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Frontier Centre for Public Policy

UNDRIP’s false promise of Indigenous Nationhood threatens individual Indigenous Canadians

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3 months ago

22 minute read

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Peter Best

All societies need to make use of force, both to preserve internal order and to protect themselves from external enemies. A liberal society does this by creating a powerful state, but then constraining that power under a rule of law. The state’s power is based on a social contract between autonomous individuals who agree to give up their rights to do as they please in return for the state’s protection. It is legitimated both by the common acceptance of the law, and, if it is a liberal democracy, through popular elections. Liberal rights are meaningless if they cannot be enforced by a state, which, by Max Weber’s famous definition, is a legitimate monopoly of force over a defined territory…Ultimate power, in other words, continues to be the province of national states, which means that control of this power at this level remains critical.

-Francis Fukuyama – Liberalism and its Discontents

Our Canadian elites, led by Justin Trudeau’s Liberal government, continue to advance the idea that Canada should be a race-based nation. This is reflected in the Trudeau government’s enactment of the racist United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People (UNDRIP) laws and policies. (The UNDRIP Action Plan.)

These laws and policies are partly based on the premise that Indigenous peoples in Canada still have distinct cultures that give them the right to exist as separate groups within the Canadian nation, living parallel to the rest of Canadians, and only optionally being subject to the laws of Canada.

Under the heading “Cultural, religious and linguistic rights,” the UNDRIP Action Plan sets out the Trudeau government’s goal of creating a country where:

Indigenous peoples fully enjoy and exercise their distinct rights to maintain, control, develop, protect, and transmit their cultural heritage, indigenous knowledge, languages, food systems, sciences, and technologies, without discrimination…. Indigenous peoples are thriving, including through connection to culture and community, the use of their languages and the expression of their spiritual heritage.

Also, the UNDRIP Action Plan prescribes that these “distinct rights” are to be exercised and enhanced by treating “Indigenous peoples” as independent, self governing, “nations,” representing over 630 race-based nations existing within the boundaries of Canada.

The premise underlying the UNDRIP Action Plan is that authentic, pre-contact Indigenous cultures still exist, and that they have the right to be preserved at the expense of Canadian taxpayers.  In other words, these nations will be dependent on other Canadians.

The last vestiges of authentic, distinct, pre-contact Indigenous cultures disappeared about 150 years ago. As Assembly of First Nations co-founder William Wuttunee wrote in 1971 in his book Ruffled Feathers: “Real Indian culture is just about dead on the reserves.” Now, over 50 years later, native traditional cultures have been replaced by re-imagined cultures, even if a declining few Indigenous people still speak their traditional languages.

There can be no going back to any part of Indigenous pre-contact cultures, nor would Indigenous peoples want to. In this respect, Iroquois writer Sachem Ely S. Parker says:

Do you know or can you believe that sometimes the idea obtrudes…whether it has been well that I have sought civilization with its bothersome concomitants and whether it would not be better even now…to return to the darkness and most sacred wilds (if any such can be found) of our country and there to vegetate and expire silently, happily and forgotten as do the birds of the air and the beasts of the field. The thought is a happy one but perhaps impracticable.

When trade with Europeans began in the early 1600’s, Indigenous peoples began the long, irreversible process of appropriating European goods and technologies, modern economic practices, Christianity, and Western norms and values, with the consequence that, by the late 19th century, their paleolithic, pre-contact cultures had become almost extinct.

All that remained was what William Wuttunee described as “touristy” and “museum pieces of buckskin and feathers,” the ceremonial remnants justly celebrated on special occasions but, less innocently, now used by their current leaders as symbolism in their endless political campaigns for more money and power.

Indigenous peoples cannot turn back from the modern, high-tech, globalist culture that is systematically enveloping all Canadians. In this respect, Yuval Noah Harari wrote in Sapiens:

Today almost all humans share the same geopolitical system (the entire planet is divided into internationally recognized states); the same economic system (capitalist market forces shape even the remotest corners of the globe); the same legal system (human rights and international law are valid everywhere, at least theoretically); and the same scientific system (experts in Iran, Israel, Australia, and Argentina have exactly the same views about the structure of atoms or the treatment of tuberculosis…. We still talk a lot about “authentic” cultures, but if by “authentic” we mean something that developed independently, and that consists of ancient local traditions free of external influences, then there are no authentic cultures left on earth. Over the last few centuries, all cultures were changed almost beyond recognition by a flood of global influences.

