Bruce Pardy, Queen’s University law professor, calls Ontario’s vaccine passports—enforced by police with PDF photo requirements and now an app—Canada’s worst civil liberties crisis since WWII internments or the FLQ October Crisis, violating Charter rights under Section 7. British Columbia’s exclusion of medical exemptions and lack of opposition from media, courts, or unions signals a cultural retreat from legal scrutiny, risking tyranny akin to China’s social credit system. Rebel News’ crowdfunded litigation, like fightvaccinepassports.com, targets strategic cases, but Pardy warns proving violations is tough with private businesses involved, urging stronger legal challenges to reverse the slide toward unchecked state power. [Automatically generated summary]
Today a feature interview with a civil liberties oriented law professor in Canada.
I know you think I've just described a unicorn.
Do they even exist?
Is it one in a million?
It's like those albino rhinoceroses that are just so rare.
Well, I'm talking about Bruce Party, Queen's University lawyer.
He's going to talk to us for about half an hour about the state of play, civil liberties in the world.
That's ahead.
Before I get to that, let me invite you to become a subscriber to Rebel News Plus.
I think I told you, we're giving away for free.
Go to rebelnews.plus.com, rebelnewsplus.com, and enter the promo code Election, and you can get a free subscription.
Now, when the free subscription is over, I think it's for a month, we'll invite you to pay $8 a month, and we hope that you'll like it enough that you'll be happy to do so.
So that's just at RebelNewsPlus.com.
Code word, Election.
All right, here's today's podcast.
Tonight, a feature interview with law professor Bruce Pardee.
It's September 2nd, and this is the Ezra Levant Show.
Why should others go to jail when you're a biggest carbon consumer I know?
There's 8,500 customers here, and you won't give them an answer.
The only thing I have to say is the government will buy a public is because it's my bloody right to do so.
I believe we're in the worst civil liberties crisis in Canadian history.
I've made my case to you on that before.
This is worse than the October crisis, the FLQ crisis in Quebec.
Of course, that province was put under martial law, but it was just for a matter of weeks, and it was just one place.
And it was just because there were bombs going off in mailboxes and people being kidnapped and murdered by an actual terrorist group.
That was bad, but it was limited in time and scope.
Of course, the Japanese internment was bad too, but it was limited again to one group of people.
You can disagree with it.
I do disagree with judging people based on race.
But there was a rationale that was particularly linked to the war, and it was just that group.
And just for that period of time, what I'm talking about in Canada now is a lockdown, a house arrest, a discrimination against people of all backgrounds for any reason or no reason using public health as the excuse.
So it covers everyone in Quebec.
It covers everyone who is Japanese-Canadian and everyone else too.
There's no end in sight.
And it takes more and more of our powers away.
Even in Japanese internment, as unfair and illegal as it was, people could still leave their houses.
It was just basically an ethnic ghetto.
They were watched in a kind of prison, but it's not as much of a prison as being in place during the lockdowns that we've had.
I fear that things are going to get much worse.
We talk about grievances and misconduct of the past of Aboriginal residential schools.
I agree there are things wrong with people being ripped away from their parents.
I absolutely agree that family units are important.
And I put it to you that we can see cases already of kids being removed from parents in custody disputes because one parent is not for the vaccine and the other is.
People are losing their jobs.
They're losing their place to live.
I put it to you that we are in the worst civil liberties crisis in Canadian history.
The former U.S. Attorney General said this COVID lockdown crisis was the worst civil liberties event in American history since slavery.
And I would agree that that is the only thing in the North American continent that trumps what we're going through now.
Can you deny it?
Well, I think that most lawyers, civil libertarians, law professors, and judges have been absent in the last 18 months, and it's terrible.
But today we have a feature interview with one law professor willing to talk about it and who believes that civil liberties are important.
His name is Bruce Party.
He's a professor at Queen's University, and I had the pleasure of sitting down with him for half an hour.
Here's that feature interview today.
Folks, please, the facts are clear.
The vaccine is the best tool we have to keep people safe, keep our hospitals from being overwhelmed, and avoid further lockdowns.
And that's why we're adopting an enhanced vaccine certificate.
We'll hear from Minister Elliott and Dr. Moore shortly.
But after in-depth discussions with our medical experts, we've landed on a vaccine certificate policy that is based on evidence and best advice.
It's a policy with the following key principles.
