Punished for Doing the Right Thing? The Battle for Ethical Medicine in Ontario

Punished for Doing the Right Thing?

The Battle for Ethical Medicine in Ontario

By Dr. Matthew Evans-Cockle

The College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario (CPSO) continues to pursue disciplinary proceedings against three Ontario doctors for providing vaccine exemption letters and making allegedly “misleading” statements questioning the health benefits of CPSO policy on COVID-19. The stakes are high for Doctors Crystal Luchkiw, Patrick Phillips, and Mark Trozzi; with their medical licenses indefinitely suspended, they are risking their right to practice medicine, their income, and their reputations as health care professionals in a struggle over both the right of patients to receive personal health care and advice from their physicians, and the right of physicians to debate medical matters of public concern. For Dr. Mark Trozzi, it all comes down to following the golden rule of doing no harm, and the Hippocratic oath to uphold the medical profession’s ethical standards. The ethical practice of medicine is simply the non-negotiable means and end of being a real doctor. For Dr. Crystal Luchkiw, the ethical and effective practice of medicine depends upon doctors’ freedom to make independent clinical judgments based on the doctor’s knowledge of both the relevant medical domain and the patient’s unique needs. It is imperative that such judgements proceed from both expertise and cornerstone medical fundamentals, and that they be exercised free from any and all coercive external interference.

According to Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi, the COVID-19 related restrictions that the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario has imposed upon doctors in Ontario are not only unethical and contrary to best medical practice, but they are also unlawful. As Dr. Patrick Phillips has explained, none of the policies imposed by the CPSO have any formal legal “force or effect to lawfully prosecute physicians.

” According to the most recent amendment of the Medicine Act of 1991, legally binding regulations may only be made by the CPSO’s council “subject to the approval of the Lieutenant Governor in Council and with prior review by the Minister [of Health].“ The CPSO’s COVID-19 policies do not have the Lieutenant Governor’s approval and were not reviewed by the Minister, and they do not, therefore, meet the criteria of legally binding regulations. The point might seem insignificant at first glance, but it is of major importance. Essentially, if the COVID-19 policies imposed by the CPSO have no legally binding power, then the CPSO has no grounds for launching investigations against Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi, no grounds for disciplinary proceedings and charges against them, and no grounds for suspending their medical licenses.

A recent hearing panel at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario rejected a motion to dismiss the CPSO investigations and disciplinary proceedings against Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi. This means that all three of these highly qualified and ethically conscientious doctors continue to have their licenses suspended. In spite of this disappointing outcome, the hearing panel did result in several significant victories for the trio of physicians. In fact, the CPSO conceded that its restrictions on speaking out against public health orders, on prescribing off-label lifesaving treatments for COVID-19, and on writing exemptions for vaccines are only suggestions “properly characterized as guidance documents, not binding rules.” Now clearly, there is tremendous irony in this concession. The hearing panel has essentially exonerated all three doctors by admitting that the CPSO’s COVID-19 restrictions are recommendations that do not have the force of law and are not mandatory. At the same time, the panel refused to dismiss the CPSO’s disciplinary proceedings against Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi, and their licenses to practice medicine remain suspended.

As Dr. Patrick Phillips has explained, what he and his two colleagues are facing, in the ongoing litigation with the CPSO, should be of major concern to all Ontarians and to all Canadians. What is at issue is, firstly, the right of all Canadians to receive personalized medical advice, treatment, and care; secondly, who determines the nature of that care; and thirdly, what advice and opinions medical doctors can express privately to patients and publicly to their communities. By depriving physicians of the freedom to treat and to communicate with patients in accordance with their medical experience and expertise and knowledge of individual patients’ needs, the CPSO effectively prohibits the basis for informed consent and compels patients to accept whatever advice is promoted by the CPSO in lieu of proper personalized care. 

The threat to Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi’s continued medical practice constitutes a real crisis in Canadian medicine that needs to be addressed immediately. The crux of the problem is that the colleges have been given virtually unlimited power to investigate, discipline and de-license doctors. Section 7 of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms states that “Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.” This section of the Charter should protect Canadian citizens from both investigations that are unconstrained by fact-based allegations, and from punishments being imposed before the allegations have been determined. Contrary to common sense, however, courts have ruled that section 7 does not apply to investigations related to professional licenses. Alarmingly, this restriction of section 7 rights and freedoms grants regulatory bodies like the CPSO unreasonably broad powers to investigate and to suspend medical practice licenses prior to a hearing. As Dr. Patrick Phillips writes, this means that the College “can charge anyone for absolutely anything and get away with it.” 

The hearing panel at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario chose to schedule a hearing of the allegations against Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi, even after conceding that the CPSO’s statements upon which the proceedings are based–regarding speaking out against CPSO COVID-19 policies, prescribing off-label lifesaving treatments for COVID-19, and providing individual vaccine exemption–were only ever suggestions and not binding rules. For a great many Canadians following these proceedings, it must surely appear self-evident that such suggestions should not be used as grounds for suspension, investigation or punishment of any doctor. Indeed, it seems highly questionable whether the CPSO panel has acted in good faith during the hearing. To wit, the CPSO hearing panel refused even to address Doctors Luchkiw, Phillips, and Trozzi’s key submissions that the CPSO “Registrar, Dr. Nancy Whitmore, did not have reasonable and probable ground to order [their] investigations [… and that] the College … failed to establish that [they] had violated a standard of practice.” Quite frankly, to ignore these submissions has all the earmarks of hubristic folly, appearing contrary to the principles of fundamental justice and the spirit of law in Canada. Dr. Patrick Phillips has expressed the matter succinctly–”In a free and democratic society, citizens are protected from laws that are so broad you can’t know if you’re violating them beforehand.”

