COVID-19
Government’s totalitarian Covid Response a turning point in Canada’s history

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy
By Lee Harding
A lawyer and former leader of the Progressive Conservative Party in Newfoundland has told the world that mishandling of COVID-19 deserves a reckoning before the world slides into totalitarianism.
In a half-hour interview with Dr. John Campbell on the latter’s YouTube channel, Ches Crosbie complained governments wanted the public to forget their “gigantic assault on the rights and liberties of Canadians.”
“No government seems to be interested in having a look back to learn lessons or to see what might be adjusted in order to make the response to any future pandemic, a more seamless, flawless and effective response. They just don’t want to do it. They have no interest in it,” Crosbie said.
Campbell, a retired nurse educator with almost three million YouTube subscribers, dryly quipped, “Presumably they’d want to do an inquiry to exonerate themselves and show how brilliant their performance was throughout the entire pandemic.”
Crosbie, an administrator for the National Citizens Inquiry on COVID-19, complained the 63 subpoenaed by the NCI to testify “want to run and hide” and never showed up.
“They think they have impunity. They don’t have to explain themselves or answer anything. It also speaks to their sense of embarrassment about what they did, that they don’t think they can defend themselves, even in a sympathetic environment,” Crosbie said.
The NCI report said Canada was put into “virtual state of terror.” Crosbie agreed and said “society went virtually mad” as it abandoned “principles of bodily integrity and personal sovereignty and the right of informed consent” and also Charter rights.
Crosbie pointed to the late Sheila Lewis who could not get an organ transplant due to refusing a COVID-19 vaccine.
“She passed away as a result. That is an incredible professional cruelty on the part of a branch of the medical profession which deserves to be roundly condemned. And those people need to account for it,” Crosbie said.
“The problem in Canada, maybe elsewhere, is that virtually every institution that we expected to defend our rights and freedoms and what we thought was normal life, failed us,” Crosbie explained.”
“That’s what the citizens of Canada told us. You can’t have that kind of gargantuan multi-institutional failure without deep self-reflection about what went wrong and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
The Rhodes scholar said by the end of the first two weeks of 2020 lockdowns, it was already apparent the “very old and those with comorbidities” had a “thousand-fold” higher risk of a COVID-19 fatality than “the young.”
“If you did want to justify that two weeks to stop the spread, then we had enough information at the end of that to know that this was not the answer, and the COVID 19 virus was not the threat to life on Earth that had been portrayed,” Crosbie said.
“That turned out to have and was argued by many at the time to have no greater case fatality rate than a seasonal influenza.”
Even so, lockdowns continued, followed by mandates for masks and vaccines, something Crosbie said demands an accounting.
“You can’t have reconciliation when those who perpetrated what the citizens of the country believe to be an unwarranted invasion of their economic, social, political and legal rights and freedoms, refuse to explain why they did it, or in any respect to account for it.
“And this is why I think that there will eventually be criminal proceedings because they are necessary, given the enormity of what’s occurred.”
Crosbie said documentation the NCI put on public record contributed to a “a tipping point” where “the truth is constantly coming out.”
Campbell agreed and said allegations of gain of function research and the origins of the virus that “appeared ridiculous, appeared conspiratorial” have been “essentially confirmed.”
Crosbie said a public shift was evident in the election of new governments in Europe with a “more critical point of view on the events of the last few years, and…the WHO power grab.” He added Canada also needed a change of government and the COVID-19 “injectable products” banned.
“How can it be safe and effective when there’s foreign DNA and simian virus in this stuff, and there are other facts beyond dispute that can be added up here to say that no one would have agreed in the right mind to receive these in the first place, had they known about it?” Crosbie said.
Campbell chidingly said, “I assume the mainstream media in Canada’s been keen to pick this up as well.” Crosbie said it was a “major problem” that they had not.
“The bottom line is you can’t have a free country if you don’t have a free press. You don’t have democracy. And that’s where we are right now, not just in Canada, but in other countries like the United States, like the United Kingdom, in Europe,” explained Crosbie.
“We’re at a crisis point in history where we were either going to have a liberal democracy with constitutional rights and freedoms, or we’re going to have totalitarianism.”
Lee Harding is a research fellow for the Frontier Centre for Public Policy.
COVID-19
Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich to face sentencing July 23

