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Canada’s Constitutional Mistake: How the Rule of Law Gave Way to the Managerial State

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44 minute read

From the C2C Journal

Most Canadians surely believe their society is governed by the rule of law. We all have rights and freedoms, safeguarded by the courts, that protect us from the tyranny of the state. All of that is mirage, argues Bruce Pardy. In this provocative essay, Pardy describes how authority in Canada is now vested in a managerial elite. They supervise our speech, employment, bank accounts and media. Controlling vast sectors of the economy and society, they track, direct, incentivize, censor, punish, redistribute, subsidize, tax, license and inspect. Elected legislatures delegate them authority, and courts let them do as they like – including infringing on Charter rights – to achieve whatever social goals they deem in the public interest. The rule of law has melted away; rule by law now prevails. It is time, Pardy says, for Canadians to correct the naïve constitutional mistake that started us down this road.

We made a mistake.

Kings once ruled England with absolute power. Their word was the law. Centuries of struggle and reform gradually overcame their tyranny. We adopted this idea called the rule of law. We established checks, balances, limits, restraints and individual rights. For a while it worked. The law in Canada, as in other countries that inherited British common law, provided a system of justice as good as anything that civilization had ever produced.

But now the rule of law is fading. When it suits them, our institutions set aside their restraints. Using an idea to hold the powerful in check works only for as long as the powerful believe in the idea. And increasingly in the Canada of today, they do not.

Our mistake, over these centuries of reform, was that we did not go far enough. We did not take power away from institutions to rule over us. Instead, we just moved the powers around. Today, as in the days of kings, the law is based upon the authority of those who govern, not upon the consent of the governed.

The Law is not what it Pretends to Be

Law students come to law school to learn the law, which many of them think is a bunch of rules. Learn the rules, and you’re a lawyer. But that is not what the law is or how it works.

On their first day of law school at the Canadian university where I teach, I read my students a poem. It’s a short  verse by R.D. Laing, a Scottish psychiatrist and philosopher who died in 1989. Laing was writing about personal interactions and relationships, but he might as well have been writing about the law. The verse goes:

They are playing a game.

They are playing at not playing a game.

If I show them I see they are, I will break the rules, and they will punish me.

I must play their game, of not seeing I see the game.

The law is a game. It pretends to be something it is not.

The Law does not Rule – People in Institutions do

I could have picked any of a thousand illustrations, but this one is simple. And it is one you already know.

Our Constitution is the supreme law of Canada. It says so, right in the text. The Constitution includes the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Section 2(b) of the Charter guarantees the right to free speech. It says: “2. Everyone has the following fundamental freedoms:…(b) freedom of…expression…”

What can we tell from these nine words? We instinctively understand, immediately, that they do not mean what they say. Because they can’t. The provision plainly states that we have a right to free speech, but in its sheer absoluteness it tells us that we do not, at least not one that we can count on. How do we know?

Imagine someone comes up to you on the sidewalk and says, “I have a knife in my pocket. Give me your wallet or I’ll stab you in the heart.” That’s an assault. Your assailant threatened you with imminent violence and, in so doing, committed a crime. And yet, all he did was speak. There has been no stabbing, yet. There has been no theft, yet. The guy might not even have a knife. He spoke words. And section 2(b) of the Charter guarantees free speech. How can it be an offence?

The answer, of course, is that section 2(b) does not mean that all speech is protected. You cannot threaten other people with violence. I don’t know anyone who would argue that section 2(b) does or that it should allow this. But section 2(b) includes no limits. Its words don’t say where the line is. The provision doesn’t tell us what “freedom of expression” means.

Rights are not absolute: Despite Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms, the courts have pronounced on everything from what jokes comedians can tell to what pronouns can be used in court; regulators will determine what online content you may see and what medical opinions doctors may express. (Source of top right and bottom photos: Unsplash)

Everyone knows that free speech is not absolute and that some speech is not protected. Courts draw that line. We pretend that they do so in a manner that is bound by precedent, logic and the principles of statutory interpretation. But those considerations don’t compel the answer. In fact, skilled jurists can basically come to any answer that they can conjure up and support with judicial rhetoric. Rationales shift. Rights can mean something a little different every time.

It’s easy to agree that people should not have the right to threaten violence. But that’s not where the line on free speech is now drawn in Canada. Instead, an array of restrictions on speech has been created. You may not discriminate in your public statements. Comedians may not tell jokes intended to offend someone’s dignity on a protected ground. In some courts you must speak the pronouns that others require. Regulators prevent doctors from expressing medical opinions at odds with government policies. The Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission has the power to curate online content. The federal government has promised to censor “misinformation” and “online harm”, which means speech that it doesn’t like.

As courts become increasingly sympathetic to legal concepts such as “collective good” and so-called “group” rights, free speech in Canada becomes less an individual right to say what you think and more a privilege to express ideas consistent with what is deemed the public interest. Our constitutional guarantee of free expression doesn’t mean what it appears to say. If the Charter was honest, it would read: “2. Everyone has the fundamental freedoms that courts decide, from time to time, that they should have.” Which is essentially what section 1 of the Charter, the clause stating there are “reasonable limits” to the rights in the document, has come to mean anyway.