Discussions of legal proceedings rarely make for good reading. The plodding pace of legal arguments and the barrier posed by technical vocabulary inevitably get in the way of visceral understanding. That’s why it’s absolutely essential that, in closing, we return to the fundamental issues. Doctors Crystal Luchkiw, Patrick Phillips, and Mark Trozzi have lost their licenses, their careers are under threat, and their lives are being marred by the unpleasant necessity of enormously costly ongoing legal battles. The personal cost they are paying is no laughing matter, but that personal cost is not what’s driving them, and it’s not where the gravity of this situation lies. These doctors are fighting for the right to care for their patients in the best way they know how, as determined by their medical knowledge and the individual needs of each individual patient. In reminding us what is at stake with the COVID-19 related restrictions imposed upon doctors by the CPSO, Dr. Phillips pulls no punches:

Countless patients have needlessly died from COVID while being denied early treatments with life-saving medications. Countless patients have been deprived of informed consent around the risks of vaccines. Countless patients were denied exemptions even though they had horrendous adverse events after the first dose. Countless patients have been forced to take genetic therapy against their will and many of those patients have died or been maimed by that therapy.

Dr. Phillips, for one, has had enough–in view of the terrible harms associated with the CPSO’s unchecked power over medical care throughout the declared pandemic, he is calling for a “complete dismantlement of the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario” and the subsequent creation of a new College, “one with leaders who respect the rule of law“ and whose power is “limited to prosecutions of offences that are in line with the charter and protect the rights of all.”

Dr. Evans-Cockle

Contact: Dr. Cockle dr.evans.cockle@gmail.com

~Ω~

Dr. Paul Marik on Dangers of Spike Protein Buildup—From Inflammation to Autoimmune Disease

Blessed are the Truth Seekers and the Truth Revealers. In many ways this short 81/2 minute interview with Dr. Paul Marik is frightening as hell when the scope of the repercussions involved with the Satanic spike protein are realized.

Of all the crimes ever committed against humanity this one has to top the list for its nefarious intent and diabolic effects on the bodies and souls of those who, believing in their governments, the WHO, their medical doctors and their mainstream media outlets, innocently and naively took the jab.

Do share this video with all you can. The Truth Shall Set Us Free!

Trust the truckers

Trust the truckers

Our freedoms ride with them

PROSECUTE ALL LEADERS PERSECUTING INNOCENTS

BLOCK THE SUPER BOWL

By
John Kaminski

The entire population of the world, minus all the paid off political puppets, already know what the deal is — it’s a no brainer. Trust the government? No way! Trust the truckers? Definitely.

Jail the so-called leaders, those disgustingly corrupt bureaucrats, working for Klaus Schwab’s beastly bribes? Absolutely.

Thanks to Ben Garrison

The people have spoken and the truckers are speaking for them while the limp wristed legislative liars bribed by Big Pharma’s crooked cash cowboys think they can tell the world what to do.

Well, the real men in the 16 wheelers have declared in no uncertain terms that they can’t, and the whole world of ordinary working class families standing by the side of the highways of the world waving their flags in freezing weather will never stop backing these upstanding family heroes against all the murderous might their demented governments can muster.

That cute little girl in the snowsuit speaks for all of us. Her sign said, “The trucks have come to save us!” And they have.

Truckers rolling worldwide

At this moment truck convoys are spreading worldwide. Finally, humanity is starting to assert itself. Even the U.S. government is now expecting American truckers to snarl Sunday’s Super Bowl by clogging the routes to the stadium.

Nobody needs to watch that pornographic halftime show and the rigged football game when the lives of hundreds of millions of people around the world are on the line, victimized by the lies of Big Pharma murderers, hedge fund henchmen and jaded politicians fattened by foreign billionaires trying their best to obliterate the lives of everyone on the planet.

I say honk your horns for freedom, everyone, everywhere, and don’t stop ’til we get it.

Trust the truckers. Tell the police to stand down. Remind them they have families too. They can either stand on the side of real people or commit crimes for the criminals who pay them, judges appointed by perverted rich industrialists and elected officials who couldn’t tell the truth if their country depended on it, which it does.

Maybe in my lifetime there has never been a popular cause so pure, so motivated by goodness, so promoted by families waving their flags and opposed by tyrants counting their money, as the massive movement of big trucks to the Canadian capital for one purpose only, to say ‘Why are you doing this to us? Why have you taken away our freedom?’

And what does our cowardly government do? Leaders hide in their opulent apartments afraid to even speak to the people whose votes they begged for, promising justice and compassion but now delivering indifference and abandonment. These leaders are cowards. The people must abandon them much faster than they have abandoned us, and abandon them now.

This is not government of the people, this is the tyranny of the billionaire bastards who could care less about the naive natives dropping dead from poison vaccines or the freezing homeless too smart to forfeit their lives to money hungry doctors too selfish to behave honourably.

This is the people speaking, this is us speaking! Not some invisible wraith of corporate contempt, attempting to tell us they have to reconfigure everything to cover the crime of all the money they have already stolen from us.

When you realize this, it reveals the colossal scam that has been played on us, trying to ruin all our systems and herd us into prisons of purposeful poverty, totally controlled by people who want not only to control us but to eliminate us permanently.

Think about the well-meaning people who have died following government orders to get jabbed with a fatal bioweapon. Think of all those babies who never made it out of their jabbed mothers’ wombs because of smarmy executives insisting that their experimental jabs were perfectly safe.

Think of all those prissy politicians mandating experimental inoculations — a totally illegal act — and continuing to say those empty words as the death toll surpasses all previous totals.

Sabotaging the republic

Think about it. Biden the Buffoon opens the borders to let the world stroll in and deliberately overload all our financial systems — welfare, health, education, housing, you name it. Three hundred thousand new residents in a single year, no criminal or disease checks, most unable to speak English. They all get debit cards, while unemployed Americans watch their savings dry up from bills they can no longer pay.