Vaccinations will be mandatory for certain indoor settings where the risk of transmission is highest because masks aren't always worn, including restaurants, bars, and casinos, among others.
Enforcement will be led by law officers, will be reasonable, and will rely on individuals and businesses to do the right thing.
That was yesterday, Ontario Premier Doug Ford announcing what he swore on a stack of Bibles he would never do.
He's bringing in mandatory vaccines and the concomitant vaccine passports, essentially a biomedical security device that you must carry with you on your phone.
For the first month, you have to carry a picture of a PDF on your phone, but after that, it'll be an app, spyware, really.
I see news out of Australia that their proposed app will require you within 15 minutes of notification by police to take a photo of yourself and use facial recognition.
That's a tracking app being used in Australia in the name of the quarantine.
They will require you on 15 minutes' notice to photograph yourself.
It is tagged to your location.
It is a quarantine enforcement mechanism.
And do you think that Ontario's COVID app will stop at just measuring COVID or will it have new functionalities like Australia's done?
Well, that's the context of our meeting with one of Canada's very few law professors who thinks about civil liberties in an active way, not a historical way.
I'm talking about Professor Bruce Party of Queen's University Law School.
Pleasure to have you here in the studio.
Thanks for having me.
Thank you for being here.
I remember in the 20th century when I was a kid thinking that civil liberties were an interesting thing, an idealistic thing, but they're also a thing of the left.
Berkeley and Freedom of Speech, in this country, Alan Borovoy, a civil libertarian.
These are folks who would take atrocious cases to prove a point that freedom is for everyone.
And that's how they showed their liberalism.
They would take cases that they disagreed with, like the ACLU sending Jewish and black lawyers to defend Klansmen to make the point.
Here we are in an actual real civil liberties crisis, and where are all the civil liberties lawyers?
Good question.
They are hard cases, I'm afraid.
The problems with these passports seem obvious, but the legal remedies are not so much.
And as you say, the left has a history of defending civil rights, but you can see how they're scurrying into the dark corners.
Now, I mean, Andrea Horgath is an example.
Recently, she made the statement, I think, on social media, that we had to proceed carefully and look out for civil liberties and human rights, and was quickly persuaded to withdraw that remark and correct herself and say that this is not a time for human rights.
You know, there's no pandemic exemption or suspension in our Charter of Rights.
I checked.
It doesn't say this doesn't apply in an emergency.
In fact, the opposite.
All of Canada's emergency legislation has to be charter compliant and has some tools in there to make sure it's so.
I even saw liberal cabinet ministers saying, oh, the charter, poo-pooing the charter itself, which used to be the lifeblood of the Liberal Party.
Yes.
Well, the thing about constitutional documents like the Charter is that you really need them the most when these kinds of crises arrive.
And so if the presumption is we can set them aside when we have a problem, then there doesn't seem to be very much reason for having them.
Section one is the famous Achilles heel of the Charter.
This is the reasonable limits provision.
And in a crisis like this, an emergency, it looks so far like courts are inclined to say, well, yes, maybe your charter rights have been infringed, but given the circumstances, that's okay.
One judge, for example, recently compared this COVID period to a time of war and said, well, during times of war, governments can expect citizens to give up some of their freedoms to get on the team.
And if that's going to be the rule for the Charter, then the Charter diminishes in importance.
You know, you're exactly right.
Free speech, for example, you don't need it when you're talking about gardening or sports.
You need it on the tough cases.
Otherwise, it doesn't really count for anything.
And I think civil liberties in a time of war, that's pretty much when you do need it.
Just before we came in here, you and I were talking briefly about the Japanese internment during the Second World War.
And we know that that was wrong because that was judging people based on race.
They weren't a proven threat of anything.
It was just because they happened to be genetically Japanese descendants.
But what you just described, and I don't know which judge you're quoting, maybe you would tell us.
If that judge were around in 1941, that judge would be saying, hey, sorry, Japanese folks, we know this is really wrong.
But sorry, you know, into the internment camps you go.
I mean, if you're saying in an emergency permits anything, then first of all, everything will be an emergency.
Correct.
Including a disease that has a 99% plus recovery rate.
Yes, correct.
So who was the judge and what were they saying?
I believe it was from the federal court.
I forget the name of the judge, but it was a COVID.
Was it on the quarantine case?
It was a quarantine case.
I think that we crowdfunded some litigation there.
We were very disappointed.
Yes.
That was the case where this government policy said you had to stay for three days at an airport hotel.
