Trudeau, Travel, and “The Science” ｜ EP 281 (zQLMctYO36E)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=zQLMctYO36E

He announces the mandates, essentially preventing millions of Canadians from boarding a plane or a train, and for civil servants who’ve been working from home since the pandemic began, they needed to be vaccinated. And it was just one of the most bizarre things. So not only did the Trudeau cabinet generate an unnecessary travel lockdown, depriving Canadians of one of their most fundamental civil rights, especially in a country of our size, but they did it and scrambled to find a scientific lie to justify it. And it was so far off base from the science that they couldn’t even find a suitable lie. And then they magnified their error by calling an election. And all of this was an instrumental attempt to gain more power on the election front because Trudeau was worried about being in a minority position and looking for a way to increase his grip on the prime ministership. Right. Oh boy. It’s no wonder no Canadian newspaper would publish that. That’s hardly a story at all. Hi everyone. I was sent an interesting article about a week ago written by Rupa Subramanya. It was sent to me by two sources, one from Barry Weiss’s Substack, which is where it was published, and also by Rex Murphy, who’s one of Canada’s foremost journalists. They were very impressed with the article and thought it was important. And so I read it and I think it is important. The article was called Court Documents Reveal. Canada’s travel ban had no scientific basis. Now, it was very interesting to me that Rupa had to publish this basically in an American news channel and sort of out of the way, although Barry Weiss’s Substack is quite popular. And she’s also had a lot of difficulty getting the story followed up in the Canadian legacy news. And it’s a big story. And I put her in touch with the Telegraph in the UK and they’re going to publish by all appearances a variant of the story. And so it’s pretty sad, bloody condition, let’s say that a big Canadian news story about the treacherous deceit of our government, federal government, is unable to attract any purchase in the legacy media outlets. It’s stunning in some sense. In any case, what Rupa revealed was that the Trudeau government put in what were among the most stringent travel restrictions in the Western world as of August 13th, 2021, and claimed scientific justification for doing so. But in fact, not only was there no scientific justification whatsoever for doing so, there weren’t any people who were making the decision, who were qualified to determine whether such scientific evidence actually existed. And so despite the fact that everyone who objected was pilloried as a public menace, as well as however else they might be pilloried, it appears as though all of it was smoke and mirrors and sheer bloody instrumental politicking. And I heard the same thing about operations at the provincial government levels in Canada from very reliable sources that all this so-called reliance on science was complete bloody nonsense. And that what was instead happening was that governments were conducting opinion polls like MAD, which is not necessarily a bad thing in itself, but often is. And ruling on that basis, deriving policy on that basis, so on the basis of public fear and whim, and then passing that off as scientific. And that’s pretty horrible. Or maybe it’s really horrible. And that was Rupa’s claim in some sense. So the story also covered a lawsuit brought against the government by a couple of plaintiffs who we have with us today, Carl Harrison and Sean Rickard, who are represented by a lawyer. And that lawyer is Sam Presvalos. And he’s here today too, so he’s also going to talk. And then featured as well commentary by Bruce Pardy. And Bruce is a law professor at Queen’s University who’s been very, he’s very interested in, well, let’s call it rule of law by precedent, you know, good old classic English common law, essentially. And so he’s going to give a broader overview of the whole legal situation. So I’m going to start with some bios, and then Rupa is going to come in and tell the story and weave the plaintiffs and their representative lawyer into the story. And then Bruce is going to comment and I’ll chime in probably too much. So first, Rupa Subramania is a freelance columnist for the National Post, Canada, and Nikkei. Her previous work has also appeared in the Wall Street Journal and Foreign Policy. She resides in Ottawa, Ontario. Bruce Pardy is a law professor at Queen’s University and is the executive director of Rights Probe. He’s a critic of legal progressivism, social justice, and the expansive managerial state at the front lines of the culture war, which is raging madly inside the law. Dr. Pardy has taught at law schools in Canada, the US, and New Zealand. He’s one of the co-creators of the Free North Declaration, a public petition and movement to protect civil liberties in Canada from COVID-19 irrationality and overreach. Sam Presfilos, the representing lawyer, founded Presfilos Law LLP at 25 years of age and serves there as managing partner. He specializes in corporate, commercial, and real estate litigation and has successfully represented clients before the Superior Court of Justice, Divisional Court, Court of Appeal, and Federal Court of Canada. His peers ranked Mr. Presfilos as one of the top 100 lawyers in Toronto in 2021 in Post Magazine. Carl Harrison, one of the plaintiffs against the federal government, has opened, operated, and sold many successful restaurants, bars, and music and comedy venues. In 2011, he was named one of the top 20 most influential people in the UK hospitality trade. He has found success as a real estate investor and developer since 1987 and has been involved in the travel sector since the year 2000. He is a co-founder and co-owner of a well-known family holiday brand operating in the UK, France, Spain, and Ireland. He was also, it’s a very interesting life, he was also co-founder and investor at Seattle Seawolves, a team which took the silverware in the first two seasons of Major League Rugby in the US. He’s also been an occasional contributing writer for the UK satirical magazine Private Eye and has as well co-produced a series of award-winning short horror films. Last but not least, he has campaigned for reform of abusive practices in the UK pub sector. And finally, Sean Rickard is a 55-year-old entrepreneur and small business owner who resides in Pickering, Ontario. He owns and operates a contracting business specializing in exterior aluminum and vinyl siding in Eve’s work on residential homes. He founded the company back in early 2013 and built it from the ground up. He’s a British citizen and a permanent resident in Canada. Mr. Rickard came to Canada on a vacation to explore when he was just 20 years old and fell in love with the country. Mr. Rickard also had a fishing and outdoor TV show back in 2005 to 2007 which aired in Canada and the US on OLN, CTV, WFN, and Global. Welcome Rupa, Bruce, Sam, Carl, and Sean. Thank you very much for agreeing to talk with me today. Rupa, why don’t you start filling us in? Tell us about the story and then fill in the story and bring these other characters in. Okay, well thanks Jordan. Thanks for having us all here. It really is a pleasure and a real honor. So I will quickly summarize the story for our viewers and our listeners. The Trudeau government always claimed that COVID-19 policies were based on the science and the evidence. They kept telling us we’re consulting the experts, the scientists, and we’re following the science and the evidence. But now thanks to the civil suit brought by Carl Harrison and Sean Rickard and we’ve seen inside the guts of one of the key mandates of the federal government implemented by the federal government which is the vaccine mandate for travel which proved so incredibly destructive and prevented millions of Canadians from traveling to even visit sick relatives and visiting their loved ones to board a plane or a train. You couldn’t even board a train for domestic travel purposes. And so while pouring over hundreds of pages of testimony and cross-examination thanks to the brilliant cross-examination by their attorney Sam Presfalaus, it becomes crystal clear that the mandates were going to happen and that the bureaucrats had to scramble to find some kind of a scientific rationale for which they weren’t able to do even just a few days before the mandate kicked in. So the question is why did Trudeau do this? Trudeau was, if you remember, the Prime Minister was in a minority in the House of Commons having lost his majority back in 2019 because of corruption and cronyism scans and he was desperate to regain it and vaccine mandates proved to be the perfect wedge issue and that’s what everybody was saying at that time. This is the fall of 2021. Why for travel? Well one crucial reason is that it’s the only sector apart from the federal workplace which comes under the federal government’s powers. In other words this was the only place where Trudeau could flex his muscles and impose a vaccine mandate and that’s what he did. So your claim here, if I have it right, just so everyone listening knows, is that Trudeau who was struggling to maintain popularity, to maintain his government, picked a divisive wedge issue because it was a divisive wedge issue, imposed it on Canadians and then attempt to insist that it was justified by the science. Yeah there was no, it’s very clear the scientific rationale is lacking at least based on the cross-examination of the key government witnesses in this case. Hmm so he risked splitting the country apart and pitting people against each other personally and socially to facilitate his government’s grip on power. That’s what it appears to be at this point. Yeah okay so sorry to interrupt I just wanted to clarify that. So all right so you started investigating this, why? Well I was actually aware of the case but I really had no entree into it until through a mutual acquaintance one of the applicants reached out to me and then I became aware of the case and the background and their fight against the federal government, against the travel mandate and then thanks to their litigation the documents eventually became publicly available and through the federal court. Ironically I must point this out that in response to my piece telling the story of Sean and Carl’s legal battle, the federal court in a very unusual move and this is what I’m told by many people that it was an extremely unusual move, they actually made it easier for the public to access the documents by tweeting about it and they made a link publicly available. And I have to say that some of the cross-examination really reads like a John Grisham novel. You know you’ve got the secretive government panel within Transport Canada which is tasked with crafting the mandate. Apart from its head who is a career bureaucrat, she has a degree in English literature. We don’t really know much about the others, there are about 20 people on this panel and she except she names one individual on this panel who seems to have some kind of a public health background. When I reached out to her she said she has a master’s in science but she refused to tell me what that was in. For all you know it could be astrophysics but we don’t know that but the key point here is none of these people had a background in medicine, epidemiology, infectious diseases, virology, you name it. They were just there to provide a cover for the mandate. And you talk about Jennifer, is it Jennifer Little? It’s Jennifer Little, yes. And she was the one who was in charge of this, is that correct? Yeah she was the director general of this group of COVID-19. These are all civil servants you’re talking about? They’re all civil servants. Okay why did they regard it as part of their duty to provide a cover story for the politicking of the liberal government? I thought they had a duty to the public fundamentally so why were they roped into this and why did they agree to it? Well I mean this is something that you would have to ask them but my guess is they were just doing their jobs I guess. You have the secretive task force within Transport Canada and they really had no good scientific rationale and they were looking for