This is a deliberate recipe for disaster. And the Communist psychos who stole the election and put up barbed wire around the White House? What an appropriate symbol to represent what the forces of evil have constructed around the American mind! Around the minds of the entire world.

Truckers have now blocked many of the major bridges to Canada. The bridge in Detroit is a jugular, especially because it has caused the major auto manufacturers to either close or restrict their operations due to lack of parts, which need to be brought in by trucks. Excellent.

Ambassador Bridge, Detroit, Michigan

The truckers haven’t wrecked the economy. The politicians have wrecked the economy, deliberately. End the mandates and the economy will come back, if the politicians let it.

For weeks now the patriotic citizens of Alberta have braved Arctic temperatures to block a border crossing to compel aberrant autocrats from mandating poison jabs for a disease that isn’t killing anybody with shots that are, wrecking businesses that never needed to be closed for a flu turned into a plague by pharmaceutical PR prostitutes.

Coutts, Alberta Canada Border Crossing

All over Canada, all over the U.S., soon throughout Europe and eventually in Australia, the trucks are coming to save us. Don’t let the government stop them, shut them off or shoot them down.

The trucks are coming to save us from governments demanding to turn us into robots. Ride with them. Bring them food and fuel as well. If they fail, we all fail. If they die, we all die.

~Ω~

John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast of Florida, constantly trying to figure out why we are destroying ourselves, and pinpointing a corrupt belief system as the engine of our demise. Solely dependent on contributions from readers, please support his work by mail: 6871 Willow Creek Circle #103, North Port FL 34287 USA.

Contact John at: pseudoskylax@gmail.com

Nation Wide Trucking Convoy Heading to Ottawa!

[Editor’s Note: This initiative by Canada’s truckers could be the most important action taken thus far by Canadians to end all the lockdowns, mandates, forced jabs and increasingly deranged, criminal and psychotic behaviour of our federal and provincial governments that have been ongoing since the spring of 2020. Such an initiative is reminiscent of a century ago when workers around the world were attempting to extract from their NWO industrialists a measure of freedom and equality and they began to STRIKE en mass in order to accomplish their objectives. Those efforts back then succeeded. Today the nation is facing a similar and even more dangerous and totalitarian effort on the part of the world’s extreme rich to control (and destroy) the lives of millions, if not billions, of human beings on the planet in order to accomplish their heinous agenda for global control of the world. They will not stop willingly and as we’ve witnessed over the past two years the more the people try to comply with their wishes the more they add to their sinister plot. We know by now that the mainstream news media (who they’ve owned since 1922) is as complicit in their agenda as they are. Any form of trust between “them” and the people has been long past destroyed and their credibility no longer exists.

Support for Canada’s Truckers is crucial to bringing this destructive behaviour on the part of the Trudeau government to a head. Only “we the people” can and will support their united efforts so it’s up to you and me and every other Canadian who values their freedom and livelihood to contribute to this just cause. Please help fund the truckers by donating to the truckers freedom convoy. With this in mind please read the following plea from Tamara Lich, Truckers Convoy organizer.]

Tamara Lich, Truckers Convoy organizer states:

To our Fellow Canadians, the time for political over reach is over.  Our current government is implementing rules and mandates that are destroying the foundation of our businesses, industries and livelihoods.  Canadians have been integral to the fabric of humanity in many ways that have shaped the planet.

We are a peaceful country that has helped protect nations across the globe from Tyrannical governments who oppressed their people, well now its happening to us. We are taking our fight to the doorsteps of our Federal Government and demanding that they cease all mandates against its people. Small businesses are being destroyed, homes are being destroyed, and people are being mistreated and denied fundamental necessities to survive. It’s our duty as Canadians to put an end to this mandates. It is imperative that this happens because if we don’t our country will no longer be the country we have come to love. We are doing this for our future Generations and to regain our lives back.

We are asking for Donations to help with the costs of fuel, food and lodgings to help ease the pressures of this arduous task.
But it’s a small price to pay for our freedoms. We thank you all for your Donations and know that you are helping reshape this once beautiful country back to the way it was.

  • Money raised will be dispersed to our Truckers to aid them with the cost of the journey
  • Funds will be dispersed via e-transfer (preferred) but can also be sent by cheque if absolutely necessary
  • Funds will be spent to help cover the cost of fuel for our Truckers first and foremost, will be used to assist with food if needed and contribute to shelter if needed

https://www.gofundme.com/f/taking-back-our-freedom-convoy-2022?qid=90be481119036174f7c93f3b337ed653

The Genociding of Australians

[***Editor’s Note: Australia is under direct attack as I write these words. The N.W.O. psychopathic killers are hell-bent on murdering the aboriginal peoples (and the rest of the non-aboriginals as well) and the people are calling out (screaming might be a more apt way of putting it) to the rest of the world to DO SOMETHING to help stop these Stalinoid attacks upon them. The country was tricked with a false flag event (the infamous Port Arthur Massacre) back in the 90’s and they foolishly turned in all their weapons to the government thus leaving them in perpetual danger. That danger has now manifested BIG TIME in the form of the “Covid-19 Bio-weapon Scamdemic” which the Australian government is using to the max in order to fulfil their Gates/Fauci W.H.O. ‘mandate’ to depopulate the planet and take over all territories not presently under the globalist’s control. This video needs to be shared and shared and shared along with any and all the other information contained in it.

In the recent past we’ve watched this process unfolding in Gaza and at one point an international effort took place to stop the genociding of the Palestinian people by these same megalomaniacal low life sadistic maniacs. Now they’re starting it all over again in Australia and if they’re successful every other nation in the world who’s under the heel of criminal cartel behind all of this will be treated in the same manner. We MUST rise up and DO something while we still can and Australia is the place to begin.]

Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

THRONE, ALTAR, LIBERTY

THE CANADIAN RED ENSIGN

Technocracy Triumphant — Manitoba Court Cancels The Charter Rights You Thought You Had

By

Gerry T. Neal

October 29, 2021

Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable.   There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible.   That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs.   If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge.   To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty. 

Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1)   One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer.   The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1.    The evidence in these challenges was heard in May.   After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases.   For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer, will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling, with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”. 

The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases.    In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling. In paragraph 292 we find the following: 

I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions. 

This is very good and right.   The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.” Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”.   Here is what followed:  

But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence. 

This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged. If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified.   If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”.    Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law.  (2) 

In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice.   In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test.    The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause.     To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”.   Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s). (3)  For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test.    Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office.  If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either. 

The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic. What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy. 

Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis: 

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.  (God in the Dock, 1948) 

This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.   

That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge.   This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation.   These are sections 13 and 67.   Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures.   Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.   

Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional.   In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age.   He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”.   The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic.   In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that: 

the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health  (first ruling, 12). 

Does it ensure such an appropriate balance?   As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17).   Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it. 

The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken. The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health. The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test. In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint.   The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder.   The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy. This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.

The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”.   This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.

The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.”    Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”. 

Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health.   Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter. 

It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism.   The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance.   The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good.   Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms.   Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around. 

The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this. This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions.   This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field.   The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them. Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual’s expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.

Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians.   A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse.   Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power.   For this reason it is imperative than  in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances.   This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4) 

This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms.    Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation. (5) When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes? 

Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.   Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief. Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”.  That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize.   The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.”   Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury. That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum.   “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal. 

Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better.   The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”.   The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”.   It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession. 

Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?   

Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?   

Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.   

The next sentence is even worse. “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.”  So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament? Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government’s not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.   

Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded. 

Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good.   Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields. Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision.   It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in A.M’s [censored. A.T.] proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.   A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health.   He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession.   In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated. To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.   

Consider the words that George Grant, in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society, identified as encapsulating the spirit of technological thought, J. R. O’s [censored. A.T.] “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”  The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable.   Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and O’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be “when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A”. “A” might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired. (6) 

It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity. 

For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7) 

 (1)  The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual: Ross MacKay.

(2)  Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag – or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.

(3)  There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.

(4)  The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity.   The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people.   The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time.   Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time.   It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.

(5)  Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading.   Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated.   This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights. With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1. As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.  

(6)  Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths.   The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths.   However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths.   The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not.   Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing?  It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other.   The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage.   The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so.   Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive? I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.

(7)  That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999).   In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986).   It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny.   Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s mastery of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people.   He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.

 ~Ω~

CANADIAN POLITICAL PRISONER DR. JAMES SEARS RELEASED ON PAROLE OCTOBER 14, 2021

CANADIAN POLITICAL PRISONER

DR. JAMES SEARS RELEASED ON

PAROLE OCTOBER 14, 2021

By

Arthur Topham

Cariboo Sentinel Reporter

October 16, 2021

“I have been released from one prison into a COVID prison.”

~ Comment by Dr. James Sears upon his release from 

the South Toronto Detention Centre, Oct. 14, 2021

We are living in unprecedented dark times. Never in recorded history have so many evil men and women around the world conspired together in the greatest plot to wrest the power of the global community away from the people and into their own blood-stained hands. Were they to succeed in this demon-inspired deed humanity, as we’ve known it for millennia, will be on the verge of extinction. The present civilization, an accumulation of thousands of years of endless, slow progression toward a world of egalitarianism and world peace, suddenly is facing the most egregious, pre-meditated threat to its survival.

I say “pre-meditated” because, for a few stalwart seekers and revealers of truth who have been labouring for decades to inform the general public of the event currently manifesting before us in full force, most people never truly realized what was being planned for them. Now that the fecal matter has hit the proverbial fan and all hell is breaking loose the tide in the affairs of humankind has risen to its peak and God only knows what the future will bring us.

One of those prescient people who saw the writing on the wall and began in earnest alerting the Canadian public to the coming danger was Dr. James Sears. As Editor-in-Chief he, along with long time publisher Leroy St. Germaine who had been operating the newspaper titled Your Ward News since 2007 around Toronto, Ontario began to spice up the content with Sears’ satirical writings on controversial political issues. 

Having been in the alt media business for a long time I learned about Dr. Sears’ publication in 2015 at a time when I was facing unprecedented challenges from the New World Order censors here in Canada and spending all my time and money in B.C. Supreme Court defending myself against the same specious charges that Sears and St. Germaine were also later to face.

The interesting parallel between James Sears and myself was that, because we used satire and parody (Sears more than I) to expose the machinations of the globalists who were bound and determined to take over the planet, we both ended up facing a similar charge; one that fell within the scope of the Canadian Criminal Code (CCC) and appeared under the heading “Hate Crime Propaganda” which, technically, is what Sec. 319 of the CCC is all about. 

Returning to 2015 and my own court case, part of my legal strategy was to file a Constitutional Challenge under Sec. 2 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms should I end up losing the court battle. As it turned out that was what I ended up doing when eventually I was found guilty in November of 2015 of one of two charges of promoting “hate” toward the particular ethnic group who had initially filed the complaint against me via the BC Hate Crime Team back in 2011.  

In order for me to challenge the legislation it was necessary to purchase the full transcript of the 14 day trial in BC Supreme Court that had ran through October and November of 2015 at a cost of close to $7,500.00. At that point in the legal process, one which had commenced back in May of 2012 and ran continuously throughout the next three years, I was flat broke and dependent upon donations from supporters of free speech around the world. It was then that Dr. James Sears contacted me and offered to pay for the transcript to be produced so that the constitutional challenge could go ahead. I gratefully accepted his offer.

