Presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Presidential rival Donald Trump, on the other hand, thinks that people who criticize judges should be jailed, along with anyone who burns an American flag. Photo by The Associated Press
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The U.S. political system is peculiar. While it’s wandered far from its origins, it’s a government based on the principle that people who seek power can’t be trusted, and it’s a democracy rooted in the belief that majorities can be as tyrannical as dictators. Not everybody agrees, of course, including members of the political class who propose to “save the republic” from rivals while rejecting restraints on power.
Last month, former Secretary of State and 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry complained that the competing voices of social media make it difficult “in terms of building consensus around any issue” because “people self-select where they go for their news or for their information.”
He fretted that if people prefer a news source that “is sick and has an agenda … our First Amendment stands as a major block to the ability to be able to just hammer it out of existence.” His hope was to overcome this impediment by “winning enough votes that you’re free to be able to implement change.”
The same month, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Americans are spreading what she calls “Kremlin propaganda” and should be “civilly or even in some cases criminally charged” for their speech. Last week she complained “we lose total control” if online discussions aren’t heavily regulated.
Current presidential hopeful Kamala Harris worried in 2019 that social media sites are “directly speaking to millions and millions of people without any level of oversight or regulation, and that has to stop.” Harris is vice-president in an administration that tried just that through back channels, leading Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to tell Congress “senior officials from the Biden administration … repeatedly pressured our teams for months to censor” discussions about COVID-19 and Hunter Biden’s laptop.
Harris’s running mate, Tim Walz, wrongly claims ”there’s no guarantee to free speech on misinformation or hate speech.” Robert Reich, the Clinton-era secretary of labour, wants Elon Musk arrested “if he doesn’t stop disseminating lies and hate on X.” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) threatened “to break up Big Tech so you’re not powerful enough to heckle senators with snotty tweets” after Amazon slapped back at her over tax policy.
This flurry of threats to speech protected by the First Amendment comes from a rogues’ gallery of Democrats who will respond that Donald Trump did it first and that they need to save democracy from his threat. They’re right the GOP presidential hopeful also has a taste for abusing power, though who started it is a judgment call, as is the question of who poses the greatest threat to the republic.
“Burning the American flag, I want to get a law passed … you burn an American flag, you go to jail for one year,” Trump harrumphed in August. It wasn’t the first time he’s called for jailing protesters who use flags as fiery props. He made the same call in July and floated the idea when he was in the White House, even though flag-burning is protected by the First Amendment.
Trump also thinks people who criticize judges and Supreme Court justices “should be put in jail,” as he commented last month (he might want to be careful about that, given his own criticism of the bench).
Also worthy of legal attention, says the former and potential future president, are “lawyers, political operatives, donors, illegal voters, & corrupt election officials” involved in what Trump, who claims the 2020 presidential contest was stolen, considers unscrupulous election-related behaviour. They “will be sought out, caught, and prosecuted at levels, unfortunately, never seen before in our country.”
Trump’s running mate, J.D. Vance, wants to ban pornography, though it generally enjoys constitutional protection. Vance’s instincts extend to political opponents. In 2021, Vance asked interviewer Tucker Carlson, “why don’t we seize the assets of the Ford Foundation” and other non-profits that pursue left-wing policies on hot-button issues. The veep nominee also wants to “seize the administrative state for our purposes,” replace existing bureaucrats with “our people” and defy the courts if they object.
Florida’s Republican Governor and recent presidential contender, Ron DeSantis, and his party’s lawmakers pushed the Stop WOKE Act to ban controversial racial training adopted by private companies. It was blocked on First Amendment grounds.
If you seek evidence that candidates for public office and political partisans disdain restraints on power when that power is in their hands, and want to punish opponents, there’s plenty of evidence on both sides of the aisle. This would come as no surprise to the founders. During debates over adopting the constitution, James Madison wrote about the balance necessary in designing a government. “You must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place, oblige it to control itself.”
Madison feared letting majorities run roughshod. “In a society under the forms of which the stronger faction can readily unite and oppress the weaker, anarchy may as truly be said to reign, as in a state of nature where the weaker individual is not secured against the violence of the stronger,” he warned.
The imperfect result was a constitution that limited government with checks and balances, and a Bill of Rights that forbade officials from interfering with many freedoms. The intent was to let people do and say a good many things that officials don’t like but are powerless to prevent or punish. It goes without saying that the U.S. government is now much larger than intended, and exercises far more authority than was contemplated by the founders. But that’s still not enough for some critics.
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Writing last month in The New Yorker, Louis Menand noted a new crop of scholars who are dissatisfied with the constitution. In their ranks is Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California–Berkeley, who hopes to strip anti-majoritarian elements from the system. Others want to completely scrap the document and start over with something that would deliver their preferred results.
But these scholars are playing catch-up with a political class intent on simply ignoring First Amendment protections for speech and constitutional restraints on their power. Ironically, efforts to abuse the power of office to hurt opponents is precisely what the founders intended to prevent with the constitution.
That authoritarian politicians justify their actions as responses to opponents who they allege are the real danger to the republic is also no surprise. Those who think coercive government is a solution to problems will inevitably try to apply it to opponents they see as problems.
The American Constitution was intended to thwart the kind of people who now make up pretty much the entire political class. We’ll see if it’s up to the challenge.
Leading political journalist calls banning the AfD an “authoritarian measure” that is “overdue,” insists that political repression is perfectly fine when it is exercised by a “constitutional state”
This man is named Marco Wanderwitz. He is a member of the nominally centre-right Christian Democratic Union, and he’s been in the German Bundestag – our federal parliament – since 2002. He reached perhaps the apex of his career late in the era of Angela Merkel, when he was made Parliamentary State Secretary for East Germany. Wanderwitz has been complaining about Alternative für Deutschland for years, and his screeching only gained in volume and shrillness after he lost his direct mandate in the last federal election to Mike Moncsek, his AfD rival. Above all, Wanderwitz wants to ban the AfD, and he has finally gathered enough support to bring the whole question before the Bundestag. Thus we will be treated to eminently democratic debate about how we must defend democracy by prohibiting the second-strongest-polling party in the Federal Republic.
