Technocracy Triumphant

Taking the attitude “who am I to judge” is, under many circumstances, appropriate and admirable.   There is one circumstance, however, when it is extremely inappropriate and reprehensible.   That is when you are a justice of Her Majesty’s bench before whom one person or group has brought another person or group, complaining that the latter has injured them in violation of the law and asking you for redress of their wrongs.   If you happen to be in that situation then your job – your only job – is to hear the case, weight the evidence, and issue a ruling, in short – to judge.   To plead humility as an excuse for not doing so is to abandon your duty.

 

 

Earlier this year, in the late spring, Chief Justice Glenn Joyal of the Court of Queen’s Bench of Manitoba heard evidence that lawyers representing the Justice Centre for Constitutional Freedoms presented on behalf of the Gateway Bible Baptist Church in Thompson, along with six other congregations, two ministers and one other individual in two related but distinct constitutional challenges to the provincial bat flu public health orders. (1)   One of these challenged the sweeping powers with insufficient accountability that had been given to the Chief Public Health Officer.   The other challenged portions of the public health orders themselves on the grounds that they violated the fundamental freedoms named in the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in such a way as could not be justified by the “reasonable limitations” clause of the Charter’s Section 1.    The evidence in these challenges was heard in May.   After taking the summer to deliberate or take a vacation or go for the world’s record in thumb twiddling or whatever, last week on the twenty-first of October Chief Justice Joyal finally ruled in these cases.   For the purposes of distinction the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of the powers of the Chief Public Health Officer will be called “the first ruling” and the ruling with regards to the constitutionality of portions of the orders will be called “the second ruling”.

 

 

The Chief Justice ruled against the applicants in both cases.    In one sense, however, the second ruling could be called a non-ruling.   In paragraph 292 we find the following:

 

 

I say that while recognizing and underscoring that fundamental freedoms do not and ought not to be seen to suddenly disappear in a pandemic and that courts have a specific responsibility to affirm that most obvious of propositions.

 

 

This is very good and right.   The problem is that the next sentence begins with a “but.”   Apart from the bad grammar involved – Chief Justice Joyal is old enough to have still had the rule never to begin a sentence with a conjunction like “but” drilled into him in grade school – buts have this nasty habit of leading into material that completely negates everything that precedes the “but”.   Here is what followed:  

 

 

But just as I recognize that special responsibility of the courts, given the evidence adduced by Manitoba (which I accept as credible and sound), so too must I recognize that the factual underpinnings for managing a pandemic are rooted in mostly scientific and medical matters. Those are matters that fall outside the expertise of courts. Although courts are frequently asked to adjudicate disputes involving aspects of medicine and science, humility and the reliance on credible experts are in such cases, usually required. In other words, where a sufficient evidentiary foundation has been provided in a case like the present, the determination of whether any limits on rights are constitutionally defensible is a determination that should be guided not only by the rigours of the existing legal tests, but as well, by a requisite judicial humility that comes from acknowledging that courts do not have the specialized expertise to casually second guess the decisions of public health officials, which decisions are otherwise supported in the evidence.

 

 

This constitutes an abdication of the very responsibility he had just acknowledged.   If fundamental freedoms still exist in a pandemic, and it is the court’s special responsibility to affirm this, this means that the court cannot defer to the public health authorities, the medical experts, on the question of whether their own measures are reasonable and justified.   If civil authority A is accused of trampling on the public’s fundamental freedoms, and the court defers to the expertise of civil authority A on the question of whether the latter’s actions are reasonable and justified, this translates into “civil authority A can do whatever he sees fit, there are no limits on his powers to which the court will hold him accountable”.    Indeed, saying that courts should be guided not just by the “rigours of the existing legal tests” but a “humility” that forbids them to “casually second guess” the decisions of public health officials is tantamount to saying that medical science is a higher authority than the law.  (2)

 

 

In the sections of the ruling that immediately follow the paragraph from which we have quoted, we see what this “judicial humility” looks like in practice.   In these pages Chief Justice Joyal considers the question of whether the public health orders meet the standards of the Oakes test.    The Oakes test was established by the Supreme Court of Canada in 1986 to determine whether legislation or other government action that infringes upon Charter rights and freedoms is nevertheless permitted under the “reasonable limitations” clause.     To pass, the infringement must first be shown to serve a “pressing and substantial objective”.   Second, the infringement must be show to be proportional, which means that it must a) be shown to be rationally connected to the objective, b) be shown to only minimally impair the right(s) and/or freedom(s) in question and c) be shown to provide a benefit to the public that is greater than the harm done by impairing the right(s) and/or freedom(s).  (3)  For each of the stages of this test, the Chief Justice essentially takes the position that because Brent Roussin decided, after weighing all the information available to him, that each public health order he issued was what was necessary at the time, therefore the orders meet the standards of the test.    Such a ruling in effect declares that Brent Roussin, as Chief Public Health Officer, is above the law insofar as he is acting in the capacity of his office.   If the court defers to him as to whether his actions in the capacity of his office meet the standards of constitutionality set in the Oakes test or not, then he is above the Oakes test and the Charter and cannot be held accountable to either.

 

 

The ramifications of this extend far beyond the issues pertaining to the public health orders and the pandemic.  What it means is that while we remain in form the country that we were, governed by a parliament under the reign of a constitutional monarch, in which Common Law and Charter nominally protect our rights and freedoms, in actual practice we have become a medical technocracy.

 

 

Anyone inclined to think that this is a good thing, or even a tolerable thing, is invited to consider the words of C. S. Lewis:

 

 

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be "cured" against one's will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.  (God in the Dock, 1948)

 

 

This description fits the rule of medical technocrats to a tee.  

 

 

That a de facto medical technocracy is inimical to the freedom that permeates our parliamentary form of government, our constitutional monarchy, and the Common Law is the real issue at the heart of the other challenge.   This was the challenge to the constitutionality of the provincial legislature’s having named Brent Roussin dictator, with Jazz Atwal as his Master of Horse, for the duration of the pandemic, which had to be framed, of course, as a challenge to the sections of the Manitoba Public Health Act (2009) which provided for this situation.   These are sections 13 and 67.   Section 67 empowers the Chief Public Health Officer to take special measures if he “reasonably believes” that “a serious and immediate threat to public health exists because of an epidemic or threatened epidemic of a communicable disease” which “cannot be prevented, reduced or eliminated” without the special measures.   Section 13 allows him to delegate his own power under the Act to a deputy.  

