Hope Springs Infernal: Pawlowski, Lich, and Canadian 'Justice'

As with Monty Python’s Lancelot and Galahad, there was much rejoicing in the Conservative corner of this “nasty, sad country” over the recent Alberta appeals court victory of pastor Artur Pawlowski and his brother, Dawid. In a court injunction dated May 6, 2021, they were found guilty of disobeying a ban placed on so-called “illegal” protests—which is to say, they were guilty of abiding by the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The drama naturally centers on the more famous pastor, who was jailed several times, and even “SWATted,” over the last two years for defying Canada’s blatantly illegal Covid dictatorship by continuing to serve his congregation, providing free meals to the poor, and preaching a message of hope to the Truckers’ movement in its protest against vaccine mandates.

As a result of the Appeals Court judgment, Alberta Health Services (AHS) is compelled to reimburse Pawlowski for all costs and fines levied, a small compensation for the outrageous treatment meted out to him, the harsh conditions of incarceration, house arrest, and restrictions on his Charter right of association.

Of course, the abuse Pawlowski suffered at the hands of Alberta’s Conservative premier Jason Kenney was not a single case. As LifeSite reports, “Under Alberta Premier Jason Kenney, many were fined and others jailed for fighting against his government’s draconian Covid rules, which severely impacted thousands of businesses.” Pawlowski, however, was among the most visible of the country’s dissidents against an out-of-control government and its camarilla of unelected judges and demagogic health authorities.

His victory and restitution are to be celebrated, but, as we will see, it is a modest triumph. It is not easy to parse the gnarled legalese of the Appeals Court document, but it is obvious that Pawloski’s and his brother’s vindication was only partial, the original judgment being “set aside” on a question of equivocal language rather than substance—that is, the initial judgment was reversed on a technicality. The drafting of the earlier proceedings apparently “created an ambiguity and potential confusion when the language identifying who is subject to the order refers to the prohibited conduct without clearly stating that all persons are subject to the injunction” (Article 56).

In other words, because the injunction “referred to other parties ‘acting independently to like effect’, so as to apply to the Pawlowskis,” the finding of contempt was dropped (Article 59)—though, as the panel of judges affirmed, “Without condoning the actions of the Pawlowskis” (Article 48). Exculpation, it seems, does not cancel guilt.

Thus, deploying the verbose dialect of a privileged and exclusionary class, the panel members essentially practiced the art of weasel words to reverse an unpopular decision in order to maintain the endogenic fiction of juridical dignity. In effect, the court rendered a Pyrrhic judgment and the Pawlowskis evaded sentencing on the strength of a presumed ambiguity.

The war against justice, truth and democracy will continue to claim its victims. The federal authority brandished by Justin Trudeau has no intention of relenting in its campaign to silence and harass its targets. Artur Pawlowski has an equally noble, brave and persecuted peer in Tamara Lich, a soft-spoken, gentle and patriotic organizer of the Truckers Freedom Convoy. All of five feet tall, this amiable grandmother of Metis origin towers over the diminutive moral stature of a disreputable prime minister who, through his juridical lackeys, has had her twice imprisoned for her support of the Truckers and her legitimate contestation of tyrannical power. Forced to serve a jail sentence without bail, she was deliberately prevented from receiving in person the George Jonas Freedom Award at a ceremony held in her honor in the Vancouver suburb of Burnaby on July 13 of this year.

The event was addressed by the Honorable Brian Peckford, the last living signatory to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and the Canadian Constitution, in which he praised Tamara Lich as an honest, hard-working Canadian fighting for our rights and freedoms. “Need I cite that this latest arrest is most egregious in that everyone knew where Tamara was—in her home city of Medicine Hat, and yet a country wide warrant was issued for her arrest as if she was some kind of serial rapist or murderer. The tragic irony of it all makes Greek Tragedy look lame as a Freedom Award Winner is displayed as a practitioner of high treason.”

Artur Pawlowski is free—for now—and Tamara Lich has just been released—also, for now. The federal court is not likely to experience the same qualms of dispensation as the Alberta court. Lich will be kept under strict surveillance. One false move, the slightest contravention of onerous bail conditions, and she will be quickly remanded. Phrases like “show trial” and “kangaroo court” come immediately to mind.

One thinks of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon as a premonition of the Sovietization of Canadian justice. Meanwhile, the unvaccinated are still subject to quarantine and crushing fines thanks to Trudeau’s infamous ArriveCAN app wielded against millions of Canadians. Legislation is in the works to cripple internet communication under the guise of preventing “hate speech,” shorthand for anything the government disapproves of. The violation of democratic principles is rapidly becoming synonymous with the law of the land.

