The Unmaking of the Canadian Constitution: Bret Speaks with Brian Peckford
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Civil disobedience is still a very important concept in any sensible democracy, any real democracy.
And that's why that thing in Victoria is very important.
And I keep saying that if every legislature in Canada, every Saturday, there were 10,000 plus people on an ongoing basis over the next, all through the summer, then I think we could have an impact upon public policy.
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting today with Brian Peckford, who is the former Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, and the last surviving First Minister who collaborated on the 1982 Constitution Act for Canada.
Welcome, Brian.
Welcome, sir.
Nice to be here.
Terrific!
So, you and I have not met before, but we've been traveling in parallel circles as we have watched things surrounding the rights in the West, in the U.S.
and Canada especially, change as the pandemic marched forward.
I think it's a good idea that we discuss what someone who is actually present and contributing to the constitution of a great western nation sees taking place in the present.
So, where would you like to start?
Well, perhaps I'd like to start with the fact that a lot of your viewers and listeners might be interested that It was only 40 years ago that we actually, as a country, put our rights and freedoms in writing.
That's important in the sense that the United States of America had a Bill of Rights, I think it was 15 years after they formed their country.
So, 1776 and 1791 were the two big dates in this discussion for the United States of America.
In the Canadian context, that was 1867 and 1982.
So we were 114 years before we actually wrote down our Bill of Rights, if you will, called the Charter of Rights, same thing.
And the difference is significant in the sense that we then proceeded along different pathways as it related to how An individual defended their rights and freedoms in their particular countries.
And so what happened in Canada, different than the United States, was that we formed a country in 1867 and defined it as a federation and the roles and responsibilities of the provinces versus the federal government and so on, and other relevant measures.
But we, the founders, decided to leave the rights and freedoms Within the same context as Britain.
We didn't have a revolution.
We peacefully, if you will, decided with England that we would become a separate country.
And so we lived under British common law, which was unwritten British common law, and conventions or customs that grew up over the years after the formation of the country.
And so they formed the basis of our rights and freedoms.
And so any individual from 1867 to 1982 that went to the courts of the land to defend their rights and freedoms did so under unwritten British common law and customs and conventions.
It was decided after a long period of talking about this many, many decades, that we would formulate a written Bill of Rights and put it into the Constitution, which was in 1982.
That 1982 Constitution Act also contained another very important provision.
It severed our last ties with England as a nation in the sense that all of our amendments to our Constitution in the future, after 82, would be done solely in Canada.
And not have to have reference back to the House of Parliament for the final vote on an amendment to our Constitution, which therefore really meant that we became 100% sovereign.
If you want to put percentages on it, if we were 80 or 90% sovereign before that, we're now 100% after that.
And so that was a significant, two very significant measures that were taken.
Sovereignty was 100%, it was called patriation at the time, patriating the constitution or bringing the constitution home for good from England.
And secondly, adding to it, among other things, a charter of rights and freedoms, which defined the rights and freedoms of individuals in the country much the same, even if the phraseology might be a bit different, but the impact was around the same.
Freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, okay, freedom of the press, all of those were in one section of the of the charter.
Freedom of assembly, freedom of association, all in section two of that new charter, in section Six, it was free to move across Canada or leave Canada.
So freedom of movement or mobility rights, as it's called in the Charter.
And then there's a section seven, which says the right to life, liberty and security of the person.
And Section 15 says every individual in Canada is equal before the law.
So those are the four, what shall I say, the pantheon of rights and freedoms that were contained in that Charter, which are germane and relevant to the discussion today.
And my advocacy on it, and being the only First Minister left who was at that table helping to create that Charter, by the way, I have become very active in the last year and a half or more since the pandemic really, and since the government started to impose these mandates to indicate that these mandates are violating these four core areas of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
And that they had no business doing that without going through the proper process, which they didn't do.
I also argue that the intent in one of the sections which said the governments can override these rights in certain circumstances.
And I remember well, the intent at that time was that it was a war, insurrection or some very You know, crucial thing that was apparel to the state.
And I go on to argue that the present circumstance of a virus which only 99% recovery plus 99 point plus recovery and a less than 1% fatality rate does not constitute apparel to the state.
And therefore, they are violating the intent of Section 1.
And therefore violating the Constitution.
I go on to say that even if you wanted to use Section 1, there are four tests in there which had to be met, and the governments have not met those tests.
So in either case, the governments of Canada, of which there are 14 by the way now, 10 provinces, the federal government, and three territories, all of them have issued mandates which violate the Constitution of our country, and particularly violate that charter which I helped create.
Well, that's marvelous.
You've answered my first 37 questions about the structure of Canada, its independence, its constitution, and you've taken us a good way into how things look from the point of view two years plus into the pandemic.
Let me say you may or may not know I'm a scientist by training I'm a biologist and I'm very interested in questions of cause and effect and One of the things that the pandemic allows us to do is
Is to learn something about what the effect of various provisions of our various constitutions, or in some cases the lack of a constitution, has done to the what I would call authoritarian overreach that we are seeing across the West.
So, for example, what you've just told us is that Canada has a constitution
That contains a Bill of Rights very much like the American Bill of Rights, but much later emerging and with what I think is one major difference, which is, and I should tell you I have a couple of hypotheses on the table about why tyranny has emerged differentially in different Western states, and one of the hypotheses has to do with the American Second Amendment.
Which complicates the question about usurping rights.
So when our government is in violation of our rights, it has to take into account that the population for both better and worse is very well armed.
Do you see the absence of gun rights from... Are they completely absent from the Canadian Constitution?
Yes.
Yes, they are.
So, do you see the absence of those rights any differently now than you did in 1982?
No.
No, not really.
Not really.
When one considers, and in our particular case, you know, I can't speak to the atmosphere and the circumstance in the United States when the Bill of Rights came in, but I can to the Canadian one.
And at the time, as we get into this, Most of these things, when nations come together, you can go back to Solnstein in Greece, if you want, when he was called out of retirement to try to keep the civil war from happening and bring the poverty stricken slaves together with the oligarchy at the time and forge a new law, which tried to bring things together.
It's always a bargain.
It's always a bargain.
And when we decided on this, Patriation, bring the Constitution home.
And the Charter, because it's a federation, all the provinces were involved with the federal government in forging this.
And each province had their own agenda.
And so we started off with like 20, over 20 items on the table.
Narrowed it down until we got something that everybody sort of could live with.
So there were other parts to that Constitution Act, which included things like Indigenous rights, minority language rights, non-renewable resources, an amending formula, right?
We're all part of this, as well as the Patriation and the Charter.
So they were all negotiated as equals, if you will, of factors in bringing the Constitution together.
So, in that context, and in that light, when you consider what I just defined as the four areas, they're pretty clearly defined.
They're pretty clearly defined.
I don't know how to say any more about free expression, or freedom of religion, freedom of conscience, in a constitution.
And I think a lot of people, at least in Canada, and I suspect in the United States too, and in the West generally, sometimes confuse constitutions with ordinary federal law or state law or provincial law.