Following the end of the trial I received an email from Dr. Sears telling me that he had penned a satirical piece on the outcome of my court case in the December edition of Your Ward News. It should also be noted that back then the country had just gone through another federal election and James Sears, prior to the event, had formed his own federal party called the New Constitution Party of Canada. He ran as an independent during the election in his home riding and raise a lot of eye-brows with his criticism of a particular foreign nation who he felt wielded way too much influence and control over Canada’s associated infrastructure from media to government to the court system. 

It wasn’t too long after my trial ended that Dr. James Sears and Leroy St. Germaine began to be attacked by the usual suspects who use Canada’s notorious “Hate Crime” laws to silence anyone who is critical of their activities. Complaints were laid followed by charges and what best might be termed a mock trial that ended in January of 2019 when Dr. James Sears and Leroy St. Germaine, Publisher of the satirical tabloid Your Ward News were convicted on two counts of “wilfully promoting hate” against privileged groups in contravention of Canada’s notorious “hate law” – Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code. 

As Paul Fromm, Executive Director for the Canadian Association for Free Expression (CAFE) put it in one of his regular newsletters, “Each was sentenced to the maximum — unprecedented for a first time offender — of a year in jail. As Leroy is of Metis heritage, he was allowed to serve his sentence at home.”

In November, 2020, under protest, Dr. Sears and Leroy St. Germaine argued their appeal by Zoom thanks to the Covid-19 restriction.

On June 14, 2021 the appeal was denied and the sentences upheld. Dr. Sears was immediately ordered to prison and denied even a few hours to say goodbye to his wife and young son. Dr. Sears’ Application for Leave to Appeal his conviction and sentence was turned down by an Ontario judge on July 16, 2021 but Dr. Sears was NOT informed and had to learn of the decision from a friend on the outside on July 29, 2021.

Following Sears’ incarceration Paul Fromm and those who supported freedom of speech began holding regular protest gatherings outside the South Toronto Detention Centre demanding the release of Dr. Sears and claiming, rightfully, that as Amnesty International states, he is a “prisoner of conscience” or a political prisoner being punished solely for the non-violent expression of his political, religious or cultural views. 

On Thursday, October 14, 2021 I received an email from Videotographer Leslie Bory telling me that after six successful protests that were organized by CAFE and videotaped by himself prison officials finally released Dr. James Sears from jail on early parole that morning. 

Due to legal restrictions that I am still currently under I cannot post the url to video showing Dr. Sears’ release and his interview with Leslie Bory but I was able to take some screen shots of the event.

I jokingly told Leslie in my reply to his email that I thought Dr. Sears was looking a bit like the infamous Charlie Manson with his full beard and long curly hair but as James said when being interviewed he had lost a lot of weight while in prison thanks to the shitty food they served but that he was generally feeling good and his time inside wasn’t all that bad. He was greeted by his well-wishers and presented with a huge bouquet of white roses.

To quote further from Paul Fromm’s latest Newsletter:

“Dr. Sears emerged bearded and very thin, but cheerful, after serving four months of a 12 months sentence (the maximum) for writing satire of [Censored. A.T.] and radical feminists, contrary to Canada’s notorious “hate law” (Sec. 319 of the Criminal Code).

He told supporters who hugged him and gave him a bouquet of flowers that he had gotten on well with fellow prisoners and most of the guards. The prison food was, he said, “garbage better than hospital food, but not as good as army food.”

“Freedom of speech is dying in Canada and will die because too many people just don’t care. People may have to leave this country for freedom.”

A new generation of free speech activists will have to join the fight, he explained.

“People should not be afraid of prison,” he told his supporters. I’m 58 years old and survived,” he said. In prison, he wrote 300 pages of several books, including a fictitious prison romance, based on reality, he grinned, between a political prisoner and a female guard.

Several bad things happened to him in prison. “I was kept for 27 days in isolation. That was illegal. The maximum is 15.” Even worse, prison authorities never gave him the legal papers he needed to argue his appeal. They ended up in his property bag.

He said, as part of his probation, he must attend a propaganda course on anti-social behaviour. He looks forward to this as he hopes to convert the teachers.

“I was a first time offender,” he said, “but I was sentenced to a year in prison — the maximum! One of my cellmates, who wished me the best of luck as I left, had been sentenced to nine and a half weeks. He’d stabbed a man, stolen a truck and had been found with a quantity of fentanyl.” Just as in the old Soviet Union, common criminals are seen by the state as a sympathetic class. On the other hand, political dissidents receive the harshest treatment of the law. “Hate speech,” he said, “is considered the worst of the worst.”

It was a warm sunny Autumn morning: “I have been released from one prison into a COVID prison,” he said to applause from the free speech supporters.

He promised that he’d be writing about “the toxic culture” among the prison guards.”

Having summed things up Dr. Sears said he just wanted to get back home to see his family and make himself a big plate of fried eggs and bacon!

~Ω~

The New Kulaks

The New Kulaks

by

Gerry T. Neal

(Expurgated for Legal Reasons by the Editor) 

The “experts” that our governments and the media have been insisting that we blindly trust for almost two years are now telling us that due to the Delta and other variants herd immunity to the bat flu is either unattainable or requires a much higher percentage of the population to have been immunized than was the case with the original strain of the virus. They are also telling us that the fourth wave of the bat flu, the one we are said to be experiencing at the present, is driven by the Delta variant and that those who, for one reason or another, have exercised their right to reject the vaccine either in full or in part – for those who have had one shot but opted out of a second, or in some jurisdictions have had two but have opted out of a third, for whatever the reason, including having had a bad reaction to the first shot or two, are categorized under the broad “unvaccinated” umbrella by those who think that it is our ethical duty to take as many shots as the government’s health mandarins say we should take – are responsible for this wave, which they have dubbed a “pandemic of the unvaccinated”.