Now, I try not to do unnecessary drama here at the plague chronicle, so I must tell you straightaway that this won’t go anywhere. Even were the Bundestag to approve a ban, which it won’t, the whole matter would end up before the Federal Constitutional Court in Karlsruhe, where I suspect it would fail in any case. Basically, the AfD are accumulating popular support faster than our ruling cartel parties can summon their collective will for overtly authoritarian interventions, and as long as this dynamic continues, the AfD will scrape by.
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A great many influential people nevertheless really, really want to outlaw the opposition and effectively disenfranchise 20% of the German electorate. Our journalistic luminaries in particular have become deeply radicalised over the past three years. They got everything they ever wanted in the form of our present Social Democrat- and Green-dominated government, only to have their political dream turn into an enormous steaming pile of shit. Because the establishment parties, including the CDU, have no answers to the crises besetting Germany, they have had to watch popular support for the AfD grow and grow. All their carefully curated talkshow tut-tutting, all their artfully coordinated diatribes about “right wing extremism,” all their transparently hostile reporting, has done nothing to reverse the trend. If establishment journalists were running the show, the AfD would’ve long been banned and many of their politicians would be in prison.
Today, Germany’s largest newsweekly, Die Zeit, has published a long piece by political editor Eva Ricarda Lautsch, in which she explains to 1.95 millions readers exactly why “banning the AfD is overdue.” The views she expresses are absolutely commonplace among elite German urbanites, and for this reason alone the article is sobering.
Let’s read it together.
Eva Ricarda Lautsch has psycho girlfriend eyes.
Lautsch is disquieted that many in the Bundestag fear banning the AfD is “too risky,” “too soon” and “simply undemocratic,” and that “the necessary political momentum is not materialising.”
The problem … is not the lack of occasions for banning the AfD. Sayings like “We will hunt them down,” Sturmabteilung slogans, deportation fantasies: we have long since become accustomed to their constant rabble-rousing. And this is to say nothing of the most recent and particularly shocking occasion – the disastrous opening session of the Thuringian state parliament a week ago, in which an AfD senior president was able to effectively suspend parliamentary business for hours. Those with enough power to generate momentum don’t have to wait for it; what is missing across the parties is political courage.
What really distinguishes Lautsch’s article (and mainstream discussion about the AfD in general) is the constant grasping after reasons that the party is bad and unconstitutional, and the failure ever to deliver anything convincing. That “we will hunt them down” line comes from a speech the AfD politician Alexander Gauland gave in 2017, after his party entered the Bundestag with 12.6% of the vote for the first time. As even BILD reported, he meant that the AfD would take a hard, confrontational line against the establishment. He was not promising that AfD representatives would literally hunt down Angela Merkel, although the quote immediately entered the canonical list of evil AfD statements and has been repeated thousands of times by hack journalists ever since. As for the “Sturmabteilung slogans,” the “deportation fantasies” and the “opening session of the Thuringian state parliament” – I’ve covered all of that here at the plague chronicle. They are lies and frivolities, and what’s more, they are so obviously lies and frivolities that it is impossible to believe even Lautsch thinks very much of them. These are things that low-information readers of Die Zeit are supposed to find convincing; they aren’t real reasons.
Perhaps this is why Lautsch backtracks, deciding suddenly that the case for banning the AfD may not be all that obvious after all. She admits that it is “legally risky” because, for a ban to succeed, somebody would have “to prove … that [the AfD] is working to destroy the free democratic order.” This is very hard to do because “it is part of the AfD’s strategy to present itself as the party of true democrats and defenders of the constitution” even though “its representatives have long been working to dismantle the institutions of our Basic Law from within.” Thus, as always, the absence of evidence for anything untoward about the AfD becomes evidence for their malicious, underhanded, democracy-undermining strategies.
Lautsch, desperate to climb out of this circular argument, first seizes upon the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution – the domestic intelligence agency that has been spying on the AfD for years. She insists that they have “already collected extensive material … which in itself could be used to justify a ban.” Lautsch’s “could” is doing a great deal of work here. The problem is that nobody, least of all Lautsch, has any idea what material the constitutional protectors have compiled. We can, however, try to learn from similar cases where we know more. Back in February, for example, I took a very close look at the information the constitutional protectors had amassed on Hans-Georg Maaßen. It was far from encouraging, and the truth is that if our political goons had anything that could really do in the AfD, we would’ve heard about it long ago.
As Lautsch continues, she strays ever further from making any kind of rational case. The last concrete complaint she raises is her claim that “the AfD is shifting the boundaries [of discourse] ever further in the direction of an ethnic conception” of Germanness, and that at the notorious “secret Potsdam meeting” the AfD politician Ulrich Siegmund said some untoward things about foreign restaurants. She rushes past these points, sensing their weakness, and spends the rest of this section on bizarre and irrelevant matters:
There is also the AfD’s self-representation as the representative of the true will of the people. That in itself has little to do with parliamentary democracy. Anyone who claims to already know the will of the people is unlikely to engage in parliamentary debate. The AfD therefore uses parliament primarily as a stage for staging the inflammatory speeches of its representatives and then distributing them on YouTube and TikTok. These are addressed directly to the “people” – and thus removed from parliamentary discussion.
Literally all politicians claim to represent the popular will and to act in popular interests. Otherwise, none of this is illegal or even remotely wrong. The AfD are an opposition party, excluded by the reigning cartel system from participation in government, and so of course they use parliamentary debate to criticise the lunatics in charge and use social media to distribute their speeches to supporters. What kind of complaints are these? Does Lautsch really want to ban the AfD because they’re good at TikTok?
It gets even stranger:
The AfD also has cultivated its own idea of the law itself. The idea is that there is a kind of natural, true law that precedes the actual law. In the words of AfD senior member Treutler in the Thuringian state parliament: “There is not only the law, there is also the spirit of the law.” This is the AfD’s most dangerous idea to date, because it can be used to bend the law, which was once set by democratically elected parliamentarians, in any direction. The true will of the people, the true party of the constitution, the true law. We cannot continue to stand by and watch this party co-opt democracy until there is nothing left of it.