There's a big difference, right?
The constitution is the glue and the principles and the values which are supposed to encompass the new government or the new territory, as well as define how it's going to operate.
Okay.
And then you leave the rest of it, because these are principles, to the courts to more define and refine, right?
And with custom and convention over time.
So one of the things missing, and it's a more complicated and longer defining discussion when you get into it into that context, right?
And so always, so I always say to Canadians now, and this is my, like, I don't know how many podcasts I've done.
I guess I'm well over 100 now.
Every day, by the way, I do at least one, if not two.
And so that'll give you an idea how many that would be if I'm going back a year and a half or more on this.
I always try to explain to people that when you talk, it took us 114 years to even open the Constitution.
So these are documents and concepts that are not revisited that often.
We must work it out through the principles that were defined and then work it out through the parliaments and through the judiciary, which are other parts of the government.
And so it's in that context that I say what I just said and answered the question.
And it's one way, reason why I like podcasts better than going on a live program where they've got 30 minutes.
Right now I'm negotiating with a radio station in Vancouver to go on on Monday, I think it is, where they're going to have somebody else on to counter what I'm saying.
But the problem is, you know, they have a half an hour and it'll take me in my, not here today, but it'll take me normally when I do a public meeting, which I do a lot of, It takes me 40 minutes to do the whole presentation for Canadians, to start with 1867 and come forward, and to put it in its proper context.
Otherwise, it's not meaningful.
I mean, people will not understand it.
Well, they're arguing with me now, you know, I might get 15.
And then you got all kinds of these ads in between.
And so it makes it difficult to understand.
That's why, like your question, I'm still answering it now, in the sense that, you know, if you feel still comfortable with what you wrote, 40 years ago, 1890 and 1982, and now it's 2022.
The anniversary, by the way, is coming up on the 17th of April, so we're getting close to the 40th anniversary.
My answer is yes, because of the reasons I just gave.
All of these things are bargains.
Okay, well, I understand, and you know, of course, the same was true in the writing of our Constitution.
It's all bargains struck by people who were, in general, extremely farsighted.
In a few regards, not.
But But with respect to gun rights, I mean, of course, our Constitution was written in the aftermath of a revolution.
Exactly.
One with, you know, muzzle-loaded rifles and muskets.
And gun rights, of course, looked very different than, you know, machine guns show up in World War II and World War I, in fact.
And your Constitution was written more than half a century later.
So, of course you would have taken a different view than the American founders, but I guess my question is this, I'm looking at Canada, I'm looking at Australia, New Zealand, The United States and I'm watching the same tyranny unfold differently in these places and I know that Canada didn't have The gun rights.
I know that Australia had them and reversed course and I know that we in the United States Still I have to say we still suffer the cost of those gun rights that I think Ought to be something all Americans can agree on is that whether these rights are good or bad.
They certainly are not cheap Um, but what I will say is, you know, at the end of last summer here in the Northern Hemisphere, I was watching things come apart in Australia and New Zealand and thinking, well, why is, why is that happening there and not here?
And the two hypotheses I advanced was one, they're off by six months because this is a seasonal effect.
It has to do With winter having dragged on now for three months and the tyranny interfacing with the mood of the public or the mood of the government and the other hypothesis was that our gun rights prevent that tyranny from breaking out here in the same way because it might meet a different response and
Now that we, you know, we've effectively tested one of these two hypotheses, because we are now at the end of our winter, and we have seen tyranny unfold, and it has done so differently in Canada than the U.S., which suggests that actually maybe both of my hypotheses were right.
They're not mutually exclusive.
Which is, we were six months behind with respect to tyranny, and it unfolds differently in a state where the citizenry is armed than in one in which it is disarmed.
And so it is that question I'm trying to address with you, which is, you've seen, I know your perspective to an extent, you've seen terrible things unfold.
You've seen your Constitution violated again and again on multiple different fronts by the current leadership.
And it is in that context that I'm wondering, you know, yes, maybe you had to strike the bargain you did, but would Canada Would Canada's constitution be standing up better if the government had more to fear from the citizenry?
A really good question and I can't answer it.
I doubt it myself.
We don't have the same history and culture as you, as the Americans have.
So we come at it from a different way altogether.
So, you know, the gun rights were never even considered during the 1981-82.
By the way, this was 17 months negotiation.
It didn't happen overnight.
It was 17 months of talks between the various governments.
The other issue with a Canadian, I would have to respond as a Canadian, is given what's happened in Seattle and Portland and continues to happen and happens with the Black Lives Matter issue and what is that?
I just saw some stuff on Seattle last night.
There are ongoing issues in the United States unrelated to the mandates which call into question whether in fact You know, the way the United States is unfolding right now is any better than it's unfolding in Canada.
And if you include both the mandates and the disruption of many, many cities and the murder rate that's going on in the United States, one would have to, as a Canadian, take that broader view and say, well, I don't know about this, you know, because As we look at our media from up here and look at what's happening in the United States, and I defend you, I'm very pro-American and defend your country a lot.
I'm foremost, I guess, promoters of America in Canada today who's speeding up.
But I do see cracks in the Constitution of the United States, which may have some relevance to that particular provision of the Constitution.
Yes, there is no question that our Constitution is failing in parallel with Canada's.
And your question about the BLM riots is A good one, but I must tell you, my wife and I, I mean we live in Portland, we watch this go down in real time, and it also gave me pause with respect to our Second Amendment, but in the opposite direction, because what we saw Yes.
Yes.
absolute failure of the rule of law in places like downtown.
What we did not see so much of was the same failure in neighborhoods.
People would march through streets in neighborhoods, and there was social harassment.
But there was a question about whether or not, as terrible as things were, especially here in the Pacific Northwest, in Seattle and Portland, if it might have been worse and been targeted if it might have been worse and been targeted at citizens in their homes if the rioters had not had the same concern about the well-armed nature of the population.
Okay, good point.
So, we don't know.
These are all, you know, and I must tell you, I'm a lifelong liberal.
I have changed my perspective on gun rights, having watched events unfold, you know.
That's a good point, but then you can also argue, well, what was the cause then of it in the beginning?
It did happen.
Yes.
And there were a lot of riots and there were a lot of disruption, at least in the center parts of the city.
But I think it's a really good discussion.
And as a matter of fact, I have never come out against the Americans' provision of gun rights.
I have never opposed it.
And for example, when I defended America, I've defended that particular provision as well.
Because you know why?
Because I understand how the Constitution got formed.
I understand the history and context of the times.
And I would also argue, by the way, as I do in Canada now, if you want to change it, we have a way of changing it, but it's not on the streets and it's not by bringing in mandates and over trying to override the Constitution with doing it the proper way.
Right, well and that is the other thing that we have to say.
So I would say I am both for and against those gun rights.
I think I am now substantially more for than against, but you know, I do find the cost of widespread gun ownership unacceptable in the sense that we have unstable people And that's an awful lot of power to be in the hand of somebody who can't handle it.