one. They were scrambling for one days before, literally less than 10 days before the mandate goes into effect. And you know including hoping that the Public Health Agency of Canada, PHAC, would come up with something which they didn’t. And Jennifer Little, the bureaucrat that I referred to with the bachelor’s degree in English literature, repeatedly said the decisions were made at very high levels and these were people senior to her and invoked cabinet confidence and refused to answer who exactly ordered the mandates. This was during cross-examination? Yes this was during cross-examination. And she has the right to keep that information secret if it’s come from a high enough legislative source? I would guess so. I mean this is not my area of expertise. I don’t really know the law governing civil servants but she certainly repeatedly invoked cabinet confidence when she was asked questions of on who exactly ordered the mandates. Making it pretty clear, I guess I mean one could infer from this, the decision was taken either by the Prime Minister himself or the cabinet as a whole. And this confirms what many had suspected all along that when the Prime Minister introduced the federal mandate both for travel and for the civil service and called a snap election two days later, August 13 he announces the mandates essentially preventing millions of Canadians from boarding a plane or a train and for civil servants who’ve been working from home since the pandemic began, they needed to be vaccinated and it was just one of the most bizarre things. Okay so let me stop you there and summarize so because this is where the plot gets particularly thick. So not only did the Trudeau cabinet generate an unnecessary travel lockdown depriving Canadians of one of their most fundamental civil rights, especially in a country of our size, but they did it and scrambled to find a scientific lie to justify it and it was so far off base from the science that they couldn’t even find a suitable lie and then they magnified their error by calling an election and all of this was an instrumental attempt to gain more power on the election front because Trudeau was worried about being in a minority position and looking for a way to increase his grip on the prime ministership. Right. Oh boy it’s no wonder no Canadian newspaper would publish that, that’s hardly a story at all. And Jordan you know if I may say this, you know if this really had been about saving lives, why didn’t Trudeau just impose the mandates and campaign on them as a fait accompli? That would have been the right thing to do. Instead he cleverly used these mandates as a wedge issue and unfortunately for him he managed to just eke out another minority government, but in the process he ended up dividing the country, he ended up demonizing and marginalizing millions of Canadians who were unable or unwilling for a range of different reasons to get the vaccine. Yeah well and a huge part of the reason they were unable or unwilling to get the vaccine was because they didn’t trust the Trudeau government at all and so there were all sorts of people and some of them I suppose were conspiratorial or in their inferences but many weren’t who thought there’s something fishy going on here, I don’t trust this a bit and those were all the people who were demonized as you know radical anti-vaxxers. We’ll get back to more with Dr. Jordan Peterson in just a second. First we’d like to tell you about Birch Gold. 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Again text Jordan to 989898 to claim your free no obligation information kit on how to protect your hard-earned savings with gold. We’re going to turn to Carl Harrison who’s taken a and Sean Rickard who’s taken a lawsuit out against the Canadian government for reasons related to the to the story that Rupa has been telling and so Carl perhaps you can start by telling us, filling us in on on what you’re doing and why. Yeah thanks yeah we’re taking uh we’ve made an application for um a judicial declaration essentially in the federal court in relation to the Canadian government’s discriminatory mandates for requiring a vaccine as a precursor to traveling. We filed that in December after a lot of thought and consideration over previous months separately. I mean I came to this differently to Sean. I came to this throughout the summer months in 2021. In April of 2021 I was listening to the Prime Minister of Canada saying that there would be a vaccine for any Canadian that wanted one and by the time we got to the fall I had a man watching a man on television as the Prime Minister of Canada talking about five to seven million of his fellow Canadians as people who were racists and misogynists and people who were taking up space, people who might not be tolerated, which is language. I mean I’m coming up 60 years old. I’ve not really heard that kind of language from a Prime Minister of many Western democracies until recently and I certainly wouldn’t have expected it from a Canadian Prime Minister but there we go and so during the summer of 2021 the Prime Minister decided he was going to dissolve parliament, go for an election and try to get re-elected in the fall and clearly he had as you said earlier identified with his advisors whoever they are a wedge issue which based around people’s health choices and he thought he could polarize the population and he thought he could use it to his advantage. Why did you feel so strongly about this to take such dramatic action because obviously most Canadians even within that five to seven million number that you described grumbled about this but didn’t do what you did. Why did you identify this as so important and why were you willing to put yourself at substantial risk financially and in terms of your time to do something about it? It’s not a difficult question to answer. I mean there are three, when you see this kind of policy implemented by governments, there are three things you can primarily do. I mean you can accept it, you can fight it or you can run away and it’s a blend of those actions and I think if you’re able to fight these things, if there’s something you can do, then you should. It’s good citizenship. I mean I’m a recent immigrant to Canada. I’m a Canadian citizen and a UK citizen and I brought my family here in 2009 and I fell in love with in Canada in the 1990s and as a recent immigrant from Europe I feel it’s a part of citizenship to stand up against these kind of issues. So running away wasn’t an option for us, accepting it wasn’t an option. So how can we fight it? We’re not in politics. The opposition parties throughout the summer of 2021 were weak. I mean Eran O’Toole I think just demonstrated an extraordinary lack of vision and weakness throughout the summer of 2021 by seemingly going along with Trudeau rather than actually opposing him. Whilst he was opposing him, his polling was doing well and as soon as he started to go along with him he plummeted and subsequently lost. So I thought what can I do? I started to think about illegal action and at that point I came across Sean who was, I saw him on Twitter, the sort of global town hall and I saw Sean there with saying some of the same things that I was thinking and starting the process of raising money and I reached out to Sean. I thought I could contribute from my own legal experience in the past. I thought that was something I could usefully add and I thought I could usefully add funding. You know I’ve been in business a long time so I have some resource and I thought that’s something else I can do. So I couldn’t politically oppose at that point. We couldn’t, we could protest, we can go and do direct action and we can protest with other people and Canadians should always protest where things are wrong and coming from the UK we’re used to protest. I mean it’s as you know, I mean you’ve been there a lot I think to the UK Jordan and protesting the UK is seen as you know something that definitely has to be done. So taking part in that, something we can do and legal action, something we can do. I came together with Sean in the fall 2021 and I’ll let Sean pick up there because he can explain how we came to work with Sam I think, probably helpful. Sure, Sean over to you. Yeah hi and thank you again for having us all on and helping us get this story out. As you said the Canadian legacy media have essentially ignored this story completely. Which is mind boggling and then also deeply disturbing but I guess this whole process kind of came about for me as Carl said in September when I heard this sort of disgusting divisive rhetoric coming out of our Prime Minister’s mouth when he was campaigning and the further we went along and the more this whole threat of banning the dirty unvaccinated or those who refuse to be injected from getting on a plane or a train and even leaving the country just absolutely terrified me. I mean to me he resembled a sort of a narcissistic sociopathic tyrant and it really troubled me and I felt that I had to do something about it. I like to travel, I feel it’s my right to travel, I’m a free man and for somebody to come along and take that away with no recourse was deeply disturbing for me. So I immediately started putting the feelers out there to various people. I spoke to a couple of politicians, most of them were useless and eventually I spoke with somebody and I was given Sam’s name and literally in the same night I had a conversation with one person who introduced me to Sam. Sam and I spoke and that same night I started a GoFundMe campaign on a fundraising campaign on GoFundMe and started tweeting about it. I’d never used Twitter before, I had four followers and in six weeks I went to 7,800 followers and during that process we were gaining a lot of traction, a lot of people’s interests and I began to realize just how this had affected like Carlson six to seven million people’s lives. People unable to go and visit family, that type of thing and this is before it even happened. So I got the ball rolling, I spoke with Sam, we hit it off immediately and he was as passionate about this as I was and we came up with a sort of a vague strategy of how we might do this and then the first thing was obviously was to start raising some money and through that process on Twitter I started getting messages from people like you do. As your followers grow people start sending you messages, some helpful, some not, some supportive, some not and I got a couple of messages from Carl and I was kind of fielding through all these messages and so on and eventually he sent me something that sort of resonated with me and I found out he was in British Columbia and so I messaged him back. A couple of times we spoke to each other through direct message and then we arranged, eventually arranged to have a Zoom call with Sam and that’s the first time that all three of us spoke as a group and Carl very kindly at that time, again as passionate as we all were about putting a stop to this, this tyranny and I don’t use that word lightly but that’s exactly the way we perceived it. Why did you two have enough confidence to go ahead with this? Now I mean at that point people who were opposing the vaccine say so I’d like to know why it bothered you so much, what the vaccine mandate meant to you personally but then why you were able to presume that you knew well enough better to risk bringing a lawsuit against the Canadian government? Did you have support from your family? I mean obviously no you didn’t have support from your family, you had support from each other. Who supported you? Why did you have enough confidence to do this? It’s a very good question and I to be honest to this day I don’t know why I did this. I was just very angry and I felt somebody needed to do something. The politicians weren’t even speaking up as Carl pointed out you know Aaron O’Toole, I mean what a wet blanket he ended up just complete rollover. They saw these atrocities and I’ll call them that going on and nobody spoke up nobody said a thing so I felt that I don’t know why I just felt compelled to do something. How helpful was it to have Sean to talk to about it? I mean now there’s two of you and not one and so that’s twice as many people. It made a huge difference. I mean we’ve been a support group for one another since day one. We’ve lost, we’ve all made and just to