The Convoy and Captain Airhead

 

For those in the Dominion of Canada who still actually believe, as opposed to paying mere empty lip service to the idea, that freedom is a basic human good the legal protections of which must not be jettisoned in a state of emergency, the events of the preceding week have been most encouraging.   Indeed, as can be seen in the Monday column “We Are All Canadian Truckers Now”, by Dr. Ron Paul, the long-time Congressman from Texas who throughout my life time so far has been by far the most consistent advocate of personal freedom against the encroachments of government to have served as an elected representative in the federal government of our southern neighbour, they have inspired freedom lovers outside of our borders as well as within.

 

As you are undoubtedly aware, for the past two years most governments around the world have been trampling all over the basic freedoms of the people they govern.   The justification offered for all of this was the pandemic declared by the World Health Organization in March of 2020.     A new flu-like virus, related to the SARS virus of twenty years earlier, had passed from bats to humans, either through a wet market or experimentation in a laboratory, and had caused an epidemic in Wuhan in China late in 2019.   Early in 2020 it had begun rapidly spreading throughout the rest of the world.   Even then, the information necessary to respond rationally without panicking was available.  We knew that the people most at risk were the same people who are most at risk from any circulating disease – the really old and the really sick, although the danger to them was a bit more severe with this one.   We knew that while it could produce an intensively painful form of pneumonia, most people who contracted the virus would survive it, with many experiencing only mild symptoms or no symptoms at all.   Our governments, however, told us that because the virus was spreading so rapidly, our hospitals, emergency rooms, and intensive care units were in danger of been swamped, and so they were going to order us all to stay home for two weeks, to go out only for “essential” purposes like buying groceries or medicine, to close our businesses if they were not “essential” as the governments defined “essential”, and to worship and carry out all social interaction online.   We were told that we would need to do all of this to slow the spread of the disease – to “flatten the curve” – in order to prevent the swamping of the health care system.   Very few seemed to notice the obvious problem with this – that if the health care system were swamped it would recover, that if hospitals, emergency rooms, and ICUs were burdened beyond their capacity this would not mean their ultimate irrecoverable failure and destruction, and that it made absolutely no sense whatsoever to treat everything else as expendable and sacrifice it all to prevent a temporary flooding of the health care system.

 

Since our governments were allowed to get away with this unprecedented and tyrannical experiment at containing a respiratory disease – previous generations of mankind knew better than to arrogantly think they could do any such thing – they kept on doing it for the last two years, imposing restrictions and lockdowns every time there was a spike in the number of people testing positive for the virus.   When vaccines were invented for the bat flu virus in less than a year and given emergency authorization for use things got worse rather than better.   Our governments had been telling us that the strategy of restrictions and lockdowns would need to continue until vaccines were available.   Since the lockdown strategy was itself new and experimental, and was clearly causing more harm than the virus itself – as even our public health officers would admit in moments when they were relaxing restrictions rather than tightening them – and no one had been able to develop a vaccine for this kind of virus in the past this was highly dubious, to say the least.    When the vaccines were available, instead of saying “you should all return to your lives now, because we have vaccines to protect you from the virus if you want them” our governments began taking measures to coerce into being vaccinated those whom they could not persuade to be vaccinated voluntarily.

 

This took the tyranny to a whole new level.   While their telling us we could only “worship” online, could only meet with members of our own household, etc. made mockeries out of our freedoms of religion, assembly, and association, these attempts to coerce us rather than convince us to accept an inoculation, were an outright assault on our basic right to the security of our persons.   Our governments do not want to pass laws telling women they cannot have abortions on the grounds that such laws would violate a woman’s right to bodily autonomy even though abortion involves the deliberate taking of the life of another human being.   Euphemistically, those who support this status quo refer to this supposed right to have an abortion as a woman’s “reproductive rights” or her “right to make choices about her own reproductive health”.   Yet these same people seem to have no problem with telling everybody - men, women, whatever - that he must have a newly invented substance that has not yet completed its clinical trials injected into his body.   They claim to respect that whether a person does so or not is his choice.   Then they turn around and tell him that if he does not choose the way they want him to choose they will take away his right to participate in society until he makes what they say is the “right” choice.    This mobster-like bullying, of course, is itself a reason why refusing these demands is the morally right decision and complying with them is the morally wrong decision.