But, you know, I do think it may be an important hedge against tyranny, which is maybe my primary concern.
A very good point and hard to argue against, I think, in the broader sense of things.
And the other thing is, I mean, nothing is perfect.
And we've all learned that, if we haven't.
If we adhere to some of the Christian principles and, you know, we all recognize that we're not perfect and that we have to work at it day after day after day.
The other thing that has to be mentioned, and I also mention when I defend America in Canada, is I think right now it's the longest surviving democracy that the planet has ever had.
Number one.
And number two, if one takes the Constitution of the United States in its totality, I don't know if man has created anything better to date, notwithstanding the gun rights.
So you've got to put it into that broader piece.
Well, you know, I think our Constitution has done beautifully.
I think it is now, it is at a point where the values that it seeks to protect remain the right ones, but it is inadequate to the job, right?
Because, for example, let's take the right to free expression, to free assembly, etc.
That is now a right that is more governed by the technical nature of the way we speak and interact than it is by governmental interference.
So to have those rights not protected on Twitter and Facebook and where we actually do our exchanging of ideas means that they are effectively not protected.
Yeah, I couldn't agree more.
But I was going to go on to say, and I'm glad you raised it that way, it's both on the technological side, but in Canada, it's also day to day.
I mean, you know, the dominance of the, you know, there are a number of things operative here.
It was big government, right?
Big press, right?
Big pharma, right?
You know, big media.
So they all converge.
It seemed like the ground was very fertile because in Canada what's been happening over the last 40 years has been a gradual erosion of our political institutions at the same time.
The Parliament of Canada doesn't exercise its powers the way it did 40 years ago.
A lot of power has moved to the cabinet and to the Prime Minister's office in Canada, which is completely the antithesis of what the Constitution is all about.
But it's been done without a shot being fired and without a law being amended.
And this is what's happened in Australia and in New Zealand as well, which were formerly British colonies that became independent.
And so what has happened has been very insidious.
Through the media, through the big government, through the big pharma, through the big tech.
Okay, that's the four horsemen, as I call them, of the now apocalypse, if you will, or put a better word of where we are as countries.
And we must now look at how the governments, the state governments, the governments with these other three horsemen have been able to usurp, right?
And overtake our constitutions.
Well, the irony here is that the same thing has happened in the U.S.
It's just happened differently, and I wish I could limit it to four horsemen.
It looks more like an entire cavalry of horsemen from my perspective, including our major political parties, which have Teamed up in the most absurd way to, you know, exactly as you described, to effectively take a carefully balanced set of powers.
I mean, this was how our founders spelled it out.
Checks and balances.
They've taken it and they've transmuted us into something that certainly, you know, there are elements of democracy, but I'm not even sure I would call us a democracy at this point.
There is that organization called Freedom Watch or whatever, or Democracy Watch that scores all the countries in the world every year.
I have some problems with some of their stuff, but in broad terms, they break it down into, once again, it's arbitrary, but they break it down into free, partly free and not free, all the countries in the world.
And I've been arguing over the last while and using that as a little analogy that the United States and Canada up to about two years ago, one could perhaps arguably say we were almost free under their definition.
But now, both of us are only partly free and on our way to being not free.
As a way of trying to bring it into a conversation.
And, you know, I find these descriptions are also not really up to the challenge.
I agree with you that we are only partially free and that the mandates we have seen reveal that in a way that it wasn't clear before.
But it's also the case that I think We are very differentially free.
In the U.S., you're fairly free if you're not a threat to power.
Yes, say it together!
Yeah, so this does not remind me of the country that our founders put together.
It reminds me of a, well, William Binney was an NSA officer who turned whistleblower.
And he hit the nail on the head.
He described what we have.
He held up his fingers.
He said we're this close to a turnkey totalitarian state.
And the key concept is that it's turnkey.
It doesn't feel like a totalitarian state until the provisions are activated.
And what we saw in the pandemic Was that many things that structures that we hadn't noticed suddenly were brought to bear and what's more the The agreement that the world reached in the aftermath of World War two at Nuremberg about immoral orders There was actually a mechanism To get around that.
Well, one thing is many people were not as thoroughly aware of the agreements that were reached at Nuremberg.
But it is also the case that if you deliver a mandate that drives people out of your police forces and your military because they refuse to comply, what it does is it leaves a force that's very compliant and doesn't know that it has to reject immoral orders.
And I guess the third thing I would say is one of the things that I think has given those of us who do know something about history comfort is that one can recognize these things unfolding and one can get out of the way if one cannot True.
turn the tide.
That turns out not to be true.
All of the places one would think to run are undergoing this move towards tyranny at the same time.
How true.
Many of our friends have had left and gone to Nicaragua, Mexico, and other places.
Quite a few have left and gone to both Florida and Texas, and some gone to Idaho and South Dakota in the United States.
Permanently, quite a few Canadians have left permanently for that reason.
But you're so right, because so many places are doing the same thing.
Just to remind you, perhaps in some cases you may not know, in Canada, In 2018, the Government of Canada, in negotiation with all the major news outlets, provided money to them all.
$600 million Canadian dollars over five years to all the major news outlets.
So, for example, in my case, as a former First Minister in Canada, I'm fairly well known by those people over 40 or 50 because, you know, I'm going on 80 now, but I was the First Minister for 10 years.
Well, a year and a half or more ago, all of that major press closed me down.
I can't put a letter in the major newspaper on Vancouver Island where I live right now in British Columbia.
Well, a year and a half or more ago, all of that major press closed me down.
I can't put a letter in the major newspaper on Vancouver Island, where I live right now, in British Columbia.
They will not carry it.
Even though it meets all of the requirements that they say letters to an editor or write are supposed to meet, they will not carry it.
Our major newspapers in Toronto, the Globe and Mail and the National Post, they won't carry my stuff.
And none of the major broadcast media will call me even though I've just done a major speech before 10,000 people and will not carry me.
So we have a very active, you know, fourth estate, the press, which has completely eliminated from its discussion anything to do with anything that's negative about the virus itself and how the government's responded and negative towards the which has completely eliminated from its discussion anything to do with They will not carry it.
There's nobody died from the vaccine.
As far as the mainstream media in Canada are concerned, for example, you know, even though we know over 50,000 for sure, if you combine Western Europe and the United States using their own government numbers.
And so that's how bad it's become in Canada.
And the lady who became sort of the figurehead for the truck convoy that went to Ottawa was fined, was arrested for what was called, they couldn't find anything to do with violence or anything else.
It's mischief.
And the bail hearing for her, her release until they had the main hearing.
In other words, she's innocent until proven guilty under all of our laws and your laws.
She had to come in court in shackles.
We've never seen it before.
Nobody can remember when the last time an accused person, it had to be some kind of dangerous murderer, came in the court in shackles.
And her first court hearing was heard by a judge who had been a liberal candidate in the politics of Canada three, four years ago.