Right, correct.
Yes.
Instead of going straight home, one of our reporters went through that.
He counted he had 14 personal interactions in his stay there, as opposed to just going straight home.
And the federal court says, sorry, that's legally kosher.
Right.
Well, you see, this is part of what this is all about, right?
This is symbolic.
It's not real if you look at a lot of the data and the evidence.
Now, I, of course, I'm not a doctor.
I'm not a scientist, but I can read.
And I've read a lot of the stuff.
And this seems to me to be more symbolic of something than real.
If I can make this comparison, it seems a little bit like Canada's climate change solutions, which actually will make no difference to anything.
But they're still very important because it's important to be doing the right thing in the public good.
That is a very perceptive comment.
And we see that Justin Trudeau is now saying, hey, this has been such a great 18 months.
Let's apply it to global warming here.
Let's take a look at him saying that just the other day.
He's loved the last 18 months.
He wants a climate emergency.
Let's take a look.
What we learnt from this climate, this COVID crisis, we will be applying to the climate crisis, to the housing crisis, to reconciliation, to making sure that everyone has good jobs and careers that carry them through and create opportunities for their kids.
Yeah, I think politicians love a crisis.
They love a war.
It makes them very important.
It makes journalists very important.
It excuses a lot of things.
And it distracts from solving more humdrum problems.
Yes, but one of the differences between this and, well, there are lots of differences, but one difference between this and war is that this seems to me to be far more insidious.
So you talked about the Japanese internment.
I mean, that was a terrible thing, but it was an obvious thing.
They weren't doing that for the good of those individuals.
They didn't pretend to do that.
They said, well, sorry, we have to go here, but it's for the greater good.
In this case, these vax mandates are being presented as, well, it's for your own good.
That's a very perceptive point.
I mean, no one was pretending that this was good for the Japanese.
We were saying that is awful, but we're in a war.
We have to do it.
I think just the same way so much of airport security is security theater.
I don't know if they've ever caught a terrorist in 20 years in any airport in North America.
I think a lot of this is public health theater.
And we saw that with the masks and then the double masks.
And we even saw people telling the New York Times, I want to wear a mask even though I'm vax because I don't want people to think I'm a Republican.
Like it's a status thing.
It's an in-crowd, out-crowd, ruling class versus the ruled.
It is so political.
And the vaccine itself has become political.
And I mean, I remember when Donald Trump talked about other remedies like hydroxychloroquine, and instantly everyone who was against Trump said, well, then we're not for that remedy.
It really doesn't have anything to do with a pandemic anymore at all, even if it ever did.
No, no, it's a turning of the culture in a way, or one of the symptoms of the turning of a culture.
It's like a purge of independent thinkers or a purge of people who want to be able to make their own calls on their own medications.
You know, I look at what we rely on to keep us a liberal society, a happy place that we like to live.
And there's a lot of, I compare it to a net with lots of little nodes.
And you can have one or two knots on a net that are broken and the net still holds.
But if they are all broken, the net breaks.
And I'm talking about the government and the opposition whose job is to oppose.
I'm talking about law professors and judges and lawyers.
Virus, Choice, and Control00:11:20
I'm talking about colleges of physicians and surgeons with maybe a second opinion.
I'm talking about popular culture.
There's so many institutions and every single one of them, I believe, has failed.
And so all of a sudden we went from a happy society to what I regard as next to a tyranny.
We're not there yet, but my God, we're moving there fast.
I think it's because every single one of these institutions failed at the same time.
Yeah, I think that's an interesting comment.
To me, there's a very interesting connection between this crisis and freedom of speech, which is also in crisis.
Yes, because the two things seem to be different subjects.
One is public health and personal medical decisions, and the other one is speech.
But there's a very close connection between them because a lot of the information about the vaccines and about the virus and about the lockdowns has been censored.
So for example, the Ontario College of Physicians and Surgeons, when I say college, I don't mean school, I mean the regulator, the regulator that licenses physicians, a little while ago came out and basically said to the doctors, you will not talk about this unless you're talking in an approved way.
Or your license will be in danger.
Now, that's all about the virus, but it's also about speech.
I mean, the whole idea of a second opinion, that, you know, I want to get a second opinion doctor.
Can I get another opinion?
Sometimes doctors recommend you get another opinion because so much of medicine is an art, not just a science.
And it used to be that when you got a second opinion, that second opinion was not perceived as a threat to the legitimacy of the first opinion.
