In March 2025, a court agreed that ‘death is a possible side effect of the Covid vaccine’. In November 2024, another court ruled that the invocation of the Emergencies Act by the Trudeau government was illegal. We need to talk.
ABDICATION OF DUTY
About 10 days ago, Blacklocks reported that a court had agreed with the Department of Health’s contention that “(the government) had no “duty of care” to individual Canadians inadvertently harmed by pandemic measures (and) “A possible side effect of receiving a Covid-19 vaccine was death”” (Note: all content of Blacklocks is paywalled). This court verdict is shocking on two counts: one, that the government, having coerced Canadians via various means into taking the Covid vaccine, has the gall to declare that it bears no responsibility for the adverse effects of that vaccine, and secondly, that the court agrees with such an outrageous contention.
I wish to remind readers that (at least) when it comes to medical matters, our courts often take a view that defies common sense, and that when you combine the courts’ views from different cases, they are in contradiction to each other. For example, as I pointed out in my article from October 2022 (‘… And Euthanasia For All’), “The prevailing judicial wisdom in Canada is that the government is allowed to violate our right to access healthcare, but it is at the same time obligated to uphold our right to access death.”
The case that was reported on by Blacklocks pertains to a young boy named Sean, whose father has been waging a lonely battle to get answers as to why and how Sean passed away soon after being given the Covid vaccine (the father’s X handle is @Answers4Sean). It is painful to see that no large media outlet has talked about Sean’s untimely death (according to the X profile, he was born in January 2004 and passed away in September 2021), nor about the court verdict. Quite often, we see MSM, and especially the taxpayer-funded CBC, highlighting the cases of people with grievances of a far less serious nature. But when it comes to Covid, I guess their (cough) sympathies (cough) lie elsewhere.
The core function of the media is to bring matters of concern to public knowledge, and where necessary, flesh out the argument(s) in order to provide a nuanced / well-informed understanding to their audience. Quite often, this would amount to holding the government / authorities to account. In Sean’s case (and those of too many other Canadians), our MSM is undeniably failing in the discharge of its core duty. I believe that this is because large sections of the media have become associates (or appendages, if you take a harsher view) of the same government / authorities that they are supposed to hold to account. Let me explain why I thing this is devolution.
THE HUMAN CONDITION
As far as I am aware, in all cultures, there are tales involving a person who could tell the king things that would put anyone else in trouble. In western lore, it was usually the court jester. In Indian stories and history, it used to be the ‘raajya-guru’ (the guru to the king, also written as ‘raaj-guru’). Ove the course of the past few centuries, we see a trend where more and more people were empowered to point out to the political authority as to where that authority was erring. The end result of this evolutionary process is encapsulated in the expression ‘speaking truth to power’. The extent to which it is possible for the populace to exercise this right, and the existence and robustness of institutions that can keep ‘the king’ in check, is the yardstick by which we measure a country in terms of being based on the rule of law. To put a fine point on it, when people exercise their right to ‘speak truth to power’, it is incumbent on the institutions to protect these people from any retributive action by those in power.
At this point, two considerations arise: (a) whether the institutions that are tasked with keeping ‘the king’ in check are discharging their duty adequately, and (b) whether ‘the king’ is able to defy the writ of these institutions. Unfortunately, as I see it, Canada is slipping on both these counts. In fact, it can even be argued that the said institutions are sometimes complicit in enabling egregious abuses of authority (as exemplified in the verdict in Sean’s case).
‘THE MOST IMPORTANT ELECTION’
Every election is characterized as ‘the most important election in (insert timeframe / name of jurisdiction)’ here). I explored this tendency in my recent article ‘Canada’s make-or-break-election’. To that discussion, I would like to add here that regardless of the criticism that anyone can make of this tendency, each election IS ‘the most important election’ for those who aim to derive material benefit from it. With that knowledge, the time is ripe to ask the rhetorical question: Why hasn’t our mainstream media, which depends on the government for sustenance, discussed the fact that the court judged that same government as having acted illegally?
