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Supreme Court declines to hear Covid vaccine travel mandate cases

Published

3 weeks ago

5 minute read

From the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms

At the time the federal government rescinded the vaccine travel mandate, the Minister of Transport had threatened to bring back the mandate without hesitation.

The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms is disappointed to announce that the Supreme Court of Canada has declined to hear the appeals in two cases that challenged the federal Covid vaccine travel mandate. The cases are Peckford et al. v. Canada and Hon. Maxime Bernier v. Canada.

The Justice Centre supported Applicants in both cases. The Applications for Leave to Appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada were filed separately.

The Hon. Brian Peckford, former Premier of Newfoundland and Labrador, was an applicant in one case, along with five others. Mr. Peckford is the last living signer of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The other case was brought by the Hon. Maxime Bernier, the leader of the People’s Party of Canada.

In both cases, the Federal Court held the issues were moot because the vaccine travel mandate had been rescinded after the cases had been filed and cross-examination had occurred, but prior to the court hearings. Dismissing a case as moot means that the court has found that its decision will not have a practical effect and that it is not worth the time and effort to decide the case otherwise.

In regard to the Covid vaccine travel mandate, however, at the time the federal government rescinded the vaccine travel mandate, the Minister of Transport had threatened to bring back the mandate without hesitation.

The Applicants argued that the doctrine of mootness ought to be reconsidered by the Supreme Court because emergency orders by their nature are evasive of review, resulting in no oversight by courts or elected legislators.

Hearing these cases would have allowed the Supreme Court to determine whether it is appropriate to allow governments to evade judicial scrutiny of their decisions made through emergency orders. Unlike legislation passed by Parliament, emergency orders are made through Cabinet orders and are protected by Cabinet privilege, meaning Canadians cannot learn the reasoning behind the decisions.

Lawyer Allison Pejovic says, “This case was of paramount importance to all Canadians, and they have been denied the right to know whether the federal government acted lawfully in preventing them from travelling and leaving the country based on their refusal to take a novel medication that failed to prevent transmission of Covid, and that has caused death and serious harm to many people worldwide. Deeming cases challenging draconian emergency orders that harmed millions of Canadians moot damages confidence in the justice system and undermines the rule of law.”

Background

On August 13, 2021, the federal government announced its intention of implementing a vaccine requirement for travelling on planes, trains or ships. The government, led by Prime Minister Justine Trudeau, did this two days before announcing a federal election, essentially making it an election promise. After winning a minority in Parliament, the Minister of Transport implemented the mandate on November 30, 2021.

Both the Peckford and Bernier cases asked the Federal Court to strike down the mandate as a breach of Charter sections 2, 6, 7, 8 and 15. The most significant breach was to Charter section 6, mobility rights. All applicants were essentially barred from travelling across Canada in any practical manner and could not leave the country. In Mr. Bernier’s case, this meant he was essentially barred from campaigning.

Of note, on cross examination a government bureaucrat admitted she did not receive any medical advice to implement such a mandate. It was done solely on the direction from the Minister of Transport and the federal Cabinet.

Just a few days after cross examinations concluded, the government ended the mandate on June 20, 2022. Both cases were dismissed by the Federal Court as moot in October 2022. The subsequent Appeals were dismissed by the Federal Court of Appeal.

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‘Mind-boggling’: Billions gone and little to show for it years after rampant COVID fraud

Published on September 15, 2024

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From The Center Square

By 

“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

Years after the passage of federal COVID-era relief and the subsequent loss of likely hundreds of billions of those taxpayer dollars, lawmakers are still unsure where that money went, how to get it back, and seemingly have done little to prevent it from happening again.

Federal watchdog and other reports estimate anywhere from $200 billion to half a trillion was lost to waste, fraud and abuse across various federal and state COVID-era programs.

“Insiders, including those who worked for state workforce agencies, conspired with organized crime factions and other individuals to defraud state UI programs and the states did little to stop them,” a Republican-led House Oversight Committee report released this week said. “Some states even hired individuals convicted of identity theft to process UI claims.”

Examples like that and the scope of the amount lost was the subject of a House Oversight hearing this week where lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and experts grappled with the scope of the lost funds and what to do about it.

“The estimated amounts of waste, fraud, and abuse in COVID-related programs are simply … mind-boggling,” Subcommittee on Government Operations and the Federal Workforce Chairman Pete Sessions, R-Texas, said at the hearing. “Half a trillion dollars. Maybe more. Much of it lost to criminal actors and our enemies. Often using comically simple tactics.”

The most common among those tactics was stealing unemployment dollars doled out by the federal government during the pandemic.

One inspector general report from the Small Business Adminstration estimated at least $200 billion in taxpayer money was lost.

“We estimate that SBA disbursed over $200 billion in potentially fraudulent COVID-19 EIDLs, EIDL Targeted Advances, Supplemental Targeted Advances, and PPP loans,” the report said. “This means at least 17 percent of all COVID-19 EIDL and PPP funds were disbursed to potentially fraudulent actors.”

Nearly all of those “fraudulent actors” have so far gotten away with the theft.

