Newly released court records from a case brought by two Canadian residents against Trudeau’s communist dictatorship show that the Prime Minister’s unlawful travel vaccine mandate was motivated only by “politics and not by science.”
Rupa Subramanya, a freelance columnist for National Post and Nikkei Asia, reported on the recently released court documents filed by two Canadians that were sealed until last month.
From Common Sense:
Both plaintiffs are business owners. Both have family in Britain. Both have refused the vaccine on the grounds of bodily autonomy. Both were reluctant to identify their businesses out of fear of losing customers.
One plaintiff is Karl Harrison. In his affidavit, Harrison, 58, said that he and his partner, Emma, had immigrated in 2009 from Britain to Canada. (He became a Canadian citizen in 2015.) They have two children, a 24-year-old son and a 14-year-old daughter, and they live in a tony neighborhood in Vancouver. He’d always been an entrepreneur. “I was involved in establishing, owning and co-owning over 40 venues of one sort or the other—restaurants, bars, music venues and comedy clubs,” he told me. “One music venue is fairly well known, called The Bedford. Ed Sheeran got his start there.”
He also has an 88-year-old mother in Britain, and he was furious that, for months, he couldn’t visit her. “When you’ve got oppressive government behavior,” he told me, “you’re only left with only three choices: accept it, fight it or leave. I can’t accept it. I moved my family here, and I would be letting them down if we moved away—so I’m in fight mode.”
The other plaintiff is Shaun Rickard, whose father, also in Britain, is suffering from late-stage Alzheimer’s. Rickard, 55, lives in the town of Pickering, outside Toronto, and he owns a small exterior-siding and eaves-contracting business. He portrayed himself as something of an activist. “I guess I’m the Lone Ranger,” he told me. “When I see something wrong, evil, corrupt happen, I feel I have to speak up.”
He was surprised when Trudeau announced the travel mandate. “I said to myself, ‘Holy fuck, how can this be happening here?’” He added that the only way to stop it would be “through revolution, which is never going to happen in Canada, or through the courts, and the latter is what we did.”
Rickard and Harrison’s attorney, Sam Presvelos, said that all government decisions related to public health demanded transparency. “Civil servants shouldn’t hide behind a shroud of secrecy,” Presvelos told me.
The whole point of the case was to lift that shroud and cast a spotlight on the unscientific basis of the mandate.
According to court documents obtained by Epoch Times, the Canadian government official with final authority over vaccine approval was not consulted about “imposing or keeping in place the vaccine mandate in travel.”
“Dr. Celia Lourenco, Director General of the Biologic and Radiopharmaceutical Drugs Directorate within Health Canada’s Health Products and Food Branch, provided this information in early June while being cross-examined as a government witness in support of the mandate,” the news outlet reported.
“So I want to be clear, nobody from the Canadian government—and when I say the ‘Canadian government,’ I include the Prime Minister’s Office, the Ministry of Transport, minister of health—no one ever consulted with you as to whether or not the government should enact that vaccine mandate for travel?” asked attorney Sam Presvelos, who is contesting the mandate on behalf of plaintiffs Karl Harrison and Shaun Rickard.
“That’s correct,” Lourenco confirmed.
Columnist Rupa Subramanya shared with her followers on Twitter, the contents of the information that she obtained from the court records.
“Recently released court documents reveal that the Trudeau government’s travel vaccine mandate was driven by politics and not science. Days before it kicked in, senior officials were scrambling to find a rationale,” she tweeted.
“The documents also reveal the travel mandate was concocted by a secretive group headed by a Transport Canada official. Apart from its head and one other member, we don’t even know who’s part of it. No scientists, doctors, or epidemiologists were involved.
“Under cross-examination, the Transport Canada official heading the secretive group that cooked up the travel vaccine mandate refused to get into detail about its workings citing cabinet confidence. It’s clear the decision went right up to the very top.
“The documents also contain a damning email exchange where a senior TC official is seeking a scientific rationale for the mandate from a PHAC official just over a week before it went into effect. He never got that rationale, but the mandate went ahead.
