by Peter W. Dunn, PhD

Since the beginning of the “pandemic”, I’ve been writing my responses on Facebook and on my blog. I’ve concluded that it isn’t really a pandemic but a “pandemic”. I have examined this “pandemic” from the outset, and I realized from the data coming from the Diamond Princes, that this so-called “pandemic” wasn’t going to be as dangerous as people were claiming. The Diamond Princess still to this day, had a higher positive test rate than any country in the world, per capita. It arguably represented a worst case scenario and should have guided public policy. Diamond Princess had population of 3711 people; 13 deaths; 712 cases.  None of the ship’s crew of younger healthy people died. Only 13 passengers died. What the Diamond Princess meant was that about 80% of people who would be exposed to the virus would have natural immunity and didn’t even test positive, and only 3.5 people of 1000 died, and these were all elderly tourists. COVID 19 did not impress me. There was never any need to lockdown Ontario. All that was needed, was that we protect the most vulnerable people in our population and Doug Ford failed to do this, as most of the deaths in Ontario in 2020 took place in long term care facilities. Later we learned that those people didn’t die of COVID 19 but rather of neglect and dehydration. But no revision of our COVID 19 death stats has ever taken place.

          Thus, the “pandemic” is much ado about nothing. Take the example of the Concord Food Centre “outbreak” that York Region Public Health announced this week, but 21 of 23 cases among employees had already been completely resolved. So we are talking about 2 cases that were still on going. Yentas in our neighborhood are crying out that Concord Food should have been shut down. But what for? The “outbreak” is almost over, and not a single customer has been found to have gotten ill as a result. So on social media, hundreds of self-appointed health inspectors are trying to destroy Concord Food because they saw a young person not wear a mask properly or some other violation. But had they ever thought what it would cost our community to shut down yet another business, and employer of young people? People don’t see the unintended consequences. I can think of a few things would have happened if York health had closed Concord: (1) hundreds of thousands of dollars of food would go to waste; (2) Other stores in our area would have to pick up the slack and that would increase wait times to get in. And standing outside is also arguably unhealthy for some people. But my grandfather died due to being left in the cold for over an hour when he was 90.

My Facebook Predictions regarding Lockdown
          I also made other predictions on Facebook:

• The better that lockdowns work, the longer they must last. That prediction has come true, because our health authorities’ dire predictions of death have been averted, and our leaders claim that we can thank the lockdowns (post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy). What was 15 days to flatten the curve has become two years to flatten everything.
• The longer lockdowns last the probability that they would kill more people than COVID 19 would approach 100%. This too is true, because while COVID 19 kills primarily the elderly who have lived out their lives, suicides and overdose and domestic murders kill people are leading killers of young people. Do we need to talk about years of life lost?
  
  “Economics Professor Douglas W. Allen, from Simon Fraser University in Canada looked at the effect of loss of employment, loss of education, increased mental health problems, increased domestic violence risk and lost opportunities for healthcare… After comparing regions with and without lockdowns around the world, and after counting the negative effects of lockdown on public health, the economist has calculated that for every year of life lockdowns has saved, it has caused the loss of 282 years of life.”
  