This, however, is a case of the guilty pointing the finger at the innocent.

Think about what they are now claiming. If herd immunity was attainable with the original virus if 70-80% of the population were immunized but with the Greek letter variants it requires 90% or higher if it is attainable at all, then the blame for the current situation, however dire it actually is – and it is probably not even remotely close to being as dire as is being claimed because the media, the medical establishment, and the governments have grossly exaggerated the threat of this disease from the moment the World Health Organization declared a pandemic – belongs entirely to those who insisted upon the “flatten the curve” strategy. Flattening the curve, which required massive government overreach and the dangerous suspension of everyone’s most basic human, civil, and constitutional rights and freedoms, prolonged the life of the original virus, giving it the opportunity to produce these new, reportedly more contagious, mutations. It was the public health orders themselves – not people resisting the orders and standing up for their and others’ rights and freedoms – that gave us the variants. It would have been far better to have taken measures to protect only the portion of the population that was most at risk, while letting the virus freely circulate through the rest of the population to whom it posed minimal risk, so that herd immunity could have been achieved the natural way and at the lower threshold while it was still available. Natural immunity, as even the “experts” now acknowledge, is superior to what the vaccines offer if this can be called immunity at all seeing as it conspicuously lacks the prophylactic aspect that traditionally defined the immunity granted by vaccines for other diseases. When you took the smallpox or the polio vaccine, you did so in order that you would not get smallpox or polio.  When you take the bat flu vaccine, purportedly, it reduces the severity of the bat flu so that you are far less likely to be hospitalized or to die from it.   When we consider that for those outside of the most-at-risk categories, the likelihood of being hospitalized due to the bat flu is already quite low and the likelihood of dying from it is lower yet, being a fraction of a percentage point, the so-called “immunity” the vaccines impart is not very impressive, making the heavy-handed insistence that everyone must take the jab all the more irrational.

For all the hype about the supposed “novelty” of the bat flu virus, it is now quite apparent that its waves come and go in a very familiar pattern.  The first wave, which started in China late in 2019, hit the rest of the world early in 2020 during the winter of 2019-2020 and ebbed as we went into spring.  With the onset of fall in 2020 the second wave began and the third wave took place in the winter of 2020-2021.  It once again waned as we entered spring of 2021, and the current fourth wave is taking place as summer of 2021 moves into fall of 2021.  Each wave of the bat flu, in other words, has occurred in the times of the year when the common cold and the seasonal flu ordinarily circulate, just as the lulls correspond with those of the cold and flu, the big one being in the summer.  How many more waves do we have to have in which this pattern repeats itself before we acknowledge that this is the nature of the bat flu, that it comes and goes in the same way and the same times as the cold and flu, compared to which it may very well be worse in the sense that the symptoms, if you get hit by a hard case of it, are much nastier, but to which it is far closer than to Ebola, the Black Death, or the apocalyptic superflu from Stephen King’s The Stand?

The politicians, the public health mandarins and their army of “experts”, and the mass media fear pornographers do not want us to acknowledge this because the moment we do the twin lies they have been bombarding us with will lose all their hold upon us and become completely and totally unbelievable.   The first of these lies is when they take credit for the natural waning of each wave of the virus by attributing it to their harsh, unjust, and unconstitutional public health orders involving the suspension of all of our most basic freedoms and rights.    The second of these lies is when they blame the onset of the next wave of the virus at the time of year colds and flus always spread on the actions of the public or some segment of the public.

It is the second of these lies with which we are concerned here.

Last fall, as the second wave was beginning, our governments blamed the wave on those who were disobeying public health orders by getting together socially with people from outside their households, not wearing masks, and/or especially exercising their constitutional right to protest against government actions that negatively impact them, in this case, obviously, the public health measures.   There was an alternative form of finger-pointing on the part of some progressives in the media, who put the blame on the governments themselves for “re-opening too early”. This form of “dissent” was tolerated respectfully by the governments, a marked contrast with how they responded to those who protested that they could not possibly have re-opened too early because they should never have locked down to begin with since lockdowns are an unacceptable way of dealing with a pandemic being incredibly destructive and inherently tyrannical. Although there was much more truth to what the latter dissenters were saying it was these, rather than the former group, that the governments demonized and blamed for the rising numbers of infections.  The governments and other lockdown supporters attempted to justify this finger-pointing by saying that the lockdown protestors, whom they insisted upon calling “anti-mask protestors” so as to make their grievances seem petty by focusing on what was widely considered to be the least burdensome of the pandemic measures, were endangering the public by gathering to protest outdoors.  That their arguments were worthless is demonstrated by how they had made no such objections to the much larger racist hate rallies held by anti-white hate groups masquerading under banal euphemisms earlier in the year and, indeed, openly encouraged and supported these even though they had a tendency to degenerate into lawless, anarchical, rioting and looting that was absent from the genuinely peaceful protests of the lockdown opponents.

With the deployment of the rapidly developed vaccines that are still a couple of years away from the completion of their clinical trials under emergency authorization government public health policy has shifted towards getting as many people vaccinated as possible, with a goal of universal vaccination. At the same time, the finger-pointing has shifted towards the unvaccinated or, to be more precise, those who have not received however many shots the public health experts in their jurisdiction deem to be necessary at any given moment. This blaming of the unvaccinated is both a deflection from the grossly unethical means being taken to coerce people to surrender their freedom of choice and right to informed consent with regards to receiving these vaccines and is itself part of those means.

