Fighting the Good Fight—in Court
1. Seeking Justice in a BC Courtroom
If the architects of pandemic lockdowns and vaccine mandates thought their power would insulate them from consequences, they were badly mistaken. According to Freedom Rising’s [1] Covid Court Case Watch, there are currently 24 court cases filed or already underway in Canada and likely many more in the US. (Only five American cases are listed in the report.) Among the issues addressed by these lawsuits are Trudeau’s travel restrictions, failing to address medical experts’ advice, draconian enforcement of Covid measures, invoking the federal Emergency Act in response to the truckers’ convoy, the government’s coercive use of the ArriveCAN app, and of course the multiple infractions against Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms.
But according to Vancouver activist and author Rick Thomas, the one to watch—the one that could determine how many of the other cases are decided—is a class action lawsuit filed by the Canadian Society for the Advancement of Science in Public Policy (CSASPP). According to CSASPP’s website:
“CSASPP’s approach engages the very premise of an alleged emergency. Without an emergency, there can be no basis for extraordinary executive powers, including everything that required or benefited from one. We filed our proposed class action on your behalf on 26 January, 2021, and intend to continue aggressively prosecuting it. Under the civil rules, Dr. Bonnie Henry must personally submit to answering our questions while under oath.”
“Our civil proceeding’s objectives are to obtain any available civil remedy for the maximum number of British Columbians that revert in whole or in part any COVID-19 related statute, ministerial order, regulation, or other executive, regulatory, or legislative measure; past, extant, or proposed; that constrain any activity of any person inadequately supported by either science or law; and that may facilitate that person’s subsequent pursuit of a civil remedy brought against, with preference towards the natural over the legal, any other person complicit in the consultation, enactment, or enforcement of said.”[2]
Thomas was involved with the Freedom movement from its earliest days in Vancouver and quickly became a supporter of the Sue Bonnie campaign fostered by CSASPP. The $15,000 retainer required by the lawyer was raised within a week in 2021; since then a further $300,000 has been raised toward court costs, which are astronomical. Thomas estimates that an average constitutional challenge will cost $1 million to see through to its conclusion. A 40-day trial for the CSASPP class action is scheduled to begin on April 17, 2023, making it by far the largest such trial to date. The certification hearing will be heard December 12. In legal terms having a case ‘certified’ means it must proceed to trial.
“When you have a constitutional case this big you have about 20 hearings before trial,” says Thomas. “It costs $5,000 a day. Most constitutional challenges are about a million bucks, so we’re barely a third of the way there. On the other hand, the truckers raised a couple million dollars in a few weeks. This is probably the biggest lawsuit in the world. Even Justice Crerar has called it a “mega trial” and has reserved the largest courtroom in the Vancouver courthouse. Reiner Fuellmich has signed on to the case and will be there—assuming he can get here. The April trial challenges the legitimacy of the Emergency Measures Act because everything else stems from declaring the pandemic an emergency. If it’s illegitimate then all the pandemic measures were illegal.”
An application has been made to have the trial live-streamed on the Internet; this alone cost $25,000, with no guarantee Justice Crerar will allow it. Thomas is optimistic, though; so far the judge has been willing to hear the case despite Bonnie Henry’s legal team petitioning for an immediate dismissal. Also advising the Sue Bonnie campaign is Kip Warner, not a lawyer but a legal autodidact who successfully sued Google over privacy rights. CSASPP has launched two other lawsuits—one to strike down the mandatory vaccine for healthcare workers; the other challenging all pandemic restrictions, in particular the unconstitutional shutdown of three Lower Mainland churches. Thomas says they are currently awaiting a decision from Justice Christopher Hinkson regarding the mandatory vaccination policy. If the judge rules against this egregious policy it could have an enormous impact on BC’s collapsing healthcare system. As I wrote in “Avoiding the Elephants in the Room,”[3] at least 2,500 BC healthcare workers have been fired for exercising their Charter right to refuse the experimental Covid-19 injections. This has worsened an already existing chronic staff shortage, causing health authorities to severely restrict emergency services in remote BC communities, while virtually shutting down entire departments. Thomas says Justice Hinkson’s “tone” has changed considerably from earlier in that trial.
