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Follow the Science - Or is that Poli Science?

Sorry

The tyranny of Justin Trudeau has finally been exposed - and by two Brits, no less​

A lawsuit has shown Canada's travel vaccine mandate had little to do with science and everything to do with politics
RUPA SUBRAMANYA12 August 2022 • 2:28pm


On August 13, 2021, two days before Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau called a federal election, his government made a major announcement that “as early as at the end of September” federal government employees would be subject to a vaccine mandate. Further: “no later than the end of October” a vaccine mandate for travellers would also be implemented.

The prime minister’s tough position in the fall of 2021 was a far cry from what he said in March 2021, when Trudeau asserted that every Canadian who wanted to be vaccinated would have a dose available by the fall, implying that it would be voluntary – at a time when Canada was struggling to procure enough vaccine doses and was lagging far behind the UK, US, and other major Western countries in its vaccination campaign.

The vaccine mandate proposal was to become a cornerstone of Trudeau’s re-election bid. Speaking in a suburb of Toronto, home to Canada’s largest, and one of the world’s busiest airports, the prime minister reiterated his government’s intention – presumably if re-elected – to impose vaccine mandates on all sectors under the federal government’s control, which boils down to federal employees and travel.

Trudeau always maintained his government’s Covid policies were based on the science and the latest evidence. Yet, his shifting rhetoric, before and after his election call, tells a different tale. Thanks to a civil lawsuit against the travel mandate by two British immigrants, we’ve now seen inside the guts of part of Trudeau’s Covid machinery, and it’s become abundantly clear that it has little if anything to do with science and everything to do with politics.

From recently released court documents, which I broke in a story for Bari Weiss’s Common Sense, show us senior government bureaucrats scrambling to find a scientific rationale for the travel mandate mere days before it was due to come into force. We’ve had the opportunity to see into the inner workings of Trudeau’s vaccine machinery thanks to two British immigrants, Shaun Rickard and Karl Harrison, who filed a civil suit against the Trudeau government in the Federal Court. Thanks to their efforts, and that of their attorney, Sam Presvelos, the affidavits, testimonies, and cross-examination of key government witnesses are now in the public domain.

These documents clearly show us that the bureaucrat charged with holding the pen, under repeated cross-examination, refused to go into details on who ordered the mandate, citing, “Cabinet confidentiality”. Exactly why the rationale for a public health mandate should be so confidential raises the disturbing possibility that there really was no rationale at all. It’s evident that a political decision was taken by Trudeau and his cabinet to go ahead with the mandates, and the hapless bureaucrats were charged with coming up with some rationale, any credible rationale after the fact.

As it happens, the bureaucrat in charge of crafting one of the world’s “strongest vaccination mandates in the world”, according to the bureaucrat herself and Trudeau, has an undergraduate degree in English literature and self-evidently didn’t have the scientific knowledge to take a call. Neither were there any doctors, epidemiologists and scientists on her team, a secretive panel whose membership is nowhere published, and which rates a passing mention on the government’s website.

The federal government’s vaccine mandates were only the icing on the cake on top of provincial vaccine mandates, masking and distancing requirements, and some of the harshest lockdowns in the Western world. Under Canada’s federal system, these fall under provincial jurisdiction, although they certainly had the moral support of Trudeau’s federal government. Canadians, especially the unvaccinated, were virtually prisoners in their own homes and in their own country. Except, of course, unvaccinated Ukrainians, who were allowed to enter Canada after the war started, even when unvaccinated Canadians were barred from travel. Perhaps, if they tried hard enough, someone could come up with a “scientific” rationale for this as well. They might also need to work a bit to find a scientific basis for why, if the vaccine mandate was necessary, it wasn’t imposed before the election, but afterwards.

The five million or so unvaccinated Canadians were, ultimately, pawns in a political chess game. Trudeau cleverly latched onto vaccination, and government mandates flowing from them, as a potent wedge issue in the lead up to the fall 2021 snap election he called. He was hoping to win his Liberal government a majority, which was languishing in a minority position in the House of Commons, having squandered a previous majority thanks to public disgust at corruption and cronyism scams in his government.

As it happened, Trudeau’s gambit didn’t pay off, and his Liberals returned, again, with a minority — although, given the quirks of Canada’s Westminster system, the Conservatives, two elections in a row, won the popular vote, but lost the election. Trudeau now clings on to power in an alliance with the Socialist New Democratic Party and likely won’t face the voters again until 2025.

The tale of Trudeau’s vaccine mandates has ramifications far outside Canada. The world over, governments have invoked draconian powers, heretofore only used in wartime, to control and regulate their people and curtain fundamental individual liberties, such as the right to gather or the right to mobility. Everywhere, people are told by their governments, much as Trudeau told Canadians, we’re so sorry, we hate to restrict your freedoms, but we’re just following the science and the evidence. We know, in the case of Canada’s travel mandate, that this is simply false. In the Canadian case, Trudeau’s ministers have made it clear that the suspended mandates could come back, as, indeed, could Covid-based restrictions the world over.