But ironically, the rise of globalism has counterintuitively led to the increase of parochial, tribalist feelings.

Historian Robert Kaplan, in his latest book The Loom of Time – Between Empire and Anarchy, From the Mediterranean to China, argues that the cultural shock caused by modernism and globalism–by their annihilation of traditional tribal life–has resulted in an emotionally compensating reaction on the part of those affected to “reinvent their primordial selves in more abstract and extreme forms in order to cope with impersonal settings,” and, in addition, to achieve worldly gains.

Kaplan explains that the anonymity and the loss of pride and identity on the part of tribal societies resulting from urbanization and other globalist influences led to the psychological need for a compensating, “emotional grounding,” which now manifests itself in intense, albeit fictional, assertions of political, ethnic, religious, and racial exceptionalism, and opportunistic demands for favored treatment by the state.

Ironically, the more modern, urban, and globally integrated the former pre-contact tribe becomes, the greater its “primordial” racial sentiments become and the greater and more inherently baseless are its ethnic or race-based claims to be favored by the state.

Pre-contact tribal cultures were relatively static and fatalistic. There was little belief in “progress,” human rights, money, wealth, or job creation. There was no belief that people had a right to material things like housing, education, medical care, constitutions, courts, judges, welfare, policing, or clean water. These are all modern Western ideas and practices that were inconceivable to pre-contact tribal cultures.

Kaplan writes:

Cultural consciousness is enhanced rather than submerged by modernization, because of the ability of modern states and societies to offer jobs, status, and other spoils for which individuals of different ethnic, religious and sectarian identities compete. Through education, modernization also makes people more aware of their collective pasts and their differences with other peoples. Such phenomena have been the forerunners to the identity politics of the post-modern era.

This is what has happened to Canadian Indigenous tribes.

Modernity, urbanization, and globalism, as William Wuttunee confirmed, have destroyed their pre-contact cultures and, as an ironic consequence, have led to abstract and entirely fantasy-based claims of present Indigenous cultural authenticity and “difference.” The more obvious it is that authentic pre-contact Indigenous cultures have vanished, the more their current Indigenous leaders opportunistically claim that they are alive and thriving.

The unprecedented, radical Indigenous political and legal demands now being routinely made by Indigenous groups are, in ironic fact, completely rooted in Western political ideas and practices.

Their demands for quasi- separatist “nation-to-nation” status, for veto powers over federal and provincial laws possibly affecting their “aboriginal rights and territories,” for reparations, for ownership stakes in resource projects and for co-management with the Crown of public lands and natural resources, are all demands that would be inconceivable to pre-contact Indigenous tribal cultures.

The Western philosophical nature of these demands is proof positive of the extinguishment of pre-contact Indigenous cultures.

Canadian Indigenous groups cannot form viable nation-states, and the UNDRIP Action Plan’s attempts to do this impossible task threatens the civic well being of individual Indigenous Canadians.

In referring to the endless squabbling between the various ethnic tribes that make up the many failed states of the Middle East and Africa, Kaplan reminds us that legitimate nation-states are more than artificial communities created by politics, as were the First Nations reserves in Canada. Rather, they are natural, “practical communities…entities of geographic and historical association.”

Kaplan also says that legitimate nation-states have hierarchical, coherent governing structures, and rules-based laws developed organically over time. They are supported by “organized bureaucratic systems interacting with each other on an impersonal, secular basis.”

None of these basic requirements of nationhood are present to any sufficient degree on First Nations reserves, which, as organized groups, are mostly strangers to the civic values, practices, and traditions of modern liberal democracies.

First Nations reserves, like the “institutionally flimsy” Arab and African tribal groups referred to by Kaplan, “have imported the fruits of science without as societies ever producing them themselves… They have experienced the West only as “things.” … They have possessed the techniques of Europe without intuiting the centuries-long cultural processes that had made the West what it was…”.

