Canadian Constitutional Crisis | Brian Peckford | EP 221

Mr. Peckford and I have been talking over the last week, as I mentioned, because he has serious concerns about the policies of the current Canadian government in relation to the Canadian Charter of Rights, which was established as part of the Constitution Act in the 1980s. He, as I said in the bio, is the only living minister who participated in that constitutional process. He is, therefore, a unique, let's say, historical and current resource because he can help illuminate Canadians as to the intent of the people who were instrumental in drafting, writing, and agreeing on all of those fundamentally important accords.

So let's start by talking about what concerns are driving you to re-enter the political discussion at the moment.

Well, primarily it is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, especially those freedoms and rights that are in sections 2, 6, 7, and 15 of the Charter, which I helped craft. Their freedoms of association, freedoms of expression, religion, conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of association—that's in section two. Section six is freedom of mobility—the right to travel anywhere in Canada or leave Canada. Section six deals with life, liberty, and the security of the person, and section 15 deals with equality. Every Canadian is equal before the law.

As we sit here today, those provisions are being violated by all the governments of Canada, but in particular, in my case right now, the federal government of Canada. I’m about to launch a lawsuit against the federal government because of these mandates, especially their travel ban.

So I want to get this straight in my head. Zooms back up. You were involved in the constitutional process, okay? And that was relevant to the establishment of the Canadian Bill of Rights—Canadian Charter Rights, sorry. Yes, let's get that right. The Bill of Rights was done in 1960 by John D. Baker and was incomplete, right? Right. Okay, that's why we needed the Charter of Rights in 1980-82. Right.

Okay, well, we might want to cover that when we talk. I'm trying to juggle a lot of balls in my head right now because we want to be able to concentrate on the issue at hand, but we also want to bring along people who are listening into the entire process, so they understand. We kind of have to do this on the fly because we have like zero time, and we want to get it right.

So when you were working on the constitutional partition process, how was that associated directly with the establishment of the Canadian Charter of Rights?

Okay, it was all in the same bill called the Constitution Act of 1982.

Okay, it's confusing because in 1981, when we finalized the deal in November, it was called the Patriation Agreement. But when it got put into legislation the next year, the words got changed because it's now going into legislation to the Constitution Act of 1982.

So the Constitution Act of 1982 contains the patriation; in other words, this was our last time severing ties with England. We wouldn't have to go back to England anymore to do any amendments to our constitution; we could do them in Canada. That's what patriation means. And then attached to what were a number of other provisions, including the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. So it's the Constitution Act of 1982, but it was finalized in the fall of 1981.

Okay, Eric, are we recording?

Like this?

We are? Yeah, okay, good, because that's actually all relevant information. Some of this might have to be sorted—what's that?

That's okay. Yeah, no, that's fine. Okay, okay, good. Put it in later.

Okay, so yeah, because I'm thinking at this point if I can have everybody else on airplane mode during the recording.

So I put at the end of the bio here as a kind of lead into our discussion that Mr. Peckford has recently re-entered the political arena because he has serious concerns about the policies of the Canadian government in relationship to the Canadian Charter of Rights. It's excellent. That's okay, that's a pretty blunt statement, but it's true.

Okay, so now we talked when we emailed, we decided that we're going to kind of open this with a description of the current problem and what you're going to do about it. And then maybe we can use that as a lead into a discussion of the history.

Yes, sure.

Okay, that seems reasonable. I want to do this—I don't want to do this in a planned way, and one of the things that goes very badly in this kind of media is any attempt to shape it, you know?

I know.

Okay, okay, so we don't want to do that. So okay, I think I thought I could open with the bio, which is pretty much what your people sent me. I just shortened it to some degree; I just tightened it up, that's all. And then I can use that line—he recently entered the political arena because he has serious concerns—I can use that and ask you what those concerns are. That should do the trick; that should open the conversation, I think.

Yes, okay, okay. And I think all the other questions I have I can just ask you. Well, we're doing this, they can just be part of the process, and that'll help me bring everyone who's listening along.

Yeah, and then I can very quickly say in my opening, as I say, one of my concerns is that in 1867, when the country was formed with the Act of Law, which was unwritten, and then we decided into the 20th century that that wasn't good enough, especially with the influence from the United States that had a Bill of Rights almost from day one.

Yeah.

So there were moves underfoot to try to do that that started with Diesel Baker in '60, but that was only a federal Act that applied to federal people; that didn't apply to the whole nation, to every Canadian. So in 1981-82, we completed that process by doing the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in the Constitution Act of 1982, which gave every Canadian rights and freedoms written in the constitution.

Yep, yep, that's excellent background.

Yeah, okay. I think likely we're ready to go. We can talk about what we're going to do with all this material when we're done recording it and figure out exactly how to manage it, the release of it, and all of that.

Yeah, I mean, I'm in some sense tempted to even use all the discussion we're having right now as part of that because that gives people a very honest representation of exactly what's going on. It's good for them to see the process and not just the conclusion.

So, and that also makes it much more trustworthy in the most real sense; there's no attempt to massage.

That's exactly it; that's exactly it. And we want to step extraordinarily carefully. So I think I'll open with this bio, and then I'll just ask you what your concerns are. I'll also do a foray into asking you why you chose this medium to make this case and claim because that's also unsettling, to say the least.

So, all right, are you ready, Eric?

Yes, sir.

Okay. Oh, is that Dave?

Yeah, I'll go down.

I don't know that he can, and Lex is going to record upstairs, so he can't go upstairs either, so he's just kind of—

No, Tucky, thank you, Scott.

We'll wait until he's back. You don't need a chair.

Wait till Lives is back? Are we waiting until we're going to wait till he's back just to confirm that?

Oh, okay, okay, so we got a just a couple-minute delay here.

Go for it, Jordan.

Hello everyone, I'm here today with a historical figure in the Canadian landscape, the Honorable Brian Peckford, former Premier of Newfoundland. We've been talking over the last couple of days about the broader events in Canada in relation to the political and constitutional work that Mr. Peckford did in the 1980s and decided that it was necessary to have a serious conversation about such things at this time.

I'm going to open this with a bio of Mr. Peckford so that everyone is situated in the proper place to appreciate the conversation. The Honorable Brian Peckford, PC, was born August 27, 1942, in Whitburn, Newfoundland. Graduating from Lewisport High School in 1960, he obtained his BA in Education at Memorial in Newfoundland in 1966 and later did postgraduate work in English Literature and Educational Psychology.

In 1972, Mr. Peckford entered the political arena as a member of the Progressive Conservatives, was elected as a member of the Provincial House of Assembly, soon serving as Special and Parliamentary Assistant to the then Premier Frank Moores. He was Minister of Municipal Affairs and Housing in 1974 and Minister of Mines and Energy and Minister of Rural Development and Northern Affairs for that province in 1976.