In England, the long and difficult process of transferring power from the king to legislatures was marked by the British Magna Carta of 1215 (shown at left) and continued through the Glorious Revolution of 1688, which gave Parliament legislative supremacy. Depicted at right, the Glorious Revolution’s Battle of the Boyne Between James II and William III, 1690, by Jan Van Huchtenberg.

Every reasonably well-informed person knows this. And yet people still harbour the conviction that the Charter means something objective and solid. If I had a dollar for every person during Covid-19 who said, “But they can’t do that, it’s in the Charter!”, I would be a wealthy man. All the Charter does – ALL that it does – is shift the final call on certain questions from legislatures to courts. But I don’t want to leave you with the wrong impression. Our problem is not that power resides in the courts.

The original problem was the king. In a long and difficult process starting in England, perhaps, with the Magna Carta in 1215, we took power from the king and gave it to legislatures.

Centuries later following the Glorious Revolution, the English Civil Rights Act of 1688 provided, in the now-quirky spelling of that era: “…the pretended Power of Suspending of Laws or the Execution of Laws by Regall Authority without Consent of Parlyament is illegal.” Parliament was elected, by some of the people at least. Legislatures had democratic legitimacy. Legislative supremacy became the foundation of British constitutional democracy.

But legislatures can be tyrants too. Legislative supremacy means that legislatures can pass any laws they like. They could do – and sometimes did – similar sorts of bad things that kings could do. They could criminalize your private relationships. They could take your property. They could give police the power to invade your privacy without a warrant. They could censor your speech. They could eviscerate rights found in the common law.

The newly independent Americans offered a solution: they created a Bill of Rights (comprising the first ten amendments to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791) that took power from legislatures and gave it to courts.

Two hundred years after the Bill of Rights, the Canadian Charter did the same: took power from legislatures and gave it to courts. And here we are. Except the story is not quite done. There is one more step to go.

The Rule of Law: Restrained Government

What was the idea of the rule of law supposed to be? Legal theorists through the ages – a short list of whom would include Aristotle, Montesquieu, A.V. Dicey, Lon Fuller, Ronald Dworkin, Joseph Raz – would say that the rule of law is complicated. But it need not be. To see it clearly, compare it to its opposite: the rule of individual persons. When King Henry VIII in 1536 ordered that his second wife, Anne Boleyn, should lose her head, that was the despotic rule of a person.

The meaning of the rule of law is made clear by its opposite – rule by the individual; when King Henry VIII ordered the execution of his second wife Anne Boleyn in 1536, that was the despotic rule of a person. Depicted at left, Henry VIII’s first interview with Anne Boleyn by Daniel Maclise (painted in 1836); at right, Anne Boleyn’s Execution by Jan Luyken (painted in 1600s).

But it is people who make laws. People enforce laws. People apply laws to cases. It can’t be any other way. How to have the rule of law without the rule of persons?

One way is to divide and separate their powers (and, to a manageable degree, to put them in competition or opposition to one another) so that no one alone can rule. The most practical way devised to accomplish this has been to divide the functions of a state into three branches: the legislative, the executive and the judicial.

Under the separation-of-powers approach, legislatures legislate. They pass laws without knowing the future circumstances to which the rules will apply. And if someone or some organization ignores their laws, they have no power to do anything about it directly.

The executive branch – headed and personified by a president, prime minister, chancellor or constitutional monarch – implements and carries out those rules. The executive has no power to design the rules it implements. Instead, its powers are limited to implementing and, in part, enforcing the rules that the legislature enacts. In the United States, where the President and Congress are distinct, legislative and executive branches are expressly separated. But even in Westminster parliamentary systems, where the same politicians lead the legislature and the executive, most executive action requires statutory authority.

Courts adjudicate. They do not make the rules but apply them to disputes that come before them. They also help the executive enforce laws by adjudicating prosecutions, passing judgment and handing out punishments. These rules prevent courts from deciding cases on judges’ personal inclinations. Moreover, courts keep the executive within its powers.

When powers are separated, no one has their hands on the wheel. No one can dictate what will happen in any specific circumstance. Legislatures don’t know to what future disputes their rules will apply. Courts must apply those rules to cases as they arise. Government agencies are bound by rules they have not made. As Austrian economist and philosopher Friedrich Hayek put it in The Constitution of Liberty, “It is because the lawgiver does not know the particular cases to which his rules will apply, and it is because the judge who applies them has no choice in drawing the conclusions that follow from the existing body of rules and the particular facts of the case, that it can be said that laws and not men rule.”

Checks and balances: Among the best safeguards against tyranny is a clear separation of powers; in the U.S., Congress (top) legislates, the executive branch – headed by the President (middle) – implements the rules, and the courts – headed by the U.S. Supreme Court (bottom) – enforce laws and adjudicate disputes. (Source of middle photo: Lawrence Jackson)

The rule of law protects us from the rule of persons. That’s the theory. But it’s not how it works, at least not anymore, and not in Canada.