In other words, and the Liberal Party happens to be the governing party of Canada right now.
She was the one who heard the bail hearing.
Yes, I wish I could be more shocked.
The problem is we have seen this in, I think, all of the great Western democracies.
We have seen, you know, and I've been struggling with how to even comprehend it.
And one thing that keeps recurring Is that I thought that Orwell had exaggerated to make the story clear and what I am now watching tells me it was no exaggeration.
Right.
Up is down.
And in this case, the thing that is so troubling is that the people who are participating knew better five years ago.
The same people understood the rights that they are now violating as effectively next door to sacred.
And they are now violating them willingly.
And there is no comprehension that they are in conflict with their own values.
And what has also happened is because the people are getting most of the news to the mainstream media, people who live right around me, right outside my door here, I'm in a small 28-unit complex, okay?
All of the people who live around me and I live in this small city of 12,000 are getting their news just from one or two sources, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation and a couple of newspapers that have refused to carry the alternative view on what's going on.
And therefore, they support what is happening in the complete abuse of our freedoms and rights in our country.
And it extends to every level.
If you look at my Wikipedia page or my wife's Wikipedia page, you will find slander.
We are accused, not even accused, it is simply asserted that we have been distributing medical misinformation on the internet, when in fact what we were doing was functioning as biologists, talking about the evidence and what it implies.
We were doing exactly what we were trained to do.
Same way in Canada, we've got doctors who've been fired from their job, right here in the province that I live in.
Just because they were vaccine hesitant.
Hesitant, right.
Right, because they looked at the evidence.
No, I didn't see that in the Canadian Criminal Code.
I didn't see it anywhere in the Canadian Constitution.
And there's no law in Canada.
Meanwhile, the governing authority, health authority in that region of British Columbia has harassed this doctor, right, has taken away his hospital privileges in the nearby hospital, and is trying to take away his license.
This is in democratic Canada, as we speak.
Well, I don't know.
Have you have you run across the concept of malinformation yet?
Yes.
Yes.
Malinformation.
This is true information that causes people to distrust their government, which our government has now declared a form of terrorism.
Yeah.
Right, so we're now, you know, in a country where effectively our right to critique the government is written into our founding documents.
Critiquing the government is now treated as terrorism, which of course triggers provisions that allow them to violate every single one of your constitutional rights with the possible exception of the third.
But yeah, it's remarkable and, you know, it also There is this question about it's this is not a secret right you and I have seen something we are not alone there are many people who understand what is taking place it's not a majority but there are many people who have seen it and yet it is of such a nature that it is hard to make the and all of the places that you would make the case.
It's like the paper that you would write on has taken up a political position and it will only allow the expression of certain ideas.
- A good way to describe it. - And, you know, let's put it to you this way.
Nobody warned us about that, exactly.
It's one thing to have people, you know, intimidate you for saying things.
It's another thing to have the mechanism of speech, you know, turn off your microphone as you try to make certain points, especially, you know, scientific points, right?
Yes, absolutely, absolutely.
I have to tell you, and you referred to it there, there are people like us and quite a few right in my little small city, okay?
And that's the other side of the coin, but I'll tell you what's happening is that they're gradually removing themselves from this existing society, okay?
They are.
They're homeschooling right across the country.
The problems I live in has more homeschooling per per capita, if you will, than the rest of the country.
But that's, you know, that's gone up like big time.
And all across the country, there are parents who are taking their kids out of school and doing a homeschooling program or actually setting up alternate, outside the system schools, okay?
And we have a small group.
As a matter of fact, you'd be interested to know.
And once again, we're in the minority, but it's a significant minority, and I think it's growing.
For example, tonight, my other activity on today, besides trying to catch up on my emails, which grow by about 250 an hour, and of those, like, 40% are really important.
And I'm missing some of them now because I'm trying to get through them all.
Because I've become very busy, my wife and myself, we are sort of on the political side, one of the leaders in Canada on this movement, not just in British Columbia or in my community, right?
And I'm in great demand on programs like yours, okay?
And we've tried to schedule it.
But tonight, There's a small restaurant in my community, in my city, that once put on a little dinner with my friends for what my wife and I are doing.
Mmm.
Wonderful.
An actual meeting in person.
Yes.
And they have been opposed in their little business to what's been going on all through this and have so far not been fine.
We've got another business here that has been fined and so on for letting people in because they never had their masks on or they weren't vaccinated.
But there's a significant, in this little city, minority, both of small business and of regular citizens who are willing to speak out and be part of organizations which oppose what's happening.
So that sort of keeps me going, right?
The other thing that's happened that you will, I'm sure, be really, really interested in is this.
I'm Vancouver Island, so I'm not allowed to travel, right?
So I can't get aboard a plane.
So I can't speak in Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Ontario like I am in British Columbia, but I can go within the margins of my own car, right, on the highways of Vancouver Island.
So I've done a lot of public meetings, all of which have been sold out.
No fee, but you know, they overloaded the building so that the fire regulations come into effect and all that.
But guess what's happened?
I think many Americans will be interested in that.
It's the fundamental Christian churches And I've come to learn, I've come to learn, and these are ones that are not even part of the mainstream evangelicals.
They're independent churches who are taking the Bible, and here's what our Christianity says according to us, and they have built churches up and down Vancouver Island, and they all may have different names and so on.
But they all share one thing in common.
And I was trying to figure out why this was, and I've spoken in, of all of the public meetings I've done, the majority have been in churches, okay?
Because they've been willing to provide a space, whereas then nobody else in the community has been willing to provide a space.
But here's what I've learned, not only from the pastors, but the people who are adherents.
And of course, they allow other people in too.
Anybody can come to the meeting.
They don't have to be members of that church.
Any public can come, and it's usually about 50-50, I'd say, of adherents and others who just were interested in what I had to say.
But here's why.
Most of these churches are learning in their Bible studies about the early Christian church.
Now, I wasn't so much coggered on to this as when my wife and I, back in the early 2000s, went to Turkey.
And we traveled to Cappadocia, right in the center of Anatolia.
Okay, you've been.
And there, there are communities that went underground.
Physically.
Physically underground.
Cities.
Okay.
Multi-layered cities.
When I mentioned this in one of the churches recently, the place went up.
They were all familiar with it and couldn't believe that a person who was sort of Well, you know, most people know me as well.
I believe in the principles and morality of Christianity and that we must have a code of conduct as a society in order to really function, you know, in a sort of a peaceful, reasonable way.
But they weren't aware that I was aware of the early church.
And when I spoke about Cappadocia, you should see the people's faces light up because they had been learning about it.
Unlike The mainstream Christian religions who have not a clue about early Christianity and how they were prosecuted because of their point of view.
That's amazing.
That's absolutely fascinating.
And I have also seen, you know, it's really interesting.
It does show up amongst Christians that there is a willingness to resist some of this nonsense.
I've been a little disappointed that Jews who have effectively, you know, taken multiple millennium Course in persecution have not rebelled in greater numbers against the tyranny that is unfolding across the West But nonetheless it is it is interesting that we that there are these communities that are not having any of it Absolutely!