The “spirit of the law” is a very old idea; it is generally raised in contrast to the “letter of the law”. The AfD did not invent this problem in legal philosophy. All laws require interpretation that accounts for their spirit and their letter, and anyway Jürgen Treutler is a minor AfD politician who does not speak for the whole party and who was not proposing a new legal approach either. He was merely trying to defend the traditional right of the strongest party – in this case, the AfD – to name the president of the Thuringian parliament.
Lautsch acknowledges that “banning a party with around 50,000 members and millions of voters” presents considerable risks. Among these is that supporting such a ban looks tremendously “undemocratic” and also that “AfD supporters could become more radicalised.”
Interestingly, these fears primarily concern the sensitivities of AfD supporters. But what about the fear of millions of Germans with a history of migration who are afraid of the xenophobia unleashed by the AfD? And what about the hundreds of thousands of people who took to the streets against it last winter?
That’s right, it would be positively undemocratic to ignore the “fears of millions of Germans” who don’t like the AfD by not banning the party. That’s just how democracy works: whenever the right people get afraid of the right party, you have to ban it. When the wrong people get afraid of the wrong party, however, bans are absolutely not in order. I and millions of other Germans are absolutely terrified of the Greens but that doesn’t count, because the Greens are a democratic party and we’re undemocratic for being worried about them.
At this point Lautsch comes to the awkward problem of authoritarianism. She assures us that we needn’t worry too much about this. As long as authoritarian actions are decided by democratically elected bodies and approved by courts, they’re totally fine:
It is true that a party ban is an authoritarian measure, but it is an authoritarian measure of a constitutional state. The Federal Constitutional Court only imposes it if the strict legal requirements are met. And the decision to initiate a party ban proceedings is taken democratically – in the Bundestag, in the Federal Council or by the democratically elected federal government.
Upon contemplating the likely consequences of banning the AfD, Lautsch becomes positively ecstatic:
And as a weapon of the constitutional state, a party ban is extremely effective. It is not for nothing that the AfD is doing everything it can to escape this fate. A ban by the Federal Constitutional Court would result in the party being dissolved, its infrastructure destroyed and its assets seized. Establishing replacement organisations would also be prohibited. AfD representatives would immediately lose their mandates. Of course, this would not get rid of the AfD members. But the party would be eradicated from the public sphere – and from the political competition. In any case, the two parties that have been banned in the Federal Republic of Germany so far – the KPD [i.e., the Communist Party of Germany] and the Nazi-successor SRP [i.e., Socialist Reich Party] – dissolved into insignificance when they were banned in the 1950s.
The SRP and the KPD were banned in 1952 and 1956, within a decade of the founding of the Federal Republic, as West Germany emerged from wartime occupation and faced down the Communist threat in the East. We were still being folded into the liberal West back then, with all the awkward (and overtly illiberal) political engineering that entailed. I find it pretty shocking that Lautsch thinks these are reasonable precedents, but she runs with them, concluding that “there are democracies that manage without banning parties, but Germany is not one of them.”
Rather, it is part of the core of German self-understanding as a “defensive democracy” to be able to defend itself against the enemies of democracy with the authority of the constitutional state if necessary. You can criticise this tendency to call on extra-parliamentary authorities such as the Office for the Protection of the Constitution or the Federal Constitutional Court, but to turn away from them at the moment of greatest threat to this democracy would be fatal.
Yes, a ban can fail. But those who are not prepared to protect democracy with all the means at the disposal of a constitutional state ultimately surrender it to its enemies. That is the greatest danger.
Germany is the only self-described “defensive democracy” in the entire liberal West. We have our ridiculous constitutional protectors and our other political enforcement mechanisms, because ours is a provisional state thrown together in haste in 1949. We were allowed democracy only within specific boundaries, to prevent the people from voting their way back into Nazism or into the Soviet bloc. That time is past. Fascism is gone and the Berlin wall came down when I was a child, but our rulers just won’t let the postwar era go away. It is always and forever 1933 or 1938 or 1952 or 1956 here in the best Germany of all time, where our rulers govern not to solve present problems, but to beat back the phantom past, and they are going to keep us mired in this dark and hopeless political timewarp until we are all ruined or they are cast out of power, or (more probably) both.
CAFE Supports Kelowna “Resistance Is Not Futile” Freedom Rally
On behalf of CAFE, I joined in with Kelowna freedom fighters today on this balmy Autumn Saturday afternoon. They hold a weekly “Resistance is Not Futile” rally, distribute the most recent Druthers and earn many favourable honks from the heavy traffic on Harvey Street. Today’s National Post carried a major article demanding a full national inquiry into the wholesale abuse on individual rights by both federal and provincial governments during COVID. Several CAFE supporters attended the second Kelowna freedom rally back in April 2020. We were right about the growing tyranny but the media and many politicos mocked us as yahoos and conspiracy nuts.
Some have argued an inquiry is needed to evaluate the effectiveness and harms of lockdowns, vaccine passports, school closures and other measures Get the latest from Sharon Kirkey straight to your inbox Author of the article: Sharon Kirkey Published Oct 11, 2024 • Last updated 1 day ago • 7 minute read868 Comments
A new paper is the latest to call for an open and transparent national COVID inquiry, “not reports developed behind closed doors that are vulnerable to interference.” Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
More than five years after COVID first emerged, amid rising and falling waves, calls are growing for a public inquiry into Canada’s pandemic response on the scale of the Krever inquiry into the country’s tainted blood scandal of the 1980s.
Not everyone agrees on the focus or details.
Some have argued a no-holds-barred inquiry is urgently needed to evaluate the effectiveness and social harms of lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, vaccine passports, school closures and other far-reaching government mandated infection control policies, some of which were never part of pre-existing pandemic plans.Advertisement 2Story continues belowTrending
“One of the most powerful things in a democracy is to have access to, what actually happened? How did people make decisions? What was known and not known at certain periods in terms of the vaccine mandates especially, and the lockdowns,” said Canadian medical anthropologist and public health researcher Kevin Bardosh.
