That’s what the official Ontario Ministry of Health sheet said. The nice woman at the Shopper’s Drug Mart on Lakeshore Drive in Toronto handed it to me, and told me to stick around for fifteen minutes in case I felt faint or something.
I stuck around.I looked at the sheet again.
I’d just gotten my first dose of what was described as “AstraZeneca Covid-19 Non-rep VV.”The sheet didn’t say when I’d be getting a second dose of vaccine.But it said I’d be getting my “next dose” of what the nice woman said was AstraZeneca.
That was back in March.Because I’m an old fart now, I was one of the first lucky enough to getAstraZeneca vaccine.After that, more than two million of my fellow citizens got AstraZeneca, too.Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was one of them.
This week, Ontario and several provinces pulled the plug on giving Canadians a first or second dose of AstraZeneca.The stated reason is blood clots.You might, might – might – get them.
Never mind the fact that, in the United Kingdom – in Britain, Scotland and Northern Ireland, to be precise – Covid cases have dropped dramatically.Never mind the fact that, on one day this week, in fact, they had no Covid deaths whatsoever.And all they have given their people is AstraZeneca.
But never mind all that.
Here is Canada, millions got one dose of AstraZeneca, and were told they’d get a second dose of AstraZeneca.
Right now, they’re being told they won’t get it.Right now, they’re even being told they might get the Pfizer or Moderna vaccines.Is it a good idea to mix vaccines?Will it be effective? Will it have nasty side-effects? We don’t know for sure.
What we do know, however, is a hoary old concept called “informed consent.” It’s been around for a while.It’s the law of the land, and has been long accepted as such by the Supreme Court of Canada, no less.
The Merriam-Webster people say informed consent is agreement “by a patient to participation in a medical experiment after achieving an understanding of what is involved.”
You don’t have to be a Supreme Court judge or an epidemiologist to understand the problem we’ve got, now.In this case, it’s more than two million Canadians agreeing to get the second AstraZeneca vaccine, and then being told they may not get it.Or that they may get something else entirely.
Did they consent to that?Did they consent to what the Government of Canada’s own Chief Science Officer called, in slightly different context, a “population-level experiment?”
Full disclosure: I’ve worked, for years, with some amazing lawyers on class action lawsuits.Those class actions mostly dealt with governments making bad decisions – decisions which adversely affected the health of citizens.We ultimately won those lawsuits.
You see where this is going, here.The Trudeau government has made a circus of the vaccine rollouts.They tried to get vaccines from China, where two of our citizens are being held contrary to international law. Then, they didn’t get enough vaccines.Then, they got vaccines too late. Then, they told us AstraZeneca was totally safe, and now they’re saying it might not be.
The result? Provincial governments are being forced to roll the dice with the health and well-being of Canadians.And “informed consent” – which is at the very centre of our entire healthcare system – is being shredded.More than two million Canadians gave consent for something to happen, and now it seems something else is happening.
Feeling faint yet?
You should be.
[Kinsella is former Chief of Staff to a federal Liberal Minister of Health.]
Summarily withdrawing the second AZ dose violates the informed consent that citizens gave to receive both. Which will likely open the door to the biggest avalanche of class action lawsuits this country has ever seen. I’ll be one of them. #cdnpoli
Some of you have been requesting me to put together a curated list of relatively new punk rock that I love. Here you go. Good night. https://t.co/o3gjOWD4u7
Pro tip, Trudeau Liberals: When you have a Constitution, heed it.
And if you have legal experts to check out your legislation, use ’em. They’ll help keep you out of trouble.
And in recent days, on the free speech front, Justin Trudeau and one of his ministers have had plenty of trouble. All self-made.
We tender as evidence Bill C-10. The bill updates the Broadcasting Act, which hasn’t changed in two decades. That’s arguably good.
But the changes contained in Bill C-10 could give unelected federal bureaucrats the power to censor the content you, Dear Reader, upload to the internet. That’s inarguably bad.
Now, during the pandemic, it’s pretty hard for anything to get noticed (ask Erin O’Toole). But C-10 did. There was a huge hue and cry, hither and yon. Canadians, on all sides of the ideological spectrum, were livid.
So the Trudeau party hastily reversed itself, and sent their censorship bill off for a Charter review. Could it still come back as bad as before? It could.
Since the establishment of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in 1982, Canadian courts have developed tried-and-true approaches to determining whether a law is constitutional. So let’s do a quick review of C-10, shall we?
First off, we need to determine if C-10 violates a section of the Charter. Simply put, it does: Section 2(b).
Here’s what Section 2(b) says: “Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms: Freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press and other media of communication.”
“Everyone” means everyone. That’s you. A “fundamental freedom” is the most basic right — and, some would say, the most important in a democracy. Because they’re the things that make us a democracy.
Does the “expression” referred to in Section 2(b) cover the stuff you post on social media, or your blog, or whatever? It surely does. In one of the earliest Charter Section 2 cases, the Supreme Court of Canada said that expression is “any activity or communication that conveys or attempts to convey meaning.”
“Any.” That covers your granny’s cat pictures, but also your 2,000-word critique of Trudeau’s vaccine rollout (which, as your granny would agree, has been pitiful). So Bill C-10 is caught by the Charter’s free speech provision. And it fails.
But is it therefore dead? Not yet, folks. The Trudeau government, which has thousands of justice department lawyers to do its bidding, can argue that the breach of Section 2(b) is “reasonable.”
That’s Section 1: To be reasonable, a limit on a Charter right needs to be “prescribed by law” and “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”
So, is Bill C-10 prescribed by law? Well, it will be, if the Trudeau cabal get their way. They have the power to pass the law, and they’ll do so with the gutless acquiescence of the NDP and the Bloc Quebecois.
But is it “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society?” No. No way.
No other country in the world is proposing to regulate the internet in this way — save and except China or Iran. Nor is the bill what lawyers call “proportional” — no other country is using a sledgehammer to kill a flea, as C-10 does. Is the impairment of basic rights minimal, here? No, sir. C-10 would throttle the principal way in which we all communicate with each other during this endless pandemic.
On every front, in every way, Bill C-10 is wildly unconstitutional. It violates our most sacred law — the Constitution of our country.
So here’s more free legal advice, Trudeau Liberals: With C-10, you are in a deep, deep hole.
And when in a hole, stop digging.
— Warren Kinsella is a lawyer and an adjunct professor at the University of Calgary’s Faculty of Law
Okay, yes. I should’ve trimmed back the winter kill on the peonies. And, yes, that’s Joey and Roxy about to collide with me.
But I wanted to show you these peonies, which (a) grew this much IN TWO DAYS and (b) were planted here by Quakers 150 YEARS AGO. Truth.