You know, Richard Feynman, the great physicist and scholar, said science is the belief that the experts can be wrong.
Right, right, right.
And the minute you think, no, that the expert is a high priest, like Anthony Fauci, then you're not doing science anymore.
You're doing religion or superstition.
That's right.
That's right.
It's science in a hierarchy.
And science doesn't really have hierarchies.
That's the way it's supposed to be.
We've published probably 20,000 videos on YouTube since we started our company.
And I think we got one strike.
That's what YouTube calls it when you're outside of their policy.
And actually, we had it reversed.
But suddenly, YouTube has new rules.
If we say that a certain medicine called ivermectin, which by the way won the Nobel Prize for Medicine, has been used millions of times, saved millions of lives, if we say that that is a cure for this virus, and I don't know if it is, how would I know?
But if we have that opinion, we will get a strike as if we showed a terrorist act or a snuff movie or obscene pornography.
There's a list of things you're not allowed to say about this virus that are incredibly particular about the provenance of the virus, about and if you contradict health authorities, which are political authorities, YouTube has a list of very specific things that if you say them, it'll be tantamount to you having an ISIS channel or something.
I've never seen anything like it in my life.
And part of the trouble that we're in right now is that all of these things are happening and it's not entirely clear that they are actually violations of any of our constitutional rights.
Well, and that's what's scary to me because we talked about the hotel quarantine lawsuit.
We have funded a few lawsuits here and we intend to fund several more about the vaccine passports.
And yet other than a tiny detail in Quebec's curfew law that I think applied to homeless people, I am unaware of any judge anywhere in Canada who has anywhere slowed down, let alone stopped, a lockdown provision.
And I know, and there's plenty of cases have gone to court.
I wouldn't say 100.
But whether it's a human rights commission, whether it's federal court, whether it's provincial court, I have not seen any ruling yet.
And the thing about the vaccine mandates, the vaccine passports, is that they're less obviously violations of charter rights than the lockdowns were.
The lockdowns, you can say, well, you're keeping me in my house.
That surely is a restriction of my liberty under Section 7.
But with the vaccine passports, here you have a situation where the government is doing indirectly what it probably could not do directly.
So for example, if the government of the province or the federal government came down and said, we're going to have an actual vaccine mandate, everybody will get a vaccine or we will fine you or throw you in prison.
If you had that, then that would be pretty obviously a violation of Section 7, I think.
And a judge.
Life, liberty, and the security of the person.
That's right.
It would be enforced medical treatment without consent.
Right.
But that is not what's happening.
The charade that's going on is that these vaccine passports are actually preserving your ability to choose.
You don't have to get a vaccine.
You do not have to get a vaccine under these vaccine passports.
The story is the choice is yours, but of course there are consequences to your choice.
And so don't get one if you don't want to.
But if you don't, then you can't fly.
Or you can't go on a train.
Or you can't see a ballgame.
And maybe you can't have a job.
But it's still your choice.
Yeah, and that's no choice at all.
You would be shocked at my email inbox, the pain and fear of people who cannot afford to lose a job.
So many people are one paycheck away from not making rent.
Yes, yes.
And you don't feel like you're at risk from the virus.
You maybe have live a healthy life.
Maybe you know a year and a half into it that it's really old people, fat people, people with underlying comorbidities, as they say.
So if you're, you know, I saw a survey from Abacus Polling that said the average vaccine objector is a 42-year-old Ontario mom who votes liberally.
Yeah, I saw that.
So a 42-year-old mom, by the way, I should tell you that under the vaccine adverse event registry, that is the most dangerous group in terms of adverse events from vaccines.
Just coincidentally, maybe it's not a coincidence that moms are the most worried.
Because to tell that mom who is probably protective of her kids and protective of health and probably thinks more about health than the husband, I mean, moms are often in charge of health for the family, right?
To tell that mom, you'll lose your job, your husband will lose his job, your kids will be kicked out of school, they won't be able to go to school, they'll have to do Zoom classes from home, which is not real school.
Is that a free choice?
That's like, you know, in the Godfather movie, when Luca Brassy says, you know, I made him an offer, he couldn't refuse.
He had a gun to his head.
Your signature or your brain's on the paper.
Well, it's an interesting sort of legal problem and conceptual problem, right?
Because there are some circumstances in which when employers require employees to do things, it seems to be completely legitimate.
And we don't call it coercion.