clarify we’ve all made huge sacrifices. We’ve all lost friends throughout this process. You know certain family members begin to think you’re a bit crazy but we’ve always had each other and we were so in line and it was like it was meant to be. I said this the other day in Rupa’s show. You just said something very terrible there you know as far as I’m concerned that you lost friends and you were subject to the disruption of your familial cohesion and so one of the things Rupa pointed to in the beginning part of this conversation was the fact that Trudeau found a divisive wedge issue and exploited it for his own purposes and so what does that mean? We want to make that concrete because that’s just abstract. Yeah well it means that your friends turn your back on you or vice versa and that now you’re at the throats of your family members and that’s how civil society decays and so the story here and this is why it’s so absolutely appalling that the Canadian Legacy Media won’t pick it up is that Trudeau was willing to sow that kind of personal level discord to say nothing of the utter economic and financial catastrophe that the policies produced to do nothing but not even really manage to cement his grip on power. I think it’s quite possible that Trudeau and the government in doing what they’ve done have very badly misread the numbers if nothing else. I think they maybe thought that people fell into one of two camps either they would be people that would be pro-mandates or people that would be against them and I think it’s much more nuanced than that and certainly in my experience of doing this exercise has been that whilst yeah okay I’ve lost a couple of friends but I’ve got a lot of family support for doing this and a lot of support from people locally and some surprising people and I think there’s an element of a lot of folks who disagree with it sort of going along with it keeping their head down that’s sort of an element of Canadian politeness almost you know and I think that’s a challenge going forward for Canada as Canada perhaps I mean maybe Trudeau’s done us all a favor by pushing us pushing Canada towards the end of what some might see as a political adolescence. Well I was thinking when Trudeau called the truckers misogynists and bigots and said that they were fomenting a rebellion in Ottawa let’s say financed by mega republicans of all the preposterous things I thought because I was down in the states when that was happening talking to Americans telling them that this was the story and they were like open-jawed in amazement including the Democrats that anyone would ever possibly believe that and then I thought well you better give the devil his due why would Canadians be willing to fall for that let’s say and then I thought well here’s the story man it’s like for 150 years 150 odd years we’ve really been able to to evince a reasonable trust in our political institutions all three political parties from right to left governed with some degree of credibility and decency and predictability and then the legacy media did their job being responsible critics and I say you could even say that of the CBC for many years and the education system was reliable and the legal system wasn’t taken over by DEI warriors and so forth and so and now all that’s or a lot of that has changed and so now Canadians were being asked by their Prime Minister to accept one of two stories either the truckers for example were misogynists and bigots hell-bent on destabilizing Canadian democracy or you could no longer trust the government in a fundamental sense or the legacy media and God only knows how much of the education system and the courts and so in some sense for a sensible and conservative people the logical choice there was to well assume the lesser devil and think that the truckers and the anti-vaxxers so-called and so forth were you know a fringe misogynist and bigot group and that everything in the background was really running as it should be but as Rupa’s story indicates and as I said I heard exactly the same story several months ago from high-level consultants to provincial governments across Canada that they were doing the same thing ruling by poll post-hoc justifying it by science all right so Sam you got involved in this so tell us your story and and flesh out what’s been happening on the legal front and where this is going to go and I want to return to Carl too about the funding issue after that sure so good so good afternoon and thanks thanks as well for having me on the podcast you know this is very much terra nova for me I’m not a constitutional lawyer I never saw myself getting involved in a constitutional case of this magnitude and I think I’ve said before elsewhere that constitutional law was my lowest mark ever in school and yet here I am at the forefront of this challenge you know I think like like my clients like Carl like Sean I also felt compelled to do something if if you see there’s a problematic trend happening and and you know you have a means to affect some sort of a change and you do nothing about it I think in your own way you’re contributing to the problem and everyone has a different threshold of getting involved and quite frankly my my threshold I I sort of crossed that threshold at the mandatory hotel quarantine which is a policy that I never would have imagined ever witnessing in a western democracy the idea that somebody would have to quarantine pending a result of a you know a virus that quite frankly we’ve seen in some iteration before was frankly disturbing to me and that that’s really what propelled me and I was very fortunate to get connected with Sean and then again with Carl and it’s true you know Sean Carl and I in many ways have become our own little family and we’ve been very fortunate to be supportive one another and what has been an extremely grueling seven eight months this case really started the Christmas Eve I suppose you made it a present to the government and and we’re still in that we’re still in the midst of it and here we are in August and we’re you know just today I’m submitting my final materials to the court for the application so it’s been an extraordinary process and we’ve learned as you’ve come to learn very extraordinary things along the way. Well can you just no one listening knows how a case like this proceeds so could you walk us through the basis for the case the nature of your challenge how the government lawyers are resisting this and then and lay out the story of the of the court battle and where it’s headed? Sure so I you know fundamentally there’s sort of two ways in which litigation proceeds through the court system the one way is an action and an action is sort of your what you what most people come to know in like tv courtroom dramas where you have a judge and you have a witness and you know there’s this idea that people are yelling and cross-examining and they’re getting evidence orally which is what we call viva voce evidence that’s not what’s happening here this is proceeding by way of an application and an application is largely a paper-based record so what happens is people put an evidence to the court and they do that by way of an affidavit and you can think of an affidavit as a story and you get stories from the applicants like Sean and Carl about how the mandates have infringed their charter rights and you also get you know stories I’ll just call them a little bit more informally from experts who talk about the science and different policy considerations and then each side has to do that so both sides have to produce their evidentiary record which is as I mentioned exclusively done by paper and then what happens is we we participate in what is called the cross-examination in an action the cross-examination is done live in front of the judge and the judge is there to assess the credibility of the witnesses and weigh testimony in an application which is what we’re doing that is done with private you know privately in a boardroom with a court reporter and there’s endless hours of cross-examinations based on what people have said in their affidavits their story and so a lot of the evidence that Rupa’s referring to came out in the process of that cross-examination because as you know our our justice system is premised on the adversarial context and the idea that if if competing evidence is tested the truth lies somewhere and the truth will come out and we’ve we spent May and June literally two months just exclusively in cross-examination we we then take the affidavit records and we take the cross-examination transcripts we file that with the court and then we appear at a hearing and in that hearing we make reference to the evidence both in the affidavits in the expert reports and also in the cross-examination transcripts and it’s just submissions from lawyers in front of a judge. Okay so what’s the nature of the challenge the government put in these mandates and they were mandated and and required and you’re objecting to that what exactly is the objection and and and why are you even vaguely allowed to do this let’s say? Well I should hope we’re allowed to do this or else we have a much larger constitutional crisis than I currently think we do but you know first and foremost there is a prima facie infringement of Sean, Carl and and those Canadians who are not vaccinated a prima facie infringement of their section six charter right which is the right of mobility and I think it’s one of the most fundamental rights that we have in the charter it goes to the very essence of what it means to live a dignified existence the notion that you know a man or woman can get up and move about their country and leave their country at their will and that’s been directly engaged in this charter challenge and in a context quite frankly that I’ve never seen before a lot of the section six cases deal with issues like extradition deportation I’ve never seen a case like this that a government policy in reference to a public health mandate has had the effect of preventing their own citizens from moving between provinces or from leaving their country in fact I’ve I can tell you right now I have not found a case like this other than a case in Newfoundland in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the second thing which I think is also very novel here is the government has effectively created Sophie’s Choice right they’re asking Canadians to do a little bit of horse trading with their charter rights you cannot simultaneously exercise your right to travel while also exercising your section seven right to protect your bodily autonomy what do I mean by that you need to make a decision you are either going to get on a plane and get vaccinated or you are not going to get vaccinated and you’re going to forfeit your right to use federally regulated transportation system I think that’s actually constitutionally unprecedented I’ve never seen a scenario where a government policy has created such a direct conflict such that it coerces you to choose one over the other and and and let’s be clear about that Sean and Carl were coerced into not traveling because they wanted to protect their decision making over what is an inherently private choice i.e. vaccination and so both of those issues are very much engaged and it’s on this basis that we’ve brought this application okay and so what’s the fine I got it so what’s the what’s the government counterclaim now hypothetically the emergency was such that the science indicated that the government could suspend Canadian charter rights okay what kind of evidence do you need when can you suspend rights and when you suspend rights by what principles are you allowed to suspend them well we were we were on a quest to answer a lot of those questions um as you know obviously no right is absolute and if the government has a compelling objective such that they may need to infringe a charter right they’re entitled to do so if they come to the table with the right type of evidence right there is a reverse onus I mean once my clients show that their rights have been breached the government then has to go to court and convince the court that they were justified in doing so and that’s where this fight is really happening what is the justification what is so compelling about the risk of the unvaccinated flying that you’ve believe