In 1979, at the age of 36, which made him a very young leader by the standards by which such things are judged, he became Leader of the PC Party and Premier of Newfoundland. His government established the Atlantic Accord, bringing offshore oil and gas revenue to the province—over 25 billion dollars to date—and a say in the management of the resource. Newfoundland's involvement in Canada's constitutional partition process in the early 1980s led to the breakthrough agreement culminating in the Constitution Act of 1982.

He is the only living first minister who participated in that constitutional process, something that's dead relevant to our later discussion. He retired from politics in March 1989, beginning a consulting company with his wife Carol, assisting companies in Europe and North America. Former Premier Peckford is the author of two books: "Someday the Sun Will Shine" and "Have Not Will Be No More," which was a Globe and Mail bestseller in 2012. He was sword to the Privy Council by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth in 1982. He retired in 2001 and presently lives with his wife Carol in Parksville, British Columbia.

Now Mr. Peckford and I have been talking over the last week, as I mentioned, because he has serious concerns about the policies of the current Canadian government in relationship to the Canadian Charter of Rights, which was established as part of the Constitution Act in the 1980s. And he, as I said in the bio, is the only living minister who participated in that constitutional process and is therefore a unique, let's say, historical and current resource because he can help illuminate Canadians as to the intent of the people who were instrumental in drafting, writing, and agreeing on all of those fundamentally important accords.

So let's start by talking about what concerns are driving you to re-enter the political discussion at the moment.

Well, primarily it is the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, especially those freedoms and rights that are in sections 2, 6, 7, and 15 of the Charter, which I helped craft. Their freedoms of association, freedoms of expression, religion, conscience, freedom of assembly, freedom of association—that's in section two. Section six is freedom of mobility—the right to travel anywhere in Canada or leave Canada. Section six deals with life, liberty, and the security of the person, and section 15 deals with equality. Every Canadian is equal before the law.

As we sit here today, those provisions are being violated by all the governments of Canada, but in particular, in my case right now, the federal government of Canada. And I'm about to launch a lawsuit against the federal government because of these mandates, especially their travel ban.

There's no other travel ban in the western world like this one, and yet we're the second-largest country in the world by geography. This impinges upon my right of travel, my right to travel to my family back east or my friends. It takes away my right as a Canadian to be protected by the mobility right of section six, and therefore, I feel that the federal government has overreached its authority.

Okay, so let me get this clear because I'm still having a hard time conceptualizing the fact that this is actually a reality. So the situation we have in Canada is that a former drafter of what is one of the most fundamental articles of our shared agreement as a people is now about to launch a legal claim against the government itself for violating the fundamental principles upon which the entire country is founded and assembled and agrees.

That's not too blunt?

No, that is very, very accurate. That's exactly what's happening. I'm the only first minister left alive who was at that conference and helped draft these freedoms and these rights and the Constitution Act of 1982 itself. And I do this very reluctantly. You know, I've been watching this thing now for almost two years. I've been speaking out about it at public meetings and on my blog and so on. And I've come to the conclusion now that I must, as a Canadian and as one of the writers and founders of the Constitution Act of 1982, not only speak about it—I must act about it.

I must show Canadians that I'm so concerned, as a citizen, as a former first minister that helped craft this Constitution Act of 1982, that I must take action against my own government because they have violated rights that I and others helped craft in 1981-1982.

Well, what do you think the legal response to this is going to be? You obviously and I know this, of course, you’ve been consulting with a legal team, I suppose, and we can talk about that. I mean, it seems to me that this puts the courts in an awfully complicated position, to say the absolute least, because it's—and please correct me if I'm misstepping in any way here—it's up to the courts to determine the letter but also the spirit of these fundamental laws. And it seems to me that it's almost inarguable that if you have a living member of the body that drafted the provisions making the claim that they're being violated, that that's as good an indication about the violation of the spirit of the law, certainly, and perhaps the letter as well, that you could possibly have.

Am I summing that up accurately?

Yes, you are. And then, and other lawyers, including the lawyers that will be representing me now in this lawsuit—the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms—have looked at the situation very carefully. And it's after weeks and weeks of deliberation that we've decided upon this action.

So the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms will be launching this lawsuit in the next 24 hours or so on behalf of me and a number of other Canadians. But of course, because of my present status and previous status as a first minister, this becomes elevated and perhaps more public than it would otherwise become.

But this is my deliberate consideration, and that of my lawyers, of what is going on in this country. What is happening is that there is a section in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms which allows governments to override these freedoms in unusual circumstances. And I remember this very well when we were crafting the constitution, these unusual circumstances—because we're putting it in the constitution—it's not a federal act or provincial act; it's in a constitution which is supposed to enshrine permanent values and give glue to the country.

Okay, so this section one can only be used—and I remember this well—in times of peril, in times of war and insurrection, or when the state is in peril, when the existence of the state is in peril.

This particular virus, for which there's a recovery of 99%, a fatality rate of less than one percent, does not constitute, in my view, a situation where the country is in peril. And therefore, I argue that section one doesn't even apply, even though they're trying to make it apply and use that as the reason for doing what they're doing.

So you're saying that in your estimation, and this is a consequence of the knowledge that you bring forth from conferring with all the people who drafted this legislation to begin with at the provincial and the federal level, that when you drafted it, you did not envision that its provisions could be violated under conditions that weren't a threat—like a fundamental threat to the integrity of the country itself—and that the current state of affairs on the public health front does in no way meet that criteria.

Absolutely, it does not at all meet that criteria.

And even in the extreme circumstance, because we're all fair people, that you tried to make section one apply—and you and you said what Peckford and others are saying happened in '81-'82 when section one doesn't apply—does apply, then there are four tests that have to be met in order for it to apply. That means it must be demonstrably justified that the action is worthwhile. In other words, some kind of cost-benefit analysis must be done by law. It must be done in reasonable limits. And fourthly, and most importantly, all those three must be done within the context of a free and democratic society—and a free and democratic society to me means parliamentary democracy.

In our country, we have 14 parliaments, and they have been completely silent. There's no parliamentary committee anywhere in any of those 14 parliaments looking at what's happening to our country. They are the people's representatives.

And so, okay, so you're also saying—and this is also terrible—that you're also saying that even the process itself by which these exceptions could be made has been essentially subverted in the name of something approximating expediency but that the rationale for that expediency does not indicate a level of seriousness sufficient to justify that expedient process.

Absolutely, exactly what I'm saying.

And I think that's extremely unfortunate, and I don't normally speak for myself on this. There are quite a few experts around, like the Great Barrington Declaration. Over a year ago now, they identified—and these were some of the greatest epidemiologists in the world—how to approach this kind of a situation. And that's their principles still stand.

You know, you protect the vulnerable, you do everything to protect the vulnerable in this kind of situation. And by the way, this is not new. All of the provinces of Canada have what's called emergency measures organizations, which spend millions as taxpayers who do nothing else—so sit down every day and organize a plan for some kind of an emergency declared.