“The COVID response was the largest infringement on basic Canadian civil rights and liberties in living memory,” Bardosh said. Among other lines of inquiry, a thorough assessment could address: Did we get the balance right between civil rights and civic responsibilities amid a chaotic and emerging threat?
The COVID response was the largest infringement on basic Canadian civil rights and liberties in living memory
A new paper is the latest to call for an open and transparent national COVID inquiry, “not reports developed behind closed doors that are vulnerable to interference.”
“We are now in the fifth year of an ongoing pandemic, and Canada continues to experience significant surges of COVID-19 infections,” half a dozen academics and specialists in epidemiology and medicine wrote in a pre-print paper that hasn’t gone through peer review.
“In addition to the acute impacts of infection, accumulation of organ damage and disability is building a ‘health debt’ that will affect Canadians for years to come,” the authors wrote.
“Canada urgently needs a comprehensive review of its successes and failures to chart a better response in the near- and long-term,” they said.
Among their concerns, no national standard for indoor air quality is being implemented to make indoor public spaces safer, particularly schools, even though SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus that spreads like smoke via tiny aerosols through duct work and under doors.
Data collection is crumbling, leaving information vacuums, particularly in vulnerable populations, inconsistent government policies have sown mistrust in public health and a post-mortem is needed to understand why Canada’s early success in vaccination has “collapsed,” the authors said.
There was an opportunity to evaluate evidence in a clear-headed way in order to go back to the standards of evidence and the ethics we had established as a community of public health practitioners prior to COVID, and those were never taken
“One of the big tragedies at various points was that there was an opportunity to evaluate evidence in a clear-headed way in order to go back to the standards of evidence and the ethics we had established as a community of public health practitioners prior to COVID, and those were never taken,” said Bardosh, director of Collateral Global, a think tank focused on pandemic responses.
“The uncertainties and ambiguities of the evidence were not adequately presented to people.”
Last year, in a scathing review of Canada’s “major pandemic failures,” the British Medical Journal said the willingness of Canadians to comply with vaccination requirements and harsh public health restrictions did more to bring COVID-19 under control than the fragmented, deficient and unsavvy response of governments.
Canada was slow off the mark getting vaccines and ended up with such an oversupply that tens of millions of doses faced expiry before they could be used. There were duelling experts and conflicting advice. Federal and provincial stockpiles of PPE (personal protective equipment) were depleted or allowed to expire before the pandemic hit. Millions of masks were thrown away.
But appeals for a public inquiry, including by the NDP in 2022, have gone unheeded. The Liberal government recently announced plans for a pandemic preparedness agency, but again deflected calls for a national inquiry.
Vaccination rates have dwindled since the Hunger Games-like sprints for shots in the 2021 spring vaccination campaign. Only about 15 per cent of eligible Canadians received an updated vaccine in the fall of 2023.
While mis- and disinformation campaigns are part of the problem, so are “lukewarm efforts” by public health to support vaccination programs, the authors wrote.
Throughout the pandemic, there were major inconsistencies in who should get access to treatments like Paxlovid, they said, and inconsistent advice on spacing between vaccine doses. Federal health officials “didn’t come clean and accept that COVID was an airborne transmitted disease, which has huge implications about what you do about it,” said Dr. Dick Zoutman, a retired infectious diseases physician and professor emeritus at Queen’s University who led the Ontario SARS Scientific Advisory Committee during the SARS crisis in 2003.
Upgrading indoor air quality would mitigate the spread of COVID in classrooms and hospitals substantially across the country, said Zoutman, one of the preprint’s authors. Instead, “we don’t even hear about
“What I find extraordinary beyond the discussion about having a national inquiry, which I believe we do need, is that it really appears to be that, among government and public figures, including public health figures in leadership roles, COVID has become a four-letter word that shall not be uttered,” Zoutman said.
“You have heard absolutely nothing in the last months, many, many months…. It appears that people have adopted the attitude: I’m done with COVID, I’m getting on with my life. Why are you still wearing a mask?’
“We have collectively decided it’s not a threat, and we do so at our peril.”
COVID is a very different pandemic than it was in 2020. “But it’s still a pandemic,” he said. The virus is mutating at a furious pace, two-and-a-half times faster than the influenza virus which is why we’re seeing new variants multiple times a year. In most cases it causes mild to moderate symptoms. Older adults and those with underlying health conditions are at highest risk. “It is still causing acute harm,” Zoutman said. “People are still getting very sick and dying,” though at much lower rates than at the outset because of vaccines and a built-up level of immunity. “Most of us have had COVID at least once; some many times, over and over again,” he said. And the risk of long COVID increases with repeat infections.
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“We have not even begun to get a handle on (long COVID’s) societal impacts,” Zoutman said.
We have not even begun to get a handle on (long COVID’s) societal impacts
Like the Krever commission into the tainted blood scandal, when thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV and-or hepatitis before the Canadian Red Cross began screening donated blood for blood-borne pathogens, a COVID inquiry under the Inquiries Act would have legal standing and the ability to send out summons, subpoena documents and “really have access to whatever it wants to look at,” Zoutman said. Krever also set a precedent for an inquiry across all levels of government, he and his co-authors wrote.
The United Kingdom is partway through a marathon COVID public inquiry that’s expected to run until 2026. “We need to know what went on here,” Zoutman said. “I hope Canada did better, but I think we had a very disjointed response.”
Zoutman and colleagues said they aren’t suggesting returning to past measures.
“There’s a strong theme that these were the wrong things to do, and they were a bad thing to do,” Zoutman said. “They were the right thing to do at the time, given the order of magnitude of what was coming, because nobody had contemplated this coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s no doubt that the lockdowns had the desired effect. They’re just a very crude mechanism,” he said. “Imagine if, in February and March 2020, we had N-95 respirators for the public in abundance. Imagine if we had high quality air handling that would filter out the virus and ventilate the viruses away. We wouldn’t have had to close our schools.”
“However, you are right: They need to be evaluated for their benefits, risks and the damages they did,” Zoutman said.
“We need to know, ‘How can we do this better and have a national plan for how we’re going to approach the next pandemic?’ We need to be very, very ready. We certainly were not.”