The Unholy Trinity of the Administrative State

In Canada, the separation of powers has become a mirage. In its place, the king has returned to haunt us, albeit in a different form. What was once the monarch has become the administrative state, the modern Leviathan. It consists of every part of government that is neither legislature nor court: cabinets, departments, ministries, agencies, public health officials, boards, commissions, tribunals, regulators, law enforcement, inspectors and more.

These public bodies control our lives in every conceivable way. They supervise our speech, employment, bank accounts and media. They indoctrinate our children. They locked us down and directed our personal medical decisions. They control the money supply, the interest rate and the terms of credit. They track, direct, incentivize, censor, punish, redistribute, subsidize, tax, license and inspect. Their control over our lives would make the kings of old blush.

Legislatures and courts made it this way. Together, they have returned power to the executive, now occupied not by the king but by a permanent managerial bureaucracy, or if you like, the “deep state”.

We believed that these institutions would act as checks and balances on each other. But from the beginning, all we have ever done is move power around. No doubt they still have their disputes and quarrels between them. But for the most part they are now all on the same page.

 

Instead of enacting rules, legislatures delegate authority to the administration to make the rules: regulations, policies, guidelines, orders and decisions of all kinds.

 

Courts, instead of keeping agencies within their powers, defer to their expertise.

 

More and more, courts allow public authorities to do as they think best in the “public interest”, as long as their vision of public interest reflects “progressive” sensibilities. Courts generally require these administrative agencies to apply the law not correctly but only “reasonably”. According to the Supreme Court, government agencies can infringe Charter rights “proportionately” to the statutory objectives they are attempting to achieve.

Instead of the rule of law, we now have what has become the Unholy Trinity of the Administrative State.  Delegation from the legislature and deference from the courts produces discretion for the administration to decide the public good.

 

The human rights commission and the tribunal – not the legislature – decide what constitutes discrimination. Environment officials, not the legislature, determine the criteria for permitting environmental impacts. Cabinet, not the legislature, decides when pipelines will be built. Public health officials, not the legislature, order businesses to close and people to wear masks. The innumerable bodies of the executive branch now make rules, enforce rules and adjudicate cases. Together, the legislature and the courts have returned power to the king. Except the actual king, living in his palace in England, is now just a figurehead. The administrative state occupies his throne.

 

Indeed, the case could be made that we effectively now have four branches of government rather than three: the legislature, the courts, the political executive and the administrative bureaucracy (the “deep state”), which consists of those government actors not directly controlled or controllable by prime ministers or premiers and their cabinets.

 

Instead of separated functions, we have concentrated power. Instead of checks and balances, the branches cooperate to empower the state’s management of society. Together, their authority is almost absolute. They can set aside individual autonomy in the name of public welfare and progressive causes.

A Managerial Theocracy

Almost 1,000 years ago, William the Conqueror vanquished Anglo-Saxon England, made himself king and created a feudal society. If you belonged to its elite, unless you were Church nobility or a member of the royal family, you were a land baron. Land was the foundation of the economy. Inheritance determined land rights and social standing. Lineage was a moral principle. Good and important people were born to good and important families. If your parents were serfs, you were a serf too, and deserved to be one. God determined who you were. For at least the next 700 years, lineage was destiny.

Fast forward through the Enlightenment to the Industrial Revolution in the 19th century. Men began making machines, and machines began doing work. Industry, not land, became the predominant source of wealth. Land was still important but became a commodity to be bought and sold like any other. Like the patricians of the fictional Downton Abbey, the landed aristocracies faded away. Productivity and merit in the markets of industrial capitalism came to matter more than lineage. A new elite emerged: capitalists, entrepreneurs and innovators, closely entwined with the at-first small but steadily growing bourgeois middle class.

But this elite rapidly gave way to another. In the book-length online essay The China Convergence, the pseudonymous N.S. Lyons explains what happened:

“Sometime around the second half of the 19th century a revolution in human affairs began to take place, occurring in parallel to and building on the industrial revolution. This was a revolution…which upended nearly every area of human activity and rapidly reorganized civilization…in order to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. This was the managerial revolution.”

A managerial theocracy was born. A theocracy is a form of government in which God rules, but only indirectly, with ecclesiastic authorities interpreting God’s laws for his subjects. In effect, those authorities are in charge. No one else gets to speak to God, so no one else knows what he means. Our managerial theocracy is secular yet works in a similar way. Rather than worshiping an external deity, the concept of “management” itself plays the role of God. Technocrats and experts are its priests and bishops. They determine what management requires in any situation.

If you are a member of the elite today, you are probably not an entrepreneur. Instead, you belong to the professional managerial class. You help to plan, direct and engineer society. You make policy, develop programs, spend public money, make legal decisions or issue licences and approvals. You are a manager – not a mid-level office manager like the manager of a bank, but a manager of civilization. You tell people what to do.

This elite directs the economy, the environment, technology, energy use, wealth distribution, interest rates, housing supply, land use, transportation, speech, public attitudes, equity, gender, mental health, diabetes, drug addiction and so on. Or at least, they try to. Managing these things often doesn’t work, of course, and frequently creates terrible outcomes. But that is beside the point.