 

 

Chief Justice Joyal ruled that this two-fold delegation of power, first from the legislature to the Chief Public Health Officer, second from the latter to his deputy was constitutional.   In the course of explaining his decision he made a number of statements that suggest a troubling sympathy with the technocratic impulse of the age.   He gave his approval to the province’s claim that with the “emergence of new threats such as SARS, West Nile, monkey pox and the avian flu” it was important that the government focus on the “modernization of the PHA”.   The modernization of the Public Health Act, that is to say, bringing it in line with contemporary trends around the world, means making it more technocratic.   In this context the Chief Justice asserted with regards to the centralization of the public health system in the person of the Chief Public Health Officer that:

 

 

the act sets out the powers afforded to public health officials to address communicable diseases and importantly, it also constrains those powers so as to ensure an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health  (first ruling, 12).

 

 

Does it ensure such an appropriate balance?   As this is the quod erat demonstrandum, this forthright assertion of it would seem to be a classic example of petitio principia, especially when we consider the weakness of everything that was then put forward in support of the assertion. After providing quotations from speeches in the legislative assembly at the time the new Public Health Act was being debated that show that the legislators acknowledged the need for such a balance, the Chief Justice finally specified the constraints this Act supposedly places on the powers it gives to the Chief Public Health Officer (first ruling, 17).   Not a single one of these is a real check that prevents the office of the Chief Public Health Officer from being corrupted into a medical technocratic tyranny by the excessive emergency power vested in it.

 

 

The first of these is that the official must believe there is a public health emergency that requires special measures to be taken.   The third is that the orders require the prior approval of the Minister of Health.   The fourth is the stipulation in section 3 of the Public Health Act that the restrictions on rights and freedoms of the special measures be as few as possible, the equivalent to the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.  In practice, the attitude of deferral to the specialized medical expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer on the part of the Minister of Health ensures that none of these constitutes a real constraint.   The sixth, which is that the Chief Public Health Officer must be a physician, is a limit on who the Minister of Health can appoint to the office not a limit on use of the powers of that office by the officeholder.   The seventh and final “constraint” pertains only to the secondary matter of the sub delegation of the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers to his deputy.  This leaves the second and fifth, both of which warrant special comment and so have been reserved for last.

 

The second “constraint” is that under subsection 2 of section 67 “the types of orders that can be made are clearly delineated”.   This is true, but the types so delineated are so extensive that this is not much of a limitation even without taking into consideration how much further deferral to the expertise of the Chief Public Health Officer would stretch them.

 

The fifth is the stipulation in subsection 4 of section 67 that “an order requiring a person to be immunized cannot be enforced if the person objects.”    Although this looks like a real constraint on the Chief Public Health Officer’s powers, for several months now he has gotten away with making a total mockery of this stipulation by doing everything short of strapping objectors down and forcing the needle into them to compel them to be “immunized”.

 

 

Therefore, quite to the contrary of what Chief Justice Joyal claims (first ruling, 18) these constraints provide no real protection against the danger of the powers the Public Health Act confers upon the Chief Public Health Officer in a public health emergency being used to run roughshod over our rights and freedoms. Whatever the intention of the legislators in 2009, the Public Health Act fails to provide an appropriate balance between individual rights and the protection of public health.   Instead, it places all the weight on the side of the latter. 

 

 

It needs to be stated here that the need for an appropriate balance between individual rights and freedoms on the one hand and the public good on the other is a truism.   The art of statecraft – politics in the best sense of the word – could be said to reduce to finding just this balance.   The problem, at least in Canada, is that for decades now we have only ever seemed to have heard this truism trotted out whenever someone is insisting that individual rights and freedoms need to make cessions to the public good.   Balance requires that there also be cessions from the public good to individual rights and freedoms.   Indeed, since the vast majority of decisions that need to be made in any complex society have to do with the good of individuals and small groups, rather than the good of the society as a whole, and it is individual rights and freedoms that ensure that those making such decisions are the ones most competent to do so, which with only rare exceptions means the individuals and small groups directly concerned, balance arguably requires far more cessions to individual rights and freedoms from the public good, than the other way around.

 

 

The basic assumption of technocracy is contrary to all of this.   This is the assumption that technical knowledge – the kind of specialized knowledge in any field that qualifies one as an expert – renders one competent to make decisions for other people if the expert’s field at all touches upon those decisions.   This assumption is laughably false – technical expertise in one field does not translate into technical expertise in another field, much less all fields, and it is rare that a decision requires information from only one field.   The most technical knowledge ought to qualify an expert for is to advise people in the making of their own decisions, not to make those decisions for them.   Indeed, were we to assume that the greater an individual's expertise is in one specialized field, the greater his ignorance will be in all others, and the more utterly incompetent he will be at making decisions for himself, let alone other people, our assumption would be wrong, but a lot less wrong than the assumption inherent in technocracy.

 

Technocracy is odious enough when it takes the form of the army of civil servants, passing the endless regulations that boss people around and tell them what to do in their own homes and how to run their own businesses, by which Liberal Prime Ministers have so effectively circumvented the constraints of our Crown-in-Parliament constitution in order to impose their will upon Canadians.   A medical technocracy enacted in a public health emergency is far worse.   Throughout history, mankind has been much more often plagued by tyranny than by insufficient government power, by too many rules than by too few, and the exploitation of emergencies, real or manufactured, and the fear they engender in the public, is the normal means whereby a tyrant seizes unconstitutional power.   For this reason it is imperative than  in any emergency, those empowered to deal with the emergency be subjected to even greater scrutiny and held to even stricter accountability, than in ordinary circumstances.   This is the opposite of the attitude of deference that Chief Justice Joyal contended for in 281-283 of the second ruling, and which he reiterated in the first sentence of 292, “In the context of this deadly and unprecedented pandemic, I have determined that this is most certainly a case where a margin of appreciation can be afforded to those making decisions quickly and in real time for the benefit of the public good and safety.” (4)

 

 

This deference is fatal to the court’s role as the guardian of fundamental freedoms.    Chief Justice Joyal acknowledged (284), as, in fact, did the province, that these freedoms were violated, and that therefore the onus is upon the government to justify the violation.  (5)  When the court gives this “margin of appreciation” to “those making decisions quickly and in real time”, however, is it possible for the province to fail to meet this onus in the court’s eyes?