Of course, the way I have worded it, the question answers itself. My point here is that out of the two institutions, one (the court) discharged its duty adequately by holding the government culpable, but the other institution (the MSM) failed to do its function of creating wider awareness of the fact. I do not deny that, with exceptions, commercial interests are always at play in human behaviour. Therefore, I wouldn’t be hung up on any media outlet producing ‘clickbait’ – as long as they devote enough resources in the direction of disseminating facts and truth. But my internet search did not show any discussion of this court verdict as having taken place in the MSM; the only links that I got were in relation to the report about the verdict itself, and about the government appealing the verdict. This is not uncommon, and a lot of Canadians are feeling unease about it, expressing their dissatisfaction in different ways. Put in a nutshell, these expressions amount to saying that facts matter ONLY IF they are known widely enough to influence outcomes down the line. Since it is the core function of the MSM to bring about this dissemination, their failure obstructs the operation of the ideal of ‘speaking truth to power’.
NUREMBURG 2.0
As I see it from the point of view of someone who is not trained in law, the court verdict holding the exercise of power by the government as illegal affects many more entities besides the government itself, viz., those who carried out the various tasks that were downstream of the invocation of EA. In particular, can the banks / institutions that froze the bank accounts (actually, all interactions of a financial nature such as mortgages and credit cards) take cover behind the argument that they were ‘just following the orders’?
The answer may appear to be cut-and-dry: since we know about the Nuremburg Principle, it would be a resolute ‘NO’. However, I contend that it’s complicated. To start with, this was the very first time that the Emergencies Act had been invoked since it was legislated in 1988. Even its prior version, the War Measures Act, had been invoked exactly once. So, there was a lack of precedent – and of the opportunity when the ideas around the consequences could be fleshed out.
That said, large corporations such as the Big-5 banks have their own legal departments (and access to pricey legal consultants). Did they arrive at an internal conclusion as to the legality of the actions that they were being asked to perform? Did they press this case with the government? If so, how was the government able to get them on board? We don’t know – largely because the MSM hasn’t presented any information to us in that regard. Whatever the apprehensions may have been before, since at least the court verdict in November (that is to say, 5 months ago), it has been entirely apropos to dig into these questions and report to the public.
HOWEVER, I think the most clinching argument here is provided by Mr. Justice Mosley himself in his verdict, in which he held that the government had acted illegally by invoking the EA (see this link, pages 123 & 124):
If a sitting judge in a federal court was of the opinion at the time that the invocation of the EA was justified, and it took him lengthy arguments against that opinion to reverse it, can the lawyers hired by the private sector be faulted for not refusing to accept orders that were much later found to have been illegal?
Before we hasten to answer in the negative, let us remember that the legal arguments against the legality of the invocation were made by other layers. Therefore, we can aver confidently that there were at least some lawyers who had a clearer grasp of the legality involved in the matter than Mr. Justice Mosley had at the time.
Refusing to obey orders would most probably have led to adverse consequences for the businesses involved. The question, then, is: was it a business decision not to protest too much? Again, we don’t know (but would love to).
Finally, if we treat this entire episode as valuable guidance, how should businesses and other entities respond in the future if (God forbid) a government decides to invoke the Emergencies Act again? I believe that this discussion is of vital importance, but once again, MSM is failing to discharge its duty to society by showing no inclination to initiate it.
CRIME AND PUNISHMENT
The invocation of the Emergencies Act wasn’t the only illegal part in this chapter – as we know, data of donors to the Convoy was obtained via hacking. This criminal act has gone completely unremarked in Canadian MSM. Actually, it is even worse: the taxpayer funded ‘national broadcaster’ CBC gleefully used that criminally obtained data. Does this make CBC (and other entities that acted likewise) an ‘accessory after the fact’? Let us remember that this data was used by the government for the purpose of punishing the donors by freezing their bank accounts.