Let's admit maybe the emergency or at least a very serious situation in the country. And then they bring to bear all of the planning tools that are necessary—not just a narrow clinical one from the Department of Health—right? How is the best way?

In Lieutenant Colonel David Redmon out of Alberta, who wrote the New Emergency Measures Act, he speaks eloquently to this and has produced all kinds of documents that nobody has challenged that this was the appropriate approach to take.

Okay, so there's two issues that stem out of that. The first is what has also happened—and you're making allusion to that—is that our political leaders have not only circumvented the parliamentary process to produce provisions that violate the Canadian Charter of Rights, but they've abdicated their responsibility for overall governance, which is the balancing of all sorts of competing interests to a narrow public so-called public health policy.

So and that's also inappropriate governance in the most fundamental sense.

Yes, absolutely, no question.

And if anybody looks at the documentation that Lieutenant Colonel David Redmond has produced, they will be convinced that—and, you know, we had the swine flu and other flu before this and other infectious diseases—and that's why these emergency measures organizations were put in place for, you know, like when the river floods in Winnipeg or when we have, you know, a nice storm in Quebec or whatever.

There are people who have already planned for all of this and have already contacted the private sector, the public sector, all the relevant government departments. So when something happens, they're ready to move quickly on all fronts and have a very joined effort to ensure that the totality of society is considered compromised and you put in measures which acknowledge all the factors, because now we know from studies that have been produced by Dr. Douglas Allen of Simon Fraser University, who looked at 80 studies over a year ago, which showed that the cure was worse than the disease. In other words, the lockdowns caused so many problems on the other side that were difficult to justify the measures that were being used.

Okay, now you alluded to the fact too that this isn't in some sense common public knowledge.

And then along with that, we're faced with the extreme oddity, I would say, of the fact that the venue that you chose to announce this move and to discuss all these issues isn't a standard news media venue—it's my YouTube channel.

And one of the things that you discussed with me earlier this week was the impossibility, in your view, of having these topics dealt with in an honest and straightforward manner by any major news organization in Canada, which to me is almost a statement damning the current larger scale governance structure, which in some sense includes a free press operating in a coherent and articulate and trustworthy manner as a check and an opportunity for reflection on the political process.

And so that in itself seems as worrisome as all the other things that we're talking about at a governmental level.

Like, I think this is preposterous in some sense that this is the place where this discussion is taking place.

And so, yes, I think you raise an extremely important point and one that I need to address. And I've been vocal about being concerned about what's happening for quite some time. And I've held public meetings here on Vancouver Island and Vancouver in front of the art gallery last October, and I've written letters to national newspapers, and they have not carried any of my letters, which is quite unusual because before this happened, they would carry my letters when I made comments on normal public policy issues across the nation, and they carried my letters.

But in recent times, they have not even acknowledged that they received them.

So how do you account for that? What's going on?

Well, it seems to me that the media very early on bought into the government narrative and developed the same kind of fear that a lot of individuals did because of what was being told—all was being proposed with all these cases, even though these cases didn't represent hospitalizations or ICU visits or whatever. And so there was a fear generated early on, and the mainstream media bought into it very quickly and now are out trying to sustain the narrative that they became a part of early on, is the only way I can explain it.

Of course, we also know that all the mainstream media have received significant sums of money from the government of Canada over the last three years—over 600 million dollars—so one cannot but mention that in any discussion like this. That one has to ask the question—has this flow of money from the federal government to the Canadian press in any way impinged upon their impartiality to tell the story on both sides of the issue?

What do you expect is going to happen as a consequence of the challenge that you're mounting? And can you go into some details about the precise nature of the challenge? Because I still don't—I don't understand it completely by any means. Perhaps it's not understandable completely by any means, but you're obviously, with your legal team, you have a view of how this is likely to unfold. So what do you want to happen? And how serious a challenge is this to the claim of the government in some sense to have legitimate sovereignty?

Yes, I think this is very serious because I think, first of all, you have to, as you know, in the legal system, specifically articulate in your lawsuit what it is you know you're making the lawsuit about. So you have to be specific. So we had to pick one area—we could, you know, freedom of expression, conscience, assembly, association, life, liberty, and so on—and we picked mobility and the federal government itself because this, you know, the second largest country in the world, right? Traveling by plane and train is extremely important for business and for the normal functioning of a nation. Remember, the maintenance of families and for the maintenance of families—the country was formed by moving from east to west with the railway. I mean, our history is all replete with that kind of stuff.

So what we chose was this particular situation of this travel ban, which right impacts every single Canadian in their movement to meet family and to conduct regular business. And so we thought this would be an area that we should highlight because we had to get specific.

So I'm particularly—the lawsuit challenging the government's program of banning travel by train and plane by Canadians. In other words, we can't travel across our own nation. The section six says mobility—the right of every Canadian to travel anywhere in Canada or leave Canada—that’s what section six says. That's the exact words of section six.

Therefore, that's what we are pursuing now in the courts in the next couple of days, in the next few weeks. Hopefully, we'll get a decision. We're asking for an expedited decision in the next three or four months.

So this will fundamentally challenge the approach that the federal government is taking on responding to this so-called pandemic and therefore will put into question this whole notion of using section one of the Charter to override these rights and freedoms.

If us, as first ministers—Dr. Peterson had wanted to just have protecting rights and freedoms—could have easily changed. We wouldn't have gone to the constitution; we would have just said, "All right, put it back. Just put an act in the federal parliament and put acts in all the parliaments," and then up to the whim of the political party at the time to change it.

We wanted to safeguard it so that it was beyond the whim of political machinations and therefore could not be changed only in the most extreme circumstances.

So what we're really concerned about, and what I'm really concerned about, is if this is not—if our Charter is not upheld and then honored, and these freedoms and rights are honored, then the next—and therefore we lose—the next time around when there's an emergency two or three years from now or when the government decides and declares that there is an emergency they can use this as a precedent, and the Charter becomes further diluted and then our rights and freedoms as individuals have been destroyed. And that section of being a democracy is no more.

That is the great danger, and so that's why it's very necessary for me to do what I'm doing.

The other point about this is that four years after the Charter came in, in 1986, there was a case in the Supreme Court of Canada where the judges were forced to look at section one because of the way the lawyer had constructed the case for his clients, called the Oakes test. And in that, the judges tried to describe what this section one meant.

And they did not a bad job—not as good as I thought they should do—but still a much better job. And it's really funny; the lower courts that have already looked at the Charter as it relates to what's going on have not used this test, which is highly unusual because courts always look to the precedent set by the highest Supreme Court in determining what they will do in their case because they were both concerning the Charter.

And so the absence of seeing the Oakes test being used in the lower court so far is very troubling, and therefore the other reason why we must take this kind of action at this time.