Congress approved $40 million for the Pandemic Response Accountability Committee, tasked with finding and preventing fraud. That committee and other investigative efforts have shown the COVID-era fraud was rampant and that little has been done to recover those funds.

That committee’s authority expires next year.

“Every dollar that goes to a fraudster doesn’t go to the small business, to the unemployed, to others that Congress were intending to help,” Michael Horowitz, Chair of PRAC, said at the oversight hearing this week. “If we want to continue to advance the fight against improper payments and fraud, we shouldn’t allow this important and fraud fighting tool to expire.”

Horowitz also said at the hearing that there is “clearly insufficient” access to data for oversight, such as accessing Social Security Administration’s death database so that payments are not sent to deceased individuals. He also pushed for his authority to be expanded to helping other agencies.

Orice Williams Brown, chief operating officer at the U.S. Government Accountability Office, also testified at the hearing that federal agencies can do more to prevent fraud of this kind. But federal agencies are not alone in the blame.

The House Oversight report released this week is called the “Widespread Failures and Fraud in Pandemic Unemployment Relief Programs” showing that states mishandled funds doled out by the federal government for unemployment insurance, sometimes with little oversight.

From the report:

The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) estimates 11 to 15 percent of total benefits paid during the pandemic were fraudulent, totaling between $100 to $135 billion. The Department of Labor (DOL) Office of Inspector General (OIG) estimates that at least $191 billion in pandemic UI payments could have been improperly paid, with a significant portion attributable to fraud. As of March 2023, states reported recoveries of improper payments in an amount of only $6.8 billion.

The design of the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance (PUA) program led to massive fraud. During the program’s first nine months, claimants did not have to provide any evidence of earnings or prior work which made the program susceptible to fraud. DOL reported that the PUA program had a total improper payment rate of 35.9 percent.

Both sides have lamented the lost taxpayer dollars, but so far little has been done to prevent it from happening again, even as Congress continues to pass multi-trillion dollar spending bills often with little time for lawmakers to review.

Lawmakers passed two bills in 2023 to increase reporting from federal agencies on fraud and to prevent those previously convicted of financial crimes from receiving certain federal payment.

The House Oversight report recommended stronger security measures, cross checking with other relevant databases, more oversight and transparency, and more documentation from benefit recipients.

“If this is not a call to action…” Sessions said at the hearing. “I simply do not know what is.”

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COVID-19

Andrew Cuomo had aides manipulate death stats to cover up COVID record, report finds

Published on September 15, 2024

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From LifeSiteNews

By Calvin Freiburger

Republican Brad Wenstrup, chairman of the House subcommittee, explained that ‘the Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19’

Former New York Democrat Gov. Andrew Cuomo personally edited state COVID-19 statistics to downplay deaths caused by his placement of contagious people in nursing homes, a new congressional investigation found.

For months, New York was the hardest hit of any state by the pandemic, due in large part to the coronavirus spreading within the state’s nursing homes. Cuomo, who resigned in 2021 over sexual harassment claims, ordered that nursing homes cannot turn away patients diagnosed with COVID-19 despite the fact the virus was most dangerous to the elderly.

He initially tried to blame nursing home deaths on the Trump administration by claiming that a federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) guidance forced him to put the infected back in nursing homes (the CDC actually called for elderly housing decisions to be made on a case-by-case basis). But even the office of New York Attorney General (and fellow Democrat) Letitia James found Cuomo’s administration undercounted COVID-19 deaths in nursing homes by as much as half.

A 2021 report by the Judiciary Committee of the New York State Assembly found that Cuomo and his senior aides edited state COVID-19 reports and undercounted nursing home deaths “on multiple occasions” to “strengthen the defense” of his order by excluding COVID deaths that occurred once patients left their nursing home.

On Monday, the U.S. House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic released a memo confirming those findings, National Review reported.

“The Cuomo Administration is responsible for recklessly exposing New York’s most vulnerable population to COVID-19,” subcommittee chair Brad Wenstrup, a Republican from Ohio, said. “Today’s memo holds Mr. Cuomo and his team accountable for their failures and provides the most detailed and comprehensive accounting of New York’s pandemic-era wrongdoing.”

The committee found that Cuomo assistant Stephanie Benson emailed top aides to get out a “report on the facts” to prevent the governor’s nursing home directive from becoming a “great debacle in the history books. Cuomo has publicly denied involvement in creating the report, his former adviser, Jim Malatras, testified that Cuomo made his desires clear to the authors through his aids and handwritten notes, and even reviewed and edited the document himself multiple times.

Former New York State Department of Health official Dr. Eleanor Adams told investigators that her department did not independently author the report or was it peer reviewed. Others testified that the decision to remove out-of-facility deaths from the count came from the New York Executive Chamber, i.e., the governor’s cabinet.

Cuomo himself testified before the subcommittee this week, where he continued to maintain his innocence. He did, however, admit that he never spoke to anyone at the CDC or Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services about the scientific justification for his nursing home directive before issuing it.

In May, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch penned an opinion identifying America’s COVID response measures as “the greatest intrusions on civil liberties in the peacetime history of this country,” against which Congress, state legislatures, and courts alike were largely negligent to protect constitutional rights, personal liberty, and the rule of law.

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