it is it is permissible in our democratic society to force unvaccinated people into making the decision that I just described and I can tell you that having been living this case for the last seven months the approach the government has seemed to take is the casual application of general scientific principles to the transportation sector they reason that because vaccination is generally good and desirable everybody should do it and because it provides some sort of a transient benefit you should do it it’s generally desirable it’s good for public health policies and we’re going to use uh means available to us to encourage and incentivize that behavior well there’s a difference between there’s a difference between should and must let’s say not least and then of course we have the problem rupa pointed out which was the scientific evidence for the utility of the travel ban itself was apparently entirely lacking so at the moment and I don’t know how this is playing out in court but in the context of this conversation and other conversations I’ve had that are similar the evidence legal and scientific on the government and let’s also say moral shall we on the government side seems pretty well how about we call it appallingly and unprecedentedly weak well it’s interesting they use the word morality there because I actually in cross-examinations I did ask uh well the individual who is responsible for the development of the policy whether there was an ethical consideration uh behind the vaccine mandate and the answer is that there is not which is astounding because there’s actually an ethical no it gets better there is actually an ethical framework available by the government online that is supposedly used to guide ethical decision making in the context of the pandemic um so and so that wasn’t used either no no so if we if we tried to give the devil is due and and so I’ll speak as a critic of rupa here her claim fundamentally is that this was nothing but blatant cynical narcissistic uh politicking of the lowest order and we might say well no that’s probably an oversimplification there must have been some other justification generated like in good faith and then also post-hoc as at least as a cover-up but essentially in some sense what you seem to be saying is that you uncovered very little evidence of any of that in the in the cross examinations so even as a scam it wasn’t a very good one there is evidence that you know vaccines can help protect against developing severe outcomes and deaths um the question is how compelling is that evidence how long does that protection actually last but the bigger question is why does that matter in the context of the transportation system when you’re talking about the fact that travel contributes one percent or less by the government’s own data it’s a covid 19 transmission and somehow this is the targeted industry that we’re going to focus on and impose a vaccination requirement as a precondition for travel why isn’t anyone comparing that to the general epidemiological situation in the community and here’s a surprise for you nobody did that nobody looked at nobody looked to compare what’s the positivity like in different settings in the general community because if you’re not traveling where are you you’re at home you’re in the supermarket you’re watching soccer you’re watching a basketball game all of which by the way you can do without being vaccinated but you can’t travel which is also one of the safest places to be i mean we have an expert um uh you know who’s who has testified that the and and this is public knowledge i mean the the filtration system and modern aircrafts are better than the filtration systems in operating 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Okay so so you just dropped two bombshells there right not not that there haven’t been any others dropped during this conversation but two i’m going to highlight them the first is that by the government’s own admission travel was a vector for the transmission of less than one percent of the virus so now we’re talking at best about a one percent probability of contracting a disease that has something approximating a two percent mortality rate if that and that’s particularly true only for people who are extremely ill or extremely elderly who are other have other compromising health conditions so it’s a negligible risk of a negligible risk but that justifies charter right suspension and then you said something equally appalling which was that anyone with any sense would have rank ordered transmission risks right across all the possible let’s say across the range of 95 percent of the social interactions and activities that Canadians engage in we would have rank ordered that in terms of danger one of the things we would have found out by the way is that locking people up together was probably a dangerous thing to do rather than a good thing to do but in any case that’s what you do at the policy level right here’s the dangers rank ordered let’s knock them off from the top down but you said none of that happened either there was no methodology for doing a comparative analysis and that’s reminiscent to me of the fact that we we locked down everybody at home and we blew apart the supply chain we never did any analysis whatsoever to find out if the economic consequences that were going to be more devastating physically psychologically and in the long term than the epidemic itself and they certainly they’re going to end up being far more devastating than the epidemic i think by all evidence generated to date so bruce maybe we’ll turn over to you for a bit to get a bit of an overview and then i’m going to go back to to to um to talk about the funding situation then we’ll go back to rupa bruce two questions come to mind for me right away the first is if the government let’s say it more clearly if the mandarins in the trudeau cabinet violated the charter for the purposes of their instrumental politicking how serious is that offense in legal terms and what is the recourse right well let’s back up just a step before you get to the charter even there’s a principle in governance which is this governments can’t just create any just create any policies that they like there’s a there’s a difference between the government and the legislature and anything a government does in terms of making rules it has to have authorization to do in a statute that the legislature has passed and in this case in the case of the of the airline mandate we’re talking about the aeronautics act now the aeronautics act gives to cabinet and the minister of transportation the power to make all kinds of rules about all kinds of things that deal with flight with the airline industry but that’s not an open-ended discretion the fact of the matter is that governments make policies that are politically motivated all the time and and they’re allowed to do that as long as they can fit them within the authority that they have in a statute but the problem for the government in this respect is this that the rationale that they’ve given if they’ve given one at all does not fit within the the authority that the aeronautic act gives so in other words the minister is allowed to create interim orders that have to do with the safety of the airline industry of the passengers of the crew and so on and the premise of a vaccine mandate is that if you have the vaccine then you won’t get infected and if you if you don’t have the vaccine then you will get infected but in the case of this vaccine that has really never been the case that was it was pretended to be early on but that has never been really the official claim at least from the manufacturers of this vaccine so if you don’t have that excuse if the vaccine will not prevent infection then what else do you have so is there okay so there’s two issues here then i think that you just delineated one is that correct me if i’m wrong that it isn’t obvious that the trudeau cabinet had the proper governmental authority to impose this mandate because it exceeded the purview of what would be generally acceptable practice on the legislative front so it was a an overreach of power independent of the fact that it violated the charter have i got that right just put aside the charter first sure you just just on the basis of pure authority and the way government works we have separation of powers yes governments and legislators now i know to most people those two things will look like the same thing because the same people are heading both of these branches you know the prime minister sits in the house of commons and the cabinet does as well and they seem to run the show in the legislature but they’re two different things and the legislature must pass a statute that gives the authority to the executive branch which is what the cabinet heads to make certain rules now those that authority is limited according to its terms and those terms in this case are you can make rules about safety but the problem is that if you don’t have the prevention of infection as one of the characteristics of the vaccine the next question is well okay but but then what’s the safety thing you’re doing well rupa and the plaintiffs and their representing lawyer have already made the claim that the evidence on the safety front not only wasn’t there to begin with but couldn’t even be scrounged up post-hawks so that right seems absurd on the on the face of it well right okay so if i may so i mean what rupert’s article was about and what and what the what san francis examination managed to achieve was essentially an admission that there there wasn’t really any uh solid scientific recommendation from the from from the health and science people to the transport people that this ought to be done should i i i i think i think the cross examination was very well done and it might be interesting just to just to read you a very short sentence from uh jennifer little that rupa was talking about in her cross examination right so the question was are there any emails any briefs any reports from health canada or public health recommending the implementation of a mandatory vaccination policy for travel and after a long pause the answer was this i do not recall a document from the public health agency or health canada to transport canada recommending that transport canada take this approach well in other words there was there was no solid written recommendation to do this and right well that’s that that sounds clear enough so that it’s not even a matter of opinion right because we can always bandy about the objection that’s opinion rupa you have a comment yeah just to quickly jump in here jordan um just picking up from what bruce was saying um that uh you know the the damning email exchange that i mentioned in my story uh it’s about a senior trans uh transport canada official who is emailing his counterpart at p hack and asking this individual look the mandate is going to be going into going into effect in a few days we need some scientific rationale some scientific evidence as soon as possible he doesn’t hear from this individual for a few days now it’s like literally where the clock is ticking and he presses her and he says we need something fairly quick so please could you get something to us soon and she eventually responds to him and uh it’s just uh generic homilies about how uh how vaccines are good for you you should get vaccinated and we believe uh that vaccines prevent severe disease and so on and so forth the question is what does this have to do with the transportation sector how is it preventing transmission how is it how is it doing how is it specific to the travel sector that’s the question and i will also tell you one more thing that i couldn’t get into my story again this goes back to jennifer little she’s asked about the um the implementation of the mandate uh and she says look you know had we done had we implemented this mandate when 50 percent of eligible canadians had been vaccinated it would have created to use her own words chaos in the system if this were really about public policy public health policy uh shouldn’t vaccination have been that should have been the primary consideration but what they do is they wait till 80 percent of canadians have been vaccinated where a high number of high percentage of canadians are vaccinated to implement a