Okay, so let me ask you a question about that because this process of circumventing parliament and then failing to meet the proper standards for the kind of crisis that would involve lifting the provisions of the Canadian Charter of Rights that should be blocked by the courts if they're abiding by the principle of common law reliance on previous precedents, especially at higher court levels, but that's not happening.

And so—and that's in the context that we discussed already where the media, for example, has become co-opted or corrupted to a degree that it's no longer reliable. I know I've spoken with many lawyers in Canada in recent years who are very upset about the co-option and corruption of the entire legal enterprise for similar reasons.

Are you even vaguely confident that the court system itself has enough integrity to give the views that you're putting forward—even though they're at the basis of the constitution that unites us all? Do you think that your views can get any fairer or more equally impartial hearing in the court system than they have in the media?

Well, I think here's where I come down on that. The lower courts have made some decisions which are injurious to the Charter, and they're being appealed to the higher courts.

So I think here's where we have an opportunity. This particular lawsuit of mine will go to the federal court of Canada first and then likely to the Supreme Court of Canada second, regardless of what decision is made. One side or the other will quite likely appeal it.

So I think at the court of appeal in the provinces—that's the highest courts in the provinces. And Canadians are confused about that because when they hear these early decisions, they think that's the end of it, and that's only the beginning of it.

To use a really good metaphor—a Canadian metaphor—we're in the second period, halfway through the second period. We still got, you know, perhaps half the game left or almost half the game left. And that's where the courts of appeal come in, who usually are more independent and more sober of thought as it relates to the jurisprudence which is before them.

And so this is where I am, and the lawyers, I think, come down and say we have to exhaust all of the civilized legal processes that we set up under our Constitution. And that means these decisions will be appealed to the courts of appeal in the provinces and then the Supreme Court of Canada.

So it's these higher courts that have an unbelievable responsibility now—unelected judges—to finally decide whether in fact the democracy of Canada is going to survive or not or whether suddenly, from 1867 to 1981-82, we didn't have a written Charter, we get one, and now within 40 years it's being eviscerated or somehow undermined by an overreach of the various governments—that's our position.

And we hope to put that to the judges, and hopefully, the judges will see it in that kind of reasoned, balanced way.

Okay, so you focused on movement, the right to movement. And I think you put that in a very interesting historical context and practical context with your discussion of the fact that Canada is absolutely huge, and people are distributed all across it, and that freedom of movement is necessary for us to conduct our businesses and to maintain our families and to communicate.

But also that Canada itself was knitted together as a consequence of facilitation of freedom of movement, not least by the railway.

So were there other violations of charter principles that you considered highlighting as you moved forward before you settled on freedom of movement?

Of course there are many, including freedom of association and freedom of assembly. Lots of people—the churches, Christian churches and other churches—were prevented from getting together, so that violence. And there's a curfew in Quebec still, which is just absolutely beyond comprehension in my estimation in a free society that that can be the case.

And I have friends in Quebec who are hurt to the bone by the fact, for example, that they're not allowed, given their—they're not allowed to attend religious services, for example, which—and that's a really egregious violation because if there's anything more fundamental, let's say that freedom of association, well, maybe there's freedom of speech. But before that even, there's freedom of belief.

And to interfere with that at a governmental level is unprecedented in my estimation, especially when they have not gone out of their way to demonstrably justify, which is one of the tests of section one—where is the demonstrable justification of what they're doing?

One would think in public policy, since my time and long before when I was a premier, one of the things governments did when they were introducing especially brand new legislation and doing very serious things with the constitution would be to do a cost-benefit analysis.

And based upon that, you would decide how you went forward. None of that was done. No parliamentary committee was ever struck to look at both sides of the issue and call in experts—all of these kinds of reasonable measures, which were part of the Canadian fabric of developing public policy, have been discarded in this particular.

So what are people—okay, so what are people doing? I've spoken to Rex Murphy about that, and Rex has been the only journalist perhaps who's been beating the warning drum trying to alert Canadians to the fact that the parliamentary process itself has been subverted at the federal and the provincial levels.

And he's certainly been allowed to express those views, but I don't think Canadians have any real sense of exactly how serious that is.

So one question would be, well, if our laws are no longer—if the laws that restrict our Charter freedoms are no longer being produced by parliamentary debate, how are they being produced?

And so that would be the first question. How, practically, how is this occurring? Is it just by—is it just by fiat? Is it just by statement? And if so, why are these laws to be regarded as valid at all? And if they're not valid, well, what does that mean?

Yeah, well, here's where the most insidious part of this equation comes into play. What the governments have done have used, in very many cases, existing legislation under which they have the power to make regulation.

So they've used existing emergencies legislation and inflated it enough or interpreted it in a manner that they could also use in this circumstance and therefore issue additional regulation.

Okay, and then in other cases, they did not fully explain or have a parliamentary committee look at other amendments when they opened their parliament and closed it within two or three days or a week.

In other words, sufficient debate wasn't allowed to understand the repercussions of what they were doing when they were giving more power to the minister and more power to the public health officer, right?

So this really means, this really means in some sense that none of these policies were subject to opposition, which—because that's—and so let’s—we could delve into that a little bit: you might say, well, in an emergency, such that provisions shouldn’t be subject to opposition because that's inefficient—but that is the same thing as saying two things:

One is that they shouldn't be thought about because discussion between opposing parties is actually thought, and then the second thing it’s saying is they should be implemented without recourse to the broader public because the broader public is represented in that oppositional structure.

So that everybody's voices are being allowed to be heard. That's what—that's in some sense the whole point of the parliament, where you parliament means place of talking fundamentally, and it means more deeply than that. Place of thinking, and even more deeply than that, a place of discussion of the entire panoply of public opinion—that's all gone by the wayside in the name of efficiency, let's say, or something like that.

Yes, Dr., and even it gets worse than that because we have had time—one can perhaps relieve or excuse, if one wants to, to make, so that your argument is completely reasonable and say for the first 90 days, yeah, this thing began, you could make an argument that, okay, the governors had to move.

But in any rational way, if they had used the emergency measures planning that was already in place, they would have moved to protect the vulnerable first and then did a study on the rest: what else do we need to do in society?

What they did was just a carte blanche over all of society without giving second thought to it. And now all of the studies 90 days after this started and 100 days, 120 days, show, right?

And then the Great Barrington Declaration is a good example over a year old now, is the Great Barrington Declaration. So they had lots of information, and Dr. Allen’s report from Cybertrades over a year ago.

So they've had lots of information and scientific studies about what's going on to demonstrate that not only are the vaccines destructive—more destructive than any vaccines in our history—and that’s a scientific fact—then they had time to adjust.

And this is where they have not even been nimble in this kind of circumstance. When you think this is the very time that governments would be nimble, okay, we'll see what we can do with the vulnerable—all these long-term care homes and the hospitals and also who are most vulnerable.

And we'll now have the parliamentary committee on an expedited basis, I understand that, on an emergency basis, bring in experts from both sides within the next 30 days to see whether what else we should do in a reasonable and graduated way or are what we're doing now the most appropriate way to respond.