Perhaps “shifted” is not the best word to describe this change in the finger-pointing.   While the less-than-fully-vaccinated are being blamed as a whole for the Delta wave the blaming is particularly acrimonious for those who both have not been sufficiently vaccinated to satisfy the government and who have been protesting the public health abuses of our constitutional rights and freedoms the latest of which is the establishment of a system of segregation based upon vaccine choice in which society and the economy are fully or almost fully re-opened to those who comply with the order to “show your papers” while everyone else is put back in lockdown.  The CBC and the privately owned media, both progressive and mainstream “conservative” have gone out of their way to vilify such people, as have the provincial premiers and their public health mandarins whose vaccine passport system is obviously punitive in nature. The biggest vilifier of all has been the Prime Minister. In his campaign leading up to the recent Dominion election he was unable to speak about the “anti-vaxxers” – a term, which until quite recently, indeed, until the very eve of this pandemic, designated supporters of holistic medicine who object to all vaccination on principle and who were usually to be found among the kind of tree-hugging, hippy-dippy, types who support the Green Party, NDP, or the Prime Minister’s own party – without sounding like he was speaking about the [Censored. Ed.] to an audience at Nuremberg in the late 1930s.

What we are seeing here is not a new phenomenon. When the ancient Greek city-states were faced with a crisis beyond human ability to control – such as a plague – they would choose someone, generally of the lowest possible social standing such as a criminal, slave or a cripple, and, after ritually elevating him to the highest social standing, would either execute him, if he was a criminal, or beat him and drive him out of their society, in either case as a symbolic sacrifice to avert disaster and save the community. This person was called the φαρμακός, a word that also meant “sorcerer”, “poisoner” or “magician”, although there is no obvious connection between this meaning and the usage we have been discussing and lexicographers often treat them as being homonyms.  In some city-states this came to be practices as a ritual on a set day every year whether there was a looming disaster or not.   In Athens, for example, the two ugliest men in the city were chosen for this treatment on the first day of Thargelia, the annual festival of Apollo and Artemis.   Parallels to this can be found in almost every ancient culture as can the related practice of offering animal sacrifices.   Indeed, the practice is generally called scapegoating, from the word used in the English Bible to refer to the literal goat over which the High Priest would confess the sins of the people on the Day of Atonement each year, symbolically transferring the guilt to the goat, which would then be taken out into the wilderness and sent to Azazel, a word of disputed meaning generally taken to refer either to a place in the desert, an evil spirit who dwelled there, or both.   

Anthropologists have, of course, long discussed the origins and significance of this phenomenon. While going into this at great length is far beyond the scope of this essay, a well-known summation of the discussion can be found in Violence and the Sacred (1977) by French-American scholar René Girard as can the author’s own theory on the subject. Later in his Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987), Girard, a practicing Roman Catholic, returned to his theory and discussed how it related to Christian theology and to contemporary expressions of violence. He put forward an interpretation of the Atonement that could in one aspect be understood as the opposite of the traditional orthodox interpretation. While there have been numerous competing theories as to how the Atonement works, in traditional Christian orthodoxy the relationship between the Atonement and the Old Testament sacrificial system was understood to be this:  the former was the final Sacrifice to end all sacrifices, and the latter were God ordained types of Christ’s final Sacrifice. By contrast, Girard argued that sacrifices were not something instituted by God but arose out of man’s violent nature. When division arose in primitive communities, peace was restored through the scapegoat mechanism, whereby both sides joined in placing the blame on a designated victim who was then executed or banished, and built their renewed unity upon the myth of the victim’s guilt and punishment. The sacrificial system was the ritual institutionalization of this practice. As societies became more civilized the institution was made more humane by substituting animals for people. The Atonement, Girard, argued, was not the ultimate sacrifice but rather a sort of anti-sacrifice. It was not designed, he said, to satisfy the demands of God Who has no need for sacrificial victims, but to save mankind from his own violent nature as manifested in the scapegoat mechanism and sacrificial system.  In the Atonement God provided bloodthirsty man with One Final Victim. That Victim offered to His immediate persecutors and by extension all of sinful mankind forgiveness and peace based not upon a myth about His guilt but upon the acknowledgement of the truth of His Innocence and the confession of man’s own guilt.

What is most relevant to this discussion, however, is not how Girard’s understanding of the Atonement contrasts with the more traditional orthodox view, but where both agree – that it brought an end to the efficacy of all other scapegoats and sacrifices.  This does not mean that the practice ceased but that it no longer works. One implication of this pertains to the choice that the Gospel offers mankind. If man rejects the peace and forgiveness based upon the truth of the Innocent Victim offered in the Gospel, “there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins” [Censored. Ed.], and so his violence, which the scapegoat mechanism/sacrificial system can no longer satisfy, increases.  This means that in a post-Christian society the sacrificial and scapegoating aspect of human violence would reassert itself with a vengeance.  

Interestingly, Girard interpreted the New Testament Apocalyptic passages, both those of the actual book of Revelation and those found in the words of Jesus in the Gospels, that speak of disasters, calamities and destruction to fall upon mankind in the Last Days, as describing precisely this, the self-inflicted wounds of a mankind that has turned its back on the peace of the Gospel rather than the wrath of God (see the extended discussion of this in the second chapter entitled “A Non-Sacrificial Reading of the Gospel Text” of Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World).   Certainly the twentieth century, in which the transformation of Christendom into secular, post-Christian, “Western Civilization” that was the main project of the liberalism of the Modern Age came to its completion, saw a particularly ugly resurgence of scapegoating on the part of secular, totalitarian regimes.

I alluded earlier to one such example.  Another example can be found in the early history of the Soviet Union and this is for many reasons a closer analogy to what we are seeing today.    When the Bolsheviks, a terrorist organization of mostly non-(ethnic)-Russians who hated the Russian Orthodox Church, the Russian Tsar, and the Russian people, most likely in that order, exploited the vacuum created earlier in 1917 when republicans forced the abdication of Russia’s legitimate monarch in order to seize power for themselves and form the totalitarian terror state known as the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, they created their own scapegoat. 