The modern Leviathan: A massive administrative apparatus controls our lives in almost every way, such as (clockwise from top-left) the Canada Revenue Agency, RCMP, Department of Environment and Climate Change Canada, public health officials (shown at bottom right, Chief Public Health Officer Theresa Tam), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and local school boards (shown at middle left, headquarters for Toronto District School Board). (Sources of photos: (top left) Obert Madondo, licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0; (middle left) PFHLai, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0; (middle right) Transport Canada; (bottom left) Picasa; (bottom right) US Mission Geneva, licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0)

People believe in public management. Like the water in which fish swim, it is a conviction people don’t realize that they have. They accept without thinking about it that society requires an expert bureaucracy. Government exists to solve social problems for the common good. What else is it for? Most people believe this. Courts believe it. Politicians of all stripes believe it. The experts certainly believe it, for they are its high priests.

Even big business believes it. Capitalists have accepted their defeat. Now they help governments to manage the economy. In exchange, governments protect them from competition and provide public largesse. Large players are allowed to operate in regulated oligopolies in a system of crony corporatism, while small independent entrepreneurs get red tape and corrupted, unequal market competition.

But mostly everyone is on board. To speak against the administrative state is to be a heretic.

Not Rule OF Law but Rule BY Law

Some people imagine that they still live in a capitalist, liberal democracy that operates under the rule of law. They believe that people should be judged and advance based upon their individual merit. They believe that free markets produce the best outcomes. They believe in the moral virtue of individual initiative and hard work. Some insist that these values still reflect a social consensus.

These people are modern-day Luddites. We live in a managerial society. Individuality is anathema to its premise of managerial supremacy. Merit still makes an occasional appearance, but merit is a principle of the vanquished elite. Management is a collective enterprise. Individual initiatives, decisions and idiosyncrasies get in the way of central planning. Our modern system of government runs on broad discretion in the hands of a technocratic managerial class. Stellar individual achievement not only often goes unrewarded, but sometimes is actually feared and resented. Increasingly, corporations function this way as well.

Instead of the rule of law, we have rule by law. The two are very different. People sometimes think that the rule of law means that we must have laws. We do. We have lots of laws. We have laws dealing with everything under the sun. We have authorities making and enforcing them. These authorities act lawfully. But that is not a definitive characteristic of the rule of law. Virtually all states make sure to act lawfully – including some of the worst tyrannies. Even the Third Reich.

Simply having laws does not mean the rule of law; even the worst tyrannies maintain the forms of lawfulness while ignoring the essential aspect that laws are needed as much to restrain the unchecked behaviour of the state as to regulate the affairs of citizens. Pictured: (top left) a session of Nazi Germany’s “People’s Court”, 1944; (right) the constitution of the communist Soviet Union; (bottom left), the Supreme Court of communist North Korea. (Source of top left photo: Bundesarchiv, Bild 151-39-23, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Acting lawfully is not the test for the rule of law. Instead, the rule of law restricts what government can do. The rule of law means, for example, that laws are knowable, transparent, generally applicable and “fixed and announced beforehand”, as Hayek put it in The Road to Serfdom. Rule by law, in contrast, is legal instrumentalism, where governments use laws as tools to manage their subjects and achieve desirable outcomes. The rule of law and rule by law are incompatible.

Managers hate the rule of law. It gets in the way of crafting solutions to problems they perceive to be important. The rule of law is unquestionably inconvenient to those in government who just want to get things done – in the sense of creating new policies, writing new rules and passing new laws. The inconvenience of the rule of law is not its downside but its purpose: to prevent officials from making things up as they go. Which is why the tenets of the rule of law are fading away. Governments wish to be agile. They aim to respond to crises as they arise. Rules are fluid, ever-changing, and discretionary. Bureaucrats and even courts make one-off decisions that need not be consistent with the previous case. Instead of officials being bound by the law, they are in control of it and therefore above it. In a managerial age, that’s not “corruption” but an inevitable feature of the way things work.

New Brunswicker Gerald Comeau (top) got a stiff lesson in judicial sophistry after bringing beer across the provincial border; instead of confirming the Constitution’s clear proclamation that all goods must flow freely within Canada, the Supreme Court moved decisively to protect the regulatory state. At bottom, former Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin during the Comeau case. (Sources of photos: (top) Serge Bouchard/Radio-Canada; (bottom) CBC)

Courts are onside. The Supreme Court of Canada has made sure that the Constitution does not impede the administrative state. To cite just one example, in 2012 Gerald Comeau, a resident of New Brunswick, bought beer in Quebec. The RCMP ticketed him as he crossed the provincial border on his way home. Under a New Brunswick law, the New Brunswick Liquor Corporation has a monopoly on the sale of alcohol in the province. Comeau challenged the fine by citing section 121 of the Constitution Act, 1867, which requires free trade among the provinces. The section states, “All Articles of the Growth, Produce, or Manufacture of any one of the Provinces shall…be admitted free into each of the other Provinces.”