Right, right. So your case is, well, in the early stages of the emergency of the pandemic when people didn't understand the magnitude of the risk, there was potential for justification for reducing parliamentary complexity to short-term efficiency.

But as the pandemic has unfolded and we've become more aware of its true risks, or lack thereof, we should have returned to the principles of parliamentary democracy as rapidly as possible, and with less and less justification, that's continued to happen.

That circumvention of the parliamentary process has continued to happen, and I suppose that culminated in recent months with the Quebec lockdown, the curfew. I don't see how anybody can possibly make the case that that curfew was implemented under conditions that were as uncertain and dire as those that obtained in the initial phases of the pandemic, especially given that Omicron is obviously much less serious than the original virus.

And also, we've already attained something approximately an 80% vaccination rate, and that's not going to be pushed up much higher than 90% without government intervention that becomes unbelievably heavy-handed.

So there's less and less justification for more and more circumvention of parliamentary processes as this proceeds instead of exactly the opposite.

Exactly. That's why it took me this long to be convinced that I had to take this action.

I mean, I never took this action 90 days after they brought in these things or 100 days, or a year after.

Right, we've—I’ve been watching this and commenting and making, you know, articulating my concerns, as Rex has, by the way. Rex and Murphy and I went to university together; we're both Newfoundlanders; we're both born in Newfoundland.

And I’ve heard him on your program with you and enjoy the conversation and love the English literature and the classics like he does, and we both got a very wonderful education at Memorial in those days.

No longer there now, but we did, and I do appreciate his commentary and what he's brought to this discussion. It's very, very important.

But the other thing is, as you say, the transmission of the virus now—and the virus has changed. So a lot of the vaccines that are being used are no longer applicable; they don't do anything to the existing variant.

Or for the original virus, the other thing is people getting more planes in my—and my travel ban that I'm arguing on before the lawsuit is that everybody transmits it now: unvaccinated and vaccinated transmit and receive and transmit the virus.

So it's hard to make the argument that the travel ban should be in place if the transmission of the virus, for which all of this is centered, is no longer valid—that is, is that the vaccinated protect against the virus because they receive it and transmit it the same as the unvaccinated?

And now we find in Denmark, Israel, just in the last few days, right, that in Australia their case rates have gone through the roof again even though they're 90% vaccinated.

And so the whole basis, right, the whole basis of this argument of these lockdowns and travel bans and so on—the basis has crumbled. The whole civil on which this so-called rational approach to a virus has completely crumbled and no longer can sustain itself.

So what one must then question—why is this continuing to be in place when all of that data is available—which at least—well, I can tell you what I've been informed of about why it's continuing.

And I had a conversation with a senior advisor to one of Canada's provincial governments—a number of conversations—some of those were conducted with Rex. None of this was made public because the conversation occurred in privacy, and I asked the gentleman I was speaking with why he wouldn't go public.

And he said, and I believe honorably that he believed he could still do more good from within the confines of the governmental structure than as a lone voice crying in the wilderness, let's say.

But he told me flat out that Canadian public policy is being—not being generated through the parliamentary process that it's supposed to be generated through. What's happening instead is the politicians are turning to badly sampled opinion polls—short-term opinion polls—and driving policy as a consequence.

And then, it's not actually driving it as a consequence of public opinion polls because that would be something like consulting the people—they're utilizing adherence to short-term public opinion polls to maximize the probability that they'll obtain political success in the electoral sphere in the near future.

And so I said, I pressed him, I said, so you're telling me that this isn't based on the science, because that's certainly what we're hearing.

He said, no, it's not based on the science. That's not driving the decisions. I asked him, is there an endgame in place, which is do we have definitions laid down for when the pandemic is now of sufficient lack of severity that it's over, so to speak, and we can go back to normal life? Is that even—is there even a conceptual framework within which that might occur?

And the answer to that was no, there's not that as well. And so, it was one of the most shocking conversations I think I've ever had in my life in some sense because I'm not cynical about the political process.

I think that cheap cynicism about politics is it's an abdication of civic responsibility, and it's bitterness masquerading as wisdom.

But then when I heard that the situation at the highest levels of governance was more cynical and less responsible than I could have even imagined, and that even when I pushed that interpretation to see if I was misinterpreting, the answer I received was a definitive no, it's as bad as you think or worse, I didn't really know what to make of that in the aftermath of the conversation because, well, for obvious—for all of the reasons that we're discussing, it’s like, well, have things really got to the point where we don't use parliamentary processes, we're violating the Canadian Charter of Bill of Rights, the press is so involved in collusion that they won't even report on it—and they're being subsidized to a great degree by the government in some sense for doing so—and that's so widespread that it covers the entire legacy media, let's say.

It's like it sounds conspiratorial in the deepest sense.

And that's why a lot of people have gone that route it's because they have been almost pushed in that room, and you see the government then using their polling.

Here they are advertising, “You've got to get vaccinated!” on the television. And they're actually even doing ads for children and trying to talk to children directly through a public ad, so they're feeding off themselves; they're creating enough fear so that they'll get the poll they want to get.

Well, that's the other thing that I see happening, and this is partly why this process is so dangerous.

First of all, it's very, very difficult to pull people and get a read on really what they want, and that's why we don't have direct democracy by the people.

We don't want fear and whim and impulsivity—that's not thought through carefully—to be the basis for government.

So really what's happened, we could say in some sense is that by circumventing the parliamentary process and abdicating responsibility for complex multi-level decision-making, we've reverted to something like the most primordial form of whim rule by mob, and that's all mediated through opinion polls.

That's been the alternative to the parliamentary process.

The other thing, perhaps, that a lot of Canadians don't acknowledge and recognize, and Canadians are very wonderful people and very nice people and very trustworthy of their governments, okay? And so what has happened in the last 40 years?

They have not known this because we have not been civically involved like we should. I say in all my public meetings, the level of good democracy is directly related to the amount of civic involvement.

Right. The less civic involvement, the less democracy.

And this is what's happening in Canada.

Yeah, well that cheap cynicism interferes with that too, and what that means is that because people are cynical and they think that’s wisdom, then they abandon these institutions, and then when they’re abandoned, that means that maybe the people who shouldn't be running them are able to run them.

And then the whole thing gets corrupted from the bottom up, and that's happening. I see that happening with school boards in particular.

It's absolutely—it's exactly—it's happening all over the place. And the problem with Canada is not the parliament that you and I grew up with, okay?

Where the MP had really significant power, where the parliamentary committee had really significant power, and this is true in all the provinces as well. There's been a gradual shift of power from the parliament first to the cabinet and now to the first minister’s office, both in all of the provinces and in the government of Canada.

Donald J. Savoie has written a book on this called “Democracy in Canada: The Disintegration of Our Institutions.” It's only a couple years old; it's a haunting book, but he's one of the experts in governance in Canada, and he's a scholar at the University of Moncton, and this is more or less his epic book.