So for example, if you're working for someone and they say, go mop the floor, and you don't want to mop the floor, and you say, well, I'm being coerced.
Well, in a way, you are because you either have to mop the floor or lose your job.
But on the other hand, you can quit if you want to and go somewhere else.
But it's what you signed up for.
I'm going to be a floor mopper.
Sure.
Now, that's the difference.
And because it's a variation or a change to your employment conditions, that's the theory upon which a lawsuit might rest.
So if you had an individual employment contract and the employer sort of came in suddenly and said, right, from now on, this is the situation.
Constructive discretion.
Constructive disclosure.
It's possible.
They sprang it on you.
They changed the title.
On the other hand, some employment contracts allow for changing policies from the employer.
So it all depends.
And it depends even more with respect to those workplaces that are unionized because they have collective agreements.
And then the question is, does this new policy of the employer conflict with the collective agreement?
And does the union care?
You know, it's so interesting.
Again, we were just chatting about this before we sat down.
I see some robust unions, particularly those with a working class sensibility.
I think the American Postal Workers, for example, they're saying, no way are we doing this.
The Toronto Police Association, the Cops Union, they're saying no way.
And that's interesting because they're going to be the enforcers in some ways.
But then they don't want the vaccs for them.
They're healthy young guys.
You're a 30-year-old cop that probably works out to stay fit for your job.
You have an extremely low rate of serious harm or death from this virus.
And they know it.
They're not taking the jab.
But I see other unions, frankly political unions, pink-collar, white-collar unions that are dependent on government friendship, like Unifor came out saying, we love these vaccines.
What's it like on campus?
Are you able to speak about it?
My perception is that many of the university faculty unions are generally supportive of these measures.
Well, you know what, if I'm not mistaken, not a single professor in Canada has lost a day's pay in the last 18 years.
In fact, perhaps they've kept the pay but not had the work.
Well, we have been teaching online, which is a pain in the ass and not good for anybody.
But it is true, I don't think that anybody's actually lost any job or pay for over it.
You know, I really think that's part of it.
There is an industry that has grown up.
I mean, we know that Jeffrey Bezos doubled his net worth.
Amazon, Netflix, Disney Plus, all the, you know, the DoorDashes, all the industries that have crept up to take advantage of the lockdown.
And I suppose good for them.
I regret that Walmart was able to stay open, but mom and pop shops weren't.
I sense an injustice there.
Well, this is one of a good example of not having the same rules for everybody, whether it's in a crisis or not.
Yes, we used to have this general proposition that was generally accepted by everybody, sort of so deeply held that people didn't even think about it, that the same rules and standards should apply to everybody.
And this lockdown situation has been one of those times when that obviously hasn't applied.
And the bigger you were, the better off you were, because the mom and pop stores need people coming in the door.
They generally don't have a web presence or not a big one, and they don't do their business that way primarily.
And so if you shut them down, throw a lockdown, you're just going to kill them off.
You know, it's heartbreaking, but that's in the very first few weeks, two weeks to flatten the curve, hey, everybody, just hold tight for two weeks till we're through the worst of it.
I think everyone said, okay, no one knows anything about this virus.
Let's take a leap of faith together.
There actually was a feeling of solidarity in there.
Well, not for everybody.
Some of us said at the time, watch out.
This is not going to go well.
You're not going to stop this.
Social Credit Surveillance00:02:31
And once you get it rolling, the government won't want to roll it back.
And look at what has happened.
And the same thing I think is going to happen with these vax passports.
Once you start down that road, you have an infrastructure in place.
And then they can start to measure other kinds of things to make sure that you're on the right side of things before you're allowed to do stuff.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, let me just play for you a clip.
I think this is from an American network talking about the advent of China's app-based social credit system.
Take a look at this for a reminder.
So picture your life in a place where everything you do, what you buy, how you behave is tracked.
The government gives you a score.
And the score is a measure of how trustworthy you are as a citizen and determines what you're allowed to do, like ever.
Boarding a train, getting a mortgage, all goes back to this score.
It's called social credit.
It sounds like that showed Black Mirror, but it's actually happening in China.
So how does that change you?
Does it change you?
What does your life look like when your every move is watched?
The system's eyes are in big data, artificial intelligence, and roughly 200 million surveillance cameras.
And that's the thing I mentioned in Australia.
So understand what Australia is doing.
Oh, yeah.
Like, you get a ping on your phone.