In other words, Indigenous tribal groups are “modern” only in the culturally appropriated material sense, and because of the Indian Act and the reserve system, they tend to be illiberal in their political culture and governing practices. The proposed Indigenous nation-states that are envisioned by the UNDRIP Action Plan will be, in Kaplan’s words, just as institutionally-flimsy as other failed states are.

This reality is at the core of the threat posed by the UNDRIP Action Plan to the civic well-being of individual Indigenous Canadians. In this regard Kaplan reminds us that: “…where institutions are weak then personalities…who milk and misgovern…perforce dominate.”

On Canadian Indigenous reserves, governance is prone to family-based self-dealing. (Kaplan’s phrase is “republics of cousins.”) There is no reason to believe that such governments will be better under the UNDRIP Action Plan. In fact, governance will probably get worse because, as Kaplan shows, tribalism and illiberalism are worsened when politically unprepared people achieve self-rule.

Indigenous lawyer and businessman, Calvin Helin, in his seminal book Dances With Dependency: Out of Poverty Through Self- Reliance, compares illiberal First Nations reserve governance to “banana republics.” He referred to Chiefs and Band Councils as “colonizers of their own disempowered people.”

 Indigenous scholar Rob Louis adds:

What realistic chance do band members have against chief and council who control their money and resources? For many band members in Canada, the battle is not just with the Crown, it is also with their own leadership… Perhaps reconciliation within Indigenous communities needs to take place before reconciliation can happen with Canada.

Until recently, vulnerable, and powerless Indigenous Canadians had the federal and provincial governments, the courts, and human rights commissions to protect them. But that is no longer true. All these state institutions have shamefully abandoned their role of protectors of weak and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians.

The Supreme Court of Canada is just as much of a threat to the civic well-being of Indigenous Canadians as is the UNDRIP Action Plan.

In its Vuntut Gwitchin decision, purportedly to preserve Indigenous “difference,” the Court ruled that in the event of an irreconcilable conflict, a First Nations Band’s “collective rights,” resting on its right to protect “Indigenous difference,” will now prevail over an individual Indigenous Canadian’s rights as guaranteed by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. As such, the Charter can now be effectively ignored by Band Councils, depriving countless Indigenous Canadians of Charter protection on their home reserves and territories.

The Vuntut Gwitchin First Nation (VGFN) is described by the Supreme Court as a “self-governing nation” in the Yukon comprising of about 560 “citizens,” only about 260 of whom live in the “main community” of Old Crow, which is the so-called “seat of government.” The other 300 odd “citizens” live mostly in Whitehorse, 800 kilometres south. There are no roads into Old Crow. Students cannot graduate from high school in that community, and there no adequate medical facilities in Old Crow.

Cindy Dickson, a VGFN citizen living in Whitehorse, claimed that a VGFN law that said that a “citizen” had to live in Old Crow to qualify to run for VGFN Council violated her Canadian Charter rights not to be discriminated against based on her residency.

She lost her case.

The Supreme Court asserted the existence of “Indigenous legal orders” that prevailed over Canadian law. There was an anti-discrimination provision in the 1993 VGFN Constitution. The Court told her to rely on that and “pursue a similar claim under the VGFN Constitution.”

The problem with this is that there is no VGFN court and no VGFN judge or lawyers. In fact, there is no VGFN institutional justice system whatsoever through which Cindy Dickson could pursue her claim. How could there be? VGFN, like most First Nations, is a mere tribal village, with a population so tiny that the creation of any such state institutions is impossible.

The Supreme Court knew this, and, to its discredit, preferred giving Ms. Dickson empty words over telling her the harsh truth that while she may have rights in the abstract, in VGFN because of its lack of institutions, she could not pursue those rights. A right without institutional support is, in fact, no right at all.

Another harsh truth that the Court avoided telling Ms. Dickson is that now, VGFN, like all Canadian First Nations, have been shamefully declared Charter-free zones by the Supreme Court of Canada. The Vuntut Gwitchin decision, along with the UNDRIP Action Plan, means that victims of corrupt or discriminatory First Nations reserve leadership practices will now have no one to turn to for protection and relief.

In fact, the Vuntut Gwitchin decision illustrates the absurdity of the Indigenous nation-state pretensions of the Canadian UNDRIP Action Plan.