 

 

Consider the arguments that the province made that it met the “minimal impairment” requirement of the Oakes test.   Chief Justice Joyal reproduced (303) the reasons the province offered in support of this contention from paragraph 52 of their April 12, 2021 brief.  Reason c) begins with “Unlike some other jurisdictions, there was no curfew imposed or a ‘shelter in place’ order that would prevent people from leaving their home other than for limited reasons”.   That you cannot validly justify your own actions by pointing to the worse actions of someone else is something that anyone with even the most basic of training in logical reasoning should immediately recognize.   The same reason includes the sentences “It was still possible to gather with family and friends at indoor and outdoor public places, up to the gathering limit of 5 people” and “An exception was also made for people who live on their own to allow one person to visit.”   Offering these as “reasons” why the public health order forbidding people to meet with anyone other than members of their own household in their own homes for over three months only “minimally impaired” our freedoms of association and assembly is adding insult to injury.  That is called throwing people crumbs, not keeping your infringement on their freedoms to a minimum.   “Minimally impair” is not supposed to mean to impair the freedom to the point that it is minimal.

 

 

Reason e) which pertains to freedom of religion is no better.   The province declared that there was an “attempt to accommodate religious services”.   The first example of this that they gave is that “Religious services could still be delivered remotely indoors, or outdoors in vehicles”.   It seems rather rich of the province to offer the latter up as proof that they tried to only minimally impair freedom of religion when, in fact, the churches that offered such services had to fight to obtain that concession. 

 

 

Had Brent Roussin forgotten that he had initially banned drive-in services when he ordered churches to close in the so-called “circuit break” last fall?  

 

 

Or rather had he remembered that it was Chief Justice Joyal who on the fifth of December last year had ruled that drive-in services were in violation of the public health orders before he, that is Roussin, amended the orders to allow for these services?  

 

 

Either way it is rather disingenuous of him to make this allusion in this context.  

 

 

The next sentence is even worse.    “As well, individual prayer and reflection was permitted.”    So, because he didn’t ban people from praying by themselves in the privacy of their own homes, which even officially Communist countries never attempted, he is to be credited for only “minimally impairing” our freedom of religion by forbidding us to obey God’s commandment to forsake not the assembly of ourselves, forbidding us to sing God’s praises as a community of faith, and forbidding us from partaking of the Holy Sacrament?   Indeed, what this sentence tells us is that the person who wrote it thinks a) that individuals need the permission of government to pray and reflect in private, b) that it is within the powers of government to withhold such permission and forbid private prayer and reflection, and c) government's not having done so means that their violations of our freedom of religion and worship have been minimal and reasonable.      

 

 

Any sort of cognitive filter that allows a Chief Justice to look at this sort of nonsense and conclude from it that the province has met its onus of justifying its impairment of our fundamental freedoms as the minimum necessary under the circumstances is clearly a dysfunctional filter that ought to be immediately discarded.

 

 

Indeed, the province’s arguments illustrate the point made above about technocracy being inimical to freedom, constitutional government, and the balance between individual right and public good.   Technical knowledge or specialized knowledge in a field of expertise, as stated above, does not translate into expertise in another field, much less expertise in all fields.  Indeed, it tends towards a certain kind of deficiency in general reasoning that could be regarded as a sort of tunnel vision.   It is called déformation professionelle in French and is similar to what is called the Law of the Instrument, illustrated in Abraham Maslow’s proverb about how if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.   A physician’s technical expertise is in the field of medicine – treating sickness and injury and promoting health.   He will therefore be inclined to subordinate everything else to the goals of his profession.   In an epidemic or pandemic, this inclination will be all the more exaggerated.  To a medical expert in such a situation, the answer to the question of what public health orders constitute the minimal necessary restrictions on fundamental freedoms will look very different than it does to those who do not share this narrow focus.   

 

 

Consider the words that George Grant in his important discussion (Technology and Justice, 1986) of the implications of the increasing technologization of society identified as encapsulating spirit of technological thought, J. Robert Oppenheimer’s “when you see that something is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”  The significance of these words is that the technological mind is inclined to reject external limitations, such as those of ethics, that stand between it and the actual doing of whatever it finds itself capable.    Modern medical thinking is thoroughly technological and Oppenheimer’s thought, translated into that of a physician and epidemiologist overseeing a pandemic, would be "when you see that you can slow the spread of the disease by doing A, you go ahead and do A".   A might have a thousand other effects, all negative, but the mind that prioritizes slowing the spread of an epidemic over all other concerns can acknowledge this and still come to the conclusion that the benefit outweighs the harm, demonstrating that its ability to make calculations of this sort is seriously impaired.  (6)

 

 

It is absolutely essential that those charged with the duty of protecting our fundamental rights and freedoms and holding government to its constitutional limits, recognize how the very nature of medical expertise tends towards the skewing of the medical expert’s perspective in this way and that therefore he is the last person to whose opinion government ministers and judges should defer in determining whether public health orders infringing upon fundamental freedoms are constitutionally justified out of necessity.

 

 

 

For the courts to fail to recognize this is for the courts to shirk their duty and acquiesce as our country succumbs to the tyranny of technocracy. (7)

 

 

 (1)   The applicants were the churches: Gateway Bible Baptist Church (Thompson), Pembina Valley Baptist Church (Winkler), Redeeming Grace Bible Church (Morden), Grace Covenant Church (Altona), Slavic Baptist Church, Christian Church of Morden, Bible Baptist Church (Brandon); ministers: Tobias Tissen (pastor of Church of God, Restoration in Sarto, just south of Steinbach) and Thomas Rempel (deacon of Redeeming Grace Bible Church); and individual:  Ross MacKay.

(2)   Tom Brodbeck’s editorial commenting on these rulings for the local Liberal Party propaganda rag - or paper of record, depending upon your perspective – was given the headline “Case Closed, Science Wins”.

(3)   There is an unfortunate tautology here in that proportionality is the term used for both all three stages of the second step of the test taken together and the third stage of the same.

(4)   The pandemic is “unprecedented” only in the sense that the measures taken to combat it have been unprecedented in their extremity.   The Spanish Flu which ended about a century before the bat flu pandemic began killed between 25-50 million people.   The bat flu has killed about 5 million over the course of a similar span of time.   Not only is the total of the Spanish Flu much larger than that of the bat flu, it represents a much larger percentage of the world’s population which was considerably smaller at the time.   It took place at a time when health care and medical treatment options were far more limited than they are today, and yet public health orders never came close to what they are today, despite the earlier pandemic having started in a time of war when people were already accustomed to emergency restrictions.