• Inflation: There has been a 26% increase in real estate prices in the GTA as a leading indicator of inflation, as excess liquidity from quantitative easing gets poured into the housing market. Food prices are getting out of hand. People are noticing this. We are entering the kind of inflation that normally is seen in Banana Republics.
• Unemployment: Canada suffered record unemployment as a result of lockdowns.
• Business bankruptcies. Thousands upon thousands of businesses that were shut down during Doug Ford’s lockdowns will never reopen. Hardest hit: probably restaurants and travel agencies.
• Suicides: I saw on Facebook a person working at a psychology clinic here in Thornhill that there are six times as many requests for help from children who are thinking about suicide, and their case load is so heavy that that it takes a year now to get an appointment.
  Or how about this open letter from Canadian pediatricians dated May 20, 2021:
  “We are witnessing a crisis in children’s mental health with a dramatic increase in utilization of acute mental health services. Schools play an essential role in the recovery process. In‐person school provides students with routine and structure, accountability, socialization and recognition of abuse and neglect. For many children, school is where they receive services and supports to meet developmental milestones. In‐person attendance is linked to important long‐term health and well‐ being outcomes and the benefits are particularly apparent in those who are marginalized or have disappeared from the school system.”
• People will be told they have to get vaccinated in order to get their freedom back, and they will beg for it.
  But these vaccines aren’t needed, except perhaps for certain people with weak immune systems, and then the vaccine will be deadly, harmful or ineffectual for those people.
• Doug Ford will lose the next election because he’s stabbed his electoral base in the back. But unlike the other predictions, this will not be a catastrophe, but a relief as Ontario’s self appointed babysitter will be sent back to private life. But what comes after him will also be a disaster if our Freedom Movement doesn’t gain traction.

I felt during those early days of lockdown, that what we needed were mass demonstrations similar to the Raptors parade when our basketball team won the NBA Championship. But alas, we are people who prefer bread and circuses to freedom.

I am here to protest not because I myself have been inconvenienced. That’s true. My rights are daily destroyed by lockdowns and stay at home orders. But I could likely cope for this for years. I am going to fight, not for myself, but for those whose lives have been utterly destroyed.

I’ve since revised Hanlon’s Razor, you know, the saying, “One should never attribute to malice what can be explained by incompetence.” But Doug Ford’s incompetence has been persistent (16 months?) and it has been willful. He had to know that lockdowns would kill people. Maybe he thought that he could save some grannies but he had to know that lockdowns would kill young people and business owners.  So I’ve changed Hanlon’s Razor: Call it Hanlon’s Razor for Covid 19:

“Persistent and willful incompetence is malicious.”

[This is the written form of the speech I delivered at the anti-lockdown protest in Vaughan, Ontario, May 30, 2021]

Please join us every week here at Bathurst and Rutherford to protest for your freedom. Every week until Doug Ford is gone.

By Peter W. Dunn, PhD

(Written form of the speech delivered at anti-lockdown protest at Bathurst and Rutherford, Thornhill, Ontario, May 23, 2021)

My name is Peter Dunn. I want to tell you why I am protesting despite frequent warnings that my exercise of a fundamental Charter right is a violation of the Reopening of Ontario Act. Yes, the York Regional Police have tried to bully us to stop protesting, and indeed, they have succeeded in getting me to retreat 3 out of the last four protests.

I came to Canada for the first time in 1986 and studied at Regent College in Vancouver. I did two master’s degrees, and I went on to do a PhD at the University of Cambridge, England (1996). My main area of competence is the reading and interpretation of ancient texts; and so today, I will interpret the Reopening Ontario Act for you and for the police. I am not a lawyer, but I have confidence in my skills as an interpreter of the intent of texts, an art we call in our field, “exegesis”.

I have been living in Canada continuously since 1995 and in 2011 I became a Canadian citizen. During that time, I had to read the Charter of Rights and Freedoms to pass an exam to qualify to take an oath of citizenship. Since 2011, I’ve been a law-abiding citizen. I pay my taxes; I don’t do violence against my neighbors; I haven’t even gotten so much as a speeding ticket since becoming a citizen. Moreover, I have a history of co-operation with the York Regional Police.

So then on March 17, 2020, Doug Ford announced the first lockdown. I immediately began to decry on Facebook that this lockdown was a severe violation of human rights, including the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms .

Finally, on 25 April, a protest took place here at Bathurst and Rutherford, and this is my neighborhood, and so I participated. The York Regional Police were out talking to protestors, but they handed out no tickets. Then at the May 2 protest, the police told the protestors that they would be handing out tickets after a 15 minute warning to disperse. Then York Regional police handed out tickets to select individuals and the majority went home by 1:30. The third week of this protest (May 9) the police told David Menzies of Rebel News that the reason why people don’t have a Charter Right to protest is because of section 1 of the Charter Rights and Freedom:  “The Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the rights and freedoms set out in it subject only to such reasonable limits prescribed by law as can be demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.”