The joint efforts of the Supreme Court and the federal government’s UNDRIP Action Plan have made individual Indigenous Canadians, in terms of having the guaranteed protection of the rule of law, effectively unprotected on their new, UNDRIP “nation-state” reserves.

Robert Kaplan writes a great deal about the multi-ethnic, multi-racial empires, the most generic form of governance in world history, where the strong hand of the emperor kept order and protected vulnerable minorities from the depredations of majorities. He cites the example of the Ottoman empire, where, with its breakup, the strong power of the sovereign in those territories was lost. Power was then transferred to tribalistic ethnic and religious groups that have little regard for the rights of minorities. This has resulted in over a century of anarchic tribal, ethnic and religious persecution and warfare in the Middle East.

Since Confederation, Canada has protected powerless and vulnerable Indigenous people from the mainly illiberal governance systems that are typical of First Nations reserves. Now, the Canadian state is abandoning this protective role. By doing so Canada is betraying the vast majority of powerless and vulnerable Indigenous Canadians, leaving them defenceless against the power and potential injustice of their tribal leaders.

What has happened echoes Frances Fukuyama’s warning that rights are meaningless unless they are created and can be enforced by a powerful state. The UNDRIP Action Plan and the Supreme Court’s rulings like Vuntut Gwitchin will not create viable and strong Indigenous nation-states. All they will do is weaken the Canadian state, causing harm to all Canadians and depriving the vast majority of vulnerable, powerless Indigenous Canadians of the protective rule of Canadian law.

Peter Best is a retired Sudbury lawyer. He is the author of There Is No Difference – An Argument for the Abolition of the Indian Reserve System and Special Race-based Laws and Entitlements for Canada’s Indians.

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Is the Senate in Violation of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, and Hindering Reconciliation?

Published on October 6, 2024

By

From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By Nina Green

Since it is abundantly clear there are no missing Indian residential school children, the ‘missing records’ by which they can be found are also imaginary, and the Senate Committee has been on a pointless wild goose chase

In July 2024 the Standing Senate Committee on Indigenous Peoples issued an Interim Report entitled ‘Missing Records, Missing Children’.

The problem with that title?  There are no missing Indian residential school children.

Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Senate Committee on 21 March 2023 that there are no missing children, and in support of that one need only look to her own two interim reports, neither of which identifies a single Indian residential school child who went missing and whose parents didn’t know what happened to their child.  In two years as Special Interlocutor, Kimberly Murray has not been able to name a single child who verifiably went missing from an Indian residential school.

Similarly, after two years of hearings, the Senate Committee itself was unable to name a single verifiably-missing Indian residential school child in its report.

Nor in fact has anyone in Canada to date been able to name a single verifiably-missing Indian residential school child.

Since it is abundantly clear there are no missing Indian residential school children, the ‘missing records’ by which they can be found are also imaginary, and the Senate Committee has been on a pointless wild goose chase which has cost Canadian provinces a very considerable amount of money since many of the witnesses called by the Committee have been provincial government employees whose departments have been forced to expend staff time and financial resources fruitlessly searching for records of missing Indian residential school children who are not missing.

Moreover by calling provincial coroners, medical examiners, and vital statistics department officials as witnesses, the Senate Committee has given the distinct impression that it is conducting a criminal investigation, and by focussing on Indian residential schools, the Committee has also given the distinct impression it has reconstituted itself as a new Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and is therefore in violation of the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement.

What justification does the Senate Committee have for conducting this public inquiry into ‘Missing Records, Missing Children’, and threatening to compel the attendance of witnesses at its hearings?

The Committee cites the following Order of Reference passed by the full Senate as justification for its July 2024 report, and for the sweeping and far-reaching recommendations the report contains:

ORDER OF REFERENCE

Extract from the Journals of the Senate of Thursday, March 3, 2022:

The Honourable Senator Francis moved, seconded by the Honourable Senator Cordy:

That the Standing Senate Committee on Aboriginal Peoples be authorized to examine and report on the federal government’s constitutional, treaty, political and legal responsibilities to First Nations, Inuit and Métis peoples and any other subject concerning Indigenous Peoples; . . . .