And I'm telling you, I was like, right from the north, Campbell River in the northern part of Vancouver Island, all the way down to the capital city, Victoria, which is on Vancouver Island.
Vancouver is not the capital of British Columbia, it's Victoria.
And every weekend, by the way, there are thousands of people who protest at the legislative building.
In Victoria?
Yeah, opposed to what's going on.
And two weekends ago, they had 13,000 people.
at the legislature in little Victoria.
Yes.
Victoria City itself is only about 100,000 people. - Yes. - The problem there is about 300,000 people, but they had and are continuing to have.
And I've spoken there.
I spoke to one of the first rallies there.
And so it's amazing to see that, right?
Even more amazing.
I am well familiar with Victoria.
I've been there multiple times.
You know, it's a it was a destination for people who live in the Pacific Northwest on the American side.
So I'm well aware of the place.
I had no idea there were protests going on there.
I mean, it's, you know, it's a hop, skip and a jump from here.
Regularly.
Regularly.
And, you know, thousands of people.
And thousands of people.
So how have they managed to keep that secret?
Well, because the press, again, won't carry it.
It's not carried in the Times Commons, which is the main newspaper there, right?
I think one story out of all of the things, right?
All of the broadcast media, the TV media.
So you've got to reply on the alternate media in order to get your message out.
So people in Saskatchewan wouldn't know.
And if you do pay attention to the so-called alternative media, then of course there's a great list of stigmas that are directed your way.
So, you know, this is another aspect of this that I wish people put more thought into, which is we have no idea actually how many people believe what and how many people can see the tyranny because the intimidation and the control of our discussion has been so thoroughly effective.
No question.
And even all the way down to polling now.
You can't trust the polls.
Well, you never could trust them all that much, but even less so now in the sense that people are not going to answer, either answer the phone or if they do, they're not going to give how they feel because they're afraid that that too will get somehow, right?
Okay, it was this many in this region of BC who said this according to the poll.
They don't want any chance of getting back to them because they're scared, like you said.
Yeah, no, it is the most bewildering circumstance, right?
You can say the most obvious things and suddenly your life is turned upside down.
Protests of thousands of people can be happening.
Well, the Prime Minister called us racist, misogynists.
Right.
I think he said, you know, we have to wonder if they're taking up some space that they shouldn't be taking up.
I recall him saying that.
Right.
Yeah.
Leaders in the West saying things that, you know, if even 10 years ago, if you had had a preview of what was going to be said, you'd think a prime minister saying that all hell would break loose.
The party would have him out the door.
I was leader of a political party in this country in the province of Newfoundland and Labrador.
And I was a national figure for quite some time because of my involvement with the Constitution and other national matters, okay?
And I know the system in Canada pretty well.
And then I was a consultant for a number of years, right?
And so I've traveled in every single jurisdiction in this country, okay?
Every single one.
I've done business in most.
I've spoken most, okay?
And so I know Canada pretty well, right?
And so when you see now a political party and a country Willing to have a leader and a prime minister who broke the law five times, by the way.
That's documented.
Five times, the Ethics and Conflict Commissioner of Canada has produced reports, investigated the situation, and he has broken the conflict of interest law five times in this country.
And because the law has no accountability except for a $100 fine or $50 fine, he still remains leader of the political party.
And he still remains Prime Minister of Canada.
And so when you have a population that's willing to continue to support somebody who's broken our laws, whereas if you and I broke the law tomorrow, right, you know, we would get significant fines or put in jail or whatever, whereas he can walk scot-free and still be the Prime Minister of this country.
So there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, as our great bird would say, when that can happen.
Yeah, no question about it.
Now, you raised the issue of his violations of the law.
I don't want to miss the opportunity to ask you about violations of the Constitution that you helped write.
I did a quick look through your Constitution.
You know, it does have a lot of familiar themes from the American Constitution, and I spotted several things right away.
You know, even though I'm not a Canadian and I'm less familiar with what has unfolded there, it was still clear that there were several places where your Constitution guarantees rights that were nowhere in evidence.
What do you see as the list of violations?
Well, the first one, you may not be aware, I have taken the federal government to court myself.
Oh, I didn't know that.
Yes, and that was the other thing that, I guess, allowed me to be more of a national figure, is that when I did all these speeches, you know, one night I came home and I got up the next morning and I said to my wife, you know, I'm talking the talk and I know what I'm talking about because I helped create this document and I'm on very safe ground and very confident with what I am saying and these violations.
But one of these days, somebody's going to say to me, even though I'm out there front and I'm risking and I'm doing all of this on my own tab, right?
I'm going all these places, doing all these things and I won't take any money.
I won't take any reimbursement for what I'm doing.
I'm doing it as a Canadian.
And it's somebody who has to give back as well, and all the right reasons.
But the other thing is, somebody could still say, you know, why don't you walk the walk?
So I contacted the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, which is an organization in Canada, which just depends upon contributions from the public.
And they take, help people go to court to challenge the government on constitutional grounds.
That's what they're set up to do.
So I contacted them and we decided, with outside lawyers as well, that I would, with four or five other people, take, but I was the sort of the chief claimant, take the federal government to court over their travel mandates.
Whereas I, as a Canadian, sitting on Vancouver Island, can't get a motor plane in Nanaimo, British Columbia, and travel to anywhere.
I can't travel within my own country or leave my country unless I'm vaccinated.
And so I've challenged that Section 6 of the Charter of Rights and Freedom which says I have the right to travel anywhere in Canada or leave Canada.
So I'm actually, now my court case is registered and there's now lawyers appointed by the federal government who argued their side.
And so we're moving through the courts now, and my hearing is likely to be in August or September of this year.
And so I might get ahead of a lot of the other cases that are in Canada, challenging the Constitution, because most of the mandates in Canada are provincial.
We have to go through the provincial courts first, then to the Supreme Court of Canada.
Mine is a federal mandate.
I'm challenging a federal mandate, which brings me into the federal court of Canada, then the Supreme Court of Canada.
So I only have two steps to go, whereas everybody else, most everybody else has three or four steps to go.
So I'm actually out there front and center, actually In the court.
Fighting tyranny.
My government.
Fighting tyranny.
Wielding your constitution on behalf of your fellow citizens.
Absolutely.
So let me ask you a couple things about this.
All right.
You're on Vancouver Island, which is part of British Columbia.
You cannot get on a plane because you're not vaccinated.
That immediately causes you a problem on Vancouver Island.
You know, I mean, Exactly.
I'm on the western part of Canada, 5,000 miles away is St.
John's, Newfoundland, the province in which I was born.
Not only can't I go to Newfoundland, I can't get on the 9-1-1 and go to Kelowna, or go to Vancouver, or go to Victoria.
Right, okay.
So, I know that there was a regular ferry to, I guess there was one to Vancouver, the city of Vancouver.
Can you get on that?
Yes.
Okay, so you can go by boat.