He's written quite a few books on this over the years, and this is a book that every thinking Canadian should read because it methodically and intelligently deals with how over time, without the shock being fired, the movement of power from where it should reside in the parliament all the way to the prime minister's office and the premier's office.

And therefore this situation in early 2020, we were very vulnerable to this kind of thing happening by governments because we have ran into that kind of atmosphere over time, with power shifting, and therefore exercise of power quickly by the executive rather than by the parliament.

Okay, so we've outlined to some degree what it means if the challenge that you're proposing to mount fails.

And what it'll mean is that what's happening now with the centralization of power and the circumventing of the parliamentary process and the reliance, let's say, on opinion polls and whim and the abdication of responsibility for governing to so-called experts who are uni-dimensional in their viewpoint, that's the status quo, and that's becoming more and more the norm.

What's the—I don't understand what'll happen if you win.

I mean, because if you win, it means that we've been—that the laws that have governed us for the last, let's say, year, two years, accepting that initial period of maybe we could say uncertainty bordering on the level of potential emergency, if you win, what does that mean for the political sovereignty of the federal and provincial governments?

I think what that means is that if we win, we—we have identified that we have some very substantial laws on the books that when challenged and brought rationally towards our highest courts will be honored.

And that will give Canadians faith to reform either the existing political parties or go with new political parties that recognize in their platform—which they've signed off on with the people—that they respect the Charter rights and freedoms and only in very dire circumstances, like a war or insurrection, cannot be circumvented.

Right? That we must get back to a parliamentary-type of democracy. The power must be returned to the parliament.

Look, Jody Rabo, when she argued as a Minister of Justice and then later wanted to appear before a parliamentary committee, she was allowed to appear a couple of times, and then they shut the committee down, even though she indicated in writing that she had more information that she wanted to present.

So there was a complete, what shall I say, tyranny of the majority, and for the parliamentary system to work, we have examples all over the place of this in all of the parliaments of Canada.

So if we win, I think it will restore some confidence in our system with Canadians and tell them that, yes, we have to reform the system more, and we can go with other political parties or reform the existing ones so that these later leaders understand and revise their platforms to get back to what is true to parliamentary democracy in our country—that's the best that we can see.

What does it say about, if you win, what does it say about the culpability of our current political leaders? I mean, I don't understand what—if their policies have been shown to violate the most fundamental principles upon which our country maintains its peace and prosperity, its integrity, if they violated that, what does that mean for them?

I mean, what are the consequences of that?

I think the consequences is that either they’d have to do a wholesale reform of their parties or other new parties will emerge with the kind of platform that is implicit in that wing.

Okay, you knew part of one of the people who was involved in the process that led to the establishment of the rules and regulations, the principles that we're discussing was Pierre Elliott Trudeau also.

What do you think his intent was in relationship to the Charter of Rights, and what do you think he wanted?

Less involvement of the provinces. That's why another piece of history, Doctor, that nobody seems to know about is that when we started the process of getting the Charter, it was a 17-month negotiation.

And over halfway through, the Prime Minister of Canada left the table and said, "You're too difficult to deal with," even though it's a federal state—you know, power's in the provinces' powers.

And here's where it's all gone wrong.

And so he left the table and unilaterally passed his own bill to patriate the constitution and have his own version of the Charter, and he went to his own friends in the Supreme Court, who turned him down.

What he was doing was viewed unconstitutional on September 28, 1981. Then he came back to the table, and we got the deal we have now.

So he didn't get his charter. His charter was amended by us because we're in a federal state, and the court ruled, "You cannot do this because you're impacting upon other units of the confederation which have legitimate power."

And so he had to come back to the table, and then we negotiated what became—for example, when you look at the Charter rights and freedoms now in that parchment piece that people see when they go into government Canada sites, and I signed a whole bunch of them at a public meeting last night, there was only one name on that charter—Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s.

That's unconstitutional! All the names of the first ministers need to be on that charter in order for it to be legitimate because it took all the first ministers except Quebec, who wouldn't agree, but all the rest said there were nine provinces and the federal government that signed off on that charter that signed off on that Constitution Act of 1980.

So there's just this insidious thing going on for four or five decades whereby everybody thinks it's Trudeau’s charter.

Trudeau’s charter got defeated by his own court! It was the charter of the provinces and the federal government together that got it approved!

That's a really important piece of history which gives an important backdrop to the nature of our country as the court saw it in 1981, and which one hopes the court will continue to see now in 2022 and 2023.

This is an extremely important thing. The other point that everybody ignores is this: that the charter doesn't begin with section one; it begins with a tiny preamble of one sentence—whereas the country, Canada, whereas we are founded on the principles of the supremacy of God and the rule of law.

And after that sentence, it's not a period; it's not a semicolon or a comma; there's a colon, which says everything follows after this.

And that's another area where the courts and their governments are falling down on the job is that they're supposed to consider everything in the charter in light of two principles: the supremacy of God and the rule of law.

And somehow that, which is a key part of opening the constitution, the introduction of the constitution has been missing.

And that's the other part that I argue very strongly until it's taken out. If somebody says, "We don't have anything about God," well then fine—you’ll have to change the constitution.

But as long as it's in there, those words are just as important as any other words in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, and therefore have to be acknowledged in any rendering of any decision under the Charter.

And so what do you think that means practically in this particular case?

Well, in this particular—in my particular case, I'm arguing very straight on the travel ban.

But one would hope that in the consideration of this lawsuit, that the judges will introduce their case and their decision and relate to the history of the Charter right and also relate to how the Charter opens.

And it's in this context that we will be considering our decisions.

Yeah, well, to some degree, the idea of right itself is predicated on the idea of, I would say it's something approximating the divine worth of each individual, which is what makes us equal before the law.

The rights aren’t—this is a problem I had, I would say in some sense with the Charter of Rights right to begin with because there's some confusion about the derivation of the rights.

Are these rights that are granted to you by your government, or do you have those rights to begin with as a consequence, let's say, of something approximating your relationship with the divine?

And then the government can impose limitations on that only where that's practically necessary. But I suppose the inclusion of that preamble is one of the acts that was taken and articulated properly to put the idea of the intrinsic worth of the individual on something like metaphysical grounds.

So it's a precondition; it's a precondition for the existence of the body of laws and the constitution itself.

Exactly. Exactly. And that's extremely important, and I deliberately introduce this now because I know hardly anybody else in discussions, the Charter and the Constitution Act of 1982, have done so.

That's partly why freedom of religion is so important, and we should say, we're not speaking about this necessarily in specifically religious terms.

There's no difference between freedom of religion and freedom of belief, and there's no difference between freedom of belief and the capacity for independent thought, but also the right to follow the dictates of your own conscience.

Exactly, exactly. And so therefore, it's in the totality of the Charter right that even my lawsuit should be considered and other lawsuits like it.