You have 15 minutes to hold it up to your face, take a picture, and the GPS and your face will prove to police where you are.
And if you don't answer within 15 minutes and let your phone spy on you, then the police will come.
And imagine if that's connected to your credit card.
So now, oh, he's at this restaurant or your bus pass.
Oh, he's on this route.
And if it's an everything system and a panopticon that, you know, you're no longer being spied on by an outside force.
You're being spied on by your own phone.
And by the way, if you don't have your phone with you, you're going to get in trouble because it checks.
Well, you see, wouldn't that be interesting for a government to require you to own a phone?
I mean, that in itself is a very important thing.
But again, they say, oh, you don't have to own a phone.
It's your choice.
You cannot have a phone, but just then.
I feel this is the worst of all worlds.
Important Cases to Bring00:15:56
You know, I've read the warnings that Pfizer and the other companies put out.
They're very detailed for legal reasons and for moral reasons and medical reasons.
They list all the side effects.
One of the things they repeatedly say is you need informed consent to take this because it's still an experimental drug.
The FDA has ordered Pfizer and the others to keep testing it for years to check out myocarditis, that's inflammation in the heart, and other things like that.
So Pfizer, I mean, if you're in the pharma business, you're worried about product liability, hasn't it?
But not in the case of the vaccine, right?
Because they're immune.
Yeah.
They're immune.
Funny word, isn't it?
But they talk about informed consent.
I do not believe that pressuring someone to take a jab is informed consent.
I think it's informed consent, but it's not free consent.
It's not free.
Well, here's the other problem, though.
So we're liable to say, well, if your employer, for example, requires you to take a vaccine, then you're taking the vaccine without informed consent.
But the problem is that the transaction about the actual vaccine is not between you and the employer.
So when you go to get the vaccine from a doctor or a nurse or a pharmacy, that's the transaction.
And that's the moment where you're supposed to be given information so you can make informed consent.
And that's where the liability will lie on that ground if you don't.
But so it's, again, it's indirectly, not directly.
Someone might say it's unethical for a medical practitioner to do a medical procedure, including an injection, on someone who is under duress.
Some would say if someone is, I've got, like, remember this?
This is a judge in the States who said to a man, five years, like a convict, five years or one year in the jab.
Take a look at this.
Common police court Richard Fry tells me he started using the COVID-19 vaccine as a term of probation in his courtroom last week, but not for everyone.
He ordered it three times out of 20 different sentencing hearings.
I did talk to one of those three offenders today, and he tells me he feels very strongly about this and feels that this order violates his civil rights.
One week to the day.
The case was about a gun charge and some drugs.
Franklin County criminal offender Sylvan Latham tells me he stood before common police court judge Richard Fry.
I know Dudge Fry's reputation.
I know he's known for giving people max time, jail time, all that.
I don't want to go to jail.
I don't want to have five years probation.
Nathan thought his attorney struck a deal with prosecutors to three years probation.
But during his sentencing hearing.
I was stressed out right then.
I didn't know what to do.
I was kind of, I was very much so put on the spot.
Latham said the judge told him he'd give him the five-year max unless he got a COVID-19 vaccine.
With the shot, Latham said his probation would be cut down considerably to just one year.
Saken at this point.
Like, I don't really like where this is going.
There's a case of someone who put aside the fact that he's a criminal.
We know that.
Now the question is, do you do one year?
Do you do five years?
And, but that's an actual question, right?
So, because the judge has...
Oh, but he's got a choice.
Yeah, well, if you're a doctor, both those choices.
Let's just consider this for a moment.
Both of those choices are choices backed with the violence of the state.
You know, we'll throw you in jail with police behind you, or you'll take the jab.
But this court order will be enforced with the power of the state.
Whereas, and this is a distinction that they make, whereas with your job, you don't have to have the job.
If you don't want the job, then you can go find a job somewhere else.
And to give them credit on that basis, we say that about other things, right?
So here's an analogy.
It's not the same thing.
I grant you it's not the same thing, but it's the same abstract idea.
So let's say your employer says, we're bringing in a policy where everybody has to have a short haircut.
And you say to yourself, well, I don't want a short haircut.
And you think, I'm being coerced.
Well, in a sense, you are.
But you've got a choice.
You can either get a haircut or find a new job.
And when you go to the barber to get a haircut that you don't want, the barber is not battering you because you've gone to the barber for a haircut.