It is glaringly obvious that the Order of Reference did not authorize the Committee to examine and report on missing Indian residential school children and missing records.  The Senate is part of the federal government, the major party to the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement under which Canadian taxpayers paid out billions of dollars to have all matters related to Indian residential schools settled once and for all – not re-opened by the Senate Committee on a whim.  The Senate Committee has thus interpreted the Order of Reference as giving it an authority the full Senate did not explicitly mention, and in fact had no power to grant to the Committee.

During its proceedings over the past two years, the Senate Committee did not trouble itself to prove that there actually are missing Indian residential school children.  Instead, the Committee operated on the basis that there are missing children even when Special Interlocutor Kimberly Murray told the Committee that ‘The children aren’t missing’.

Based on the false assumption that there are missing Indian residential children, the Committee proceeded to castigate those the Committee falsely claimed were ‘withholding’ records which would help to find them.

In doing so, the Committee ignored the fact that the only body which was ever actually entitled to records was the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

Under the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement, $60 million dollars was allocated to fund a Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and section 11 of the TRC’s Schedule N mandate stated that, subject to privacy interests:

Canada and the churches will provide all relevant documents in their possession or control to and for the use of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

It should be noted that under the TRC’s Schedule N mandate important limitations were put in place stipulating who was obligated to provide documents to the TRC, how long that obligation was to exist, and what was to be done in case of a dispute about the production of documents.  The TRC’s Schedule N mandate provided that:

(1) only the federal government and the churches  – i.e., not provincial governments or any other entity – were obliged to provide documents;

(2) the federal government and churches were only obliged to provide documents to the TRC during the TRC’s five-year mandate; and

(3) under section 2(l) of the TRC’s Schedule N mandate any ‘disputes over document production’ would be referred to an officially-designated body, the National Administration Committee (NAC) set up under section 4.11 of the 2006 Settlement Agreement.

The TRC concluded its work and issued a final report in 2015.  That marked the end of any obligation on the part of the federal government and the churches to provide documents to the TRC, which ceased to exist and had no successor.

The Senate Committee has thus invented a problem where none existed.

That being the case – there was no problem until the Senate Committee invented one – exactly what is the problem the Senate Committee invented?

Again, one must refer back to the 2006 Settlement Agreement and the TRC’s Schedule N mandate.  Section 2(a) of the Schedule N mandate states that, subject to privacy legislation, the TRC was:

authorized and required in the public interest to archive all such documents, materials, and transcripts or records of statements received, in a manner that will ensure their preservation and accessibility to the public.

To fulfil this part of its mandate, in 2013 the TRC entered into a trust deed with the University of Manitoba by which the University undertook to preserve the TRC records and make them available to the general public.  That has not been done.  The University of Manitoba has not made the records generated by the TRC itself in the course of its work and the records turned over to it by the federal government and the churches prior to 2015 available to the general public on its National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation (NCTR) Archives website.  In particular, the University of Manitoba has not made available on its NCTR website the Sisters’ chronicles and Oblate codices which recorded daily life in the schools.  Instead, the University has allowed its staff at the NCTR (which is not a legal entity and is not a successor to the TRC, but merely a building on the University of Manitoba campus staffed by University of Manitoba employees) to turn its millions of digitized records into a publicly-funded Indigenous genealogical service, as Head Archivist Raymond Frogner has explained on several occasions, and as Tanya Talaga documents in her new book, The Knowing.

Thus, if the Senate Committee had wanted to investigate an actual problem, it could have investigated why the University of Manitoba has not complied with its legal obligations under the 2013 trust deed and has not made the TRC records available to the general public as mandated by the 2006 Indian Residential Schools Settlement Agreement and the TRC’s Schedule N mandate, particularly the Sisters’ chronicles and Oblate codices which recorded daily life in the schools.

Instead of investigating that very real problem, the Senate Committee pursued a problem of its own invention by falsely claiming that records were being withheld from the ‘NCTR’ by Catholic church and provincial entities.  This appears to be deliberate obfuscation because the Senate Committee must surely know that the NCTR is not a legal entity, and thus cannot legally receive documents.  The actual recipient of documents sent to the ‘NCTR’ is the University of Manitoba, a fact which is never mentioned in the Senate report.  Moreover the Senate report provided no evidence that any documents were actually being withheld, which of course it could not have done even had it tried since there is no legal obligation on the part of any entity to provide the University of Manitoba and the University’s NCTR staff with documents or records.