“It appears to me the legal profession is starting to wake up. One lawyer I spoke to said he was vaccinated but felt it was an issue of personal choice. It’s just becoming so blatant, all the athletes dropping dead, all the doctors in Ontario dying. The pandemic is about to be put on trial; they have to refute everything and they’re going to have a very hard time of that. All the stats are on our side. But what the defense will try to do is find some reason to throw it out. Bonnie Henry’s lawyers have tried different tactics to get the class action thrown out.”
Henry’s legal team tried to argue what is known in legal terms as “standing,” that is, that CSASPP lacks legitimacy as an established organization and thus has no standing to make a legal petition in court. However, as CSASPP’s own website makes clear, it is a registered non-profit group that is a “non-partisan, secular, crowd funded, and volunteer driven organization that was created in response to popular community demand for a direct action initiative to counter BC’s COVID-19 related measures.” Thomas says the argument was so “lame” the judge actually laughed at Henry’s team and allowed the case to proceed. Government lawyers also tried to argue that the April 17 trial date gives them insufficient time to prepare but Justice Crerar said he won’t be changing the date.
2. Romancing the Resistance
In addition to supporting the Sue Bonnie campaign, Thomas has just released a new book, Fringe Minority: A Report From the Trenches of the Canadian Freedom Movement, primarily a memoir of his own experience with the Freedom movement. Prior to launching the new book, he also published a book with the provocative title, How to Defeat the New World Order. Thomas is the author of 10 previous books, ranging from a book about the music industry (he is also a musician), fiction, nonfiction, and spiritual books along with a couple of novels. He was in the middle of a novel about a fictional civil war in the US when the pandemic hit, forcing him to decide whether to abandon it or do a major rewrite. Thomas was forced to quit jobs in Vancouver tourism because his employers refused to recognize his legitimate mask exemption. He and his partner started attending rallies and then got involved in organizing “at least” 150 events, including workshops, meetings, and film festivals.
In Fringe Minority, Thomas explores both the national Freedom movement and the means used by the federal government to undermine it. Many social media agents trashing the Freedom movement can be traced back to the antihate.ca website funded by the Liberal government, which had an ad seeking agents at $55,000 per year. It has produced messaging that paints resistors as “racist,” “far right,” “conspiracy theorists,” etc. Despite being pitched as bipartisan, says Thomas, the site has a decidedly left-wing bias. A classic tactic of governments fighting insurgency movements is to sow internal division. Sadly, this has worked well, although divisions naturally occur in any movement comprised of people drawn from widely diverse backgrounds. Government counter-insurgency campaigns tend to focus on widening these divisions even further. Thomas estimates there are now 400 different groups in Canada.
“The Twitter accounts are all listed and they’re all connected to antihate.ca. It’s a private intelligence agency and they’ve even said so themselves. The chapter about intel is all about the research I dug up on social media agents who know more about our movement than anybody else, including some of us. Half of it is stuff that we went through here, about the division and the mistakes the movement made. The divisions that happened in Vancouver were the worst in Canada; it was downright vicious, social media infighting and it’s really focused around the two lawsuits, ours and Action4Canada’s. Before the lawsuits started there was already division between the two camps but the lawsuits divided them even further. I’m prejudiced, so of course I think we’re on the right team.”
Fringe Minority also provides historical context for the anti-vaccination movement, which began in Britain in the 19th century when the government there tried to make vaccination mandatory. “It’s all been used before, it’s the same playbook—the scale is just vastly bigger. It’s a long battle for our health freedom that was started a long time ago and we’re part of a tradition of people protesting against this.”
Having written a book titled How to Defeat the New World Order, I asked Thomas if he was optimistic about the future, and what he thinks we need to do to make it a good one. In the short term, he says, he isn’t optimistic. Doctors and scientists analyzing the data on the experimental vaccines are saying the huge spike in excess mortality we’re seeing isn’t over yet; [4] some believe that within 2–3 years of the vaccination campaign we could see as many as a billion people globally die from complications and another billion injured for life. “That’s a conservative estimate, because at least 1 in 3 of the vaccines are lethal. Another third are placebo and the other third are experimental,” says Thomas. On the other hand, he sees the crisis as an opportunity for a “Greater Reset,” and that the World Economic Forum’s agenda for a “Great Reset” is actually “dead on arrival.”