But the Supreme Court feared that prohibiting trade barriers between provinces would threaten the modern regulatory state. If to be “admitted free” is a constitutional guarantee of interprovincial free trade, the Court trembled, then “agricultural supply management schemes, public health-driven prohibitions, environmental controls, and innumerable comparable regulatory measures that incidentally impede the passage of goods crossing provincial borders may be invalid.” Therefore, the Court said, provincial governments can impede the flow of goods across provincial borders for any reason, as long as limiting trade is not their “primary purpose”. So there you have it: “shall” and “be admitted free” actually mean the opposite of what you think they do.

So too with the Charter. The Supreme Court has held that the guarantee of equal treatment under the law in section 15(1) requires equal or comparable outcomes between groups. The B.C. Court of Appeal has held that the principles of fundamental justice in section 7 justify socialized medicine. The Ontario Divisional Court has held that professional regulatory bodies may order the political re-education of their members, notwithstanding section 2. The Supreme Court has held that administrative agencies may disregard freedom of religion in pursuit of the values of equity, diversity and inclusion. The Ontario Superior Court has held that prohibition of worship during Covid-19 that infringed freedom of religion was saved by section 1.

A rule-of-law document in a managerial age: Courts regularly interpret the Charter based on the values and social principles the administrative state seeks to advance, disregarding or reinterpreting provisions they find inconvenient – such as ruling that prohibition of religious worship during Covid-19 did not infringe on freedom of religion or association. (Sources of photos: (left) BeeBee Photography/Shutterstock; (right) The Canadian Press)

The Charter is a rule-of-law document in a managerial age. Courts are interpreting it in a manner consistent with managerial values.

We trusted that the institutions that rule over us – the legislature, the courts, the executive, the bureaucracy, the technocrats – would commit to their own restraint. We assumed that they would protect our liberty. We believed that vague language in constitutional documents would preserve our political order. All of that was a naïve mistake.

False Fixes

Constitutional rights are not enough. They merely carve out narrow and unreliable exceptions to the general rule that the state can do what it thinks best. They affirm the default assumption that the state’s power is unlimited. Our constitutional mistake cannot be fixed by better drafting.

Yes, section 2(b) of the Charter could have been more precise; but not all provisions are as vague as 2(b), and the Supreme Court has given its own meaning to sections more robustly worded than 2(b). Language, of course, has inherent ambiguities. Finding words that deal precisely with every future circumstance is impossible. Legal answers are rarely black-and-white. The process of applying general rules to specific facts requires interpretation, reasoning and argument, within which skilled jurists can bob and weave. Better wording would have improved our Constitution, but it would not have been enough to safeguard the rule of law and resist the managerial state. We need different constitutional premises.

A long line of philosophers, from the ancient Greek Socrates to the 20th century American John Rawls, have expressed the idea that populations agree to be ruled. There is a “social contract” between the ruled and their rulers. In exchange for their submission, governments provide the people with benefits, such as peace, prosperity and safety.

But it’s a chimera; no such social contract has ever existed. Citizens are never asked for their agreement. No one is permitted to opt-out. No one agrees on the extent of the authority, or on what the benefits are to be. Social contract theory is a fiction. Real contracts are voluntary, while (supposed) social contracts are involuntary. Involuntary consent is no consent at all. Even in the West, laws and governments coerce people against their will.

A Different Premise: Consent

The alternative is a legal order based upon actual, individual consent. That would mean that people could not be coerced or have force imposed upon them without their agreement. Since laws are based upon force, the state could not impose any other laws without the specific consent of each citizen subject to them.

These two principles would change everything.

If force was prohibited, then the law would consist of corollaries of that principle: rights and liabilities that protect person and property by prohibiting touching, physical restraint, confinement, medical treatment without informed consent, detention, confiscation, theft, the use of biological agents, breach of privacy, threats of force, and counselling, soliciting or inducing others to use force; that keep the peace; that compensate for physical harm; that enforce partially executed contracts; and so on. The only exceptions to the prohibition on force would be in response to the use of force: to repel force in self-defence and to execute and enforce laws prohibiting force. No one, including the state, could use force or impose other rules for the common good, public necessity or emergency.

Many questions would arise. How would courts enforce these principles? What happens when different people consent to different sets of other laws? Taxes require coercion, so how would the state fund itself if citizens could refuse to be subject to tax laws? These and many more challenges can be answered in a principled way. But they are for another day.

What we do know: the existing constitutional order is failing. Instead of protecting liberty, the state has become its leading threat. It is time to fix our constitutional mistake.

Bruce Pardy is executive director of Rights Probe and professor of law at Queen’s University. You can reach him at [email protected] or on Twitter @PardyBruce.

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Health

Canadian Health Organizations Unite to Demand Truth on Vaccine Safety

Published on

News release from the World Council of Health Canada

Canadian Health Authorities Served Over Childhood Vaccine Information

Children’s Health Defense, Canada Health Alliance, Vaccine Choice Canada, and WCH Canada joined this week to serve health officers and ministers of health across the country.