vaccine mandate which is just extraordinary so and i agree i finish off this thought to go to to go back to this this this idea that the rationale let’s let’s just give them the benefit of the doubt let’s say that the actual health-based scientific rationale is as rupe leads to that you know vaccines are generally a good thing and that that having a vaccine mandate will incentivize people to get a vaccine when they wouldn’t otherwise do so that is it’s not about being on the plane it’s about the fact that people who want to be on a plane will have to get back okay here’s the problem if that’s the rationale that is not about the safety of air travel and that means that is not an order authorized under the act uh-huh so that’s the legal issue well the moral issue might be well if you have to use compulsion then maybe that’s a sign that your policy is ill-formulated and also i would say from an epidemiological perspective um or in a psychological perspective in order for that argument to to be credible you’d have to have documentation showing that if you added compulsion to the vaccination process that that would actually produce less resistance to the vaccine rather than more and that evidence would be very hard to come by because there’s a certain number of people that as soon as you force them to do anything even if it’s in their own good for their own good even if that’s documented the mere fact that you’re forcing them is going to convince them to tell you to go to hell and i’m for one very happy that there is a minority of people like that so so that the evidence that i don’t think there’s any good evidence for the use of compulsion in in public health or at least there’s no evidence suggesting that policy based on compulsion shouldn’t be regarded as inferior to policy based on rational dialogue and and let’s say positive motivation and consensus which is a much better grounds for what would you say the consent of the governed how about that so can we turn bruce to the charter issue then have you have you elaborated out on the first one enough well yeah sure so as sam alluded to this weighing up of rationales will take place under a section one analysis and you’ll get the section one only after the breach of the charter right in this case section six has been established and so i would say in this case i mean this cross-examination is terrific for the purpose of that section one analysis okay tell us about tell us what a section one analysis means right so so section one analysis basically says section one says you know all of the rights and freedoms in in the charter are are subject to reasonable limits if the government can can demonstrate that the infringement of the right is justified in a free and democratic society then we’re going to say okay and in order to show that it’s justified the government has to show that the problem that they were trying to solve was serious enough that it justified these measures that they chose a proportional way of doing so that it caused an infringement as little as as little as possible under the circumstances and so on so to sam’s point that charter rights and freedoms are not absolute and of course they’re not section one over time has shown to be a pretty large gate wide enough for the government to drive you know to drive a truck through sometimes yeah truck yeah right well brian peckford a former a former premier of canada and one of the uh founders of the charter has uh vociferously objected to the government’s use of section one saying that he knows perfectly well as a consequence of discussing the issue with the people who designed the charter to begin with back in the 1980s that none of them intended that section one be used in a circumstance as trivial and uncertain as this one right but so to to give the courts in this particular moment the benefit of the doubt that’s not actually what section one says i mean if section one had been intended to apply you know only in the most extreme existential emergency situation like it could have worked that way if that is what it had said but but the way it is worded it’s at least possible to interpret section one as giving you know pretty loosey goosey leeway for figuring out whether or not it’s justified in any particular case yeah well maybe maybe section one needs to be revisited in a really serious manner listen the whole charter needs to be revisited but unfortunately we have created now such an onerous amending uh formula that that becomes almost politically impossible to do and even if it wasn’t i’m afraid that the that the political circumstances right now is such that if you opened up the charter in the constitution you’d have a good constituency size constituency on the other side trying to make things worse from our point of view right so okay so let’s let’s talk about the courts momentarily so bruce i know you have some concerns about the politicization of courts in canada politicization of the legal enterprise and the judiciary um and you’re certainly not alone in that do you have any faith that this case can receive a fair trial oh i would like to think so sure yes listen we have we have a lot of good judges in this country a lot of very fine jurists with terrific legal minds and yes we have seen signs of of what i would say ideological bias for example just let me give you one small example at his first press conference when he became the chief justice of the supreme court uh chief justice bagner held a press conference and he was asked by a reporter if he agreed that the supreme court of canada was the most progressive in the world and he agreed with the statement and he said it was he was very proud of that fact the most progressive court in the world in a progressive country which is the way things ought to be now that is a an expression of an ideological preference and that that’s not what neutrality is supposed to mean inside a courtroom but on the other hand we have good judges who are able to carry out what i believe to be the proper judicial role we saw it for example a short time ago when on in her bail review um for for the bail review of tamara leach a supreme court justice reviewed the facts and the law in a meticulous and careful and proper way and and set her out on bail because that was the right decision okay so so if if a judge is acting properly tell me if i’ve got this right first of all under the the english common law system and and its variants let’s say that operate in canada a judge is supposed to take the current circumstances of polity and individuality and social change into account but fundamentally remain within the framework uh uh evolved as a consequence of precedent and previous law and so every decision is supposed to be tied back to a network of previous decisions even though there has to be some transformation let’s say on the edges is that a reasonable way of looking at it see well yes exactly so so one way it’s been put is that the the we have a common law system right so there’s going to be some evolution over time but the way they put it is it’s supposed to be evolution and not revolution you’re not supposed to have the law being sort of handed down by the courts the law making role is that of the legislature not not right not the courts yes well and we’ve seen some decay of that in canada as legislatures have abandoned their duty and left difficult decisions to a more activist judiciary and this is a very bad thing okay okay so but you think you think in this case at least and perhaps in most court proceedings in canada that the judiciary is sufficiently intact so that a ruling on a case like this could be trusted well you see it’s impossible to tell because you don’t know you know who you’re going to get or what’s going to happen so so the track record during covid hasn’t been all that great because what one thing that courts have have have demonstrated is is not not not to every single judge but but as a pattern is on an unwavering commitment to the government’s covid narrative so far as to allow some judges to take judicial notice of for example the the the the safety and benefit of the vaccine and the risk of the virus without any evidence uh and so it’s neither black or white one way or the other and okay okay sam sam carl sean do you guys feel that you’ve been through this now for about eight or nine months do you feel that as you’ve observed the wheels of justice grinding slowly forward that you that your sense of justice has been served i know the outcome hasn’t occurred yet but how are you feeling about the process i think it did earlier on um it seems to have um this is just my opinion of course but it seems to have deteriorated a little bit in the last few months but uh i i don’t know just just just the attitude um i’ll probably let sam speak to this more but um like early on we the government are famous you know just to get this out there for for throwing throwing us curveballs right off the bat they tried they filed a motion out of the blue and we wondered why they didn’t want to cross examine us and then we found out a few days later why is they filed a motion to have our affidavits struck so and i’ll let sam explain that a little bit better to you so these are difficult cases uh for obvious reasons and i also think they’re difficult cases in the social political climate that they that they happen in but i’m confident that with the record that we’ve produced with the approach that we’ve taken which is a very no-nonsense nitty-gritty pay attention to details be very you know be very thorough approach i think we have a quite frankly very good shot at winning and i have faith that we we will get a fair and impartial hearing before the federal court um and and i think to a large extent you know we are and we have been in this case very resilient and you have to be i mean there are there are some cross examination transcripts where i have probably had to spend close to an hour to get an answer and it wears you it wears you out right it’s a first time ever and you know i’m i’m frequently in the commercial list with with big players trying to you know resolve multi-million dollar litigation disputes and i can tell you the government is way more resilient trying to get a straight answer uh trying to get a sense of what’s happening why it happened when it happened and who was involved it’s it’s it’s a tough process but i think like anything else if you do your homework and you’re prepared and you’re willing to you know do you know take difficult steps i mean we have brought so many interim motions uh to ensure that procedurally this moved in a way that we thought was fair and appropriate um it it it it extracts a big sacrifice from you and it’s a very resource intensive process but i’m very confident the commitment we’ve made and the dedication we’ve made is going to yield a good result for us okay well that’s that’s very heartening to hear you know because your story basically is that this is very difficult and it it requires painstaking effort but if you do it properly it’s still a fair game and thank god for that and so maybe i could ask you guys too if you wouldn’t mind let’s let’s go to the funding side of this how much has this action cost and let’s look at that two ways there’s the outright costs right so let’s say the legal costs but then there’s also the costs in terms of time and involvement because sean you and carl must have been spending untold hours on this i would think on a daily basis and so there’s a huge personal cost there so carl yeah let’s uh what’s what’s happening on the funding front how much has this cost and what has it cost you and sean personally well i mean actions like this are always going to cost you know at least hundreds of thousands of dollars right that’s that’s the reality of it um and um and and if you lose and suffer adverse costs awards then then worse again you know so it’s a it’s going to be an expensive action however you try and do it the cost of um the cost of the work that a lawyer has to do is you know is going to be in there the cost of um working with um you know expert witnesses and and as the intensity of the case builds and more motions are submitted then of course the cost builds now anybody who’s you know had the unfortunate pleasure of suing government in the past knows that one government