“This is the biggest crisis and yet also the biggest opportunity. I think this is the end of the new world order. Any economist will tell you the Ponzi scheme of the Western world is unsustainable, it can’t continue. We also need separation of corporation and state, media and state. All our modern rights arose from the rebellion against the church and its union with the state. The party political system needs to end; in the US it just ends up a Coke vs. Pepsi war. The ultimate answer is to reverse engineer what they did which is to get us spiritually and philosophically back into a God-centred world. We can’t fight from the perspective of trying to fight only for our special interest group.”
To that end, Thomas believes it’s critical that those in the Freedom movement set aside their personal and political differences toward achieving this common goal. Whatever our personal opinions of BLM, conservatives or leftists, he sees a movement toward the centre as critical, with mutual respect for everyone’s right to free speech and spiritual practice. As I write in Words from the Dead, when it comes to spirituality, it’s not so much the content of faith that matters so much as the act of faith as the core of an ethical life. The principle of free speech thus applies equally to the global diversity of religious belief—a ‘live and let live’ doctrine, except where religion is used as cover for violence and terrorism.
“There’s leftists, Marxists, libertarians, all kinds in our movement. It’s just that the conservatives saw it first—the leftists were late to the party. The challenge for the conservatives in our movement is to put aside their political differences and shake hands with the left, whom they’ve been trashing their whole lives. I think at this time we all need to hug the centre; not for people to abandon their politics, but just to build bridges.”
[1] https://freedomrising.info
[2] https://www.covidconstitutionalchallengebc.ca or www.suebonnie.ca
[3]
[4] “What Is the Cause of Increased Mortality Rates?” Children’s Health Defense, September 2, 2022: https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/increased-mortality-rates-cola/?utm_source=salsa&eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=5c1c397c-a8bf-4d71-bb5c-2aa4b1990322
Thanks Finn. What I have tried to tell Freedom leaders is that the government is an old hand at sowing dissension among the ranks of resisters, while we are mostly well-meaning but inexpert dissidents. As you say, the cracks in the dissent are what will be exploited and prolonged. But humans being what they are, I'm not sure there's any easy answer to the problem. The courts are sometimes the only language power brokers understand but the gatekeepers ensure that the costs are so high that for most justice is too expensive.
Thanks Sean, very hopeful summary.
Here's an editorial I wrote on the topic of Hate Speech:
Hate Speech; bring it on !
Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder but hate is certainly in the ear as well!
Being born into a Jewish family you can reasonably assume that I am well aware when anti-Semitism rears its ugly head. The mildest form of a-S are words (sticks and stones etc!), at least they are not physical! Anti-Semitism is the World's oldest and perennial prejudice and nothing will change that. That some people have an antipathy, an irrational hatred of Jews is just a fact of their lives, and trying to forbid its peaceful(?) expression is more than just a waste of time, it drives it underground to be later possibly expressed in violent acts. But enough about me.
So then, Hate Speech has its uses (or abuses!). The tragedy is that the term Hate Speech has become so widely interpreted as to include almost everything that offends. There already exist laws against a-S; what good have they done, and will more do better? Freedom includes Freedom Of Speech; if you don't like what I'm saying, don't listen. If you don't like what's on TV, change the channel. If you don't like what you're reading, don't buy it: Grow Up!
If I say something that offends you although that's not my intention, then who has created the problem? Freedom Of Speech would eliminate the need for or impact of Political Correctness (Ugh!), Wokeness including CRT, Cancel Culture and Virtue Signalling, and wouldn't that be a relief?
Now don't get me wrong, I am totally against HS that is intended to generate and encourage acts of actual physical violence, or the 'legal' stealing of one's assets as in frozen Bank Accounts and blocked Credit Cards etc as was employed by our government recently. I also consider the physical violation of our bodies by mandated jabs as covert HS by using incessant propaganda. Even the Heritage Minister has targeted 'offensive' to him, books and documents in the Archives to be (figuratively) burned; how's your memories on this? And where will it all end?
Removing statues of historical figures is also another form of HS; if the statue offends you, don't look at it. Elevating one race or ethnic group over any or all others is also HS, or should I say, BS!
HS then is an extreme manifestation of intolerance of the Other or their views, and a-S between Moslems and Jews is ethnically, religiously or culturally a form of self hate; go figure!
As the saying goes, Who among you can cast the first stone? Or better, If thine eye offends thee, pluck it out!
Steve Friedman, West Kelowna.