The Canada Health AllianceChildren’s Health Defense CanadaVaccine Choice Canada, and the World Council For Health Canada united this week to put Fraser Health and other health authorities across Canada on notice regarding dangerous information being provided to parents and families about vaccinations. Fraser Health, one of five regional health authorities in British Columbia, Canada, is responsible for delivering health care services to a population of over 2 million people in Metro Vancouver and the Fraser Valley. Fraser Health is currently promoting COVID-19 genetic “vaccines”  and various traditional vaccines for children and youth. The information that Fraser Health is providing is inaccurate and dangerous. Like many governmental agencies in Canada and elsewhere, Fraser Health is promoting misleading claims of safety and efficacy for DNA-contaminated, modified-RNA, genetic “vaccines” for COVID-19, as well as various traditional vaccines for other infections. Children’s health and lives are at risk.

On October 28, 2024, four major Canadian health organizations together sent a registered open letter to all medical health officers in Fraser Health, as well as mailed copies to all other district medical health officers in BC; all provincial, territorial, and federal chief medical officers of health; and all provincial, territorial, and federal health ministers. Appropriate cover letters were included for each recipient.

The intent of these letters is to reach the heart of the recipients, inspiring them to take corrective action on dangerous misinformation regarding childhood vaccines.

October 25, 2024

Re: Open Letter to Fraser Health Authority

We are writing in response to the information currently being disseminated by various public health officers at the request of Fraser Health Authority utilizing the ‘Healthy Schools Communications Toolkit’. (Source)

The broader medical community, the public, and especially parents look to health authorities such as Fraser Health Authority to provide accurate, up-to-date information to assist in making informed decisions regarding the health and safety of children.

Statements in the ‘Healthy Schools Communication Toolkit’ issued by Fraser Health Authority in recent weeks claim, with no conditions or qualifiers, that vaccines are ‘safe, effective and necessary’ for the health and safety of children.

These statements are inaccurate and misleading.

Of particular note for being misleading and outright dishonest are the following:

  • Tdap-IPV: protects against diphtheria, tetanus, pertussis (whooping cough) and polio.
  • “Vaccines are safe and are your child’s best protection.”
  • Repeatedly misrepresenting “vaccination” as “immunization” (Source)
  • “The COVID-19 vaccines . . . are safe, effective and will save lives.”
  • “Vaccines do more than protect the people getting vaccinated, they also protect everyone around them. The more people in a community who are immunized and protected from COVID-19, the harder it is for COVID-19 to spread.”
  • “The best way to protect others and reduce the risk of getting sick with the flu and COVID-19 is to get immunized. The flu and COVID-19 vaccines are safe, effective and available for free to anyone aged six months and older. It is much safer to get the vaccines than to get the illnesses.” (Source)

These statements are especially disconcerting given recent disclosures related to the lack of evidence of the safety of childhood vaccines and the COVID ‘vaccine’ in particular.

The COVID ‘Vaccine’

The claim of safety of the COVID ‘vaccine’ cannot be made in the face of the May 29, 2024 admission by the Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC) in response to an order paper question from Conservative MP Cathay Wagantall. (Source) The Public Health Agency of Canada acknowledged that booster recipients have higher death numbers than the unvaccinated. The report states: “Across all weeks in the time period of interest, the number of deaths were highest among those with a primary series and 1 additional dose.”

Despite PHAC urging caution in interpreting the data, they fail to address their own misleading definitions when they identify vaccine recipients as “unvaccinated” during the first 14 days following vaccination, the period of high lethality after the injections. The misleading use of the term “unvaccinated” renders all information from the PHAC and Health Canada unreliable and validates the safety and efficacy concerns surrounding these products.

Researchers investigating the safety and effectiveness of Pfizer’s vaccine in fully vaccinated, partially vaccinated, and unvaccinated children and teens found cases of myocarditis and pericarditis only in vaccinated children. (Source) The study also found that initial protection by BNT162b2 vaccination against positive SARS-CoV-2 tests in adolescents aged 12-15 had waned by 14 weeks after vaccination. Brian Hooker, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Children’s Health Defense states: “This study clearly shows that Pfizer’s COVID vaccine provides almost no benefit to children and adolescents but does increase their risk of myocarditis and pericarditis. It begs the question: Why does the CDC continue to recommend these unlicensed shots for kids? Where is the data they use to support their statement that the benefits of these vaccines outweigh the risks?”

On October 7,2024, Florida State Surgeon General Dr. Joseph A. Ladapo announced new guidance regarding mRNA vaccines. (Source) The Florida Department of Health conducted an analysis to evaluate vaccine safety. This analysis found that there is an 84% increase in the relative incidence of cardiac-related death among males 18-39 years old within 28 days following mRNA vaccination. Non-mRNA vaccines were not found to have these increased risks. As such, the State Surgeon General recommends against males aged 18 to 39 from receiving mRNA COVID-19 vaccines.

The Department continues to stand by its Guidance for Pediatric COVID-19 Vaccines, issued March 2022, which recommends against use in healthy children and adolescents 5 years old to 17 years old. This now includes recommendations against COVID-19 vaccination among infants and children under 5 years old.