I would say that if there was a medical practitioner who has some oaths, do no harm, it's medically unethical to do a procedure on someone for no good reason or even a bad reason.
And so if that criminal came and said, the judge says if I do this, I get out four years earlier, I think that that medical practitioner might be justified in saying it's unethical for me to give you the jab because I know that because you don't need it.
You're doing it for these other reasons.
And I will not perhaps see what.
But now we're mixing up consent and motivations.
All right.
So if a doctor, so I grant you for sure that the doctor has a responsibility to say, look, here are the risks and here are the benefits of this.
And I'm not going to do this to you until you tell me that you understand and that you agree and that you want me to do this.
If you do not want me to do this, I will not do it.
But if you tell me that you do in spite of the situation that you're in, in spite of your motivations, then okay.
I see.
Well, I feel like this is a ratchet.
Once you're in, you're never going back.
Sure.
Yeah.
Doug Ford claimed it's temporary.
He had no end date.
Still waiting for the end of the war so that income taxes will end, right?
Yes.
We're going to challenge some of the worst vaccine passports in BC, for example.
They won't even allow medical exemptions.
Wow.
I heard that.
I don't know.
I don't understand how they're going to arrange that, but okay, let's.
Well, I mean, and why not?
And even if that's just to scare people and they move it back an inch, mission accomplished, by saying, by taking such an extreme line and by having no media call them out, no opposition party call them out, no law professors call them out, no court called them out, no one called them out, you know, and you try and say something on YouTube, okay, get ready for a strike.
We're going to challenge the law in the places where the vaccine passport comes, and we're looking for strategic cases.
In fact, frankly, if you find cases that you think have a very persuasive or a plaintiff who's very sympathetic, who has done everything right, and who has been punished brutally by an institution, like in BC when they say no medical exemptions, that's insane.
We want to file these cases.
And like you say, there hasn't been a single win yet.
What do Canadians do if the courts say, sorry, guys, it's just how it is, Section 1?
Well, you know the saying that law is downstream from politics and politics is downstream from culture.
And people sometimes think that, you know, in this kind of a crazy time, the law will save us because the law is written down in black and white.
We have a constitution, we have a charter, we have statutes, we have the Human Rights Code, and so don't worry about it.
But I'm sorry, that's not the way it works because when you start to lose the culture, the law goes with it.
And you cannot depend upon it.
And this is, we are in a cultural moment.
Things are turning badly.
You know, I keep thinking of that remake of True Grit where Lucky Ned says, I don't need a good lawyer.
I need a good judge.
I think that's where we are.
But let me ask you, are there good lawyers?
Are there professors?
Okay, let me ask you this.
Where are the professors?
I know that when Stephen Harper was the prime minister, every week there'd be another mass letter signed by 20 law professors telling him he was a bad man.
You know, I mean, Omar Cotter probably had 100 lawyers writing in his defense.
You're the first law prof I've talked to who's speaking with some concern about civil liberties.
Are there other people like you?
And if so, where are they?
Maybe I've just missed them.
There are.
There are.
They are a much smaller proportion, to be sure, for sure.
Are they shy or afraid?
Some are.
Yes, they work in an environment in which they are the distinct outliers.
And academics are trained to get along.
Yeah, work in an institution, don't rock the boat.
It's terrifying.
So it's, and to your other question, there are lots of good lawyers who would be great at this.
And we still do have lots of good judges, good judges, but we haven't had them on these cases for the most part so far.
And I can't explain that quite.
Well, you've been very generous with your time today.
It's been great to meet you.
I've seen your columns in the newspapers and I feel like you're a force for civil liberties.
20 years ago, that would have been normal.
Now it's unusual and we're grateful for it.
We have a couple of projects here at Rebel News.
We just set up something we call it vaccineconsultations.com, where we give anyone, we pay for a half-hour legal consultation with lawyers about their vaccine passport situation.
So, I mean, we're getting so many emails and we don't want to be a lawyer, so we've come up with a bulk contract.
We'll start off with 100, and if we can keep crowdfunding, it will just try to give people some info.
Great.
But go ahead.
No, no, I was just running the last thing I said through my head.
I have to go back to it just for a moment because I don't want to cast aspersions that aren't deserved.
I suggested that the quality of the judges that we had on these cases was poor, and that's not true.
I do not want to fault the individual judges.
I don't even know who they all are.
But the outcomes have not been what I would have liked.
So let me go back to my statement.