And so all of this is extremely important in knowing who we are as Canadians and how we're going to function as human beings in some democratic structure into the future, because our democratic structure will be significantly reduced if we lose on having these provisions of the Charter honored again.

Right, so, okay, and so you're also making the case that there's been a tremendous abdication of responsibility on the part of our political leaders, and also the circumvention of our parliamentary processes, which is dangerous procedurally and also a threat to our liberty and freedom and prosperity—all of that. But we also have had that discussion in the context of, in some sense, a broader discussion because you also made the case that it's the degeneration of civic involvement as a consequence of a narrow cynicism that has set up the preconditions for this to occur in the face of an emergency.

And so Canadians shouldn't be patting themselves on the back in self-righteous manners saying, "Those damn politicians have betrayed us." They should be thinking, "Well, that's occurred to some degree, and that's awful, and hopefully unconstitutional, but it's happening in the context of all of us not stepping forward to take our proper place in the governance of society because we're cheaply cynical about politics and lazy and irresponsible."

Absolutely. I couldn't agree more; and that's where the educational system, you know, the whole totality of our society comes into play and the various parts of that society which make it function better.

And one of the great areas is in education. When I taught grade eight back in 1960—in Springdale, Newfoundland—I introduced civics.

There was no civics in the class in school even back then. I introduced it there. There was within the Department of Education's curriculum guidelines the opportunity if any school or teacher wanted to teach it; there was some material available on civics and you could teach a course.

And I went to the principal and asked if I could teach it—this is back in the late 1960s.

So the gradual erosion of our educational system to necessarily include, right, a course on this governance and on the system of government at the municipal, provincial, and federal level was missing even then and continued to be even worse as time went down, and the history got taken out of the course, out of the curriculum.

And some fusion of social studies got rep—well, the whole principles—the principle of the sovereignty of the individual and then the associated sovereignty of the people—that principle cannot abide unless sovereign individuals take responsibility for governance.

And cheap cynicism is no excuse for not engaging in that process. I mean, I've been struck through my whole life talking to young people in particular about their feelings of powerlessness and their separation, in some sense, from the day-to-day operations of the state.

And I got involved in the political party when I was very young. I was 14. It was with the NDP in Alberta with Grant Notley. And that was all about the same time you were operating on the processes that we're describing now.

And one of the things that absolutely shocked me even back then when I was that young was how hungry the political parties were for anyone's involvement, how welcoming they were if you wanted to get involved, and how much scope of movement was available to you as a private citizen almost at your beck and call if you were willing to involve yourself in the political process.

Now I don't think young Canadians—they certainly haven't been taught that that's the case, and they certainly haven't been guided through the training processes necessary to make them aware of the availability of that.

But it's also partly to be laid at the feet of Canadians—is like you could be involved in the political process if you just asked and wanted to be! It's not like these parties aren't crying out for workers, volunteers, and you can move up the ranks very quickly if you're competent.

So there's no excuse for that not happening.

No, no! Absolutely! But the educational system is partly to blame because we're followed through before we become an adult and want to get involved in political affairs.

We have, you know, complete ignorance of how the process works—even the political parties work, like you say—or how the municipal council works, or the school board works, or the province works, what powers are the problems?

What powers does the federal government have? How are we different from the United States of America, which is the elephant that lives next door to us? We should know all of these things, and this should be a course, you know, developed from grades seven or eight up to the last year of high school so that when people graduate, they have a knowledge and an understanding that they can then pursue through university and so on.

Yeah, exactly. Well, we have vague courses that are in the political ideological domain that basically concentrate on something approximating the vague horrors of the past—not that those aren't real and not that we shouldn't take responsibility for them—but they're no substitute for detailed knowledge of the actual structures of governance.

And there's certainly no substitute for the deep respect that should be part and parcel of every Canadian's political view for the integrity of the institutions that have enabled us to live in peace and prosperity for, well, the entire expanse of Canadian history internally and then much in the much broader Western world for hundreds of years before that.

Yeah, exactly!

But what has also happened is that we have the individual, because of the nature of governments over the last 40 years, where the state has taken on more and more say in the operation not only of the society generally but even of the economy and everything that goes with it—plus everything else—is that the sovereignty of the individual, the importance of the individual, your individual action, your individual decisions have become less and less and less.

And so individuals feel somewhat powerless because the state has taken over almost every aspect of their life.

And so every time there's a problem, what is some politician doing about it? Not what am I doing about it as an individual, even over our health care, for example.

It's all been just relegated to the state to the degree that, you know, you’ve got to fix my problem. You know nothing about whether I'm taking my—you know, I have a good diet or if I’m exercising.

It's like this, and back to the pandemic again, this is a really good example of where governments have really fallen down on the job is that everybody knows that vitamin D is very, very important for your health and that it's a great vitamin as it relates to your immune system.

Yet no government in Canada has been advancing and promoting vitamin D during this very critical time when studies have shown that those who have adequate levels of vitamin D have less hospitalizations, protecting those who have, you know,/adequate levels.

So one would think that they're really concerned about public health; one of the first things they should have had at every press conference they had was, "Go get your vitamin D levels tested," right?

And then start taking vitamin D if, in fact, your levels are low. And we all know about 80% of people who live in northern climates like Canada have a deficiency in in vitamin D.

So here we had a really cheap way of helping so the hospitalization rate could have been a lot less than it was just by people taking regular vitamin D.

And so this is a really, really common-sense concept that had lost all meaning in some kind of different approach.

And it all had to be pharmaceutical. It all had to be some kind of, you know, vaccine; it just couldn't be vitamin D and zinc and vitamin C and kerosene and other things like that, not to mention Ivermectin or Hydroxychloroquine, which has been on the market for 40 or 50 years.

Yet they're telling us to take a vaccine that hasn't had the tests that these other two have had.

So let’s recapitulate, and maybe we should close because we covered an awful lot of territory. And I think it'll take the listeners of this podcast a fair bit of time to digest everything that's been discussed already.

And so you’re mounting a challenge to the integrity and constitutional appropriateness of a series of laws that have been passed in Canada over the last two years, and you're mounting that as one of the establishers of the charter upon which the entire country is predicated, making the claim that these actions violate both the spirit and the law that governs our land at the deepest possible level of analysis.

That's the first thing. The second thing is the collusion between the press and the governmental agencies that are circumventing the parliamentary process is so intense that it's almost impossible to have this discussion in the public landscape.

It—they aren't venues for that.

No, I can't. I've tried!

It's not like I haven't tried. I'm not making this kind of statement without evidence. I don't come by all of this lightly.

I don't want to do what I'm doing. I'd rather not have to do this as a Canadian and especially as a first minister who was involved in the council.

Right?

Yeah, this is not trivia.

I've written the National Post; I've written other newspapers, and they have not carried my stuff, nor have they ever gotten back to me.

