Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis | Common Sense, Substack - Rupa Subramanya:
Aug 2. 2022 - "On August 13, 2021, the Canadian government announced that anyone who hadn’t been vaccinated against Covid would soon be barred from planes and trains. In many cases, [they] could no longer travel between provinces or leave the country. Jennifer Little, the director-general of COVID Recovery, the secretive government panel that crafted the mandate, called it 'one of the strongest vaccination mandates for travelers in the world.' It was draconian and sweeping, and it fit neatly with the public persona that Prime Minister Justin Trudeau had cultivated — that of the sleek, progressive, forward-looking technocrat guided by fact and reason.... But recently released court documents — which capture the decision-making behind the travel mandate — indicate that, far from following the science, the prime minister and his Cabinet were focused on politics....
"Two days after announcing the mandate, Trudeau called a snap election — presumably expecting that his Liberal Party, which was in the minority in the House of Commons, would benefit from the announcement and be catapulted into the majority [8.00 in video - gd] .... In the meantime, roughly five million unvaccinated Canadians were barred from visiting loved ones, working or otherwise traveling. (Trudeau, for his part, stayed in power. Even though the Conservatives have won the popular vote in the past two elections, because of Canada’s parliamentary system, they have been denied the top job.)....
"The court documents are part of a lawsuit filed by two Canadian residents against the government. Until last month, they were under seal. Both plaintiffs ... have refused the vaccine on the grounds of bodily autonomy.... One plaintiff is Karl Harrison ... [who] has an 88-year-old mother in Britain.... The other plaintiff is Shaun Rickard, whose father, also in Britain, is suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s.... [I]n the fall of 2021, Rickard launched a GoFundMe to do battle with his government. In November, Harrison, who had learned of Rickard on social media, reached out to him. In December, they jointly filed suit.... (In February of this year, when the Canadian government invoked the Emergencies Act in response to the truckers protesting a separate vaccine mandate in Ottawa, GoFundMe forced Rickard, like those raising money for the truckers, off the site.) Rickard and Harrison’s attorney, Sam Presvelos, said that all government decisions related to public health demanded transparency.... The whole point of the case was to lift that shroud and cast a spotlight on the unscientific basis of the mandate.
"Among other things, the court documents indicate:
1. No one in the COVID Recovery unit, including Jennifer Little, the director-general, had any formal education in epidemiology, medicine or public health. Little, who has an undergraduate degree in literature from the University of Toronto, testified that there were 20 people in the unit. When Presvelos asked her whether anyone in the unit had any professional experience in public health, she said there was one person, Monique St.-Laurent.... St.-Laurent is not a doctor, Little said....
2. Little suggested that a senior official in the prime minister’s Cabinet or possibly the prime minister himself had ordered COVID Recovery to impose the travel mandate.... But she refused to say who had given her team the order to impose the travel mandate. 'I’m not at liberty to disclose anything that is subject to cabinet confidence,' she said. The term 'cabinet confidence' ... refers to the prime minister’s Cabinet. Meaning that Little could not talk about who had directed the COVID Recovery unit to impose the travel mandate because someone at the very highest levels of government was apparently behind it.
3. In the days leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short. That was made clear by an email exchange in the latter half of October 2021 between Aaron McCrorie and Dawn Lumley-Myllari. McCrorie is the associate assistant deputy minister for safety and security in Transport Canada, the department that houses COVID Recovery. Lumley-Myllari is an official in the Public Health Agency of Canada.... 'To the extent that updated data exist or that there is clearer evidence of the safety benefit of vaccination on the users or other stakeholders of the transportation system, it would be helpful to assist Transport Canada supporting its measures,” McCrorie wrote. Four days later, on October 22, McCrorie emailed Lumley-Myllari again: 'Our requirements come in on October 30 ... so need something fairly soon.' On October 28, Lumley-Myllari replied to McCrorie with a series of bullet points outlining the benefits, generally speaking, of the Covid vaccine. She did not address McCrorie’s question about the transportation system.... Two days later, on October 30, the travel mandate took effect.
"Then, eight-and-a-half months later, on June 14, 2022, government officials announced that they were suspending the mandate — although they made it clear that they could bring it back at any time. Within days, government lawyers filed a motion seeking to shut down Harrison and Rickard’s suit on the grounds that it was now moot — and, Presvelos said, to make sure the public never saw the court documents....
"In September, a judge will decide whether to quash the lawsuit. So far, 16 government officials have testified. Even though this kind of case almost never goes anywhere — there have been several court challenges to the mandates, and all of them have been rejected—Harrison and Rickard, in a way, have already won: They have cast a spotlight on how the sausage gets made."
Read more: https://www.commonsense.news/p/court-documents-reveal-canadas-travel
No comments:
Post a Comment