(5)  Many of the news articles reporting on these rulings have been extremely misleading.   Several have reported that the Chief Justice ruled that no Charter rights were violated.   This is true only in the sense that there is a distinction between rights and freedoms and that the Chief Justice ruled against there having been a violation of Section 7 and Section 15 rights.   With regards to Section 2 fundamental freedoms, however, he ruled – and the province admitted – that these had been violated, and that therefore there was a burden of justification on the government to prove these violations to be constitutional in accordance with Section 1.  As the discussion of Section 2 was by far the most important part of the case, to summarize the entire ruling as if it were all about the Sections 7 and 15 challenges, is to utterly distort it.  

(6)   Suppose that a virus is spreading which, if unchecked, will cause 10 000 deaths.   The public health officer, if he takes Action B, can prevent the epidemic and all of those deaths.   However, Action B will itself cause 10 000 other deaths.   The number of deaths will be the same whether action is taken or not.   Should the public health officer take this action or do nothing?   It would be odious to attempt to resolve the dilemma by comparing the value of the 10 000 lives lost the one way, with the value of the 10 000 lives lost the other.   The person who makes the case for the public health officer’s taking Action B, therefore, would have to reason along the lines that since it is the public health officer’s duty to combat epidemics and save lives threatened by disease, and the intent behind Action B would be to save the 10 000 threatened by the epidemic not kill the other 10 000, Action B should be taken and the 10 000 lost to it considered collateral damage.   The person who would argue the other side would point out that the 10 000 lost to the epidemic would die of natural causes, that the 10 000 lost as a result of Action B would die as the direct consequence of human action, and that the human moral culpability for taking an action that directly results in a death is greater than the human moral culpability for not taking an action that would prevent a death by natural cause, ergo it is worse to take Action B than to not do so.   Which of these two arguments is the most persuasive.  I would suggest that for people who are both normal and capable of rational, human, moral thought, the second of the two arguments is likely to be the most persuasive, and that those persuaded by the first of the two arguments are most likely to be found among medical experts.

(7)   That technological science was leading us to a universal technocracy which would be the worst of all tyrannies was a warning sounded frequently throughout the Twentieth Century by such thinkers as Jacques Ellul (The Technological Society, 1954, Perspectives on Our Age, 1981), C. S. Lewis (The Abolition of Man, 1943, That Hideous Strength, 1945), and René Girard (I Saw Satan Fall Like Lightning, 1999).   In Canada, George Grant played the role of Cassandra on this theme, which runs through his entire corpus of work from Philosophy in the Mass Age (1959) to Technology and Justice (1986).   It was central to the thesis of his 1965 jeremiad Lament for a Nation that by succumbing to the technologically driven capitalism of America, Canada was losing the pre-liberal traditions that informed her founding, and would be drawn like the rest of the world into the “universal homogenous state”, a technocracy that the ancients had predicted would be the ultimate tyranny.   Technological science, as he argued in the first essay of Technology and Justice, begins as man’s mastery of nature, but progresses into man’s master of himself, which translates into his mastery of other people.   He did not shrink from implicating modern medicine along with other more obvious culprits in this.

 

 

 

Brian Pallister Removes All Doubt

There is an old saw that goes “it is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt”.   It has been attributed to pretty much everyone with a reputation for folksy wisdom of this sort from the last millennium or so, and is sometimes ascribed to sources of ancient wisdom such as Confucius.   Indeed, it could be taken as a rough paraphrase of Proverbs 17:28.    Homer, when confronted with it in an early episode of The Simpsons, promptly set about illustrating it.  Internally, he asked himself “What does that mean?  Better say something or they’ll think you’re stupid”, and then blurted out “Takes one to know one”, after which his inner voice applauds this supposedly witty comeback.  Brian Pallister, premier of my province of Manitoba in the Dominion of Canada, is either unfamiliar with the adage or he has decided to follow in the footsteps of Homer Simpson.

 

On Tuesday, the day his public health mandarin Roussin informed us that he would finally be lifting the vile and absurd requirement that we gag and muzzle ourselves with face diapers in indoor public places which tyrannical order ought never to have been imposed on us in the first place, Pallister ensured that this news would be overshadowed by issuing a poorly worded apology for his remarks of the seventh of July. 

 

In those remarks for which he apologized, he had not said anything bad about anyone – except the Marxist terrorist mob that had vandalized the statues of Canada’s founding and reigning monarchs on Dominion Day and who deserved his rebuke.   Nor had he said anything that could be reasonably interpreted as justifying historical wrongs that had been done to anyone.   Note the adverb “reasonably”.   The interpretations of the nitwits and nincompoops whose thinking has been perverted and corrupted by being infected with the academic Marxist virus of Critical Race Theory, a pathogen far more deadly and dangerous than the bat flu, don’t count.   His comments were entirely positive and affirming, but because they were positive and affirming about the people who settled and built Canada, that is to say the very people whom the “Year Zero” Cultural Maoists wish to erase from history, they were met with outrage and outcry on the part of the same.

 

In other words he had said nothing for which he owed anyone an apology.   Indeed, he owed it to Canada and to all patriotic Canadians regardless of their racial, ethnic, and cultural backgrounds, not to apologize for his remarks.   This is because to give in to the demand that he apologize for his remarks of the seventh of July is apologize for the very existence of Canada.    Canada owes nobody an apology for her existence.   Academic Marxists who think otherwise, and the far too many who speak for them in government and in the media, need to be slapped down hard, not coddled with apologies intended to appease.

 

Astonishingly, for someone who gives the impression of being a man who is quite proud of the fact that his only ethics are those acquired in the schoolyard, Pallister would appear to have forgotten one of the most basic lessons of the same – bullies cannot be appeased.   Bullies feed off of the weakness of their prey.  By appeasing them, people merely announce their own weakness and let the bullies know where their next meal can be found.  

 

Surely Pallister must realize that those who have been demanding that he grovel and eat his innocuous words spoken in defence of the people who built this country are bullies.   What other word could better describe those who make such irrational demands knowing that they can count on the Crown broadcaster, the “paper of record”, and most of the other public opinion-generating media to back them up, with nary a word of dissent?

 

Therefore, Pallister should have known that there was no apology that he could make that would have satisfied these wolves.   The fact that he has spent the last year and a half throwing his weight around, telling Manitobans they cannot meet with their friends in either public places or their own homes, blaming Manitobans for when his own draconian policies failed to produce the desired effect of a drop in bat flu cases, berating and insulting the few of us who dared stand up for our constitutional rights and freedoms, and trying to blackmail us all into agreeing to take a hastily prepared, experimental new medical treatment, might help explain why he failed to grasp this.   Having enjoyed playing the bully himself for so long he forgot what to do when on the receiving end of bullying.  