When asked for comment, Federal Health Minister Mark Holland’s office said the public health measures put in place by the government “saved more than 700,000 lives during the pandemic.”
A report co-authored by Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, based on modelling of different scenarios, estimated that “without the use of restrictive measures” and high levels of vaccination, Canada could have experienced almost a million deaths.
The count of total deaths from COVID-19 in Canada was 60,871 as of Sept. 21.
“We are committed to a scientific and evidence-based approach to public health and to protecting the health of Canadians,” Matthew Kronberg, Holland’s press secretary, said.
National Post
Why Canada needs an ‘urgent’ public inquiry into its COVID response
Some have argued an inquiry is needed to evaluate the effectiveness and harms of lockdowns, vaccine passports, school closures and other measures Get the latest from Sharon Kirkey straight to your inbox Author of the article: Sharon Kirkey Published Oct 11, 2024 • Last updated 1 day ago • 7 minute read868 Comments
A new paper is the latest to call for an open and transparent national COVID inquiry, “not reports developed behind closed doors that are vulnerable to interference.” Photo by JOEL SAGET/AFP via Getty Images
Article content
More than five years after COVID first emerged, amid rising and falling waves, calls are growing for a public inquiry into Canada’s pandemic response on the scale of the Krever inquiry into the country’s tainted blood scandal of the 1980s.
Not everyone agrees on the focus or details.
Some have argued a no-holds-barred inquiry is urgently needed to evaluate the effectiveness and social harms of lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, vaccine passports, school closures and other far-reaching government mandated infection control policies, some of which were never part of pre-existing pandemic plans.Advertisement 2Story continues belowTrending
“One of the most powerful things in a democracy is to have access to, what actually happened? How did people make decisions? What was known and not known at certain periods in terms of the vaccine mandates especially, and the lockdowns,” said Canadian medical anthropologist and public health researcher Kevin Bardosh.
“The COVID response was the largest infringement on basic Canadian civil rights and liberties in living memory,” Bardosh said. Among other lines of inquiry, a thorough assessment could address: Did we get the balance right between civil rights and civic responsibilities amid a chaotic and emerging threat?
The COVID response was the largest infringement on basic Canadian civil rights and liberties in living memory
A new paper is the latest to call for an open and transparent national COVID inquiry, “not reports developed behind closed doors that are vulnerable to interference.”
“We are now in the fifth year of an ongoing pandemic, and Canada continues to experience significant surges of COVID-19 infections,” half a dozen academics and specialists in epidemiology and medicine wrote in a pre-print paper that hasn’t gone through peer review.
“In addition to the acute impacts of infection, accumulation of organ damage and disability is building a ‘health debt’ that will affect Canadians for years to come,” the authors wrote.
“Canada urgently needs a comprehensive review of its successes and failures to chart a better response in the near- and long-term,” they said.
Among their concerns, no national standard for indoor air quality is being implemented to make indoor public spaces safer, particularly schools, even though SARS-CoV-2 is an airborne virus that spreads like smoke via tiny aerosols through duct work and under doors.
Data collection is crumbling, leaving information vacuums, particularly in vulnerable populations, inconsistent government policies have sown mistrust in public health and a post-mortem is needed to understand why Canada’s early success in vaccination has “collapsed,” the authors said.
There was an opportunity to evaluate evidence in a clear-headed way in order to go back to the standards of evidence and the ethics we had established as a community of public health practitioners prior to COVID, and those were never taken
“One of the big tragedies at various points was that there was an opportunity to evaluate evidence in a clear-headed way in order to go back to the standards of evidence and the ethics we had established as a community of public health practitioners prior to COVID, and those were never taken,” said Bardosh, director of Collateral Global, a think tank focused on pandemic responses.
“The uncertainties and ambiguities of the evidence were not adequately presented to people.”
Last year, in a scathing review of Canada’s “major pandemic failures,” the British Medical Journal said the willingness of Canadians to comply with vaccination requirements and harsh public health restrictions did more to bring COVID-19 under control than the fragmented, deficient and unsavvy response of governments.
Canada was slow off the mark getting vaccines and ended up with such an oversupply that tens of millions of doses faced expiry before they could be used. There were duelling experts and conflicting advice. Federal and provincial stockpiles of PPE (personal protective equipment) were depleted or allowed to expire before the pandemic hit. Millions of masks were thrown away.
But appeals for a public inquiry, including by the NDP in 2022, have gone unheeded. The Liberal government recently announced plans for a pandemic preparedness agency, but again deflected calls for a national inquiry.
Vaccination rates have dwindled since the Hunger Games-like sprints for shots in the 2021 spring vaccination campaign. Only about 15 per cent of eligible Canadians received an updated vaccine in the fall of 2023.
While mis- and disinformation campaigns are part of the problem, so are “lukewarm efforts” by public health to support vaccination programs, the authors wrote.
Throughout the pandemic, there were major inconsistencies in who should get access to treatments like Paxlovid, they said, and inconsistent advice on spacing between vaccine doses. Federal health officials “didn’t come clean and accept that COVID was an airborne transmitted disease, which has huge implications about what you do about it,” said Dr. Dick Zoutman, a retired infectious diseases physician and professor emeritus at Queen’s University who led the Ontario SARS Scientific Advisory Committee during the SARS crisis in 2003.
Upgrading indoor air quality would mitigate the spread of COVID in classrooms and hospitals substantially across the country, said Zoutman, one of the preprint’s authors. Instead, “we don’t even hear about
“What I find extraordinary beyond the discussion about having a national inquiry, which I believe we do need, is that it really appears to be that, among government and public figures, including public health figures in leadership roles, COVID has become a four-letter word that shall not be uttered,” Zoutman said.
“You have heard absolutely nothing in the last months, many, many months…. It appears that people have adopted the attitude: I’m done with COVID, I’m getting on with my life. Why are you still wearing a mask?’
“We have collectively decided it’s not a threat, and we do so at our peril.”