I can go by boat, but I gotta be masked up.
I can go by ferry because that's inter-provincial.
Remember, we're still in the same province.
Right, but you can't leave British Columbia.
You can go to Vancouver or go to the mainland.
No, on the ferry side.
But I can't even get on a plane and go to another part of British Columbia.
Okay, got it.
Because aviation is federal under the Constitution.
Can you get to Toronto?
No, I can't get anywhere in Canada.
You can't?
No, not by plane or by train.
I'm not allowed to take the train either.
Let's suppose that the mandates collapse as attention turns to events in Ukraine and summer drives the pathogen.
They are falling now, but the federal one hasn't gone yet.
But let's suppose it did.
What happens to your court case?
Stay safe because they broke the law for all of these days and months before they lifted it.
The law doesn't go away by calendar.
It goes away by if you violated it or not.
Right, good.
And then... We're in there to the end, okay?
And if I lose on the federal court, I'm taking it to the Supreme Court of Canada.
I'm not stopping until I go to the highest court.
And then if the highest court turns it down, then I'll have to propose a different kind of country than we got now.
Well, I'm going to be watching this very carefully.
Now, I think the same provision on which the basis on which you are suing also guarantees the right of Canadian citizens to enter Canada.
Which therefore is relevant to the objections that the trucker convoy was raising.
So when your case is adjudicated, will their complaint effectively be adjudicated too?
Yes, yes, that will also affect the truckers and everybody else, because there's the travel mandate, right?
And if the court rules that the federal government violated section six of the right of mobility in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, then, and not only that, Because it's a mandate, and it's a government mandate, the other mandates in the other provinces are going to come on a lot greater scrutiny by the judiciary and may allow the judiciary to be a little bit more independent than they are right now, or force them to be.
So my case is extremely important in that broader context, I think.
As a matter of fact, I write a lot.
I've got my own blog.
I get anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 a day going into my blog, which is rather significant, I think, a personal blog, and a lot of people depend upon my writing and what other things I put on my blog.
I'm about to release, and I'll release it publicly as well, a new essay on the Charter and where two courts already, lower courts, have violated it, okay?
Because I want to pursue this because, as you and I both know, When people speak, and if they have a good case, and you get other people on your side, you can influence not only your governments and your politicians, although they've been sort of absolutely ignoring us to date because we've been in a minority, but as you keep eating away at it, right, eating away at it, you may also Influence the judiciary, because they are still people.
They are still listening to the news and reading things.
And so I keep saying to people in all these public meetings, we keep doing what we're doing.
We keep eating away, beating away at the government, but also the judiciary, who have become rather conflicted in recent times, as I said to you about the female liberal candidate, now a judge in Ottawa, Who was the one who heard the first part of the leader of the convoys case?
She should have recused herself.
The Chief Justice should have said, you can't hear this case because you're conflicted.
None of that happened.
And she heard the case.
So this is absolutely outrageous, right?
So if we keep eating away at it, we may, before it gets to the highest courts of the land, have some impact on at least changing the view of the judiciary so they rein in the governments through the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in Canada, through the Bill of Rights in the United States.
Now, if we're unsuccessful, which most people think I am going to be unsuccessful, then our nation is really, really broken.
I take the view still that there is a chance.
I put it in the hockey game.
Because Canadians understand hockey pretty well.
I say we're in the last part of the second period.
We've got all of the first period to go because the appeal courts haven't heard it yet.
So we've got to exhaust our existing system to see.
We know it doesn't work very well.
We've got to exhaust the last part of our system, which is the appeal courts of the judiciary, before we say we've got to do something different.
So, this raises a number of issues, but I must say I'm most troubled by the implication that the end of a hockey game is the first period.
Is that right?
Yeah.
Oh my god.
The end of the hockey game is the third period.
Oh, it's the third period.
I see, okay.
No, I thought you were numbering it in reverse.
I thought that you had implied that the end of the game was the first period.
No, no.
We're almost at the end of the second period and we've got one period to go.
Got it.
Well, my error.
Okay, two things.
One, I want to just simply mention that what we see on this side of the border is a disturbing tendency to sideline the judicial and legislative branches
By a kind of bizarre fiat in which the executive comes up with a cockamamie theory that says that it doesn't have to listen to the legislature or the judiciary and the point is that's obviously absurd in light of our constitution but if you believe it then you don't ask them, right?
And so many of the worst provisions of the anti-terrorism or supposedly anti-terrorism orders that emerged in the U.S. effectively grant the executive the right to do things without review, right, which wouldn't endure the court's scrutiny.
But of course, if you don't ask the court, then we never find that out.
So I don't know if that's happening in Canada as well.
Not so much in Canada, but it has started to happen with these.
What they're doing is they had opened their parliaments just long enough to do an amendment that nobody knew anything about and that wasn't shown in the mainstream press to give more power to the public health officer in the respective jurisdictions, okay?
And then they can go ahead and issue more and more regulations, don't have to refer back to Parliament.
Now I'm challenging that, and I will in my essay today and in the course, that in the section where the tests are to override, there's something called, but all of this must be in the context of a free and democratic society.
And this is not a free and democratic society when you can do edicts.
And repeat doing edicts based upon something that the Parliament did six months ago or a year ago before the circumstances changed.
So I'm arguing on that case.
The other thing is in our Bill of Rights, in our Charter, it is you must demonstrably justify.
And my argument is they haven't demonstrably justified anything, because within the context of public policy, demonstrably justifying Canada means some kind of cost-benefit analysis.
All governments do cost-benefit analysis.
It's quite common.
I mean, there's nothing magic about it.
And I remember when I was Premier, when I was elected, that when we would introduce new legislation, we often did cost-benefit analysis.
Does this really do more harm than good or more good than harm?
And they have done none of that.
And those words are right there.
in Section 1 of the Charter, demonstrably justified within a free and democratic society.
But the Prime Minister of Canada, as you remember through the truck convoy, introduced the Emergency Act, which was a grandchild of the War Measures Act, in which they tried to bring in and freeze people's bank in which they tried to bring in and freeze people's bank accounts, stop what was going on in Well, it didn't last very long because the investment community, both nationally and internationally, got onto them and said, "See you around, Joe.
We're not investing in this banana republic anymore because if you can freeze the account of this small business, when does my account get frozen because I'm involved in Canada?" So they took away the Emergency Act, but they still left all the other mandates which violate the Constitution, including the travel mandate that we talked about.
Well, as you pointed out earlier, the fact that they removed the Emergency Act does not change the fact that they violated their constitutional protection against unreasonable seizure.
And there are cases in court challenging what they did on the emergency aid, not just because it's lifted, it's still there.
They did wrong and they must be brought to heel for that wrong.
But the point of it all is that all of the mandates around the different provinces, right?
Many of them are still in effect as it relates to masks are just being removed now, but the travel mandate is still there.
And there are vaccine mandates still in place where you cannot win a certain business if you're not vaccinated.