 

While we have not experienced this tyranny in its worst possible form here in the Dominion of Canada – our sister Commonwealth Realms of Australia and New Zealand have had it much worse – we have had to take it in combination with the insufferable arrogance of our Prime Minister, Captain Airhead.     This is rather the opposite of Mary Poppins’ old line about how “a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.”   Captain Airhead has outdone himself in the realm of arrogance – a truly spectacular feat – when it comes to the vaccine coercion, for he has turned it into a form of scapegoating that makes it look like he was sitting around reading Mein Kampf and thinking something to the effect of “hey, you know, this guy gained tremendous public support by talking this way about the Jews, a disliked minority, maybe I should try the same with the unvaccinated.”   Except that the thought as it formed in his own mind would have been much less coherent.  Captain Airhead does not have the capacity for extended rational thought even of such a perverse type.   Captain Airhead began telling Canadians in the last couple of waves of the bat flu that these waves are all the fault of the unvaccinated.   Since the vast majority of Canadians were vaccinated – the vaccination campaign had been a record-breaking success - he was in effect telling Canadians “your vaccines won’t work unless everyone is vaccinated.”   Rather than admit that his pandemic and vaccination policies had been a failure from beginning to end, he opted to taking an utterly stupid position in order to blame his failure on people he thought he could get away with abusing, in the hopes of turning the hostility of Canadians fed up with all this pandemic nonsense onto them.    For weeks, he and his sycophants in the media, have been telling us that Canadians are increasingly frustrated with the unvaccinated, and trotting out polls ostensibly saying that most Canadians would support even more draconian measures being taken against the unvaccinated.

 

While behaving in the aforementioned disgusting manner, this increasingly petty tyrant turned on the very people he had held up to us as heroes – to the extent he was capable of holding anyone other than himself up as a hero – at the beginning of the pandemic.  On top of vaccine passports – those vile “show me your papers”, Mark of the Beast-style cards/QR codes that limited access to pretty much everything except grocery stores and pharmacies to the vaccinated – he began adding vaccine mandates where he could, and pressuring the provinces to add them where he had no jurisdiction.   One of the very first vaccine mandates to be widely brought in across Canada restricted work in the field of health care to the fully vaccinated.   Thus, those “front-line” nurses and other health-care providers, lauded as heroes two years ago, were told that unless they took a shot that they were not persuaded was in their own best interests to take, they would be out of work.   When many opted to lose their jobs rather than submit to this bullying and tyranny, the effect of the vaccine mandate was obviously to increase the pressure on the health care system rather than decrease it.    Now Captain Airhead has imposed a vaccine mandate on long-haul truckers crossing the border with the United States, either in collusion with the Biden administration or prompting the latter to do the same in retaliation.   His government has also dropped hints that it is looking at a similar mandate for inter-provincial transportation.      Two years ago Captain Airhead was telling Canadians to thank truckers who did not have the option of staying at home and were “working day and night to make sure our shelves are stocked”.   Now he was telling them their services were not wanted unless they allowed him to dictate their medical choices.  This is what has prompted the long-overdue backlash we have been seeing over the last week.

 

Early last week, or the last day of the week prior to last if you wish to be precise, convoys of trucks set out from British Columbia heading towards Ottawa.   By the end of the week, similar convoys from every province of the Dominion were joining them.   As this armada of trucks descended upon the capital, everywhere they went supporters turned out in droves to cheer them on.   It was dubbed the “Freedom Convoy” and its purpose was quite straightforward.   It was a protest demanding the repeal, first, of the cross-border vaccine mandate for long haul truckers specifically, second, of vaccine mandates in general.   Many of the truckers, like all salt-of-the-earth type decent Canadians, also want Captain Airhead to step down.

 