COVID is a very different pandemic than it was in 2020. “But it’s still a pandemic,” he said. The virus is mutating at a furious pace, two-and-a-half times faster than the influenza virus which is why we’re seeing new variants multiple times a year. In most cases it causes mild to moderate symptoms. Older adults and those with underlying health conditions are at highest risk. “It is still causing acute harm,” Zoutman said. “People are still getting very sick and dying,” though at much lower rates than at the outset because of vaccines and a built-up level of immunity. “Most of us have had COVID at least once; some many times, over and over again,” he said. And the risk of long COVID increases with repeat infections.
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“We have not even begun to get a handle on (long COVID’s) societal impacts,” Zoutman said.
We have not even begun to get a handle on (long COVID’s) societal impacts
Like the Krever commission into the tainted blood scandal, when thousands of Canadians were infected with HIV and-or hepatitis before the Canadian Red Cross began screening donated blood for blood-borne pathogens, a COVID inquiry under the Inquiries Act would have legal standing and the ability to send out summons, subpoena documents and “really have access to whatever it wants to look at,” Zoutman said. Krever also set a precedent for an inquiry across all levels of government, he and his co-authors wrote.
The United Kingdom is partway through a marathon COVID public inquiry that’s expected to run until 2026. “We need to know what went on here,” Zoutman said. “I hope Canada did better, but I think we had a very disjointed response.”
Zoutman and colleagues said they aren’t suggesting returning to past measures.
“There’s a strong theme that these were the wrong things to do, and they were a bad thing to do,” Zoutman said. “They were the right thing to do at the time, given the order of magnitude of what was coming, because nobody had contemplated this coronavirus pandemic.
“There’s no doubt that the lockdowns had the desired effect. They’re just a very crude mechanism,” he said. “Imagine if, in February and March 2020, we had N-95 respirators for the public in abundance. Imagine if we had high quality air handling that would filter out the virus and ventilate the viruses away. We wouldn’t have had to close our schools.”
“However, you are right: They need to be evaluated for their benefits, risks and the damages they did,” Zoutman said.
“We need to know, ‘How can we do this better and have a national plan for how we’re going to approach the next pandemic?’ We need to be very, very ready. We certainly were not.”
When asked for comment, Federal Health Minister Mark Holland’s office said the public health measures put in place by the government “saved more than 700,000 lives during the pandemic.”
A report co-authored by Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam, based on modelling of different scenarios, estimated that “without the use of restrictive measures” and high levels of vaccination, Canada could have experienced almost a million deaths.
The count of total deaths from COVID-19 in Canada was 60,871 as of Sept. 21.
“We are committed to a scientific and evidence-based approach to public health and to protecting the health of Canadians,” Matthew Kronberg, Holland’s press secretary, said.
for hearing on my SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation) application to strike the City’s Petition against us. (See the B.C. Protection of Public Participation Act)
Rustad promises to ensure all court proceedings are recorded and made available online so people can hear what is going on. This is the first step in holding judges accountable.
If my case was open to the Canadian public who could see J. Heinrich’s actions and incessant eyeball rolling, as well as Grabavac’s, the hot lines would be filled with people demanding their resignations.
Alberta has had its own effective Bill of Rights for decades and will be strengthening it this fall.
If elected, will you promote the passage of a similar B.C. Bill of Rights for this Province, including protection for property rights, protection for unvaccinated, and parental rights over their children?
Yes You get my vote
No Why would you not want to protect our rights and freedoms? You don’t get my vote.
Please remember other innocent people who have stood up for our rights and freedoms against our tyrannical governments during COVID-19 and to the present, who are now in the midst of their ongoing, oppressive trials:
Tamara Lich
Chris Barber
The Coutts prisoners: Anthony Olienick and Chris Carbert
Pat King
Tommy Robinson
and many other real victims.
NOTE: Jury decision in the Coutts trial was rendered and the jury determined that they were innocent of the primary charge of conspiracy to commit murder against police officers.
Despite this, they remain in custody now for over 900 days.
Justice Labrenz unbelievably sentenced Carbert to 6 ½ years for possession of a restricted firearm and six months for mischief (to be served concurrently), and Olienick to six years possession of a restricted firearm and six months for mischief, as well as a six month sentence for possession of an explosive also served concurrently, for a similar total of 6 ½ years. Less 900 days (credited to equal about four years).
Make no mistake, no one goes to jail for this length of time on these types of criminal offences.
An appeal by the Accused should now have already been filed.
The Crown, Mr. Johnston, to no surprise has already appealed as well.
Counsel for the accused has submitted a sealed envelope that could implicate one of the prosecutors in criminality. No details have yet been provided, but it is said to be part of the appeals process.
An application will be made shortly to have the prisoners released pending the hearing of their appeal.
Defence counsel have already raised the issue of the jury being pressured into a rushed verdict so as to be released for the August long weekend. This would not be surprising. Other concerns about the jury have already been expressed by counsel that they were culturally biased in relation to a firearms possession charge.
In a mixed set of updates here. The Bank of Canada (B of C) has recently announced plans to suspend introduction of a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) to the public.
While this may sound victorious on its face, and there is much positive to say when such plans are shelved or put on hold, please remember the use of the word “suspend” as opposed to “cancel”.
Has the B of C simply decided to wait on the outcomes and research from other countries and then simply tag along?
In this past summer, the B of C was recommending Canada provide its own CBDC for digital payments. This apparently has been suspended or now put on hold. We can only hope for some permanency to this decision.
We need a Constitutional amendment that 100% absolutely provides for the mandatory use and acceptance of cash for all transactions – in any amount. So, if you wish to pay $1 000 000.00 for a house in $100/bills, you should be allowed to so do. That is privacy.
Conversely, Google has announced that the Google Wallet can now function as digital ID, based on the selling point of course, of convenience to the exclusion of all privacy. Once privacy is lost, so is freedom.
“Imagine starting a vacation like this,” Google Wallet executive Alan Stapelberg wrote in a blog post last week. “You arrive at the airport and breeze through security by tapping your phone to a reader, scanning your boarding pass and ID. While waiting to board, you grab a drink at an airport bar, tapping your phone to prove your age. When you arrive at your destination, you find your rental car and leave the lot without stopping for an in-person ID check because you already provided the necessary information in the rental car app. You check into your hotel online and your key is issued straight to your digital wallet. You do all of this with your phone — no physical wallet required.”