Despite the fact that these vaccines are incapable of controlling... Exactly, of stopping transmission or doing anything good.
And so the mandates are still there and therefore have to be fought every day and every hour of every day.
So, two points.
One, I would argue that the absence of cost-benefit analysis or risk-benefit analysis is the hallmark of the failure of transparency.
That is to say, when you're doing things for reasons other than the ones you're stating, you don't do a cost-benefit analysis because very often you will want to do the things even though they don't add up, right?
They add up for some hidden reason.
And the other thing I wanted to say is, in some sense, We already have a problem, and it's actually a shared problem, that our nations have joined together in the Five Eyes Alliance, which effectively, at least I don't know what else it does.
But one of the things it does is it allows the United States, Canada, and the other members to basically reciprocally violate the rights of the citizens of the Five Eyes.
In other words, Canada can, you know, the United States government is limited in how much spying it's allowed to do against Americans, but it can contract with Canadians to do the spying and vice versa.
And so anyway, we're kind of, we've escaped the bounds that were envisioned by the authors of these documents, including you, I think.
Yes, I couldn't agree more.
I agree with you 100%.
I would even enlarge it.
The nation state, as we have understood it, is under vicious attack right now.
And I believe in traveling around the world and being involved in elective office in Canada, that the savior to mankind and being a democratic organization rests that the savior to mankind and being a democratic organization rests on the shoulders of a nation What we have started to do in our international agreements
Like the EU started it years ago when it was economic, and then it became political.
Thank you for the Brits to get out of that bloody thing.
And it was only, I think they had enough DNA left from the Magna Carta to stop doing this.
I was the ordinary person in Britain who stopped Briecs from being part of the United Kingdom.
It wasn't the leadership.
It was the farmer who suddenly realised that Brussels was going to tell him how many Bushels of wheat he could grow next year.
That's not really triggered what happened in Britain.
But in any case, what's happening in the international agreements now and trade agreements is that they're infringing upon the sovereignty of the United States of America and the sovereignty of Canada.
That's where the line has to be drawn that you do trade agreements and I'll trade with you and you trade back with me either by barter or whichever way you want to do it.
But when you start to interfere with the individual rights and freedoms and the sovereignty of a nation that the Parliament of the United States no longer has complete control over all of its activity, that's where I draw the line.
And the line has been crossed now.
I'm a member of the Pacific Partnership.
I think Trump got out of that.
And rightly so.
And rightly so.
That's where every national government should draw the line.
And we'll do trade agreements because, yeah, we've traded forever.
The Greeks, the Athenians were successful because they manipulated, you know, they managed to trade with all of their partners in the Mediterranean Sea at the time.
And so it goes back to the beginning of man.
But that doesn't mean that you can't have a trade agreement and still have sovereignty.
You can have both.
And that's the way it used to be.
And now the globalists, Starting out of Europe, because they got their European Union still intact in some way or form, even though it's pretty shaky right now, we should not go down that road.
The United States should remain a national sovereign nation, Canada should, and we should then cooperate where we can without interfering with our own sovereignty.
I think this is really the best explanation for what we're seeing, is that there is an unnamed, unelected, unaccountable something that finds the sovereignty of our nations distinctly inconvenient, and the rights of the citizens to be an ever-present thorn in the side, and it is now, it has become impatient, and it used the pandemic, and I must tell you, I do think that this is a very dangerous pathogen.
A pathogen whose hazard is greater than one can see in the case fatality rate.
And by virtue of the fact that it is actually enhanced over what nature would have delivered.
But nonetheless, it used the hazard of that pathogen to get us to unhook provisions of our constitutions that we would never have unhooked under normal circumstances.
You know really this couldn't be more dangerous.
We will not get those rights back if we do not defend them vigorously and they you know Those of us who learned about this as it unfolded are behind the eight ball, right?
The plan was pretty sophisticated and Highly successful before we even knew what we were fighting about so it is time for us to wake up and defend these documents and Yeah.
And what happens in Canada, and I'm sure it does in the United States, in general jurisprudence, here's what happens.
A case comes before the court three years from now in Canada if we don't restore our Charter and our Bill to where it really belongs.
If we don't restore it and get the courts to say, no, the Charter comes first, the Charter is in the Constitution.
By the way, we have a thing in our Constitution that says the Constitution of Canada is the supreme law of Canada.
It oversees all, it's above all the other laws.
If we don't overturn and have the judiciary re-established, what will happen three years from now or four years from now when a citizen of Canada goes to court under their individual rights and freedoms, the judge and the judiciary have the license to say, oh, back in 2022, there was a precedent set.
And it's this precedent now that we must go by.
And the Charter is no more.
Right, but somehow all of the things that made this work, right, are malfunctioning.
So, you know, we literally had the Department of Homeland Security issue a bulletin in which they said That malinformation was a dangerous type of terrorism and malinformation they defined in their document as based on fact but causing people to distrust the government, right?
So the idea that we cannot discuss facts like the corruption of our government that would cause people to be distrustful of it is a violation of the most basic element of our Constitution.
You know as far as I know the ACLU has not immediately emerged to challenge this I hope I'm wrong about that, but it may be that the ACLU is preoccupied with the kind of nonsense that it's been Advancing in recent years and hasn't noticed this egregious violation of our most basic right Exactly.
Same kind of thing is happening in Canada, exactly the same kind of thing.
And the edicts come out of the health departments and public health officers, you know, out of some obscure emergency declared, never defined, right?
And that's the other thing about it.
A lot of this will not pass muster in any reasonable definition of emergency in Canadian law.
But they've declared it one.
And therefore, because they've declared it, it is one without ever defining what the emergency or the pandemic means.
You know, I've said now in my essay, which I'll publish today, for example, there was a professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, who in April 2021, released a report where he reviewed 80 studies from around the world and demonstrated through those studies That the cure was worse than the disease.
The way they had approached the cure, it was worse than the disease.
And he published that.
He could not get any of the mainstream media to carry it.
He went on months and months without that being carried by anybody.
And now, by the way, his document has been validated over and over again, very careful.
And he took all these 80 studies and he used all the different formulas that All of the people like to use to define all of this, okay?
Did it properly.
And by the way, in that study, which is absolutely damning because the two court cases that I use in my essay to show that they violated, okay, the Constitution, these court cases came out in the late fall of 2021, October and November, when his report came out in April.
So I'll come, and one of the courts was in British Columbia, two and a half, three miles as the bird flies from his university.
I mean, you know, I mean, give me a break.
So here you have, and in that report, by the way, he also said that 90 days after the virus was declared back in March of 2020, there were data available, which he produced, which showed That you stay on this present course of that kind of mitigation and you're going to be in deep, deep trouble.
And so he says there was even data available so that the governments in August of 2020 Should have changed course as to how they were mitigating this virus, and they did not.
And that was available.
Right, so this is the thing that I think has been driving many of us crazy, is that what I noticed, geez I can't remember the first time it occurred to me, but what we have in the U.S., and I know that you in Canada have a mirror image of it, is bad public health policy that exceeds what incompetence could have generated.