Even more importantly (if that is possible, given the atrocious actions of CBC), I find it absolutely disgraceful that the person who did the hacking, Aubrey Cottle, has not had to face ANY legal consequences for carrying out a criminal act. Contrast this with cases where a criminal case is thrown out by the courts because the police had obtained evidence against the accused by using methods that they aren’t allowed to use.
Whenever I see any politician spew pieties about Canada being a ‘rule of law’ country (former PM Trudeau was especially fond of doing this), I feel extremely angry. Canada may have been a ‘rule of law’ country at some point, but in its present configuration, whether an act is treated as criminal / illegal or not depends on who carries it out, and the causes attached around the act. In this instance, a crime had been committed, but since it served the interests of those holding political power, no cognizance is taken of the criminality involved. We are certainly past the phase of ‘without fear or favour’ in our governance.
From my background in India, I know that the courts there have the power to initiate legal cases without anyone approaching the courts for the same (the legal term for this is ‘suo moto’). I don’t know if this legal concept is part of Canada’s judicial system, but if it is, then the relevant court(s) has/have failed to ‘speak truth to power’ so far about the crime that was committed by a Canadian while on Canadian soil. But now, this hacker seems to have attracted the attention of the US justice system; as posted on X by Shaun Rickard, GiveSendGo, the crowdfunding platform whose data was hacked, is planning to pursue legal action against this person, who has reportedly been arrested already. The fact that in Canada, there hasn’t been even a whisper about pursuing legal action against a self-admitted criminal suffices to cause us to hang our heads in shame. Some ‘rule of law’ country we are.
(IN)EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW
By contrast, the two leaders of the Convoy have suffered a far worse fate. First of all, at least one of them, Tamara Lich, had to endure detention for 48 days on a comparatively low-level charge of ‘mischief’ – while people who are accused of far more serious crimes, up to and including murder, routinely get bail in much shorter time (often on the same day).
The charge itself (of ‘mischief’) is worth a discussion of its own. In February 2022, when the Convoy was camped happily in downtown Ottawa, all sorts of incendiary terminology was used to describe it. The most prominent individuals in the MSM (and, of course, politicians) were throwing around terms like “insurrection’, ‘siege’, ‘occupying forces’ and ‘overthrowing the government’. Had any of these descriptors been remotely true, then Patrick King and Tamara Lich would have been charged with something a lot stronger – perhaps even ‘treason’ (Section 46(2) of the Criminal Code of Canada):
At the time, I wrote an article (‘Loose Lexicon’) in which I pointed out the error in deploying such wild – and wildly irresponsible – rhetoric. Acceptance of my views fell along expected lines – which isn’t surprising; my worry is that (owing to the social tendencies in Canada that I have elaborated on in my article ‘Structural Dysfunction’), the patently false arguments of those who screamed ‘insurrection’ and ‘sedition’ will never lose validity in the minds of a large proportion (perhaps the majority) of Canadians. In the absence of an agreed set of facts, it is impossible to reach an agreement. This permanent disagreement will be used by politicians to further their own personal / political ends.
EXONERATION
In all fairness, but without prejudice to any of the foregoing, one must accept the possibility that Mr. Justice Mosley’s verdict may be overturned on appeal (or later, by the Supreme Court). Will that happen? It may seem unpatriotic to express doubt that the ‘Mosley verdict’ will be allowed to stand – but one must take a realistic view. Unfortunately, our reality is not entirely consistent. Will the appeals process go the way Sean’s case did? As lawyers Daniel Freiheit and Lisa Bildy have posited, the (unusually protracted) prosecution of the leaders of the Convoy was a monumental waste of resources, for the purpose of punishing Canadians who dared to ‘speak truth to power’.
In today’s socio-political climate of Canada, it is difficult not to take a bleak view of the possibility that Mr. Justice Mosley’s verdict will be allowed to stand. But we must remind ourselves that hope springs eternal – or at least, until such time as it is dashed.
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