“The architect behind Canada’s travel vaccine mandate heads a secretive government panel called Covid Recovery. None of the folks on the panel are doctors, scientists, or epidemiologists. She herself has a bachelor’s degree in English literature.”
“The Trudeau government has always claimed that this vaccine mandates are based on science, but we now know through recently released court documents that the travel mandate had no scientific basis. I broke the story yesterday,” Rupa stated.
More from Common Sense:
Among other things, the court documents indicate:
- No one in the COVID Recovery unit, including Jennifer Little, the director-general, had any formal education in epidemiology, medicine or public health.
- Little, who has an undergraduate degree in literature from the University of Toronto, testified that there were 20 people in the unit. When Presvelos asked her whether anyone in the unit had any professional experience in public health, she said there was one person, Monique St.-Laurent. According to St.-Laurent’s LinkedIn profile, she appears to be a civil servant who briefly worked for the Public Health Agency of Canada. St.-Laurent is not a doctor, Little said.(Reached on the phone, St.-Laurent confirmed that she was a member of COVID Recovery. She referred all other questions to a government spokesperson.)
- Little suggested that a senior official in the prime minister’s Cabinet or possibly the prime minister himself had ordered COVID Recovery to impose the travel mandate. (During cross-examination, Little told Presvelos repeatedly that “discussions” about the mandate had taken place at “senior” and “very senior” levels.) But she refused to say who had given her team the order to impose the travel mandate. “I’m not at liberty to disclose anything that is subject to cabinet confidence,” she said.
- The term “cabinet confidence” is noteworthy because it refers to the Prime Minister’s Cabinet. Meaning that Little could not talk about who had directed the COVID Recovery unit to impose the travel mandate because someone at the very highest levels of government was apparently behind it.
- In the days leading up to the implementation of the travel mandate, transportation officials were frantically looking for a rationale for it. They came up short.
That was made clear by an email exchange in the latter half of October 2021 between Aaron McCrorie and Dawn Lumley-Myllari. McCrorie is the associate assistant deputy minister for safety and security in Transport Canada, the department that houses COVID Recovery. Lumley-Myllari is an official in the Public Health Agency of Canada. In the email exchange, McCrorie seemed to be casting about for a credible rationale for the travel mandate. This was less than two weeks before the mandate was set to kick in.
“To the extent that updated data exist or that there is clearer evidence of the safety benefit of vaccination on the users or other stakeholders of the transportation system, it would be helpful to assist Transport Canada supporting its measures,” McCrorie wrote.
Four days later, on October 22, McCrorie emailed Lumley-Myllari again: “Our requirements come in on October 30”—in just over a week—”so need something fairly soon.”
On October 28, Lumley-Myllari replied to McCrorie with a series of bullet points outlining the benefits, generally speaking, of the Covid vaccine. She did not address McCrorie’s question about the transportation system, noting that the Public Health Agency of Canada was updating its “Public health considerations” with regard to vaccine mandates.
Two days later, on October 30, the travel mandate took effect.
Then, eight-and-a-half months later, on June 14, 2022, government officials announced that they were suspending the mandate—although they made it clear that they could bring it back at any time.
Within days, government lawyers filed a motion seeking to shut down Harrison and Rickard’s suit on the grounds that it was now moot—and, Presvelos said, to make sure the public never saw the court documents. (Since the case was still open, and court documents are unavailable to the public while cases are open, shutting it down would have sharply reduced the likelihood of anyone seeing government officials’ testimony.)
So, on July 12, Presvelos filed an additional damages motion, arguing that his clients had suffered damages during the mandate. Neither Harrison nor Rickard said they wanted money. The point was to make sure the suit didn’t go away and the court documents were made public.
You can read the rest here.
For those interested in accessing the court documents, please see here: https://www.fct-cf.gc.ca/en/court-files-and-decisions/court-files#cont
— Freivogel1111 (@freivogel1111) August 4, 2022