Kulak, which is the Russian word for “fist”, was a derogatory term applied with the sense of “tight-fisted”, i.e., miserly, grasping, and mean to peasant farmers who had become slightly better off than other members of their own class, owning more than eight acres of land and being able to hire other peasants as workers.   Clearly this was a loosely defined, largely artificial, category, enabling the Bolsheviks to hurl it as a term of abuse against pretty much any peasant they wanted. The scapegoating of the kulaks began early in the Bolshevik Revolution when the Bolsheviks sought to unify the other peasants in support of their regime by demonizing and vilifying those of whom they were already envious and confiscating their land.    After Stalin became the Soviet dictator in 1924 he devised a series of five-year plans aimed at the rapid industrialization and centralization of what had up to then been a largely feudal-agrarian economy.   In the first of these, from 1928 to 1932, Stalin announced his intention to liquidate the kulaks and while this worded in such a way as to suggest that it was their identity as a class rather than the actual people who made up the class that was to be eliminated, that class identity, as we have seen, was already largely a fiction imposed upon them by the Bolsheviks and the actions taken by Stalin – the completion of the confiscation of kulak property, the outright murder of many of them and the placing of the rest in labour camps either in their own home districts or in desolate places like Siberia, clearly targeted the kulaks as people rather than as a class.    The history of Stalin’s liquidation of the kulaks as well as that of the Holodomor, the man-made famine he engineered against the Ukrainians, is well told and documented by Robert Conquest in his The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror Famine (1986).

“Anti-vaxxer”, like “kulak” is mostly a derogatory term used to demonize people.   The term itself ought to be less arbitrary than kulak.    Assigning someone to a class of greedy, parasitical, oppressors simply because he is fortunate enough to own a few more acres of land than his neighbour is quite arbitrary and obviously unjust.   Identifying someone as being opposed to vaccines on the basis of his own stated opposition to such is not arbitrary at all, although dehumanizing someone on this basis is just as unjust.   In practice, however, the “anti-vaxxer” label is used just as arbitrarily.   Look at all who have been turned into third-class citizens, denied access to all public spaces and businesses except those arbitrarily deemed “essential” by the public health officials, and whose livelihoods have been placed in jeopardy by the new vaccine mandates and passports.    While those who have not taken the bat flu shots because they reject all vaccines on principle are obviously included so are those who have had every vaccine from the mumps to smallpox to hepatitis that their physician recommended but have balked at taking these new vaccines, the first of their kind, before the clinical trials are completed.   So are people who took the first shot, had a very bad reaction to it, and decided that the risk of an even worse reaction to the second shot was too great in their instance.   So are people who came down with the disease, whose bodies’ natural immune system fought it off, who thereby gained an immunity that recent studies as well as common sense tell us is superior to that imparted by a vaccine that artificially produces a protein that is distinctive to the virus, and who for that reason decided that they didn’t need the vaccine.   There are countless legitimate reasons why people might not want to receive these inoculations and it is morally wrong – indeed, evil, would be a better word than wrong here – to bully such people into surrendering their bodily autonomy and their right to informed consent and to punish them for making what, however much people caught in the grip of the public health panic may wish to deny it, is a valid choice.    It is even more evil to demonize, vilify, and scapegoat them for standing up for their rights.   Ironically, those currently being demonized as “anti-vaxxers” by the Prime Minister and the provincial premiers include all who have been protesting against the vaccine passports and mandates, a number which presumably includes many who have had both of their shots and therefore are not even “unvaccinated” much less “anti-vaxxers” in any meaningful sense of the word, but who take a principled moral stand against governments mistreating people the way they have with these lockdowns, mask mandates, and now vaccine passports and mandates.

The Bolshevik scapegoating of the kulaks, and the as-we-speak scapegoating of the “anti-vaxxers” by all involved in the new world-wide medical-pharmaceutical tyranny, all demonstrate the truth of the implication discussed above of the Atonement’s abolition of the efficacy of sacrifices and the scapegoat mechanism, whether this is understood in the traditional orthodox way, as this writer is inclined to understand it, or in accordance with Girard’s interpretation. If people reject the peace and forgiveness offered in the Gospel and can no longer find it in the old sacrificial/scapegoat system the violence multiplies. In the ancient pre-Christian practices, the victims were singular or few in number (there were only two victims, for example, in the annual Thargelia in Athens). These modern examples of the scapegoating phenomenon involve huge numbers of victims.  The sought objective – societal peace and unity – is still the same as in ancient times, but it is unattainable by this method since scapegoating millions of people at a time can only produce division and not peace and unity.

The peace, forgiveness, and unity offered in the Gospel is still available, of course, although the enactors of the new medical tyranny seem determined to keep as many people as possible from hearing that offer. They have universally declared the churches where the Gospel is preached in Word and Sacrament to be “non-essential” ordering them to close at the first sniffle of the bat flu and leaving them closed longer after everything else re-opened, although the number of churches that willingly went along with this and even took to enthusiastically enforcing the medical tyranny themselves raises the question of whether anyone would have heard the Gospel in them had they remained open.  Which brings us back to what was briefly observed earlier about Girard’s interpretation of Apocalyptic passages as depicting the devastating destruction of human violence which the scapegoat mechanism can no longer contain when man has rejected the Gospel.   Perhaps it ought not to surprise us that throughout this public health panic the medical tyrants have behaved as if the Book of Revelation’s depiction of the beast who demands that all the world worship him rather than God and requires that they show their allegiance to him by taking his mark on their right hand or forehead and prevents them from buying and selling without such a display of allegiance had been written as a script for them to act out at this time. 

~Ω~