And all of them also know that I'm out there on my blog, which gets 10,000 to 15,000 readers every day, and a lot of them know that.

So I've had to go to alternate media, and I've done about 50 interviews before I launched this lawsuit—all over Canada, two and three hours long—and I get hundreds and hundreds of emails a day responding to what I'm doing.

And now I've been led to where I am today, to actually, as one individual with others, file a lawsuit against the government of Canada in the federal court on the travel ban to give it specificity so that I can make this kind of lawsuit.

And how do you think, if you had your will, and you were acting in accordance with the idea that someday the sun will shine and have not will be no more, what do you think Canadians should do as a consequence of receiving the information we have today?

And in terms of their reactions to the fact of this lawsuit and its potential outcomes, so if you could call on Canadians to deliver what they should be delivering as individuals given the situation we're in now, what would you recommend for them to do?

I would recommend the following: please don’t go down a bunch of rabbit holes talking about a monarchy of 100 years ago. I get all this all the time—that Canada is only a corporation; it’s not really a country, and all of that.

Stick with what we know for sure. And we know we have a constitution and two written documents. One, when we were formed, another in 1981—they are documents that were passed legally through parliamentary representative democracies and they have been exercised.

They have been used, so the very fact that they've been used makes them a reality because part of our constitution is also custom and convention. And that customer convention proves that what we have is valid.

Okay, so what they should be doing is sticking with the elected—all of the elected people in their legislative assemblies, the ministers, everybody in their legislative assembly right up to the premier and in the federal government.

Go write your MPs; write your MLAs. Ask them and demand meetings with them to go through—what are you doing about this?

What is your argument against—In favor of these mandates when all this information is available? So Canadians must start to really activate their civic responsibilities in a huge way and then involve themselves in legitimate organizations who are open and free that are going to help you do this kind of—a full rights protection.

Okay, so you're saying that we should trust the basic institutions; we should have faith in them because they've worked for us in the past, they've united our country, and are drawn from a tradition that has united countries for long before that.

And that we should start using them properly and responsibly, and also, like in my particular case, the Justice Center for Constitutional Freedoms, Rocco Galati in Toronto, who's got a constitutional foundation, and he's initiating actions against the federal government.

There's another one called the Canadian Constitutional Foundation itself in Ontario—all of these organizations who are looking for the support, financial support; they should be supported because they are very—they're vanguards.

They are—they are protected.

We can put links to them. We can put links to them in the description of this video.

So we'll have my—if you can get your team to give us all the links that you would like to put in the description of the video, then we'll do that, and we'll do our best to get this out.

Well, hopefully tomorrow, as soon as we possibly can.

Well, thank you very much, but I really think that if we get back to participating in our democracy, we can turn this around.

But we—and it may come to also, like the truckers' convoy, now peaceful demonstration, civil disobedience is also a part of democracy—legitimate civil disobedience.

We must protest in front of our legislatures in a peaceful manner, demonstrating and articulating our position in a rational way.

And so part of that is definitely a concern about the manner in which governance itself is being conducted in the county in Canada and a call for a return to parliamentary supremacy and proper procedures.

Absolutely, absolutely.

Well, thank you very much for speaking with me today and for—and for all of the people who are listening to this. Thank you for your attention, and pay attention because this is a non-trivial occurrence.

And if we're careful and wise, maybe we can weave our way through this without having things crumble into anything resembling chaos around us.

Thank you very much. Very great pleasure to meet you, sir. We'll talk again perhaps as this unfolds.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, what's that? There are going to be two things.

Yep.

If Mr. Peckford, and if you can give us short summaries of how it feels for him to have helped build this establishment and to see where we're going with it.

I don't think I've got the energy; I don't think I can do it.

I think, but I do think we should talk about—we should talk about this procedurally. There's two ways we could release this, in my estimation.

We could start with the bio and proceed that way, or we could include—because we started recording. You and I started recording before we even started the discussion; there’s a kind of part of me that thinks we should just also include that.

And so I'm fine with that.

Yeah, that's fine!

Yeah, okay. So what we'll do, we'll get Eric to get you this video as fast as possible, and you can take a look at it, especially the opening, and see if—but I think making this as transparent as possible is exactly the right thing to do.

And so we'll do like no editing, and we'll release everything we can.

Well, you know what? You're right on line with me. That's my whole inclination, my whole instinct; that's the way I've operated all my life, and I beautifully like that!

Yeah! Well, this is one of those—they say that you shouldn't ever, if you like sausages, you should never see how they're being made, but this is one of those situations where people need to see how the sausages are being made.

Yes, absolutely, I couldn't agree more.

Okay! And here I've got another question for you too. Tell me what you think about this: it's conceivable.

So I'm in touch with Rex Murphy all the time, and I’ve told him that something was brewing, although I didn't tell him what.

Do you think it would be worthwhile to get this video to him as fast as we can to see what, first of all, what he thinks about it, but also to inspire him, conceivably, to start attending to this and to working on building his criticism?

That would be—what do you think about that?

I think you could do it, say, tomorrow afternoon, quite likely after the Justice Center released their press release.

Okay. It should be—you can do what you like with it now, but that would be the best timing.

Yes, because you don't want to involve anybody else, no matter how legitimate, until really after the—you can release your things whenever you want; the lawyers have agreed, right?

And that's the agreement I have, so you can preempt the press release but we leave it there until the press release is out tomorrow afternoon.

Then you—the first person you can contact is Rex.

Okay. Will you get your people to put that in writing to me in an email and also include Eric on that? Because I don't want—I'm somewhat scattered as a consequence of the discussion and I don't want to make any mistakes in this procedure.

Okay, okay, okay.

When will the press release—oh, when will the press release be going out?

Tomorrow?

The best I have for my lawyers is tomorrow afternoon.

Tomorrow afternoon?

It could be, you know, three or four o'clock in the afternoon.

Okay, so I'll get going out tomorrow.

Okay, well, I'll get Eric to continue coordinating this with your people. I'm not going to have any time to pay attention to this over the next today because I'm completely stacked with meetings, and I have a public lecture tonight, so I'm going to be kind of out of the loop.

I'm going to leave it in Eric's hands; he's very capable and reliable, and he can just communicate with Peace as you've been doing and the other of the team and copy me, and we'll be back to you right away.

Okay, okay.

All right, well, away we go.

Away we go.

All right, pleasure to meet you, sir. And hopefully, at one point, we'll be able to meet in person.

Yes, and I'll say the last word. I'll say what you have participated in here today is a very important contribution to hopefully restoring our democracy through the Charter.

That's all—it’s important to me. That's the only thing I do from eight o'clock in the morning till eleven o'clock at night, is pursuing the ideas that I pursue with you today.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All of that and that the last statement as well.

Yep, thank you, Tammy.

Okay, so you can handle this, can you?

Yep, absolutely. Teams all prepped and ready to go, so we are going to get started on it as soon as I can get them the files, which will be very soon.

All right.