tactic in the same way as many uh larger aggressive litigants is to try and drown the smaller guy in costs okay well so we have an answer to one earlier question which is well why don’t more people stand up and the answer to that is well because it’s unbelievably expensive and it yeah and it consumes your whole life and so first of all that means most people literally cannot do it they don’t have the time because they don’t have they don’t have the excess resources in some sense that allows for the time i’m not suggesting you guys were sitting around on your laurels but you at least had the financial acumen and resources to make something like this vaguely possible and that would put you in a small percentage of people to begin with and then you’d have to be willing to do it and then you’d have to find the right lawyer and then you’d have to be able to withstand eight months of well and that’s a lot of trouble on the personal and the and the judicial and the cognitive front so it’s a very difficult undertaking how have you funded it so far and what’s been the story on that front um and it’s been a mix of two things um it’s been a mix of personal funding um and also some you know helpful donors that have you know offered to come forward but the majority of it ultimately is in our case is going to be personal funding at this time and i think the funding of these cases is a very interesting aspect in itself and i think the structure of the organizations that do this work in canada is something that’s worth um you know discussing um from my perspective i don’t see that the freedoms guaranteed by the charter should be uh political but there seems to be a tendency that organizations perhaps more to the right of center are left with the battle of fighting for them and i find that curious because the loss of freedoms affects everybody in canada wherever you sit in the political spectrum so we have in canada a small group of organizations that take on this kind of work and they rely on lots and lots of small donors occasionally large donors perhaps you know just incentive for constitutional freedoms canadian constitutional foundation and some recent new entrants um you know such as uh you know the democracy fund and so on and so forth and indeed we’re putting together a charitable foundation which will be up and running shortly called the institute for freedom and justice which we’re hoping to fund in slightly different way so it can take on two issues one being key areas of litigation in relation to this kind of constitutional challenge and equally as importantly and i think is you know supporting people who want to provide additional education to canadians regarding the freedoms that should be protected by the charter in the first place and a few people know about the the charter and about the content and in fact i’d say one more thing uh jordan yeah yeah we were talking about section one earlier and bruce and i have had one or two conversations over time about this um and i’ve been fishing around from the start trying to find out where section one even came from and what i found was that it was very difficult to find anybody who knew and i asked some people that we asked some people that you’d know i mean you know we asked preston manning for example and yeah yeah that is really interested in this and he said that’s a great question i’ve no idea i asked brian beckford um brian and i have had some emails about this and um brian doesn’t really know where section one comes from i you know it’s it’s there but who wrote it who drafted it i don’t know section 33 we know has a connection to peter lowheed but where does section one come from um and i’ve been grubbing around trying to find out why i’ve had people in the parliamentary library looking at this suppose it was a concession to quebec claims for sovereignty um i no i don’t think so i think that’s more i mean section 33 is interesting because that was in the that was put forward and from what i can see connected with peter peter lowheed and then pietro does seem to want a sunset clause in there and that seemed to be the concession but section 33 as san will tell you doesn’t apply to mobility rights um in the charter and um but section one the best i can think and i can find out so far is i think you have to look to the mid 1970s and possibly the international covenant on civil and political rights which is binding on canada but if you read that carefully there section one could possibly be an attempt to to sweep up clause to catch some of the issues that arise out of that document and at the time at the timing 1982 that would seem to fit that some consideration after the iccpr came well that’s a great mystery you know the fact that the the biggest the biggest set of possible restrictions on our most fundamental rights is based on a clause whose authorship is unclear and whose intent is unspecified sean do you have anything else to say on the uh funding front before we return to rupa i’d like to take this opportunity to i mean early on i as i said i started to go fund me we closed that down when the freedom convoy ran into problems and go fund me sort of you know uh stuck a knife in their back so to speak so i i i shut it down and i moved it over to give send go um but i but i just quickly wanted to say thank you to all of the we have supporters on social media and so on that have supported us through gifts and go and i wanted to thank everybody that’s donated thus far is that still operating yes it is the gifts and go it’s the canadian freedom litigation fund so if people want to donate to your cause it’s the canadian freedom litigation fund at give send go that’s correct yes and also that’ll be funding another case that i’ll be running is um uh filing an application an injunction against arrive can and the quarantine oh yes there’s a good idea so yes so so everyone who’s listening some of you are going to be thinking well what can i do about this and well there is something you can do there’s two lawsuits pending they’re both going to be very expensive i’m sure many of you who are watching listening are somewhat perturbed and annoyed let’s say about that bloody arrive can app which is a complete disaster and an unnecessary addition to the passports which we also can’t get and so rupa one thing we might derive from this conversation especially in relationship to carl’s last comments was that if the press was doing its damn job then maybe private citizens wouldn’t have to be taken on the government so now you have this story it’s a red hot story as far as i can tell it’s a blazing hot story and you can’t get people to publish it in canada in the mainstream journals and or newspapers and this is even the case get despite the fact that you’re actually a columnist for the national post and the national post is a conservative newspaper i have some associations with it they’ll publish my work fairly fairly uh frequently and i’ve had a good working relationship with them but like why are no canadian newspapers of note we won’t even talk about the tv stations but especially not the cbc but why are no canadian newspapers of note picking this up and why in the world do you have to deal with the with the englishman instead and the telegraph let’s say that’ll be better for the story anyways but it’s still appalling and so tell us about your experience with this yeah it’s uh it’s a great question jordan i um you know i worked with barry wise and peter savodnik my editor before uh when i wrote a piece on the truckers protest back in february and uh it uh you know i had a great impact i think it was an important contribution at that time to dent what i felt was an incredibly corrosive narrative that had been in place at that time which characterized the protesters as white supremacists racists and bigots and so on and so forth you were with the truckers weren’t you you actually went you went there like a journalist sort of yeah i live in the area and i really went out of curiosity i just wanted to see what the was about on the first day that first weekend i spent about 10 8 10 hours in the freezing cold it was one of the coldest days of the winter at that time and i walked everywhere and i was pleasantly surprised in fact it was a very um it was it felt like canada day and i even tweeted about it and said you know it’s like it feels like canada day in the winter and i was immediately criticized for it for romanticizing what was uh what is what was supposed to be and would be insurrection and uh and i just didn’t get that impression at all i i i met some of the nicest people and i spent um two weeks or three weeks during the course of the protest speaking to everybody the truckers the protesters anybody who wanted to chat with me i managed to have a conversation with them sometimes these were long conversations i would be up till two three in the morning speaking to people and um and then i wrote this piece for barry wise’s sub stack at that time and she reached out to me and she’s she’d seen my tweets and she wanted me to do something for them i really enjoyed their professionalism i and my piece had a great impact and i wanted to continue that relationship with them um so for me it was not necessarily uh you know is it canadian media versus some someone else i just i really just enjoyed the experience the learning experience that i and i just wanted to continue to learn by uh you know but through working with them um but having said that your question is a good one why isn’t anybody in the mainstream media picking this up um why is it that um uh you know no no one wants to talk about it there isn’t there hasn’t even been an acknowledgement of the piece so far i haven’t even been trolled by anybody by any of the mainstream commentators for writing this piece there has been literally no response it’s silence it’s looking the other way they’re talking about everything else under the sun um and it’s extraordinary uh and i don’t quite know what to make of it well i think it turns back to something we talked about earlier i think that the bitter pill that canadians are being asked to swallow is so large that they’re choking on it and i can understand that you can have some sympathy for that you know i mean some of us bruce and i for example and i know bruce quite well we’ve been observing this sort of thing developing for like eight years something like that or longer than that oh longer longer than that longer than that quite a while yeah how long how long 10 years how long at least a decade in concrete terms but it’s been i think it’s been in development for for decades yes yes yes well it’s sort of gone like this right it’s it’s been accelerating but i think most people and most people don’t think about political issues that often and that’s because they’re busy with their lives and they also don’t know what to believe or who to believe and that certainly being scrambled now and so i i think that’s why your story this is what stunned me so much about the continual scandalous behavior of the liberals i don’t think that people can process it because my sense of it looking at it is that every week and that was certainly the case earlier this year particularly especially when the emergencies act was was brought about every week something so scandalous is produced by the federal government that under normal conditions it would immediately produce the dissolution of a reasonable parliamentary government and it just happens week after another and i don’t think people can and then the media covers it very badly but i don’t think people can believe it plus of course the cbc for example is 100 in the hip pocket of the liberals not least as a consequence of the 1.2 billion dollar a year subsidy which enables them to report no news to no viewers and so i think i think that’s this wall of of of ignorance that you’re running into you said it’s got to be something like that rupa because why at least aren’t the progressives hassling you let’s say even that’s not happening no i’m i’m just being attacked by a bunch of bots a bunch of nameless trolls uh who’ve uh you know who are going around calling me a russian agent i’ve been called a seditionist uh that these no first of all they said the documents didn’t even exist and that i was making it all up and then the federal