected to public scorn and shaming.”
‘Bizarre’ COVID-19 Measures
The authors also cited examples of some of the “bizarre” things that happened during the pandemic.“In Quebec, we had unvaccinated people being chauffeured around Costcos in plexiglass golf carts, we had the cherry blossoms in Toronto being roped off because they apparently could increase the chance of COVID being spread,” Ms. Van Geyn said. “All kinds of really bizarre types of things that the government did that really had no scientific or even common sense rationale.”
The foreword of the book, published by Optimum Publishing International, is written by retired politician Preston Manning, the founder of the Reform Party.
“He’s so willing to help people who are working on a cause that he values,” Ms. Van Geyn said, adding that Mr. Manning is someone she and Ms. Baron have known for a long time.
Ms. Baron said the book was not written to please anyone or to document a particular political narrative of the pandemic.
“We think that people both on the left and right won’t be totally satisfied because there are some things that we agree were necessary as measures and there are many other things that we think were an overreach,” she said, adding that she hopes the book will help “insulate” Canadians from “future rights violations.”