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As Brian Peckford said in his peroration, we are experiencing a dark day in our Constitutional history, “aided and abetted by a failed parliamentary system that obstructed justice [and] ignored the accusation of misogynists and racists levelled by the Prime Minister at some of his own citizens, and rendered the Members of Parliament mere instruments of abuse…making a mockery of the democratic principle of accountability.” Provincial courts in Alberta, Ontario, Quebec, and other jurisdictions were equally complicit in following the federal example.

There may be rejoicing over the release of Artur Pawlowski and his brother, and now with respect to Tamara Lich, but there is no joy in Mudville as long as Justin Trudeau is in the batter’s box, and, unlike Casey in the famous poem, gives no indication of striking out.

Property Rights? Not in Canada

A few years back, my wife and I were staying at a family-run country inn for a couple of weeks of R&R in the Thousand Islands, a magnet for summer visitors from around the world. Sitting on our balcony, we observed a group of Chinese tourists filing out of a tour bus, several of whom, carrying packed lunches, negotiated the rock perimeter that separated the establishment from the road, strolled across the carefully tended lawn, entered our landlady’s garden gazebo, and made themselves at home.

They proceeded to spread their lunches across the table and fell to amidst convivial chatter, oblivious to the fact that they were on clearly marked private property. Somewhat taken aback, it slowly dawned on us that they had no sense of private property, no awareness that such a concept even existed—the collectivist mindset in a nutshell, or in a gazebo. The inn’s grounds and gardens were, apparently, held in common by the people, to be enjoyed at no expense of personal investment and maintenance.

All your stuff belongs to us.

Ownership of property, as John Locke famously argued in The Second Treatise of Government, which establishes the legitimacy of “original appropriation” and rightful exclusion, is the keystone of the democratic state and the very foundation of personal liberty. Our visitors were plainly strangers to the idea, having been educated and domesticated in a totalitarian nation. What is one to make, then, of a high-placed public official in a liberal democracy who plainly shares an equivalent sensibility?

Responding to questions concerning Bill C-19, currently in its second reading before the Senate, Canada’s Justice Minister David Lametti recently claimed that “You don’t have an absolute right to own private property in Canada.” Among a series of other repressive measures, such as new luxury taxes and Climate Action Incentive payments, the bill would allow the government “to seize and cause the forfeiture and disposal of assets held by sanctioned people and entities, to support Canada’s participation in the Russian Elites, Proxies, and Oligarchs Task force in light of Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine.”

The problem is not only that the bill may be in violation of international law. The problem is that the bill can be readily weaponized by the government at any time against its own citizens, thereby stealing their property via a form of nationally-implemented eminent domain, exercised arbitrarily over every facet of citizens’ lives. We can’t say we weren’t warned. In Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville pointed out that, without safeguards and a sense of “civic virtue,” democracies were prone to elevate tyrannical rulers intent on “penetrating into private life.”

Democracy in Canada is no different. Knowing the authoritarian proclivities of the Tyrant on the Hill, as prime minister Justin Trudeau is colloquially called, it’s a safe bet that the concept of a private self, and of the belief in personal property which anchors it, are not especially cherished by our Dear Leader, except insofar as it applies to him. Trudeau is more than capable of initiating Canada’s “illegal invasion” of his own country. His justice minister has merely expressed the prime minister’s deepest sentiments and controlling agenda.

Told ya.

Such perfectly demagogic statements uttered by the justice minister also perfectly encapsulate the state of affairs in what can no longer be considered a democratic nation. We may “have no absolute right to own private property,” which can be expropriated whenever the government desires, but the outright theft and suppression of citizens’ rights do not stop there.

As Canada’s draconian Covid legislation and coercive vaccination policies ensured, we have no absolute right over our own bodies, a most intimate form of private property—Naomi Wolf’s The Bodies of Others is a must-read in this respect, especially as it pertains to Canada. We also have no absolute right over our own opinions, which can be whimsically banned under Bill C-36 that would legislate against “hate speech,” as conveniently defined by the authorities. We have no absolute right to our bank accounts and financial assets, once regarded as an inalienable form of private property, which can be illegally frozen at the government’s discretion, as occurred in the aftermath of the Truckers Convoy. We have no absolute right to our Charter freedoms, which, as we have learned to our cost, can be ignored or suspended at will.

Parliament itself has become something of a joke, acting as a pedigreed club in which substantive issues affecting the lives and livelihoods of citizens will not be seriously discussed. It appears that we have no absolute right through the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to examine dodgy and controversial government documents and orders leveraged against citizens, which are increasingly sequestered under the chevron of confidentiality and solicitor-client privilege. Senator Claude Carignan unavailingly chided the evasive and supercilious deputy prime minister Chrystia Freeland in special committee treating of the Emergencies Act, frivolously invoked to suppress the Truckers’ anti-vaccine protest: “We need information and documents, not a figure skating show.”