Ignoring the fact that it had invented a non-existent problem, the Senate Committee forged ahead, holding hearings and threatening to compel the attendance of witnesses.  It is noteworthy that in so doing the Committee engaged in conduct which the TRC itself was forbidden to engage in under its Schedule N mandate, which states that ‘Pursuant to the Court-approved final settlement agreement and the class action judgments’, the TRC:

(b) shall not hold formal hearings, nor act as a public inquiry, nor conduct a formal legal process;

(c) shall not possess subpoena powers, and do not have powers to compel attendance or participation in any of its activities or events.  Participation in all Commission events and activities is entirely voluntary;

Here is what Senator Scott Tannas had to say about holding hearings and hauling up witnesses in public on 21 March 2023 in an exchange with the University of Manitoba’s employee, Stephanie Scott:

Senator Tannas: Thank you for being here today. Ms. Scott, you mentioned that there are still organizations and people with data that has not been turned over to you. We all want to do things to help. Part of helping is listening and talking, but sometimes part of help that we can provide is to actually do something. Here in the Senate, we do have the ability to hold oversight hearings. We can compel people to come and testify before us. What would you think if you gave us the names and the contacts for organizations that aren’t providing data, and we’ll haul them up here in public and we’ll ask them why?

Ms. Scott: I would love for you to do that. We have been waiting a long time, and I think it’s absolutely crucial. When Tk’emlúps happened and the children began to speak from beyond, that’s when the world and the landscape changed for us. We used to have to do a lot of reaching out across the country, developing partnerships, still trying to acquire different records. We have worked closely — I think it’s time — the time is now, the time could be today that you call upon those people, and I would be more than willing to share that information with you. We have done a public media campaign. There are no secrets. Everything has been public and we all know what’s happened, many of us here at this table. If you are willing to do that, I respectfully would ask you to help.

Senator Tannas: I certainly would advocate for that. If you want to send the clerk, for future discussions, the name of let’s say the three most flagrant and obvious resistors, we could start maybe there and talk about it as a group. All senators would have to agree that’s a kind of meeting that we were going to have. To me, there is a time for action. As Senator Arnot mentioned, we’re not going to get anywhere until we get all the data. We won’t get to the full and complete truth, which is what all Canadians should want. It’s the only way we’re going to move forward. Thank you, that’s the only question I had.

‘Flagrant and obvious resistors’?  It is unconscionable that Stephanie Scott, an employee of the University of Manitoba, would agree to provide (and did provide) the Senate Committee with a list of ‘flagrant and obvious resistors’ when she has to be aware that there is no legal obligation on the part of any entity to provide a single document to the University of Manitoba or its NCTR staff.

But even more importantly, it is unconscionable that the University of Manitoba and its NCTR employees continue to pretend that there are missing children, and continue to pretend that the University needs millions of records to identify these non-existent missing children.

Does the Senate Committee’s report further reconciliation? Obviously not.  The report misleads Canadians, both Indigenous and non-Indigenous, in a way which is harmful to both by pretending that thousands of Indian residential school children are missing who are not missing, and that the provinces and the Catholic Church are withholding records that would help find them.

The Senate Committee should immediately withdraw its July 2024 interim report.

Nina Green is an independent researcher who lives in British Columbia.

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COVID-19

Will We Fall For The Same Old PCR Tricks Again?

Published on October 6, 2024

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From the Frontier Centre for Public Policy

By John Carpay

As with the number of COVID-19 “cases,” the number of “Covid deaths” proclaimed by politicians, government health officials and government-funded media is also based on highly unreliable PCR testing, using an undisclosed number of cycles.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. How long will Canadians continue falling for the same media tricks that they fell for during the years of lockdowns and vaccine passports?

“Alberta’s COVID-19 death toll more than 4 times higher than flu over past year,” exclaimed the CBC on September 9. This was followed two days later by Global News exclaiming: “New Alberta COVID data highlights value of getting newly formulated vaccine once available: expert.”

These media stories claim there were 23,933 COVID-19 “cases” in the past year, with 6,070 people hospitalized “for COVID.” Media claim that 732 Albertans died of COVID-19 during the past year, compared to 177 from the flu. University of Calgary professor Craig Jenne describes this as “continual evidence that COVID-19 is not just another flu” and laments that viruses “continue to take lives at a really unacceptable rate.”