court sends out a tweet a couple of days later saying given the interest uh in this case we’re actually making these documents more easily available to the public so that shut them up but then they’ve had to move to something else that i was some you know a russian agent or you know uh you know i’m lying about this and i’m i think you’ve just i think you’ve just internalized your oppression that’s my that’s my sense of the situation so so in any case you haven’t been able to promote this story in any of the normative channels i mean barry weiss’s substack is not a minor league operation it’s very influential so that’s that’s definitely something but it’s but it’s definitely outside the normative structure of media discourse particularly in canada and i think it’s quite striking that the telegraph has at least opened up an invitation to you to continue this kind of investigative work and that that isn’t happening in canada it’s like why are newspapers not willing to jump on a hot story well this is extraordinary jordan so i was speaking to a journalist and she told me that uh you know um you know newsrooms are just you know just don’t have the money anymore they just don’t have the resources to put together a bunch of people and i said wait a second the way yeah i said wait a second i’m a freelance columnist i did this entirely on my own i read through over a thousand pages of transcripts over a few days i spent uh you know i was i was up late into the night working through them and thinking about the you know how i could frame this story if i can do it you can do it you can so easily do it uh you know you just you just need one other person maybe uh you know to work with you i just don’t buy this excuse at all initially i wanted to give them the benefit of the doubt you know they’ve only now discovered the documents let them go through it and uh and and maybe they will eventually get to it it’s now been more than a week since the story broke it’s been about three weeks since the documents have been out and it’s just extraordinary that no one’s really touched it i will also point this out to you that it’s even the independent media the independent media which constantly rails against the mainstream media rightly so even they haven’t gone to town on the story and i can’t figure out why what exactly is going on okay well we’re all trying to figure out what’s going on that’s that’s for sure rupa wrote this story for everyone who’s listening just so we’re we remember what we’re doing here rupa wrote a story about a week ago that she published with barry weiss court documents reveal canada’s travel ban had no scientific basis and so that’s quite the headline and so i read that and thought well this probably needs to be talked about and so you referred to bruce bardy who’s a constitutional lawyer and to carl harrison and shawn ricard who’ve taken out a court case against the canadian government and their legal counsel sam presfilos and we’ve walked through the story and so what are you hoping to have happen that’s another thing i’d like to know yeah no good question it i guess the most important thing for me right now and well for all of us as a group and anybody who’s following along for the ride is that this case be heard right now they filed a mootness motion against this as you know because the travel ban has been suspended hasn’t been revoked and suspended and they’ve made it quite clear that they can bring it back at any time that they so choose and the attorney general of canada has filed the mootness motion against us so on september 19th we are all heading down to Ottawa for a public hearing we just sam’s actually in the process of filing all of our final submissions and everything just to fight that battle before we even get to our end game which is the the hearing in late october so to me you know all the support has been absolutely amazing and we hope that continues okay well let’s let’s stop with that again so i want i want you to say again exactly what the listeners and viewers can do to help you continue this battle so they can go to give send go that’s give send go and what are they looking up they’re looking at the canadian freedom litigation fund canadian freedom litigation fund okay so if those of you who are watching find this compelling and you’d like to do something about the fact that your rights are being abrogated by a government hell-bent on instrumental uh partial tyranny uh then there’s something you can do you can send some money they can also find me on social media my name will be on the screen here somewhere and at the bottom notes and uh yeah we’ll be more than happy to have people follow along and support us and and and i really appreciate what you’ve done jordan in getting this story out to as many well it’s so i think it’s a privilege i look at this and i think well unless i’m completely out of my mind and lots of people think i am this is like the hottest news story that’s hit canada in 15 years and i get to tell everybody about it so why is that not a good deal apart from the fact that it’s utterly horrible and contemptible and appalling and pathetic and and weasely and deceitful and instrumental and uh and and what you’re traumatically unbelievable okay carl you’re right on the money oh man it’s something man what a world carl yeah i mean i but echo shaw’s comment that the you know when you start these actions you want them to be heard and this is so important in that regard it’s such an enormous matter of public interest and it has huge ramifications and repercussions and risks if a canadian government can get away with this kind of behavior where it makes routine health choices uh coercive coerces people to make routine health choices in choices in order for them to take part in normal aspects of canadian society and to exercise the sort of freedoms that everybody would expect in a modern liberal democracy in the west and that’s hugely important to get it heard i’m sure sam can say something about the how a moot the issues with the mootness motion and that comes up i think on september 19th or 21st as shaw has said and if we if we’re successful in persuading the court that this matter isn’t moot and should be heard then there’s a five-day hearing in ottawa a public hearing in person in ottawa in the federal court from october the 31st and that’s an opportunity for the media to actually find they engage with as you say perhaps the biggest story in canada in a decade about how the government has behaved around this particular issue on what possible grounds could they find it moot i let sam deal with the detail but essentially it’s i’ll say this right i’ll ask this because i found this this isn’t really a legal point but it’s curious i found i find it odd that the attorney general of canada is saying to the canadian people please ignore my cabinet colleagues please ignore mr al gabra please ignore mr jaclo when they say to you in a formal public statement that these measures have been suspended and we’ve got every intention of bringing them back in the fall if we feel like it and david lametti the attorney general of canada is saying please ignore these guys they happen to be my cabinet colleagues and one of them happens to run the transport ministry and one of them happens to run the ministry of health but please ignore them take no notice because they haven’t been suspended these measures have been lifted for good and that’s why the issue is moot and clearly it’s not that’s not moot at all and mootness in canada something sam can come on to peculiar here not the same in the uk not the same in the u.s this is an issue which can be repeated in the short term and is is worthy of review well you’d think even if it’s even if it’s moot now which it isn’t that doesn’t mean that there’s not something to be said about what happened so what happened is unconscionable all right sam over to you well mootness is a funny thing especially in the context of a pandemic mootness in the context of a pandemic is a very different consideration i think than mootness ordinarily and i’ll give you a very concrete example of that a couple of months ago before the interior court of appeal i was i was doing a constitutional challenge on the restrictions on outdoor gathering as you know being outdoors one of the safest place probably the safest place to be with the covid-19 pandemic and at the time i had filed my materials for appeal there were still restrictions outdoor by the time the attorney general gave me the responding materials the restrictions were lifted several months later the restrictions were back in and a couple of weeks before the hearing the restrictions had been repealed the court of appeal dismissed it as moot and so you’re left in this very unfortunate and precarious and quite unpredictable situation of you know timing and and it’s i don’t agree that the issue of timing especially in the context of a very fluid pandemic where the government has demonstrated its willingness to turn on and off various and quite frankly recycle through various different public health measures timing shouldn’t play a role in this this is not moot in the sense of you know the government that a court in another area has already made a decision has already said this is unconstitutional this is mootness in the context of very fluid public health measures and so regardless of whether or not those public health measures are activated and that’s what i’m going to say because we all know they can be activated and reactivated at the women’s cabinet right regardless of whether they’re presently activated the manner in which these decisions are being made and the tools that are available um in the context of a public health crisis are critical we’ve established a very dangerous precedent here because god only knows what’s going to happen for example when the next serious flu comes around because it’s going to be indistinguishable in many ways from from the mortality rate say of of covid by all of evidence especially if it’s a serious flu and it’s likely to be because we haven’t had one for a while and so why wouldn’t we go down the same road immediately because i think that’s probably what we’ll do so okay sam anything else to say more generally about the situation what do you what what’s going to happen over the next couple of months as far as you can tell and what are you hoping will happen well you know obviously i’m i’m hoping that as as shauna are alluded to i’m hoping that we you know we succeed in our mootness motion which is going to be heard in september not with the federal court i think we have very cogent reasons why the matter deserves its day in court and to be heard and decided on the evidentiary record that we have spent you know the better part of a year and significant resources investing so that the truth can come out but more broadly there’s two statements i’d like to make to to everyone who’s going to be watching and listening to this uh to this segment the first one is our case is not political you know even though we make a lot of reference to the liberal government uh it’s it’s actually not political and the reason why i’m saying this because democracy should not be political transparency in the decision making of the people that we have trusted to govern us according to a basic set of immutable principles that are frankly based on you know decency and liberty that’s not a political thing well it’s not as if just just to point this out it’s not as if the conservative governments at the provincial level haven’t done exactly the same thing it’s not as if aaron otule didn’t roll over instantly when these sorts of things came along so if it’s political it’s not partisan right right exactly right and i think that’s but you’re right that’s probably a better way to put it should not be a partisan issue because today you might be on one side of the vaccine debate and tomorrow you’ll find yourself on the different side of a wholly separate debate and you hope that as a citizen of a democratic country the government’s going to show you a basic level of respect and decency and dignity and the second thing that i wanted to mention is you know it’s very important that in the times of crises like now in a pandemic and an unprecedented pandemic in recent history we need to remind ourselves