In other words, if you look at the policy that we have, it is actually the inverse of the correct thing.
It's not even random.
It's far worse than that.
Exactly.
And then you see a cost-benefit analysis like the one you're describing, and there is no interest in looking at it because apparently there is some other priority driving the policy other than the desire to limit the spread of the virus or protect people's health.
And guess what?
The headline of his report was just that, cost-benefit analysis.
Cost-benefit analysis.
That's what the headline, that's what he headlined his report as.
It makes sense and then of course, you know, the pattern is just utterly reliable.
A cost-benefit analysis suggests there's something wrong with what we're doing and anybody who points out that that's what a cost-benefit analysis said is then demonized as if they were unpatriotic or uncaring or motivated by greed or who knows.
And guess what?
In the interviews that I've done in the last four or five days, okay, most of them Canadian, okay, by very well-known, smart, informed people, and I've mentioned Professor Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University.
It's the first time they heard of it, even to this day, because of course nobody's carried it.
It's a little bit like the protests in Victoria that are happening without any awareness.
Yeah, no, it's definitely a bizarre moment and as much as we were thoroughly warned by Orwell and others, somehow no warning is sufficient until you see it in real time.
No, and I think it speaks to history big time.
I think it speaks to history big time, you know.
If you don't learn from history, you're bound to repeat it kind of stuff, you know.
And we've seen this over the years with the various wars and whatever, through all of our history as a species, right, as a homo sapien or whatever you want to call us.
You see it over and over again.
That's why Victor David Hanson, by the way, who you might be aware of in the United States, who writes quite prolifically on a lot of things.
He's a classic scholar.
Out of California.
But he writes a lot in American Greatness and a couple of other websites.
He just did a comparison with the Greeks and what's happening now.
And just, you know, we're not learning from history.
We're not learning from not only yesterday, but, you know, lots of things which happened.
We don't know our history.
We don't know We're not learning from it.
So we're very, as a Christian would say, we're very fallen angels, aren't we?
Well, you know, I struggle.
There's a certain penalty that emerges if you do draw parallels to history, right?
You know, you can find yourself in very hot water if you draw these connections.
And, you know, it strikes me as an artificially high standard.
Right, so okay, we've got these vaccine mandates.
It's not exactly Mangala, it's not exactly Tuskegee, right?
Those are not perfect parallels.
But I guess my point is, at the moment that you find yourself reaching for parallels, and those are your closest your closest examples, you are in very dangerous water.
And so I don't know how to make this point, right?
Why are we in this section of the library looking for analogies, right?
Things are bad at the point that Tuskegee becomes relevant to a active public health program.
Yeah, good point.
And, you know, likewise the internment of Japanese Americans.
Right.
All of the relevant examples from history are imperfect, but that ought not provide us comfort because the fact is, you know, they're as close as we got.
Yeah, but you'd like to think that we learn and that we will not And repeat, you know, certain decisions which we know were based upon data, regardless of what the nature of that data was, whether it was a virus or something else, that we won't then repeat it because we've had knowledge of how our imperfection in another that we won't then repeat it because we've had knowledge of how our But we don't seem to be able to do a really good job on advancing ourselves.
Technically, we've advanced ourselves, but I don't know.
Does anybody ever come along who has the same impact that Socrates or Plato or Aristotle has had?
I mean, where's our Montesquieu?
Where's our political philosopher of the 18th century?
Where is our John Stuart Mill?
I mean, I don't know if there's anybody around.
Where's Francis Bacon?
Where's Cicero?
So, I'm not so sure that on a proper score of globally doing this, that we've advanced all that much as a more well-rounded human being.
Yes, that's true.
And the other question is, why do we not have these figures?
And in part, it may be because to the extent that they exist, they've been so demonized and driven to the fringe that we're not even aware of them.
Good point.
Which is a tremendous, a tremendous danger.
All right.
Is there anything else you would like to cover before we wrap this up?
No, only that.
And I keep arguing, and I know it's sort of a thing a lot of us say, but civil disobedience is still a very important concept in any sensible democracy, any real democracy.
That's why that thing in Victoria is very important.
And I keep saying that if every legislature in Canada, every Saturday, there were 10,000 plus people on an ongoing basis over the next, all through the summer, That I think we could have an impact upon public policy, but without there being civil, I put it this way.
A good democracy is only one that has a high level of civic engagement.
And as the level of civic engagement goes down, so does the level of democracy.
And I think that's perhaps the best way of putting it.
And you can go and look at examples everywhere, and that will be so.
If locally in your school board situations, You get a lot of people out voting for their school board member, you'll get a better school board because they have to be more accountable and they know they have to be more accountable.
The less specific engagement, the school board goes out and does its own thing, does a whole bunch of things so that then all of a sudden there's a crisis and we've got years and years before we can repair it.
So the higher the engagement of the individual in their local communities as well as their organizations nationally, The better chance we have.
So I say to people in Canada and the United States, get involved with your organizations that are fighting for freedom and are fighting to oppose these undemocratic mandates.
And this may make a difference.
All right, well, I will add one thing then.
I don't know if it's pure coincidence, but the groundwork for the undermining of the Western democracies was laid before the pandemic provided the excuse.
And the most fundamental element of it was the breakdown in our ability to agree on, I think, literally anything.
Right, so I was watching in the academy the failure of our agreement that 2 plus 2 equals 4, that men cannot magically become women, that pedophilia is bad, right?
All of these things that every reasonable person would have agreed on 10 years ago has broken
Free and we are now unmoored and I think it is that failure which makes The civil disobedience and the resistance that you are talking about less likely to emerge really these things are so offensive to the the structure of our nations and To you know to the thing that makes the West vibrant that there this you know what Trudeau has done is an affront to
To citizens of any Western nation and it ought to have caused a universal response and the absence of that universal response is emblematic of the fact that we've lost the ability to agree on even the simplest things.
I couldn't agree more.
I really agree.
There was a poll out yesterday in Canada which showed that 48% of Canadians agreed with what Trudeau did and 48% had a problem with it after all the things he's done he's about at the lowest level he'll ever be by the way and the premiers almost all the premiers got a passing grade and their mandates were just as bad if not worse than what Trudeau did so that validates what you just said unfortunately and said what a battle we have well uh yeah that's uh
it's a terrible note to end on but I guess I would say that uh in this discussion I think it should be evident that um you know good people who are still committed to uh seeing the world as it is and uh making it better can have a perfectly enjoyable conversation and It has been a real pleasure.
Brian Peckford, where can people find you?
You said you had a blog.
Yes, they can find me at Peckford number 40, number 2, because I was born in 1942.
So P-E-C-K-F-O-R-D, the number 4, the number 2.wordpress.com.
Excellent.
Anywhere else people should look for you?
I don't think so, except because the press won't carry it, but that's the best place to find me.
And yeah, I'm there every day.
Excellent.
I will put a link to that in the description of this video.