 

In this situation, offering an apology of any sort, was the worst thing Pallister could have done.     The people demanding that he apologize are not interested in receiving an apology from him, sincere or otherwise.   They want to remove him from office and replace him with the one man in Manitoba who would have handled the situation of the last year and a half worse than he.    Whereas the role of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition is supposed to be to hold the government accountable to the elected assembly for its actions and to speak out when the government abuses its power, Wab Kinew, the leader of the provincial socialists, has spent the pandemic, not calling Pallister out for how his actions have trampled the most basic constitutional rights and freedoms of Manitobans, destroyed businesses and livelihoods, and done tremendous harm to our mental, social, and overall wellbeing, but saying that he should have locked us down harder, faster, and kept us in lockdown longer.   When groups who have been speaking out about how our rights and especially our religious freedoms were endangered by the lockdown measures met with one of Pallister’s minister’s to express their concerns, Kinew condemned the government for agreeing to meet with them and hear their point of view.    Those who want this man to become our next premier, either can see nothing wrong with a government strategy of closing all businesses and paying people to stay home for the duration of a pandemic, or don’t care about his policies and want him in power for no reason other than his race, while accusing those of us who do very much see something wrong with his political philosophy and strategy of being racists for opposing him.

 

If we limit the options to those of which Pallister is capable, the best thing he could have done would have been to follow the advice of the old saying with which we opened this essay.   That was more or less what he had been doing for the previous few weeks and it had been working fairly well.   The media was running out of things to say about his remarks and would eventually have moved on to something new, whereas Manitobans were given a respite from having to see his face on the news every day.    It was a win for everybody!

 

If, however, we expand our options to include what Pallister might have done had he been a different person with a better character, the best thing he could have done would have been the following.   

 

He would have held another press conference in which he flat out refused to apologize for his comments.   He would have said that his words had been directed towards the mob of Maoist radicals who attacked Canada, her constitution and institutions, and her founders and history in their criminal and terrorist acts on her national holiday.   He would have then pointed out, correctly, that throughout history, any time a mob like this has been allowed to get its way it has turned out very, very, bad for everybody, and that therefore this sort of thing must not be tolerated but rather nipped in the bud.    He would then have reiterated his comments and insisted, quite rightly, that Canada owes nobody an apology for her founding, history, and very existence as a country.

 

He would then have directly addressed the media and the phoniness of their manufactured moral outrage.   He would have pointed out that they themselves carried the lion’s share of the blame for stirring up the Marxist mob whose actions he had rightly condemned.   They had completely abandoned even the pretense of journalistic ethics, integrity, and responsibility when they spun the discovery of graves on the sites of the Indian Residential Schools into a web of exaggerations and outright lies about murdered children (1) which has incited not only the aforementioned mob actions but the largest wave of hate crimes this country has ever seen.

 

Finally, he would have addressed the Indian chiefs who took offense at his remarks – note the distinction the late Sir Roger Scruton liked to make between “taking” and “giving” offense – and issued rude and arrogant demands for his resignation in which they insulted and demonized other Canadians in a most racist manner.   He would have told them that if they persist in their crummy attitude then they can take it and their “reconciliation” and stick these where the sun don’t shine, to which location he would be happy to provide directions.

 

Of course, the Brian Pallister who would have done this would have had to have been a very different and very better Brian Pallister than the one we actually have.   The same would have to be true of the Brian Pallister who would sincerely apologize to those whom he actually owes an apology – all Manitobans, of all races, cultures, and creeds – for the way he has bullied us all with his lockdowns, masks and other such draconian nonsense.

 

(1)   That thousands of graves could be found on these sites has never been a secret.   The Truth and Reconciliation Commission discussed these at length in the fourth volume of its final report.  They are not “mass graves” – the media falsely labelled them such and the bands that had announced the finding of the graves corrected them and while the media  eventually switched to talking about “unmarked graves” they issued no retractions.   “Unmarked” refers to their present condition, it does not mean they were always unmarked.   The TRC Report says that graves in the Residential School cemeteries were usually marked with wooden crosses.   Students were not the only ones buried in these cemeteries – school staff were buried there as well, and often the school shared the cemetery of the church to which it was related and the nearest community.   There is no reason to think that the graves contain murdered children.   No bodies have been exhumed, no autopsies conducted, and the TRC Report itself indicates that disease was the cause of most of the deaths of children buried in the school cemeteries, tuberculosis alone accounting for almost half.   The huge gulf between what the actual known facts are and the narrative imposed over the facts by the media, arises entirely out of the anti-Canada, anti-Christian, hatred and malice of the latter. 

Real Journalism?

 

Let us imagine that at some point in his youth Bartley Kives received a visit from the News Fairy who told him that someday, if he was very, very good, she would grant his wish and he would become a real journalist.   Kives, however, after high school went on to receive a degree in sociology from the University of Winnipeg.   It is very difficult to take a degree in sociology from anywhere without squashing your conscience like a chirping little annoying bug.   When the school is the University of Winnipeg it is virtually impossible.    While signing away your soul in a blood contract with Mephistopheles and Karl Marx may not actually be a formal requirement for the degree, it would seem to be de rigueur. 

 

For almost two decades Kives reported and wrote for the Winnipeg Free Press, covering pretty much everything from music to city politics to restaurants.   While occasionally the Winnipeg Free Press has employed a real journalist – Ted Byfield, believe it or not, worked for the paper back in the fifties and, of course, the late, great Tom Oleson graced its pages until shortly before his death almost ten years ago – for the most part Manitoba’s “paper of repute” has preferred hack writers that mindlessly toe its party line.    On issues that pertain to the Dominion of Canada as a whole, that party line is and always has been, Liberal, both big and small l.   In John Wesley Dafoe’s day the paper existed to promote the Grits’ agenda of Americanizing Canada and turning her into a vassal satellite of the United States.   When the federal Liberal Party was taken over by Communist operatives in the 1960s – Lester Pearson, who had been a Cambridge Five style Soviet spy when attached to our embassy in Washington D. C. in World War II, and Pierre Trudeau who had led the Canadian delegation to a Communist economic conference in Moscow in 1952 and who never met a Community tyrant he didn’t love and adore and fawn over – the paper dutifully followed its party into the fever swamps of the far left.   Radically opposite as those two positions seem, they were united in their contempt for the traditional constitution of Canada and for the Common Law freedoms of Canadians.  John Farthing showed in Freedom Wears a Crown, (1956) how the policies of the earlier, Mackenzie King Liberals, had undermined freedom and paved the way for Prime Ministerial dictatorship.   A decade earlier Eugene Forsey, after his doctoral dissertation was published, had debated the very same issues with Dafoe, making mincemeat out of the partisan publisher. On the provincial level, where the Grits have been mostly a non-entity for the larger part of a century, the paper has tended to support the NDP. 