Thanks to two British immigrants, we now know how the Covid policy sausage is made in Canada, and it isn’t pretty.

Rupa Subramanya is a columnist with the National Post in Canada

 
I was initially inclined to take this as a nothing burger based on the author of this piece in the opinion section (there is a reason why news outlet relegate many columnists to an "opinion" section), but misinformation is a growth industry and is so prevalent that purveyors of it should be held to task. A close study of her piece in comparison to the hours and hours of testimony on which she "based" the column would require hours to draft a response. Thankfully, some journalists have already done so.

Here are a few snippets, but for the full monty the link provides greater detail.

FACT-CHECK

Right-Wing Sources are Spreading Misinformation About a Court Battle Over Canada’s Vaccine Mandates​

Original court documents tell a different story than the one contained in a viral blog post from a convoy-friendly National Post columnist

The Claim:​

A National Post columnist claims newly released court documents “reveal” there was “no scientific basis” to Canada’s vaccine mandates in the transportation sector.

Writing on an American blog site, National Post columnist Rupa Subramanya shared excerpts from thousands of pages of court documents in a legal challenge against Canada’s vaccine mandate covering the transportation in a blog titled: “Court documents reveal Canada’s travel ban had no scientific basis.”

Among the evidence Subramanya presents to make her case for the “unscientific basis of the mandate” are short excerpts from an affidavit as well as hours of cross-examination testimony from a Transport Canada official who oversaw the implementation of the department’s vaccine mandate policy.

Subramanya alleges the documents show the public servant admitting under oath that there was no “science” involved in the development of the policy, insinuating that the entire policy was engineered to help win a “snap election.”

The blog uses out-of-context quotes and citations to advance misleading explanations for how the vaccine mandate — among the many grievances of the leaders of the 2022 convoy occupation of Ottawa — came into existence.

Rating: Subramanya’s claim that court documents reveal Transport Canada’s vaccine mandate policy had “no scientific basis” is misleading and contradicted by her own source documents.

While the original court documents Subramanya cites are authentic, her blog leaves out key details, uses out-of-context quotes and contains factual inaccuracies. Taken together, these present misleading impressions of Transport Canada’s testimony and evidence.

misleading-label.png
 
Whoa, whoa, whoa there. You're saying a journalist snipped and clipped a report to frame their story in such a way as to perhaps mislead the public? This is an outrage! Has Global/CBC/CTV been advised of this? Why the very thought makes me want to write a strongly worded letter to The Times.

TLDR version; Journos being journos, no film at 11:00
 
Why next thing you know Defence Attorneys will be making the Crown's cases for them....
 
Press Progress hates a "right-wing" viewpoint? Colour me shocked. The least they could do, was post the entire set of documents. Instead, they do what they accuse the "right-wing misinformation outlets" of doing, by taking screenshots of information to prove their point. If anyone wants to read the documents in totality, Brian Lilley had the journalistic integrity to post them along with his opinion commentary:

LILLEY: Court records show Trudeau brought in vaccine mandates for travel purely based on politics
 
I was initially inclined to take this as a nothing burger based on the author of this piece in the opinion section (there is a reason why news outlet relegate many columnists to an "opinion" section), but misinformation is a growth industry and is so prevalent that purveyors of it should be held to task. A close study of her piece in comparison to the hours and hours of testimony on which she "based" the column would require hours to draft a response. Thankfully, some journalists have already done so.

Here are a few snippets, but for the full monty the link provides greater detail.

Just read diagonally through the article, but caught a glimpse of this as some of it was highlighted as a link:
Except, of course, unvaccinated Ukrainians, who were allowed to enter Canada after the war started, even when unvaccinated Canadians were barred from travel. Perhaps, if they tried hard enough, someone could come up with a “scientific” rationale for this as well.
My ears perked up so to say, and that gave me an idea of what sort of a degenerate of a writer I was dealing with... I mean, what I am supposed to feel envious? Jealous? Bitter, perhaps, towards Ukrainians? Seriously?

Has that 2-bit knucklehead never heard of this new thing called risk management? What about context? Or just some basic empathy?

This is what universities really produce these days. People who can write but cannot think.
 
Just read diagonally through the article, but caught a glimpse of this as some of it was highlighted as a link:

My ears perked up so to say, and that gave me an idea of what sort of a degenerate of a writer I was dealing with... I mean, what I am supposed to feel envious? Jealous? Bitter, perhaps, towards Ukrainians? Seriously?

Has that 2-bit knucklehead never heard of this new thing called risk management? What about context? Or just some basic empathy?

This is what universities really produce these days. People who can write but cannot think.
The number of times I seen TC take a "No risk" approach. They earned the nickname of the "Department of No".
 