The following is beyond medical debate and considered accepted medical knowledge:

  • The COVID injections do not stop COVID infection or transmission.
  • Healthy young people have essentially zero risk of serious illness and death from COVID.
  • Since the COVID mRNA “vaccines” were given to the public, over 1.6 million adverse events and over 38,000 deaths related to these injections have been reported to the CDC’s Vaccine Adverse Events Reporting System (VAERS) in the US. Among these toxicities, increased rates of myocarditis—sometimes fatal—in young people, especially boys, have been demonstrated in recipients of the mRNA injections.
  • Additionally laboratory analysis has found high levels of DNA adulteration, and multiple undeclared genetic sequences in both Moderna and Pfizer Covid-19 genetic “vaccines”.
  • The Pfizer and Moderna COVID mRNA injections, while commonly called vaccines, are not true vaccines, but a type of mRNA-based gene therapy. In effect, they are ‘vaccines-in-name-only’.

There is no legitimate medical justification for healthy children or young adults to receive the COVID mRNA injections. Any institution continuing to refer to these injections as ‘vaccines’ and declaring them to be “safe and effective” is intentionally misinforming the public and health practitioners alike. This demonstrates a blatant disregard for scientific evidence and the health of our children and youth.

Lack of Proven Safety of Childhood Vaccines

In August 2024 Vaccine Choice Canada sent personalized letters (Source) to all provincial Health Ministers and chief public health officers, including Dr. Bonnie Henry, on the lack of proper safety testing of childhood vaccines. In that letter VCC stated:

In the July 6, 2024 publication of the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Stanley Plotkin et al. (Source) admitted “the need for more rigorous science” pertaining to the safety of vaccines. They noted that “In 234 reviews of various vaccines and health outcomes conducted from 1991 to 2012, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) found inadequate evidence to prove or disprove causation in 179 (76%) of the relationships it explored.”

What Plotkin and his fellow authors acknowledged is that the science to conclude vaccine safety is inadequate. (Source) Additionally, in 2023 the Informed Consent Action Network confirmed that “none of the vaccine doses the CDC recommends for routine injection into children were licensed based on a long-term placebo-controlled trial.” (Source) This is also true for Health Canada.

Further, five studies comparing unvaccinated children with vaccinated children provide compelling evidence that the current vaccination schedule is harming our children and a significant contributor to the epidemic of chronic disease in children today. (A New Parents Guide to Understanding Vaccination)

There is no substantive evidence to claim that the following vaccines prevent infection or transmission:

  • Pertussis
  • Polio
  • Tetanus
  • COVID
  • Influenza
  • Diphtheria

These vaccine products are designed to minimize symptoms, and do not prevent infection or transmission. Referring to these products as “immunizations” is misleading and dishonest. With these critical disclosures, it is no longer honest, responsible, or ethical for Public Health authorities to claim that “vaccines have been proven to be safe and effective”.

Fraser Health has no scientific basis to assure parents that giving their children vaccines is “your child’s best protection” when none of the vaccines on the childhood schedule have been tested for safety and effectiveness against a true placebo. That claim is scientifically unsupported and contradicts what is medically known.

It is time to cease the unqualified claim that “vaccines are safe, effective and necessary”.

Canada has consumer protection laws which prohibits engaging in any act or practice that is otherwise misleading, false, or deceptive to the consumer. Because parents rely on Health Canada and our Public Health Officers when they make health care decisions, children are harmed by the misleading and deceptive claims of health agencies such as Fraser Health Authority. These consumer protection laws need to be enforced.

Conclusion

  • Public Health agencies such as Fraser Health Authority continue to mislead and deceive the public by maintaining the unsubstantiated claim that vaccines are safe, effective and necessary. That claim requires immediate retraction and correction.
  • Public Health undermines their credibility in making such unsubstantiated statements and puts the credibility of the entire health care system at risk.
  • We appeal to your moral and legal responsibility to be fully transparent regarding the limitations on the evidence of vaccine safety, effectiveness and necessity.

We expect you will address this matter with the same seriousness that we are and we look forward to receiving your response.

Sincerely,

Ted Kuntz, President, Vaccine Choice Canada

Dr. Bill Code, President, Canada Health Alliance

Dr. Mark Trozzi, President, World Council for Health Canada

Christine Colebeck, President, Children’s Health Defence Canada


Organizations

The Canada Health AllianceChildren’s Health Defense CanadaVaccine Choice CanadaWorld Council For Health Canada, and the World Council For Health International.

Related Material

  • Here is honest, concise information about vaccines and genetic injections in the form of a 6-minute video. Please share this liberally with parents, teachers, and families (Click Here)
  • Vaccine Choice Canada’s New Parents’ Guide to Understanding Vaccinations (Click Here)
  • Children’s Health Defense Canada. A Parents’ Guide to Healthy Children. (Click Here)
  • World Council For Health International 2022 Alert to Parents Regarding Children and Covid-19 Genetic “Vaccines”. English, Spanish, and German. (Click Here)
  • Children Should Be Freed Now and Never COVID-Injected. Children are by nature very resistant to coronavirus infection for multiple reasons that we will concisely discuss below. (Click Here)
  • COVID Injections: Unveiling the Mechanisms of Harm. New pathology, a new wave of disease, and 44 common examples of injection-induced illnesses supported by over 930 scientific publications linking these diseases with the injections. (Click Here)
  • Canada Health Alliance. Why Do Vaccines Continually Fail to Live Up to Their Promises? (Click Here)
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Crime

RCMP Bust B.C. Fentanyl Superlab Linked to Mexico and Transnational Exports

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Sam Cooper 

@samthebureau

In a remote mountainous area of British Columbia, federal police have dismantled the largest fentanyl laboratory ever discovered in Canada. This western province has become a critical front in the Five Eyes battle against the production and distribution of deadly synthetic narcotics trafficked globally by networks involving Chinese and Iranian state-sponsored mafias and Mexican cartels.

