We are Canadian lawyers. In our country, civil
liberties are under unprecedented attack. Governments,
public health authorities, universities, public and
private employers, municipalities, and businesses are
trampling Canadians’ rights and freedoms. Our free society
is at risk.
Covid rules restrict citizens’ abilities to
work, shop, travel and socialize. They erode civil
liberties strategically, attempting to not run afoul of
the law or to trigger protections in the Charter of Rights
and Freedoms such as liberty and security of the person,
the freedoms of association, assembly, expression,
conscience, religion, and mobility rights. Where Covid
rules appear to have violated the Charter, courts have
deferred to the state to take whatever measures it deems
necessary, whether demonstrably justifiable or not.
Legislatures have passed statutes that
delegate broad discretionary powers to unelected public
health officials, who then create draconian legal
restrictions by fiat, without public scrutiny or open
debate. These directives give private and public employers
cover to suspend and dismiss workers who insist on their
right to decide their own medical treatments. In our
system of law, no principle is more important than the
right to control your own body and to make your own
medical and health decisions. An anxious populace, swept
up in a deliberate campaign of fear, now believes that
individual liberties upon which our liberal democracy is
founded are dangerous and selfish. A growing collectivism
that demands safety at the expense of autonomy shapes
public policy.
Courts have embraced the pandemic narrative,
some taking judicial notice of the nature of risks of the
virus and safety of vaccines to adults and children. But
the facts are anything but settled. Courts are supposed to
be neutral. On Covid, as on any other contentious subject,
their mandate is to find facts exclusively upon the
evidence adduced by the parties in the courtroom. Instead,
courts appear to have taken a side on Covid. Access to
justice and the rule of law are now at risk. Unvaccinated
persons are banned from juries, throwing into question the
ability of all to obtain a fair trial heard by a jury of
their peers. Irrational policies born of panic affect no
one more than disadvantaged communities who already suffer
from lack of access to justice.
The right to privacy and control of personal
medical information has been abandoned. Disclosure of
vaccination status is becoming a requirement for working,
travelling, entering public and private establishments,
crossing the border, and sometimes medical treatment.
Those who cannot or will not disclose face aggressive
social disapprobation. Vaccine passports create the
infrastructure for a global digital surveillance system.
Institutions that last year were prohibited from
collecting individual medical history now demand it as a
condition of employment or admission. University and
college students are being denied their education for
refusing to disclose their own medical choices.
Medical regulators have become dictatorial.
They have warned doctors not to express medical opinions
that might conflict with official Covid policies,
effectively censoring them, and directed them not to
certify grounds for medical exemptions from vaccination
requirements, rupturing the physician-patient relationship
and breaching the principle that only a practitioner who
has examined a patient is equipped to give a diagnosis.
Human rights commissions, which until recently championed
expansive interpretations of human rights, have issued
edicts narrowing grounds for accommodations.
Covid rules are inconsistent and irrational.
Authorities enforce them selectively and preferentially,
coming down hard on common people while turning a blind
eye to the privileged. Covid vaccines do not prevent
people from becoming infected or from transmitting the
virus to others, but only unvaccinated persons are banned
or required to undergo testing. People who have recovered
from Covid and therefore have natural immunity are still
subject to vaccination mandates even though the purpose of
vaccination is to mimic natural immunity. Governments,
public health authorities and employers advise that Covid
vaccinations are safe, but pharmaceutical companies have
been granted immunity from liability and no employers will
accept legal responsibility for side-effects or adverse
events, whether minor or serious, suffered by their
employees who take a vaccine that they do not want. The
risks posed by Covid vaccines may be in dispute, but they
are not zero. Particularly for children and healthy young
adults, they may be riskier than the virus.
We fear the erosion of our free society. We
question the single-minded fixation on a virus that poses
little risk to most people. We protest the uncalculated
harms that Covid policies are causing to people’s health,
livelihoods, relationships, and mental states. We oppose
the mass hysteria and anxiety that governments and the
media are fuelling. Most of all, we object to the
deterioration of our civil liberties and the failure of
our legal institutions – legislatures, governments,
administrative bodies, and courts – to protect them.
We are appalled by what is happening in our
country. We call for the immediate end of vaccine
passports and mandates. We propose a public inquiry into
the handling of all aspects of the declared pandemic.
Canadians should have control of their own lives and have
the right to make their own decisions about their health,
medical treatments, personal information, travels, and
associations. Canada is supposed to be a free country
governed by the rule of law. Restore it now or risk losing
it for good.