Lets be honest with ourselves here, the LPC wasn't pro-mandate until they realized thought it could swing voters their way. Regardless of the specifics of how they came to the conclusion, the mandates were a crass political maneuver to secure votes.

@Furniture, I think the edit is more accurate, n’est-ce pas? Since they didn’t get that slam dunk majority (after the passiv-aggressive threat to public servants and travellers), I’d say they swung and missed the voters’ mindset.

Transport Canada implementing a policy without a lot of thought or study, I am shocked, Shocked I tell you! If they do, it's then generally a decade late.

Maybe TC also uses CBC direction input for formulating policy? 🤷🏻‍♂️
 
Press Progress hates a "right-wing" viewpoint? Colour me shocked. The least they could do, was post the entire set of documents. Instead, they do what they accuse the "right-wing misinformation outlets" of doing, by taking screenshots of information to prove their point. If anyone wants to read the documents in totality, Brian Lilley had the journalistic integrity to post them along with his opinion commentary:

LILLEY: Court records show Trudeau brought in vaccine mandates for travel purely based on politics

While Mr Lilley may be much less of an xxxxxxx obnoxious than Ms Subramanya, the content of his piece draws almost exclusively from her blog/opinion/article and links to it as supporting "evidence". Though he may have provided copies of some of the court documents, a quick scan (in relative terms, still took me more than an hour) of the examinations of the two that he singled out in his article (Drs Laurenco pgs 72-420 and Waddell pgs 436-562 of the 1299 page pdf) left me wondering where was the smoking gun that both of these opinion pieces suggest.

Other than confirming my bias that most lawyers are arseholes (there's one or two that haunt these means that may be exceptions to the rule), their questioning didn't elicit what the plaintiffs' attorneys tried to get them to say despite some masterly weasel-wording.

While you may feel that Press Progress has a left leaning bias (it probably does), their analysis of Ms Subramanya's opinion piece is probably more on point than her's.
 
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Well, former Newfoundland premier and Charter signatory Brian Peckford is also suing the government over the travel mandate. His lawyer, Keith Wilson, stated last month that during pre-trial cross examination, PHAC's top epidemiologist stated that they (PHAC) never recommended mandatory vaccination of air travelers... and that the reason was because the scientific evidence did not suggest that it would be effective.

He mentioned this in an interview with Ezra Levant of Rebel News on 15 June. Of course, given the outlet, many may automatically decry this as "misinformation".

I read through the "fact check" on pressprogress.ca and it doesn't actually seem to refute the primary claims in the original article. While Transport Canada did receive many reports from PHAC in the months leading up to the implementation of the mandate, it does not appear that any of them recommended mandatory vaccination for travelers or employees. The main point of the article is to suggest that mandatory vaccine policies were developed by bureaucrats at the recommendation of politicians, and not the recommendations of health experts.

Here's an excerpt of the evidence from the fact check that displays how Transport Canada determined the timing of the policy implementation:

"Knowing through the fall 2021 that a large proportion of Canadians were fully vaccinated and a very considerable proportion of the population had at least one dose, including those who received their first dose after the Government of Canada's August 13, 2021 announcement, had time to become fully vaccinated. The October 22, 2021 document confirmed that this trend in vaccination rates was continuing, validating that the timing of Transport Canada's stepped approach was sound."

It appears that Transport Canada was of the opinion that the policy timeline was "sound" as long as vaccination rates were high and travelers had sufficient time to fall in line with the policy (get vaccinated). It does not, however, offer any explanations as to why or how the policy would significantly reduce spread of the virus. Nor does it try to tie the policy timeline to any specific wave or hospital capacity at the time. The only mentions of "success" of the policy I can find are with regards to increasing vaccine uptake. Was the goal of the mandates (travel, workplace) to "convince" people to get vaccinated, or was it to reduce spread of COVID19 and overall hospitalizations? Wouldn't higher vaccination rates suggest less need for such measures? ...if it was believed at the time that vaccination strongly protected an individual from contracting COVID19, then why were they afraid of being around unvaccinated individuals?

In December I posted instances of significant outbreaks amongst first responders (police, firefighters, paramedics) that had already let go their vaccinated employees. Remember when 53 members of the Ottawa paramedic services tested positive after a Christmas party? ...it was after they had laid off their unvaccinated staff, and took place at a downtown establishment during a time when the vaccine passport system was in effect. Were people suggesting that the chance of spread was reduced because all attendees were fully vaccinated? By exactly how much was it reduced? Of course, though, sentiment at the time was that the minority of unvaccinated individuals were the cause of the continued pandemic. There was also numerous reports (some of which I posted), in early fall 2021, from countries with early and high vaccine implementation that effectiveness waned significantly, particularly when it came to preventing spread. Many people acknowledged that such measures (vaccine mandates/passports) infringed on Charter Rights, but argued that Section One of the Charter places "reasonable limits" on such rights... on what reasonable grounds were these policies implemented?
 
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