In a groundbreaking discovery, the RCMP located the superlab in Falkland—a village of 946 residents nestled in the rugged terrain between Calgary and Vancouver—using Phenyl-2-Propanone (P2P) to manufacture methamphetamine. This production method, primarily employed by Mexican cartels, stems from the precursors and scientific expertise Mexican cartels have gathered from elite Chinese criminals since the early 2000s, according to U.S. enforcement sources.

David Teboul, Commander of the RCMP Federal Policing program in the Pacific Region, underscored the significance: “Manufacturing methamphetamine using P2P had not been seen in Western Canada until now,” he said. “The P2P manufacturing method has been the primary method used by Mexican cartels to produce methamphetamine for years.”

Demonstrating the destructive power of the cartels involved, the RCMP seized a staggering cache of illicit substances and weapons. Officers confiscated 54 kilograms of fentanyl, massive amounts of precursor chemicals, 390 kilograms of methamphetamine, 35 kilograms of cocaine, 15 kilograms of MDMA, and 6 kilograms of cannabis. The superlab was described as the largest and most sophisticated of its kind, capable of producing multiple types of illicit drugs.

“To put things into context,” Teboul said, “the over 95 million potentially lethal doses of fentanyl that have been seized could have taken the lives of every Canadian at least twice over.”

A large portion of the product was destined for other countries.

During the investigation, RCMP officers learned of several large shipments of methamphetamine prepared for international export. They intercepted 310 kilograms of methamphetamine before it could leave Canada, preventing a significant quantity from reaching global markets—a critical point as Canada faces pressure from its allies over its role in the global fentanyl and methamphetamine trade.

Teboul noted that the RCMP collaborated with its Five Eyes enforcement partners—an intelligence alliance comprising Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. Although Teboul did not provide specific details, this cooperation underscores the international scope of the transnational investigation.

The first suspect, Gaganpreet Singh Randhawa, was identified and arrested during raids. He is currently in custody and faces multiple charges, including possession and export of controlled substances, possession of prohibited firearms and devices, and possession of explosive devices. More arrests are expected, Teboul said.

The scale of this criminal network echoes the power and violence fueling gang wars that have rocked British Columbia, putting innocent lives at risk during high-powered shootouts in Vancouver. Investigators seized a total of 89 firearms, including 45 handguns, 21 AR-15-style rifles, and submachine guns—many of which were loaded and ready for use. The searches also uncovered small explosive devices, vast amounts of ammunition, firearm silencers, high-capacity magazines, body armor, and $500,000 in cash.

British Columbia has been grappling with an influx of synthetic opioids like fentanyl, significantly exacerbating the opioid crisis across Canada. The province has witnessed a surge in overdose deaths, prompting law enforcement to intensify efforts against drug production and trafficking networks. Experts highlight weaknesses in Canadian laws and a lack of federal oversight at the Port of Vancouver, which have been exploited by transnational crime and money laundering organizations from China, Iran, and Mexico.

This significant bust comes at a time when Canada is under increased scrutiny from international allies over its role as a hub for the export of fentanyl and methamphetamine. The superlab takedown appears to align with serious concerns raised by lawmakers in Washington about how Canada and Mexico are being used by transnational crime organizations to distribute fentanyl worldwide.

A recent U.S. congressional report argues that the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) strategy relies less on overt military actions and more on covert tactics, including trafficking of fentanyl and leveraging money laundering, aimed at exploiting vulnerabilities across social, economic, and health domains.

“Fentanyl precursors are manufactured in China and shipped to Mexico and Canada. For precursors that arrive in Mexico, Chinese transnational mafias work with Mexican cartels to smuggle and distribute fentanyl in the United States on behalf of the CCP,” the report states. “The DEA confirmed Chinese transnational crime leaders hold government positions in the CCP and indicated that Chinese transnational crime organizations are dedicated to the CCP.”

“The public deserves to know about the CCP’s role in fentanyl production and how the Party is using fentanyl as a chemical weapon to kill Americans,” the report adds. It recommends that Washington publicly “blame the CCP as much as the DEA and its partners currently blame the Sinaloa Cartel” for fentanyl trafficking and urges the government to “educate international allies about CCP chemical warfare” and encourage them to condemn Chinese transnational crime.

According to congressional investigations, Beijing is actively incentivizing the export of fentanyl and methamphetamine worldwide. The report alleges that Chinese criminal organizations, including Triads led by individuals with official positions in the CCP, are working alongside Mexican cartels to generate profit to fund interference operations in America.

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