 

In more recent years Kives has been reporting locally for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation.   Abandoning the overt and heavy progressive bias of the Winnipeg Free Press is hardly a requirement for employment at the CBC.    Although the publicly funded Crown broadcaster is supposed to fairly represent the views of all Canadians it has long behaved like “anybody but the Conservatives” was its official policy, regardless of who happens to be in power at the moment in either Parliament or any of the provincial legislatures. 

 

The Progressive Conservatives have been in government in Manitoba since 2016 and the CBC, like the Winnipeg Free Press, has been striving to unseat them ever since.    Coincidentally or not 2016 was also the year that Kives was brought onboard CBC Manitoba.   In 2019, the efforts of the media failed and the Conservatives, led by Brian Pallister, were returned to power in an early provincial election.   The following year the bat flu pandemic struck, and the media in general, and Kives in particular found in it a stick with which to bludgeon the provincial government.

 

Now if, as has been thought to be case for centuries, it is the role and duty of the fourth estate to hold government accountable, to ask it the tough questions, to shine a light in every dark corner of the halls of authority, to expose all the secrets, to speak truth to power, does this not mean that the News Fairy has returned at long last and turned Kives into a real journalist after all?

 

Alas the answer is no.

 

It would be one thing if he really were asking Pallister and his chief health mandarin Brent Roussin the hard questions.   Questions like:

 

Do you recognize any constitutional limits to your powers that remain in effect even in an emergency?

 

In your opinion are the fundamental rights and freedoms of Manitobans their own property or something that is permitted to them by your government as you see fit?

 

How much mental, social, and economic damage would the lockdowns have to do before the cost of the lockdowns exceeds the cost of doing nothing at all?

 

How far would government restrictions have to go before you would admit they have gone too far and crossed a line that should never be crossed?

 

Kives does not seem to be interested in the answers to questions like these however.   He does not even seem to be interested in questions like those that Pallister groupie, Josh Aldrich of the Winnipeg Sun, is occasionally willing to interrupt his sycophantic boot-licking to ask about why the government has been consistently picking on small businesses and restaurants, which are not significant sources of transmission, with its public health orders.

 

No, the only questions Kives seems to be interested in are “why didn’t you lock us down again faster?” and “why didn’t you lock us down again harder?”

 

The theory that Kives appears to be operating on, based upon much of his recent commentary but especially “Lockdown 3, the one everyone could foresee” from the 8^th of May, and last Sunday’s “In Manitoba’s darkest days, the premier casts shade”, is that the province’s slapping down a hard lockdown as fast as possible last spring was a success, that their gradually increasing the restrictions in stages in the fall as the case numbers rose only to see them continue to rise was a failure, and that therefore they should have locked down the entire province hard as soon as they saw case numbers start to rise again this spring.  

 

One problem with this theory is that while Manitoba’s initial hard lockdown did indeed, seem to work, last spring, other provinces and other jurisdictions in other countries that tried the same thing at the same time, met with failure instead, and had the sort of results that we saw in the fall.   What is the explanation for this difference?

 

The most obvious explanation is that the virus had only just arrived in the province and had been caught before it had begun to spread in the brief period in which it was capable of being contained in this manner.      If this is indeed the true explanation, then last spring’s success would not have been duplicable in the fall.   All an earlier and harder lockdown would have accomplished would have been to make the lockdown that much worse in its harmful and destructive effects.  

 

Anybody familiar with the history of infectious disease and the way quarantines work should be able to grasp this.   Quarantines control the spread of infectious disease by either a) keeping it out in the first place or b) containing it so that it doesn’t spread.    The former is what the traditional method of placing ships and their passengers and cargo under quarantine before letting them into a country was designed to accomplish.   The latter is what the kind of quarantine where a doctor locked you into your house for a couple of weeks and had your neighbours drop food off on your doorstep when you had the smallpox or measles or some such thing was designed to accomplish.    The strongest quarantine of the latter type was the kind the French called the cordon sanitaire, where an entire city or region was sealed off, in the hopes of preventing the disease from spreading outside the area.   This practice was depicted in a fictional example by Albert Camus in The Plague (1947).   In more recent real life it was used in several places to contain the original SARS virus and Ebola.   What governments around the world have attempted to do with the lockdown model since last spring is something radically different from these traditional quarantine methods.   Indeed, it could be called the inversion of a quarantine.    It is not designed to keep a disease out of a country or contain it locally because it is imposed on societies where the disease is already present and spreading.   It is not imposed merely upon the sick and those known to have been in contact with the sick while contagious but upon all healthy members of a society, thus causing a ton of collateral damage.   It is not remotely as effective as traditional quarantines – last year’s experiment demonstrated that countries and regions that rejected the lockdown model did not end up being the countries and regions most devastated by the disease or even being significantly worse off than countries and regions that locked down.  In some cases they fared slightly better with regards to the disease itself and in all cases avoided the tremendous harmful effects of the lockdown.

 

Kives’ commentary is padded with tear-jerking rhetoric about the “deaths of hundreds of grandfathers and grandmothers”.   How many of those grandfathers and grandmothers died, not because of the disease this overhyped virus causes, but because of the extreme loneliness and despair created by being forced into social isolation in the name of saving their lives?   This is the sort of question a real journalist would be asking.   A real journalist would also be interested in all the sons, daughters, fathers, mothers, brothers and sisters lost to opioid and other narcotic overdoses and suicides brought about by social isolation and/or the loss of the business in which all of their life’s work and savings had been invested caused by lockdown experiment.   Anyone interested in such people would not be so quick to shoot his mouth off about how the government has not been doing enough by not locking down fast enough and hard enough.

 

Where Kives does get it right is in raising questions about Brian Pallister’s stock excuse for how bad the province has done in the fall and again this spring.   In his remarks on Sunday, for example, Kives said:

 

The premier and public health officials routinely state that Manitobans are simply not following the rules at a time when community spread makes it difficult for people to avoid the virus in the workplace and elsewhere.

 

He then quoted an ICU physician from Winnipeg to the effect that most of her patients had been trying to follow the rules.