It is starting – Use cash as much as possible – use credit cards or digital only if there is no other alternative.
The Bank of Canada is admittedly planning for digital currency. It claims that it will not replace cash – BUT – and here is the caveat, it will continue to use cash “notes for as long as Canadians want them.”
In other words, if you don’t use cash, you will lose it. Reading between the lines, it is clear that the Gov’t will simply issue press releases and polls showing most Canadians don’t use and/or don’t want cash, and then the Bank of Canada will claim it has to eliminate cash because few people are using it or want it, and it is, ironically, too costly to maintain printing the notes and coins.
Bill Still, the US Patriot and author of the incredible documentary, The Money Masters, outlines the results of recent polls showing that 86% of Canadians fear the digital dollar!!! Wow.
87% of Canadians have heard or are aware of the Bank of Canada’s CBDC (Central Bank Digital Currency), and 82% are strongly opposed to it!!
Companies will not use digital currency if we are not using digital currency!
It will cost them too much in lost business.
Here are two awesome posters that you can distribute to all businesses to put on their entrance doors, advocating for the use of cash. Print on 8 1/2 x 11 glossy hard stock for best results.
For Business owners:
The dangers of digital gov’t ID and currencies are here… you need to use cash as much as possible. As recognized by Freedom Rising, there are many inherent dangers of using digital currency. What do you do, not if, but when:
The internet is down
There is a power outage
The card reader malfunctions
Your phone battery dies or doesn’t work for other reasons
WE SUGGEST YOU CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING AS WELL:
Your phone is stolen
Your passwords are co-opted
Your credit/debit card strip is damaged – needs replacing
There are errors in relation to the quantum of $$ on your card
Gov’t limits your purchases/CRA liens the balance on your card
AND MANY OTHER DANGERS
CLEAR has promoted the non-use of digital currencies and credit/debit cards as much as possible, for years.
Suggested Solution:
Withdraw money on Saturday/Sunday from the bank or bank machine, and then leave your money at home if you are scared to carry it with you, and just carry the amounts of cash for each day’s purchases for the week.
NO MORE CARDS!!!! NO EXCUSES!
USE CASH $$$$$$$$$
Do you want to be the next person to be “unbanked” because of your political beliefs????
Get these cards below at the CLEAR booth to give out everytime you use cash – or print your own to hand out!
Make Business sized cards to hand out at all your cash purchases!
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Kindness of the week
To Johnwho continues to tirelessly support our website and internet related activities!!
And….
To all our kind and wonderful volunteers who make this all possible…including these newsletters!
Pastor Reimer was fined $500 for allegedly breaching bail conditions, despite the fact that the original, underlying charges against him were dismissed!
Speaker of the House of Commons freezes all Government Bills, including Bill C-293, until all STDC documents are turned over to the RCMP in relation to the Green Slush Fund (Auditor General found over $300 million funneled to Liberal insider businesses)
Felony Charges Filed Against 7 in Michigan Double-Voting Case
Concerns over election integrity are mounting among U.S. voters. According to a recent Gallup poll, the percentage of Americans saying they are “not at all confident” in the vote has steadily climbed from 6 percent in 2004 to 19 percent in 2024.
While 57 percent of voters say they are somewhat or very confident that the votes for this year’s presidential election will be accurately counted, a deep partisan divide persists. A record-high 56-percentage-point gap exists between Democrats and Republicans, with 84 percent of Democrats expressing confidence in the voting process, compared to just 28 percent of Republicans.
This is compounded by the fact that food prices are generally not included in the determination of the inflation rate in Canada. Make no mistake – they should be.
CAFE Salutes 70th Rally of Shelburne Freedom Fighters
CAFE supporters frequently join in the regular Saturday freedom rallies held in Shelburne, Ontario. On Saturday, October 5, CAFE Director Paul Fromm was invited to speak.
Mr. Fromm warned about federal efforts to gag free speech, especially Bill C-63. Also, the NDP has introduced a private member’s bill that would make denying or diminishing the still largely unproved harms of the residential schools (216 mass graves?) a criminal offence.
Mr. Fromm pointed to a recent news story.
“Canadian Heritage Minister Pascale St-Onge is set to make history by becoming the first openly lesbian cabinet minister to take parental leave when her wife gives birth in the coming weeks.
“I’m not someone who really likes to talk about myself or my personal life either,” St-Onge said in an interview with The Canadian Press.
The Quebec MP said she decided to speak publicly about her parental leave because she has “a responsibility to continue the fight” for LGBTQ rights.” (Canadian Press, September 28, 2024)
When a society can’t get the basics right:that there are two sexes — man and woman; marriage is between a man and a woman, then this disordered state of mind and morality leads to other errors.
For instance, the Liberal elite is hopped up on LGBTQ ideology. Men can pretend to be women. Is it any wonder, he asked, that this same elite cannot and will not control the border and has allowed an invasion that has led to a massive housing crisis, a stressed medical system and impossible traffic gridlock in the GTA and Greater Vancouver areas?
Is it any wonder that these mixed-up people seek to destroy one of Canada’s greatest resources — the oil and natural gas industry — in pursuit of the World Economic Forum’s grim climate change fanaticism?
Spreading the word and sharing your views on voting in the next BC Election is one simple and extremely important way to make sure that positive change is possible.
To that end, Brenda Blatz has some eye-catching business cards available to pass out to friends, families and businesses, and even to others you meet in your day-to-day life.
If each of you receiving these emails gets 10 people to go to https://politicalscorecards.ca/ to see what your candidates are thinking, that’s potentially as many as 10,000 voters more informed. And if they each show or tell just a few more people then we’ll have a very informed community at the polls on October 19, 2024.
To pick up your own supply of cards to share please contact Brenda at brendablatz@telus.net or text 250-490-6354
Watch your inbox as we send out a few more emails before the election in our attempt to keep you informed on the issues.