About the middle of the week Captain Airhead dismissed the convoy with the sort of language we have come to expect from him.   He said “The small fringe minority of people who are on their way to Ottawa are holding unacceptable views that they’re expressing, do not represent the views of Canadians who have been there for each other who know that following the science and stepping up to protect each other is the best way to continue to ensure our freedoms, rights, and values as a country”.    The best way to answer that is to quote Luke Skywalker from the movie The Last Jedi (2017) as saying “Amazing.  Every word you just said was wrong.”    To briefly parse the latter part of Captain Airhead’s remarks, obeying government orders to stay apart for two years is the opposite of being there for each other, there is no such thing as “the science”, science, sans definite article, is a tool to be used and not a leader to be followed which real scientists would be the first to tell you, and agreeing to government measures that limit to the point of eliminating your and your neighbour’s freedoms of assembly, association, and religion and bodily autonomy helps destroy rather than ensure our rights, freedoms, and values.   It is the first part of the remarks, however, that are of most interest to us here.   It was apparent already on Wednesday when Captain Airhead said this and is unavoidable now that the convoy of truckers is a sizeable representation of a much larger segment of society and anything but “small” and “fringe”.   As for their “unacceptable views”, the only views that the truckers espouse as a group are that it is wrong and unacceptable for the government to be telling people they need to take a foreign substance into their bloodstream and punishing them if they don’t do it.    Prior to the pandemic, this was the consensus viewpoint in the free world.   As recently as last year Captain Airhead espoused those same views himself.   He opposed vaccine passports and mandates into the spring of 2021 calling them “divisive” and saying that this is not how we do things in Canada.   His complete flip-flop on the matter occurred at the time that Canada was emerging from the particularly harsh lockdown of winter-spring 2021, provinces were introducing vaccine passports, and they were polling well as they seemed to offer, to the vaccinated at least, a return to something resembling the normal.   It was around this time that Captain Airhead, faced with a Parliamentary order to hand over un-redacted documents regarding the dismissal of a couple of scientists from the virology lab in Winnipeg, documents he was so desperate to keep out of the hands of Parliament that he sued the Speaker showing his total contempt for Parliament and unfitness to serve as Prime Minister, was contemplating asking for a dissolution of Parliament and a new election.   When he ultimately went the latter route, arrogantly thinking he would be handed a majority government – the election, which nobody else but him wanted, restored the status quo ante – he tied his future political prospects to mandatory vaccination.    What arrogance, what hubris, what chutzpah to declare that his having abandoned his opposition to mandatory vaccination less than a year previously made that opposition into “unacceptable views”!

 

The Freedom Convoy arrived in Ottawa on Friday and Captain Airhead fled the city saying that he had come into contact with the bat flu and needed to self-isolate.   Then on Monday, after a weekend in which the truckers and their supporters had expressed their opposition to the vaccine mandates and other tyrannical pandemic measures without burning buildings down, looting stores, toppling monuments, or otherwise behaving like the kind of protestors Captain Airhead embraces and supports, Captain Airhead announced that he – triple vaccinated as of earlier that month – had tested positive for the bat flu, and that he would be speaking to the nation about the trucker protest.   When he gave his address, did he say “boy, I was wrong, I got all my shots and I still came down with the virus, maybe I should humble myself and talk to these truckers, who represent a lot more Canadians than I thought”?  

 

Hardly.   He doubled down on his insults, his arrogance, and his claims, obviously debunked by the fact that the most recent wave of the bat flu driven by a variant that infected more people in just over a month than previous variants had in a year producing a situation where, by contrast with previous variants, almost everyone has either had the bat flu or knows someone who had it, came after a record-breaking supermajority of the populace had been fully vaccinated, that vaccination is our only way out of the pandemic.   He said that “Canadians at home” were “watching in disgust and disbelief at this behaviour, wondering how this could have happened in our nation’s capital after everything we’ve been through together”.   He said this even as the results of the Angus Reid poll conducted over the weekend, results that showed that majority opinion in Canada had switched away from support for his policies to wanting all Covid restrictions lifted – the position of the truckers – were being released.  He spoke of those who “hurl insults and abuse at small business workers and steal food from the homeless”.  This was hardly typical of the behaviour of the demonstrators – were it otherwise the evidence would be all over the media – and is mighty rich coming from someone whose policies have ruined small businesses across the country while benefiting large multinationals, driven people into homelessness and destitution, and made life exponentially harder for the homeless (strict capacity limitations on homeless shelters and the closing of public spaces have, throughout the pandemic, corresponded with the winter months).   Wearing his “Mr. Tough Guy” mask, he declared that “we” – he should have used the singular, as that is what he meant, but he is not smart enough to recognize that holding the office of Her Majesty’s Prime Minister does not give him the right to use the royal “we” and that having lost his majority government in 2019, failing both then and in 2021 to win even a plurality in the popular vote, and now having lost majority support for his policies he should not presume to speak for Canadians in general – “would not be intimidated”.   His conveniently timed need to self-isolate in a non-disclosed secure location speaks rather loudly to the contrary.  “We won’t cave to those who engage in vandalism or dishonour the memory of our veterans” he said.   Whereas protestors whose causes he has embraced over the past couple of years have toppled and beheaded statues, burned down churches, and committed real acts of vandalism, what he refers to here is the placing of a removable sign on the Terry Fox memorial.   As for the dishonouring of the memory of our veterans, I would say that the last two years of him trampling all over the freedoms those veterans fought for is far more dishonouring to their memory than a few protestors dancing on the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

 