 

It is, of course, disgusting for Pallister, Roussin, and their underlings to continuously scapegoat ordinary Manitobans in this way.     To scapegoat is to blame someone else for your own failure.   The provincial government has failed Manitobans and not the other way around.   The government’s failure, however, is not a matter of them not suspending our constitutional rights and freedoms severely and quickly enough.   It is rather their refusal or inability to consider the myriad of options other than preventing us from socializing with one another until everyone is vaccinated.   

 

On Tuesday, the 25^th of May, a number of Manitoban physicians held a press conference in which they talked about “tens of thousands” of Manitobans who are suffering and dying, waiting for surgeries and cancer tests, because the hospitals are too busy dealing with bat flu patients.   They begged the province to issue a stay-at-home order and to order all “non-essential” businesses to shut down.   Sure enough, come the evening news, there is Bartley Kives on CBC, gushing all over these doctors and uncritically sympathizing with their plea, even though he was supposed to be reporting rather than editorializing.

 

“For nearly two months”, Kives said, “doctors have been pleading with the province to enact tougher restrictions to prevent the crush of COVID patients from getting out of hand.   Those pleas largely went unanswered.”

 

Who is he trying to kid?   For the nearly two months in question, I have watched as what little of Manitobans’ constitutional rights and freedoms as were left to us after the previous six months of Code Red have been whittled away as the government has given in to demand after demand from these doctors who are largely sheltered from the harmful effects of the fascism for which they are asking.

 

Doctors, as a rule, live in houses rather than apartments or single-rooms, and so, a stay-at-home order, restricting them to their homes outside of work hours and grocery shopping, would simply not be as confining to them as it would to the thousands of other Manitobans far more adversely affected by such an order.   Doctors are pretty much the hottest commodity in the marriage market and so, even though their notoriously insufferable egos keep the divorce rate high, a stay-at-home order would simply not leave them as completely isolated from human social contact as it would the thousands of people in the province who live alone.    Lockdowns do not threaten the livelihoods and savings of doctors – they will continue to rake in their highly overinflated salaries for the duration, with all the overtime they could dream of to boot.

 

Perhaps if a law were enacted requiring any doctor, journalist, or politician that calls for a lockdown to experience that lockdown in its harshest rather than its mildest form – confine them to a single room, not just their home in general, deny them contact with their immediate family, strip them of their salaries, for the duration of the orders they request – they would think twice before asking the government to place burdens on their neighbours that they are not willing to lift themselves.

 

Earlier, in his 8^th of May commentary, Kives had quoted Brent Roussin as saying, when he announced the third lockdown:

 

“We need to have these restrictions be the least restrictive that we need for that time.”

 

The necessity to which Roussin was likely alluding is that created by the requirements of our constitution as interpreted by the Supreme Court of Canada in the 1986 Oakes ruling.   It is indeed, required, the Supreme Court ruled, that when the government has a legitimate reason for limiting our basic rights and freedoms, that the limits it so imposes be as few as possible.   A real journalist who believed it to be the fourth estate’s duty to stand up for the rights and freedoms of the people by sounding the alarm and calling the government out whenever it overstepped the constitutional boundaries on its powers, would have grilled Roussin on his claim that the restrictions he has imposed have indeed been minimal.

 

Kives, however, took the opposite approach of insisting that the government could have and should have done more.

 

Is it just me or did I see his nose grow a little in his last news segment?

 

He’s got a long way to go, I am afraid, before the News Fairy makes him a real journalist.  

Brent Roussin’s Blasphemy

Orthodox Christianity affirms both the truth that God is Sovereign Lord over all that is Who in His Omniscience knows the end from the beginning and the truth that man is a morally responsible being who has been given true agency and thus is accountable for his deeds.   For millennia, theologians have grappled with the tension between these two truths.   The theological dialogue on this subject overlaps in some ways the ages old philosophical debate between determinism and free will.   Periodically, it has erupted into controversy when someone sought to resolve the tension by emphasizing one of these truths to the point of denying, or at least being perceived to deny, either the other truth or other truths.    One such period was the fifth century.   In the third Ecumenical Council (Ephesus, 431) the early Church ruled that the Celtic monk Pelagius had taught heresy by emphasizing free will to the point of denying Original Sin (that the human nature we have inherited from Adam was broken in the Fall and became predisposed to sin) and the ensuing dependence of man upon grace (God’s freely given favour) for salvation.   While the early Church as a whole formed a consensus against Pelagianism, only the Western, Latin-speaking, Church united in favour of Augustinianism, the doctrine of Pelagius’ foremost opponent and critic, the Bishop of Hippo, and this became one of the factors, perhaps the earliest, that led to the Schism between East and West six centuries later.

 

Controversy over this matter erupted again in the sixteenth century.   In 1524, Desiderius Erasmus, the Dutch scholar and Christian humanist, wrote The Freedom of the Will, as a response to the strong Augustinian view of predestination in the works of Dr. Martin Luther.   Dr. Luther answered him the following year with On the Bondage of the Will.   At this point in the controversy where one stood on free will and predestination corresponded with which side of the growing Reformation divide one was on.   Those who remained under the authority of the Patriarch of Rome emphasized free will, the Reformers and their followers stressed God’s Sovereignty and predestination.   

 

By the end of the sixteenth century, however, it was no longer so simple.   In the Reformed Churches, which had broken with Lutheranism in the Continental Reformation over a number of issues, the strong predestinarianism of the leading Reformed theologian John Calvin had been magnified into supralapsarianism – the idea that God decided Whom He was going to send to Hell first and then decided to allow the Fall in order to have grounds to condemn them – by Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza, and this incredibly ugly portrayal of God naturally provoked a backlash in the opposite direction.   Jacob Arminius, assigned to write a thesis defending supralapsarianism, instead become a proponent of free will, and his followers, the Remonstrants, wrote a five-point repudiation of Calvinism called the Remonstrance, which was condemned as a form of Semi-Pelagian heresy by the Reformed Church at its Synod of Dort, which took place at about the same time the work on the Authorized Bible was being completed.   The canons of the Synod of Dort, five, one each in response to the points of the Remonstrance, became known as the “Five Points of Calvinism”, identifiable by the acronym TULIP (Total Depravity, Unconditional Election. Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, Perseverance of the Saints), although this does not follow their order in the canons.   These have, ever since, been more important to most Calvinists than John Calvin’s own teachings, which did not include Limited Atonement, a doctrine Calvin would almost certainly have burnt someone at the stake for blasphemy over, especially if he heard them attribute it to him, although Calvinists have turned a deaf ear to everyone from Moses Amyraut to R. T. Kendall, who has ever bothered to point this out.