The police didn’t get around to giving me a ticket and I went home after an hour and half. Last week however I arrived a little late, around 12:45, and the police immediately approach me. Maybe they recognized me. They then told me that they were warning everyone and that we had only 15 minutes before they would start writing me a ticket. At that point, another officer said I had the right to protest, provided I went to the corner and protested by myself.

But I want to examine the York Regional Police’s claim that because of section 1 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, we know longer have section 2 rights. This claim doesn’t pass my first test, which is the bullshit test. Everything I’ve learned to this point in Canada, and everything I’d ever seen in this regard–e.g., allowing for example BLM protestors to carry on without tickets, and even just a couple weeks ago, Palestinian protestors in downtown Toronto—no tickets; everything told me that I still had Charter Rights, that the police with guns couldn’t so easily annul my rights on the mere pretext of the Reopening of Ontario Act.

The Reopening of Ontario Act depends on Emergency Measures and Civil Protection Act (EMCPA) for its authority to invoke an emergency. What it actually does is give Doug Ford the unilateral and dictatorial right to call an emergency and to reinstate lockdown and stay at home orders that were declared under the EMCPA. So thus, the EMCPA, which is multiple times invoked in the Reopening Act, remains valid regarding the emergency measures that are thereby declared. And here is the explicit wording of the EMCPA regarding the Charter of Rights and Freedoms:  “The purpose of making orders under this section is to promote the public good by protecting the health, safety and welfare of the people of Ontario in times of declared emergencies in a manner that is subject to the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms.“

The York Regional cops tell me that I no longer have charter rights due to the Reopening Act limiting via section 1 our section 2 rights in the Charter. However, neither the Reopening Ontario Act nor the EMCPA ever appeal to section 1 nor say that its intention is to limit Charter Rights due to a declared emergency. The English language is clear in terms of what the words, “subject to” mean. It means “dependent or conditional upon”. I.e., the Charter Rights are deemed to be higher law than Doug Ford’s emergency decrees.

So in fact, the EMPCA, and thus also the Reopening Ontario Act which invokes the EMCPA for its emergency orders, says the exact opposite of what these officers claim. Rather than take away our Charter rights, the law says explicitly that any emergency measures must be subject to these rights.

Despite this clear wording of the EMCPA, our battle remains uphill. A knowledgeable person reacted to this claim of mine  in this way:  “The real problem with our Charter is that the judges have too much power due to s. 1. Whether the legislation specifically mentions s. 1 or not, s. 1 can be used to limit our constitutional freedoms anytime the judges rule that it is “demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society.” But who makes that determination? Unaccountable, unelected judges. But whatever the law is, it’s up to the police to enforce it. If the police don’t enforce it, then it doesn’t matter what the law is. So in a way, the police do hold the real power.”

Now I also want to discuss the history of Federal Emergencies Act which is also the background story of the EMPCA. The Canadian government on it’s website (here): The federal Emergencies Act replaces the War Measures Act which has been criticized because it resulted in human-rights atrocities, especially the confiscation of property and the internment of the Canadian residents of Japanese ancestry during WW2. Thus, the Charter of Rights and Freedoms were created and now our existing emergency laws are explicitly said to be “subject to” the Charter, not the other way around.

And what do we have today? Atrocities. People are losing their businesses; children are kept in states of captivity; all of us under house arrest without habeas corpus. I urge you, the York Regional Police, that you should be careful, lest you find yourselves on the wrong side of history.

So with this speech, I urge the police to respect the EMCPA and our fundamental Charter rights and back off and let us do our protest. If you don’t, then you, the police, not COVID 19, not Justin Trudeau, not even Doug Ford, but you, the guys with the guns, have plunged our province into a Totalitarian Police State. I urge you, therefore, honour your oath of service, and respect our Charter rights. Thank you.