Thanks to the generosity of donors, the Justice Centre has been able to provide Chris Barber and other Canadians with criminal defence counsel. His lawyer, Diane Magas, has spent 45 days in court over the past 31 months, challenging the Crown’s prosecution every step of the way.
For the criminal defence of Chris Barber alone, the Justice Centre has received invoices for $217,117 in the past 31 months. We have also previously paid invoices for $122,272 to defend Tamara Lich against the unjust prosecution that she has been facing since February 2022.
Will you partner with us in the defence of Chris Barber?
Your donation of $500, $100, $50 or any other amount will help us cover these legal expenses. Your support will ensure that we can continue to fight for Chris and other Canadians whom we are defending against political prosecutions. As a registered charity, we will send you an official tax receipt in 2025, for all donations you make in 2024.
Essentially, by defending Chris, we are defending the Charter freedoms of expression, association and peaceful assembly on behalf of all Canadians.
Peaceful protests, attended by Canadians like Chris Barber, belong on Parliament Hill. The violent suppression of peaceful protests should have no place in Canada, nor should citizens ever face criminal prosecutions over simply exercising their Charter freedoms peacefully.
Thank you for your generosity in supporting the Justice Centre’s work to defend the free society.
Yours sincerely,
John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. President Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms
Make no mistake about it free speech has few friends in Ottawa at least among Liberals, NDP and Bloc MPs. The latest assault is a private member’s bill introduced by an NDP MP. The National Post (September 26, 2024): “An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.
Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, presented her private member’s bill, several days before the country is set to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation next week.
Private member’s bills rarely pass.”
However, “several years ago the Liberal government passed an amendment to its 2022 budget implementation bill that added a criminal provision against making public statements that promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.” …
““There’s a difference between freedom of speech and hate speech,” Gazan said, adding the abuses perpetrated to Indigenous children is irrefutable.” Just as the Jewish lobby imposed holocaust belief on us, thus making it a state religion, the thought control freaks of the NDP and others seek to impose this highly questionable account of Canadian history on us all.
NDP MP tables bill seeking to criminalize residential school ‘denialism’
Gazan presented her bill less than a week before the country is set to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation
Published Sep 26, 2024 • Last updated 2 days ago • 4 minute read
938 Comments
NDP member of Parliament for Winnipeg Centre Leah Gazan. Photo by Spencer Colby /The Canadian Press
Article content
OTTAWA — An NDP MP tabled a bill Thursday seeking to change the Criminal Code to criminalize downplaying, denying or condoning the harms of residential schools in Canada.
Leah Gazan, who represents Winnipeg Centre, presented her private member’s bill, several days before the country is set to mark the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation next week.
Private member’s bills rarely pass.
Article content
Several years ago the Liberal government passed an amendment to its 2022 budget implementation bill that added a criminal provision against making public statements that promote antisemitism “by condoning, denying or downplaying the Holocaust.”
As of last November, the federal Justice Department said it was not aware of any charges or prosecutions having been laid under that offence, with British Columbia, Manitoba, Quebec and Alberta all saying they had no charges or cases on record, so the constitutionality of the law has not been tested.
Gazan confirmed in an interview Thursday she drew inspiration from the existing provision, saying she wants to see the “genocide” of residential schools given the same status.
Gazan, whose mother was a Chinese and Lakota woman and whose father survived the Holocaust, said the history of genocide on one side of her family “is never up for debate.”
“That is not true for Indigenous People of Canada,” she said on Thursday. “I cannot think of anything more violent to survivors and their family members and community to constantly have their history with genocide up for debate.”
“If this country is serious about reconciling it has to come to terms with some of our history and take the actions necessary to protect those that are most impacted by it.”
If passed, Gazan’s private member’s bill would make it an offence to willfully promote hatred against Indigenous people “by condoning, denying, justifying or downplaying the harm caused by the residential school system in Canada.”
In her speech to the House of Commons after tabling it, she said “all parliamentarians must stand firm against all forms of damaging hate speech, including the denial of the tragedy of the residential schools in Canada.”
The Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, which was established to investigate the residential school system, heard from thousands of former students who testified to experiencing physical, sexual, emotional and psychological abuse, as well as malnutrition.
The government-funded largely church-run system saw more than 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children removed from their homes and placed in these institutions over the course of 160 years. A majority of the schools were run by the Catholic Church.
The commission’s final report released in 2015 also estimated more than 6,000 Indigenous children died at the institutions, including from disease. The National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation has a recorded list of the names of more than 4,000 who died.
Last fall, Gazan also tabled a motion that called on members of Parliament to recognize the residential school system as a genocide, which received unanimous consent from Parliament.
She told National Post she respects free speech, but said “all rights have limitations.”
“There’s a difference between freedom of speech and hate speech,” Gazan said, adding the abuses perpetrated to Indigenous children is irrefutable.
A spokeswoman for Justice Minister Arif Virani said Gazan is highlighting an important issue through her bill, which the government would review.
“We must not ignore the lasting impact these schools had on Indigenous peoples—an intergenerational trauma that continues to be deeply felt today. The denial of the atrocities that occurred remains painful for survivors, their families, and communities,” said Chantalle Aubertin.
The special representative the federal government appointed to develop policies around protecting suspected unmarked graves has also called on the government to consider adopting “legal mechanisms” to address the practice of downplaying abuses suffered by those who attended residential school.
In a June 2023 report, Kimberley Murray outlined how the Tk’emlups te Secwepemc First Nation in British Columbia had people try to enter the site, including with shovels in the middle of the night, to try and “see for themselves” if the remains of Indigenous children were in fact buried in unmarked graves.
Gazan said on Thursday some politicians have also taken part in downplaying and justifying what happened to Indigenous children at residential schools.
Conservative MP Jamie Schmale said in a statement on Thursday that his party would “closely examine” the bill.
“The residential school system is a dark chapter of our nation’s history. In 2008, the Canadian government under Conservative Prime Minister Stephen Harper delivered an apology finally acknowledging the horrors of the residential school system.,” Schmale said.
Assembly of First Nations National Chief Cindy Woodhouse posted on X that she supports the bill.
“Each political party should be in support of this bill,” she added