that this should never serve as a carte blanche for the government to do whatever it wants yeah circumstances of uncertainty the absence of evidence is not evidence you know that anything should and can be done and we must remain vigilant now more than ever and we need to we need to refer back to the principles that we know are true and as the as the evidentiary record will show the government had principles principles that were developed in the context of influenza influenza pandemic and and we need to avail ourselves of those principles you know we don’t throw them outside the window which you know seems by a large measure was done here i really want to thank sean and carl two people who made extraordinary sacrifices as you’ve mentioned earlier i can’t imagine the toll this has had on their personal and private life i know i speak with them more often than i speak with my fiance so i can’t imagine what that has resulted on the home front and you know it’s canadians like sean and like carl who are taking their civic duties seriously and it’s because of the work that they have really undertaken in this case that millions of canadians and hopefully people around the world are going to see what’s going on here and we’ll learn and be better because of it well let’s hope that’s the plan bruce we’ll turn to you and then and then we’ll let rupa wrap up i think so what have you got to say from the overview perspective well first let me say my hats off to these gents for for having the stuffing to do this it takes a lot of courage and determination so good on you let’s not fail to acknowledge how dangerous this story and this development is to a lot of people to a lot of institutions this is a threat it’s a threat both to the covid narrative but it’s also a threat in a bigger sense because we have a seem to have in this country a prevailing belief that governments are benevolent and act in our interests all the time now sometimes that may make mistakes and you might prefer one color to the other color but essentially there’s a there’s a there’s a belief in the good faith of governments to do their best and to do the right thing and and stories like this stories like this threaten that belief right they they they put into place the possibility that that is not true that instead we’re being played by our own governments and and that’s partly why i think the political class is so resistant to this and similar stories because it does represent a kind of of threat to the foundation of what we think we’re about as a country and as a culture you know in some ways our biggest liability as as a population is our disbelief our disbelief our inclination to not believe facts when they threaten the the the furniture in our heads and you would know more about this than me jordan yeah well it’s no wonder you know because the sorts of things the principles that you’re describing so you imagine that here’s a rule is the the more fundamental a principle is the more other principles depend on it and then each of those principles encapsulates a lot of chaos and so when you’re asked to and chaos produces anxiety and desperation and disunity and conflict it’s real and it’s deadly psychologically and socially and so when you’re asked to revisit your faith in a fundamental presupposition which is well accounting for human error the government is acting in good faith because that’s what’s being questioned here well no they’re not okay well how many snakes have you just left left out of the closet and the question is well hopefully not all of them but we don’t really know and it’s a reasonable response to say i’m not going to believe that without exceptional evidence but the problem is is that rupa and the gentleman that we’ve been talking to have showed that there’s every reason to believe that this happens to be the case and so it’s no wonder it’s taking canadians a long time to to swallow this it’s a large and bitter pill so but not as large and bitter as the pill we will all be required to swallow if we don’t wake up to what’s happening agree so that yeah okay and so bruce if the government has in fact exceeded their political mandate their moral political mandate and if they have violated the charter in at least this instance and i would say many many others then what should that imply and what recourse is there apart from at the voting booth well the voting booth becomes very important in this i mean what you’re essentially what you essentially need is a cultural change on the part of a critical mass of people who say you know what no this is not okay and and we will not go along with this now and the next time this happens which is going to be very soon uh you unless you have that kind of critical mass you’re not going to see changes in the behavior of the press of the government maybe the courts uh all our institutions all our institutions in spite of themselves are influenced by popular opinion they deny it but it that doesn’t make it not true well you know as i’ve been as i’ve been going around on my tour one of the things i’ve sort of added is a suggestion to people for what it’s worth but i’ve talked to i don’t know how many people 60 200 000 people i guess in the last four months one of the things i’ve tried to suggest to people is that they pick up their civic duty a bit it’s like look and again those of you who are listening and watching and thinking there’s nothing i can do it’s like yes you can you can join a political party you can join the conservatives you could join the liberals you could join the ndp although i don’t know why you would because they just look like liberals to me and i don’t think you should join the liberals but in any case you can do all of that and then and that’s not nothing and you could get involved and you could start to move the political landscape in accordance with your own needs and wants and become more articulate doing so and learn to play a role in the political process and if you don’t then what’s happening is going to continue to happen because we do have a system where sovereignty inheres in the people and that means if the people abdicate their civic responsibility then the the delusional and terrified instrumental tyrants will have their way people should not underestimate the effect that they can have on their own and in small groups i mean that’s what these three guys are doing on their own for example but but if we had more people doing more things in the way you’re describing the change would be significant yeah so if you’re listening and watching and you’re not a member of a canadian political party then you got to ask yourself you know what right do you have to your outrage so because you’re not pulling your weight man and and if you’re not in any civic institution at all you’re not in a church you’re not in a business organization you’re not on a sports team you’re not engaged actively in the civic discussion then it’s no wonder that you’re being blown by the wind every way because well that’s this position you’ve left yourself in and so join when you join these places don’t just go along you’re you’re there to change the course yeah well and to learn you know if you’re young you think well what can i do it’s like well first of all you can volunteer you can learn to serve the people who have a little bit more authority than you and you will learn doing that and if you’re good at it you’ll rise up the ranks unbelievably quickly because one thing you can say because people have abdicated their political responsibility is that there’s kind of a responsibility void there and so if you’re halfway as competent and willing to put in some time and effort the rewards can be incommensurate in relationship to the effort so okay rupa maybe you can just walk us through what you hope to have happen next what you think should happen yeah well i can’t really top bruce but i’ll try my best jordan you know just to sum up this this this story uh you know for for our uh for your viewers and listeners basically this government appeared to have made this policy by firing from the hip without any recourse to a scientific rationale we know this rationale was probably concocted on the flight after the policy decision had been made and it’s also interesting that the trudeau government announced this vaccine mandate in the lead-up to an election as it proved to be an important wedge issue for him to get re-elected even though they lost the popular vote in the end and they only got a minority government basically what is unfortunate about all of this is that sound public policy was held as held hostage to politics um with the government with the trudeau government pushing these divisive vaccine mandates in the few areas where they had jurisdiction which is namely the travel sector and the federal workforce um also i would like to point out that the uh you know that it’s odd it’s incredibly odd that uh that trudeau would promise vaccine mandates as part of an election campaign rather than just simply implement them as a country serving prime minister if this was indeed about public health policy why would you have to make it a campaign issue it really really is bizarre and you know you would ask me earlier at the beginning of the show about civil servants citing cabinet confidentiality and i’ve been thinking about this exactly why uh you know why why should something like a public health mandate uh you know why why is it so confidential why is the rationale for a public health mandate why should it be so confidential um and this is a this is a very puzzling question and for me it raises the disturbing it raises a disturbing possibility that there really was no rationale at all and in the end the emperor has no clothes um and uh i think going forward i really i you know i very much agree with what bruce was saying and what you said uh change is going to have to come in some form or the other i uh the truckers protest i think uh moved uh moved the needle or the dial a little bit um and i know a lot of people came around um and and started asking these questions certainly polls right now show that uh were previously 70 percent of those polled supported vaccine mandates right now that number stands at 20 so people are starting to rethink um mandates they’re starting to ask these questions uh they you know they they’re starting to ask questions of their elected officials uh they’re asking hey you know you told us with vaccination we’d go back to uh our uh back to our lives but yet we you know we’re still facing uh restrictions we’re still looking at mask mandates uh what is going on uh i i would also like to point out to the fact that the booster uptake in this country has been pretty low compared to most other places uh and that shows that people are you know starting to have a rethink you know if if if the boosters are not uh preventing transmission what is the point in me getting it and uh and you know so perhaps why should a 20 year old get a booster what’s the point in that maybe it makes sense or a child yeah or a child for that matter so i think people are starting to ask questions we may not necessarily see the kind of outrage that we would like to see uh but i do think that uh change is certainly happening well maybe maybe we’ll get lucky and we’ll see change instead of outrage you know and and maybe that’s a more canadian way of doing things that we’re slow to wake up but maybe when we wake up we will move in the right direction absolutely that is my hope as well yeah all right well i’ve been talking today to rupa subramania bruce party sam presphalos carl harrison and sean ricard they’re all in their own way attempting to bring some clarity to what’s a very murky and dismal situation let’s say with hopefully some light shining in the distance and so appreciate you very much um all of you for being willing to participate in this conversation and for all the diligent work that you’ve done and the sacrifices that you’ve made i’m going to continue my talk with rupa uh alvar at the daily wire plus uh where we go behind the scenes a bit and look at uh the details of her career and her life and what’s put her in a position that she’s able to do the sorts of things that we talked about today hello everyone i would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guest on dailywireplus.com