As Rex Murphy pungently quipped in a National Post column, “Granted the committee investigating the use of the Emergencies Act is only about piddling, trivial matters: Civil Liberties. Bank Accounts frozen. Arson alleged. Property seized. Police jamming the streets. Jail without bail.” The parliamentary exchange, he continues, “is proof of how far [our leaders] have drifted from the feelings and understandings of ordinary people”—though I would add it is also evidence of how far our leaders have strayed from the basic presuppositions and principles that ground the existence of a parliamentary democracy. We have no “absolute right” to expect fairness, honor or constitutional responsibility from our elected representatives.

Freeland: all your stuff belongs to us, eh?

One recalls the catchphrase adopted in essence by Claus Schwab’s World Economic Forum (WEF) planning the New World Order, envisioned as the Great Reset: “You will own nothing and you will be happy.” The first part of the statement is true, the second part not so much. More to the point, the oligarchs, technocrats, plutocrats and directors of the administrative state promoting the Great Reset will own everything and they will be exceedingly happy. We know that Justin Trudeau and Chrystia Freeland are graduates of Schwab’s Young Leaders training programs, and are fully on board with the WEF’s globalist project to remake the world in the interests of a powerful and unaccountable elite. Our absolute rights are now the government’s absolute prerogatives.

It is as if we are watching Justin Trudeau, his cabinet and his caucus strolling across our property, entering our gazebo, and spreading their lunch across the table. The irony is that we, who once assumed that we were guaranteed property rights to our dwellings, our bodies, our opinions, our bank accounts, our need for information, and our Charter and Constitutional provisions—now watch helplessly as the political tourists who roam in and out of public office in this country are now the de facto proprietors of our legal and legitimate possessions. The experiment in confiscatory policy is occurring before our eyes as our very lives are inexorably subject to official annexation. It appears that David Lametti was correct. Indeed, we have no absolute right to anything and Canada has become the world’s shining example of the greatest act of larceny in the history of the democratic state.

In Canada, Liberty at the Covid Crossroads

I live in a country that has become, for people like me, a vast internment camp. Knowing that vaccine fail is a fact and unwilling to allow an experimental infusion into my body, I have become a social leper. I cannot attend a broad range of public events, visit various facilities and businesses, or dine in restaurants. Now I find I cannot even leave the country, which is my fondest wish. Airlines, ships, and trains are all off-limits for inter-provincial and international travel. Combat-decorated pilot and CEO of Canadian Citizens for Charter Rights and Freedoms (C3RF) Russ Cooper writes, “the country has become “a police state with mandated ‘jabs’ and passports…We find our civil liberties giving way to martial law.”

I believe my rights as a citizen of a democratic state have been violated by an increasingly autocratic government. I have studied our Charter of Rights and Freedoms and consulted lawyers and constitutional experts on its provisions. I have wondered whether the Nuremberg Code applies to the government’s presumably arbitrary cancellation of our rights and privileges as citizens, and have been told by legal professionals that the relation of the Code to the Charter is a “grey area,” in part because Canada has not formally signed on to Nuremberg, and in part because the relevant sections of the Charter are subject to interpretation.

With regard to the Charter: The import of the principles in question, in particular Sections 1, 6 and 7, remain hotly contested. Section 1 states that rights and freedoms are subject to “reasonable limits.” Section 6 establishes that “Every citizen of Canada has the right to enter, remain in and leave Canada,” including inter-provincial travel, and Section 7 treats of “the right to life, liberty and security of the person and the right not to be deprived thereof except in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice.”

Rights are a grey area, citoyens!

Section 1 affords the government some latitude, given that “reasonable limits” remains a matter of interpretation—a “grey area” embedded in the very document. Section 6 is clearly being abrogated—there is nothing “grey” about it—but Section 7 can be manipulated in favor of one segment of the population (the “vaccinated”) while punishing another (the “unvaccinated”) “in accordance with the principles of fundamental justice”—although it is now known there is scarcely any difference between vaxxed and unvaxxed. Again, the concept of “fundamental justice” may be construed in any number of different ways. It’s as grey as grey gets.

What we call the “rule of law” has become distressingly controversial and unsettled. In an article for the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship (SAFS) Macon University Business Law professor Peter Bowal points to the weakness of the Charter as a legal document, a weakness that renders it exceptionally difficult to show that one’s rights have been infringed, especially as all-important judicial decisions relating to the pandemic thus far “have fallen in line with the governmental and public interest”—that is, the government’s interpretation of “public interest.” Section 32 of the Charter makes it clear that only the government can ensure these rights—in effect, enforce, justify and even reconceive them. Bowal’s treatment of the question is ambiguous as he seems to believe that the burden of proof for abrogation of rights legitimately devolves upon the government, trumping the individual rights claimant.