There are lots of good judges in Canada.
Lots of them.
We haven't done well so far with the COVID cases.
That is not, I'm not faulting what the judges have done.
I am disappointed in what they've done for the most part in these cases.
But listen, we still do have a good court system, a good legal system in Canada.
It has underperformed, in my opinion, during this period.
It's sort of gone and hidden in the dark corners, as I've said before.
But let's not throw at the baby with the bathwater.
It is still worth doing exactly the kind of thing that you're talking about.
And if we can, there are going to be important cases to bring.
They're going to be difficult cases because, as I said, it's not clear for all kinds of reasons that these vaccine passports actually do violate constitutional rights.
They're doing it in a way that's very smart.
Often, the charter will not apply because charter applies only to the government.
And so, when you have the government facilitating the means by which to check whether you're vaccinated and a private business, a restaurant, or as the case may be, decides to use that system, then that's not a charter problem.
It's a private problem, and the charter does not apply.
So, we have difficulty all over.
We have difficulty with the design.
We have difficulty in getting the results that we want.
We have difficulty in persuading the judges that we've had so far that the individual rights that are at stake here are actually more important than the private good, because that is not the trend that we're on.
Well, you make me think of perhaps one of the front lines is to represent a business that does not want to implement the vaccine passport.
They don't want to be the privacy invader, the checker-upper.
That's a better case.
It's a still difficult case.
But at least that way, you would have the mandate from the government to complain about it.
Well, we have so many projects that we're trying to launch all at once.
We just launched the vaccine consultations one.
Fight vaccine passports is our flagship right now.
And to answer you, you're right.
You need excellent lawyers.
You don't want the first case to go to court to be wowly lawyers.
You want a sympathetic client where the fact pattern is very strong.
You don't want an iffy case.
You don't want a client that makes the judges recoil.
You want to make sure you're arguing the law well and all the laws that could apply.
And yeah, there is that X factor.
What are the judges and what are the politics?
But I think what we're trying to do with our fightvaccinepassports.com is get top-notch lawyers, QCs in many cases, and sympathetic clients.
And one of the reasons that you won't hear a lot from the very good lawyers is that's not the way very good lawyers work.
Good lawyers work quietly.
They speak softly and carry a big stick in the courtroom.
That's where the work is done.
So you won't see a lot of grandstanding from these guys.
There are a lot of good ones out there.
And the kind of case that you were describing earlier is a perfect case, like from BC.
If you could find a person who was medically unable to take a vaccine and was mandated to do so anyway by this program, that's a great case.
We've got two cases like that.
I'll keep you posted on those and I keep our viewers too.
Professor Protey, being very generous with your time, it's great to meet you.
I wish you good luck.
I can imagine that you're sometimes a lone voice in academia.
Maybe I'm wrong on that.
Not totally alone, but we are very few in numbers on some issues, yes, for sure.
Well, I'm very grateful for your time.
I learned a lot from you.
I hope we can keep in touch from time to time.
And I will keep you posted on the strategic cases we choose.
I think you'll find them interesting just as a scholar.
And I know you write columns.
Hopefully, some of them will be interesting and hopeful enough that will make you want to talk about them.
And this is all we know how to do.
We crowdfund, we journalize, and we get lawyers fighting for clients that we crowdsource.
This is what we do here at Rebel News.
That's what we're going to try.
That's extraordinarily important and valuable.
So thank you very much for that.
That's very nice of you saying it.
There's our show for today.
What an interesting fellow, Professor Bruce Party.
You can read his columns in a lot of different places.
I think I read one very recently in the National Post.
Am I right?
I'm glad they published you.
Stay with us.
more ahead well bruce party i wish there was a hundred of them uh bruce parties out there I wish there was a thousand of them.
I wish they were writing letters to the newspaper.
I wish they were testifying before parliamentary and legislature committees.
I wish they were taking cases pro bono to court.
I wish there were so many more freedom fighters, like I said, different knots in the net that all came undone at once.
I'm very sad about our situation, but I know that the few things we know how to do here at Rebel News, we will do.
We will recruit lawyers to sue.
We will recruit plaintiffs and crowdfund the battle.
That's sort of what we know how to do.
We'll do that one thing.
Maybe Bruce Party will do his one thing and we'll find a few others and maybe there's a chance to fight back.
We'll die trying.
That's our show for today.
Until next time, on behalf of us here at Rebel World Headquarters, see you at home.