 

Similarly the debate continued within the Roman Catholic Church.   Cornelius Jansen, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Ypres in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking region of what is now Belgium, taught a form of Augustinianism that closely resembled Calvinism in a book that was published after his death in 1638.   Although the book was placed on the Index of Prohibited Books by the Holy Office (Inquisition) in 1642, and condemned in a papal bull later that year, its teachings, dubbed Jansenism, began to spread, especially in France, where the local bishops sided with the Society of Jesus and the Roman Patriarch in condemning it as heresy.   Apart from the clergy who taught the doctrine, the most notable Jansenists were the philosopher Blaise Pascal, and his younger contemporary, the classical dramatist Jean-Baptiste Racine, both of whom were students in the Jansenist school at Port Royal.

 

If Jansenism was the predestinarian counterpart to Calvinism within the Roman Catholic Church, the free will counterpart to Arminianism could be said to have been Molinism.  Molinism takes its name from Luis de Molina, a Spanish Jesuit who died in 1600, making his the older of the two doctrinal movements.   Molina stressed free will to the point that he was accused of Semi-Pelagianism (the heresy that teaches that man is capable of taking the first step towards God, although he requires God’s grace to complete the journey, which is the reverse of Arminianism in which God must initiate salvation by His grace, but man must co-operate with his free will to complete it).   Among the ways that he sought to alleviate the tension between this strong view of man’s will and the Sovereignty and Omniscience of God, was by introducing the concept of scientia media – Middle Knowledge – in his commentary on St. Thomas Aquinas.   St. Thomas in his Summa had distinguished between God’s natural knowledge and His free knowledge.   The former pertains to things that must be because they could not be otherwise (that the sum of two and two is four, is an example), the latter to things that are because God has decided that they will be that way.   This distinction is not itself universally acknowledged, for there are those who believe that everything falls in the latter category and that two plus two make four because God willed it to be so when He could have easily willed two and two to make five, because they believe that for God’s will to be free and Sovereign it must not be subject to anything else, including God’s own immutable and eternal nature, which is the source of everything that falls into the natural knowledge category in Thomistic theology, but this is not a widespread view except perhaps among Islamic theologians.   What Molina described as Middle Knowledge was God’s knowledge of everything that depends upon the choices of created free agents.   God knows, Molina maintained, what any given person will do in any given situation, because He knows all counterfactuals for every contingency, that is to say, what would have happened if circumstances had been different and choices were otherwise.   To illustrate the idea from popular culture, it is similar to the way the Watchers in Marvel Comics What If series can see all alternative realities.

 

I have not brought all of this up in order to argue for or against the Molinist concept of Middle Knowledge, much less to try and settle all of the various disagreements about God’s Sovereignty and man’s free will.    The point I wish to make is that whether one holds to Molinism or regards it as rank heresy, that the kind of knowledge included within Middle Knowledge – the knowledge of what would have been – belongs to God and God alone, is surely something all orthodox Christians can agree upon.   Note the difference between “what would have been” and “what might have been”.   Knowledge of the latter is available to human beings, of the former only to God.   Indeed, if you think about it, the stronger predestinarians, the Calvinists, Jansenists if there are any left, et al., have even greater reason to think that knowledge of “what would have been” belongs only to God than Arminians, Molinists, et al.

 

To claim for yourself a quality or attribute that belongs only to God is to commit the sin of blasphemy.

 

On Saturday, the sixteenth of January, the Winnipeg Sun’s front page featured the face of Manitoba’s chief public health mandarin, Brent Roussin and the headline “1, 700 Lives Saved”.   The first paragraph of the accompanying story which could be found on page three read “Manitoba’s top doctor says the province’s most stringent restrictions to date during the pandemic likely saved 1, 700 lives between November and January”.

 

Well, and I mean this to be just as offensive as it sounds, I grew up on a farm, and am quite familiar with the smell of those words.

 

Even with his qualifiers like “likely” and “approximately”, Mr. Roussin – with all due respect to Joseph Epstein, he’s got it backwards, after their horrible behaviour last year it is the physicians who should be stripped of the honourific “doctor” from the perfect passive participle of the Latin verb for “to teach” because they have proven themselves to be completely unteachable – is basically claiming knowledge of what “would have been”.   What would have been had he not behaved like some kind of mutant offspring of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and stripped Manitobans of their fundamental and nominally protected freedoms of association, assembly, and religion, forbade them from visiting with anyone other than members of their own household, ordered their Churches and synagogues to close as if his orders were more important than God’s commandments, persecuted them if they attempted to express their right to protest against all of this , cancelled Christmas (and Diwali and Hanukkah and any other major religious festival that would normally have occurred in the last three months), shut down small businesses for the busiest shopping season of the year as if he had a contract from Jeff Bezos to drive all commerce online to Amazon, encouraged them to snitch on one another for violating these completely unreasonable new rules, programmed them to think of each other as sources of contagion rather than friends, family, and neighbours, and conditioned them to think of their basic rights and freedoms, not as belonging to them as free subjects of Her Majesty, but as belonging to the politicians and health bureaucrats to be dispensed to us and taken away from us as they see fit.     Well, knowledge of what “would have been” belongs to God, not Brent Roussin, who seems to be doing his worst to live down to the old the joke about how the difference between God and a doctor is that God knows that He is not a doctor.

 

The article went on to say that Roussin “based the number on the province’s modelling and the trajectory the province was on in early November” which is as much as saying that he pulled the number out of thin air.   Modelling is computer generated fantasy, not real scientific evidence.   The hard facts are that the survival rate for the disease he claims to have been trying to protect us from is extremely high, over 99%, for most people, and the demographic that produces the most fatalities for the same disease, is that of people who have already exceeded the country’s average life expectancy (81.95 years) and have over two co-morbidities, that is to say, serious health issues.   These facts strongly suggest that is presumptuous in the extreme for Roussin to be patting himself on the back over all the lives he has saved with his fascist restrictions.   Especially since he remains remarkably silent about all the lives and livelihoods that have been destroyed by the lockdown, for which he is morally culpable, and ought to be legally culpable as well.

 

It does not seem likely that he will be facing human justice for his brutal and inhumane trampling all over Manitobans rights and freedoms any time soon.   One day, however, he will face the Judgement no man can escape.   It will not help his case on that day, that in the here and now, he has blasphemously claimed the kind of knowledge that belongs only to the Judge, to justify his terrible deeds.