From LifeSiteNews
Freedom Convoy leader Tamara Lich is slated to be sentenced on July 23.
In a recent update by The Democracy Fund, the group noted that “Sentencing for Ms. Lich is scheduled for July 23rd and 24th before Justice Perkins-McVey in Ottawa.”
In April of this year, Lich and Chris Barber were found guilty of mischief for their roles as leaders of the 2022 protest and as social media influencers. The conviction came despite the non-violent nature of the popular movement.
TDF also noted that the full 108 page judgment of Justice Perkins-McVey’s ruling is now available online.
According to TDF, the “Court determined that both Ms. Lich and Mr. Barber were leaders of the Freedom Convoy 2022 movement and were involved in organizing and leading trucks and other vehicles from western Canada.”
“While there was no evidence that Ms. Lich owned a vehicle emitting fumes or honking, or that she blocked access to buildings, the Court noted her creation of the Freedom Convoy 2022 Facebook page, which gained a large following, and her involvement in setting up the GoFundMe and later GiveSendGo fundraising pages,” noted TDF.
As for Barber, his sentencing has been further delayed. The delay in his case follows an update he gave earlier this month in which he announced that the Crown wants to jail him for two years in addition to seizing the truck he used in the protest. As such, his legal team has asked for a stay of proceedings for the time being.
The Lich and Barber trial concluded in September of 2024, more than a year after it began. It was only originally scheduled to last 16 days.
Lich and Barber were initially arrested on February 17, 2022, meaning their legal battle has lasted longer than three years.
Despite the peaceful nature of the Freedom Convoy, then-Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his Liberal government invoked the Emergencies Act to clear-out protesters, an action a federal judge has since said was “not justified.” During the clear-out, an elderly lady was trampled by a police horse and many who donated to the cause had their bank accounts frozen.
The actions taken by the Trudeau government were publicly supported by Mark Carney at the time, who won re-election on April 28 and is slated to form a minority government.
COVID-19
Vaccines: Assessing Canada’s COVID Response

David Clinton
I planned to be “first in line” for the shots as soon as my age cohort became eligible. By early March however, COVID itself dropped by the house, leading to the most uncomfortable (although non life-threatening) week of my life.
It’s been five years since COVID hit and one part of me wants to stuff it all in a closet somewhere and forget about it. But perhaps certain events – and especially government errors and overreach – should be documented. So this post will identify actions at all levels of government from those early days that, given our understanding of the threat available through the benefit hindsight, were both misguided and damaging.
I haven’t completely forgotten the mood through the early months in 2020. Politicians faced near-unanimous public demand for an aggressive response. Much of that sentiment was the result of messaging coming from foreign governments (mostly in the U.S.). But the local sentiment was definitely there.
To be fair, Governments got some things right and, taking into account the chaos and uncertainty of those early months, even some of their mistakes were understandable. But it’s the job of government to lead. And to avoid making choices – even popular choices – that will lead to predictable harms.
Vaccine mandates starting in 2021 were a case in point. Federal authority largely stemmed from the 2005 Quarantine Act and the Contraventions Act that allowed officials to issue tickets for non-compliance with the Quarantine Act. Provincial mandates were based on laws like Ontario’s Emergency Management and Civil Protection Act. The question isn’t whether the mandates and their enforcement were legal, but whether they caused more harm than good.
As the first vaccines started arriving in Canada around February 2021, I planned to be “first in line” for the shots as soon as my age cohort became eligible. By early March however, COVID itself dropped by the house, leading to the most uncomfortable (although non life-threatening) week of my life.
After recovering, my family doctor advised me to wait three months before getting the shots so my body could get back to normal. During those months, I got access to preprint results from the Israeli study into natural immunity which showed that:
Natural immunity confers longer lasting and stronger protection against infection, symptomatic disease and hospitalization caused by the Delta variant of SARS-CoV-2, compared to the BNT162b2 two-dose vaccine-induced immunity
Those results were later confirmed by CDC and NEJM studies, among others.
Given that context, I didn’t see any justification for exposing myself to even minimal health risks associated with vaccines. Which meant that, despite demonstrably posing no threat to public health, I would (at various times) be unable to:
- Board domestic commercial flights, VIA Rail, Rocky Mountaineer trains, and cruise ships within Canada
- Board international flights or trains departing Canada
- Freely return to Canada through an overland point of entry
- Upon return to Canada, bypass the 14 day quarantine under the Quarantine Act
- Upon return to Canada via air, bypass the three day quarantine in (expensive) government-approved hotels
- Engage in ‘non-essential” activities like restaurants, gyms, events (details varied from province to province)
- Enter Parliament
- Seek employment in federally regulated air, rail, and marine sectors
What should Canadian governments have done? Remove restrictions on individuals with natural immunity, obviously. Which, by the way, would have come with the valuable bonus of entirely avoiding the truckers protest and consequent confrontations.
If authorities were reluctant to take us at our word on immunity, they could have followed the European Union’s lead by emulating their Digital COVID Certificate for proof of recovery. Were they worried about people without immunity creating fake certificates? Hard to take that one seriously. There were more fake vaccine passports littering the streets of Ontario than abandoned Toronto Maple Leafs car window flags in a normal early May.
In the end, my own suffering was negligible. I didn’t really want to visit family in the U.S. all that much anyway. But for millions of other Canadians, the real-world stakes were far higher. And all that’s besides the billions of dollars wasted during those years’ government policies.
To be sure, resisting unscientific street-level calls for vaccine mandates would have required courage. But shouldn’t acts of courage be a source of pride for public officials?
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