It’s the same narrative that we were fed in 2020 and the years that followed: creating and then maintaining unfounded fear of COVID-19. This unnecessarily high level of fear, in turn, generated support for the violations of our Charter freedoms of association, expression, religion, conscience, mobility, and peaceful assembly, and the right to choose freely what will or will not be injected into our bodies.

What is missing from these stories by government-funded media is significant and relevant.

Firstly, government-funded media make no mention of the number of cycles used in the PCR (polymerase chain reaction) testing that was used to generate these 23,933 so-called “cases” of COVID-19.

The percentage of people testing “positive” for COVID-19 by way of the PCR test depends on the number of times that a viral remnant in a person’s nose or throat is doubled (amplified). If a COVID-19 viral remnant is amplified 40 times, almost everyone will test positive for COVID-19. Conversely, if that very same viral remnant is amplified only 20 times, very few people will test positive for COVID-19. The PCR test does not and cannot determine whether someone is sick with COVID-19, or a spreader of COVID-19.

As explained by expert witness Dr. Joel Kettner in Gateway v. Manitoba:[1] “the outcome of a PCR test depends on Cycle thresholds (Ct), which is the number of cycles of amplification needed to strengthen a weak signal, so as to enable the identification of the amino acid sequence of the virus being tested for. The higher the Ct to obtain a positive signal, the lower the volume of genetic material in the sample.”[2]

In the same court case, expert witness Dr. Jay Bhattacharya explained that the unavoidable errors in PCR testing render the PCR test unfit for public health decision-making: “A reliance on a test that is run up to 40 cycles, (or any number of cycles higher than 30) — is certain to produce a very large proportion of false positive outcomes. Lockdowns that are imposed on the basis of ‘case’ counts derived from PCR tests will be only marginally related to the threat posed by the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus.”

Neither Alberta Health Services nor the media will inform the public about how many times a viral remnant was doubled to generate these 23,933 “cases” of COVID-19. A large but willfully undisclosed number of these COVID-19 “cases” pertain to people who are not sick with COVID-19 and not spreading COVID-19. This includes large numbers of people who have had COVID-19 and who have fully recovered, acquiring natural immunity along the way. Governments which claim to love science should freely and readily disclose this information to the public, as well as to each individual receiving her or his PCR test result. And yet, since 2020, Canada’s federal and provincial governments have kept this information a state secret, typically divulged only under duress in court, when governments get sued by Justice Centre lawyers who defend Charter freedoms.

In Gateway v. Manitoba, for example, government officials admitted under oath that at least 40% of their “Covid cases” were people who were not sick with COVID-19 and not spreading it. Governments and their health authorities can easily generate high numbers of “Covid cases” simply by running PCR tests at 40 (or more) cycles, and encouraging (or requiring) large numbers of people to take the PCR test.

As with the number of COVID-19 “cases,” the number of “Covid deaths” proclaimed by politicians, government health officials and government-funded media is also based on highly unreliable PCR testing, using an undisclosed number of cycles.

The second glaring omission from government-funded media reports is the relevant context. Over 33,000 Albertans die each year, which is what you might expect in a province of 4.8 million people. The leading causes of death in Canada are cancer, heart diseases, lung diseases and strokes. This fact did not change with the arrival of COVID-19 and lockdowns in 2020. If it’s true that 732 Albertans died of COVID-19 (and thanks to PCR testing we really don’t know) that would be just over 2% of deaths in Alberta, with 87% of these deaths among people 70 and over. Compare this 2% with the more than 10% of deaths in Alberta from “ill-defined and unknown” causes in 2021. Professor Craig Jenne states that viruses “continue to take lives at a really unacceptable rate.” The same could be said of cancer, heart diseases, lung diseases and strokes, not to mention suicides, alcoholism, obesity and car accidents.

The omission of relevant facts, combined with a blind and erroneous faith in the accuracy of PCR testing, is what government-funded media used in 2020 to spread unfounded fear. They are trying to do the same thing now. Will we fall for it again?

First published in the Western Standard here.

John Carpay, B.A., LL.B. is president of the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms.

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