We are naïve, Bowal argues, in “embrac[ing] and fiercely cling[ing] to the rights delusion,” to assume we have “legal rights entitlement,” or, for that matter, I would add, to repose our trust in the broad-based fairness and independence of the judiciary. I would argue that the government’s interpretation of the Charter is, in essence, apodictic, which does not make its reading of “rights” right. The dilemma is profound and citizens who claim their constitutional rights apparently “have no standing” (to use a familiar legal phrase) in the view of an all-powerful government. It’s not a pretty picture.

With regard to the Nuremberg Code: Its application to considerations of domestic violations of its constituent principles with respect to scientific “experiments” performed on the human person—in particular Section I stipulating that “Voluntary consent is essential,” Section 5 stating that “No experiment should be conducted if it is believed to cause death or disability,” and Section 9 requiring that “Subjects should be able to end their participation at any time”—are not codified in national legal instruments.

That was then, this is now.

But this inadequacy has been rectified. UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights declares that “human dignity, human rights and fundamental freedoms are to be fully respected” in all public health legislation and that “the interests and welfare of the individual should have priority over the sole interest of science or society.” And as the prestigious Robert H. Jackson Center in its document on “The Influence of the Nuremberg Trial on International Criminal Law” informs us, the Nuremberg promise and precedent has finally come to pass in the creation of the International Criminal Court. The ICC, based in part on the Nuremberg Charter, with jurisdiction to try genocide, war crimes and Crimes Against Humanity, began functioning in in 1994 and was adopted by the Rome Statute in 1998.

What is especially salient in this connection is the ICC principle of complementarity, which “enacted broad-ranging criminal legislation to ensure that all the crimes within the Rome Statute are covered by domestic penal law… to maximize the potential benefits of the principle of complementarity in the event of allegations against a State’s own nationals.” The principle is notoriously complex but allows for “admissibility” protocols in cases of national failure to prosecute when prosecution seems warranted or when the political intention to prosecute unjustly is evident. “The Court holds a promise,” the Center’s document anticipates, “of putting an end to the impunity that reigns today for human rights violators.”

It is my contention that the Canadian government is precisely such a human rights violator. The “grey area” in the Charter does not seem as grey as government-friendly lawyers, go-along judges and skeptical specialists claim. According to The Epoch Times, Toronto-based litigator Ryan O’Connor believes “[t]here are several sections of the Charter that are implicated by mandating vaccines,” specifically Section 7 as well as Section 15, “which protects individuals from discrimination and that requires equal treatment of individuals before and under the law” (italics mine).

Similarly, The Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms issued a statement condemning federal mandates that translate into the certainty that “unvaccinated Canadians will lose their right to move and travel freely within Canada, their right to leave Canada, and their right to earn a living and participate in society without discrimination.” Such mandates amount to “an egregious and unacceptable infringement” of our constitutional rights. As the Centre’s president John Carpay observes, “No government will violate human rights without putting forward a good-sounding justification, such as the war on terrorism, communism, online hate, drugs, or a nasty virus.”

Blame Canada.

From a combination of ignorance of the accumulating evidence calling the vaccines into serious question and the temptations of political absolutism, the government has breached the civil rights of its citizens—if civil rights are to mean anything at all. It has disregarded the moral implications of the Nuremberg Code, the tenor of the UNESCO indenture and the provisions of the ICC, despite the pious statement from the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the effect that “Canada strongly supports the International Criminal Court… as a key pillar of the rules-based international order.”

The government has scanted both the spirit of these international instruments and the purport of its own Charter. Like other Western administrations—for example, Australia and the U.S. under Biden—it has eaten away at the foundations of liberal democracy and deliberately eroded the rule of law in everyday life understood as part of the social contract. As Ryan O’Connor asserts, “the crux of the issue is more about politics than it is about public health.” Indeed, it is more about convenient “interpretation” of laws and principles and the levying of coercive measures than about civil liberties, democratic justice and political freedoms.

Government authority, certainly in the case of vaccine mandates, does not rely on reason and debate but on the imposition of power backed by physical force and a largely complicit judiciary. It has no genuine interest in discussion and evidence and no compunction against segregating a substantial cohort of its people whom it denounces as irresponsible. Canada was never intended to be a leprosarium, but much has changed. Canada is now a dictatorial regime, in many ways reminiscent of the former Soviet Union. And the Charter of Rights and Freedoms is cosmetic cover for the enactment of political absolutism. Grey areas don’t mean much to citizens who have been deprived by government decree of their constitutional right, however moot, to participate in common life, travel, work and enjoy the fruits of now-threatened liberty.