His focus, however, was on smearing the protestors with accusations of racism.  A few weeks ago, a clip of him giving an interview prior to last year’s Dominion election re-surfaced, in which he accused the unvaccinated of being “racists” and “misogynists” and asked whether Canadians should “tolerate these people”.   This dehumanizing language brought upon him vehement condemnation, at home and abroad, nor did the hypocrisy of the person of whom photographic – and video – evidence of his having worn blackface – and on one occasion full body brown skin makeup – on at least three separate occasions surfaced in the 2019 Dominion election calling other people “racists” go without notice.   Whereas accusing opponents of “racism” and “sexism” is a standard progressive tactic in Captain Airhead’s case there appears to be a personal element to it.   Knowing that he is guilty of not living up to his own progressive ideals – and, indeed, falling short of them in ways that are truly spectacular, as you can see by asking yourself how many people you know who have worn blackface even once – he projects his guilt onto others, in this case onto the unvaccinated he was trying to scapegoat and otherize in a manner reminiscent of Hitler, more often onto the country of Canada prior to his “enlightened” premiership.  

 

In his speech, he concentrated on such things as the single person at the rally carrying a flag bearing the symbol that his own father reportedly wore on his jacket while dodging the draft to fight in the war against the regime whose emblem that symbol was.   Since nobody has been able as of yet to locate the person who brought this flag to the protest nobody knows whether he did so as an expression of agreement with the ideology the flag represents or, perhaps more likely, to make the statement that the Prime Minister’s actions resemble those of the regime that flew that flag.   Either way, it is obvious to everyone – and I suspect this includes Captain Airhead and his sycophants, as much as they claim otherwise – that the person with this flag represented nobody at the rally but himself.   Another person at the rally carried the flag of the states that attempted to secede from the United States seven years before Confederation.   Progressives maintain that this flag is as objectionable as the first mentioned through a tortured reductionism that reduces all the differences that had been driving the two regions of the United States apart for a century prior to that to a single racially sensitive issue.   Within living memory – indeed, quite recent living memory - that flag was a universal symbol, not of racism, but of rebellion, employed as such even in countries with no discernable connection to the history, culture, and issues pertaining to the conflict that produced it.   This notwithstanding, the fact that the other protestors were filmed objecting to its presence clearly demonstrates that this person too, whatever his intent, did not speak for anyone but himself.  

 

What many people may not realize is that in any large size protest against progressive policies there will always be one or two people with symbols of this type.   Progressives themselves make sure of this.   While in some cases it is a matter of outright infiltration – a progressive activist, or a government agent provocateur will join the protest and do or say something to bring opprobrium upon the protest as a whole - it also has to do with the way progressives a) introduce policies that are unjust to certain whites – working class whites, middle class whites, prairie farmers and other rural whites – but not to others such as journalists, academics, and technocrats where their own white supporters can be found, b) proclaim any backlash against such injustice to be “racist”, “white supremacist”, “white nationalist” etc., in the hopes of radicalizing the backlash so that c) they can point to the symbols of such radicalism, when they inevitably appear in larger protests against progressive policies that have nothing to do with racial issues whatsoever as a means of smearing the entire protest.

 

In this case, Captain Airhead’s efforts and those of his controlled media have failed on a truly grand scale.   The protest was too large and too obviously racially and ethnically diverse – predictably so, considering that what the media dubbed “vaccine hesitancy” is more prevalent among racial and ethnic minority groups – for Airhead’s remarks to be taken seriously by anyone with an iota of intelligence.

 

Captain Airhead, his fellow progressives, and their media spokesmen have spoken of the trucker protest as a threat to Canadian democracy.   Many supporters of the convoy have said, by contrast, that it is democracy in action.   In a way both are right and both are wrong.   What we have actually been seeing is two different understandings of democracy come to a clash.   There are many different ways of understanding democracy.   In ancient Athens, the birthplace of democracy, there was a form of direct democracy, in which the democratic assembly, consisting of all corporate members – citizens - of the city, voted on every public matter.   In most societies with a form of democracy – and all complex societies with a form of democracy – that democracy has been representative democracy, where the citizens vote for representatives, who then form the government.   Republican governments such as that of our neighbour to the south are a representative form of democracy.   The House of Commons in our parliamentary form of democracy is also a representative form.   Populism, in which a grass-roots movement forms – often behind a charismatic leader – to make demands of the government is another form of democracy.

 

Captain Airhead’s understanding of democracy is an extremely corrupt perversion of representative democracy.   It is basically that every few years there is an election and whoever wins the election, at least if it is a Liberal, can then do whatever he wants until the next election, constitutional limits on his powers be hanged, because he is the choice and voice of the people. The truckers protest is populism in its best possible form.   The popular movement is not demanding that anything be taken away from anybody else, merely that what was stolen from them – and from every Canadian – their basic freedoms of peaceful assembly, association, and religion and above all their right to reject with impunity the demand that they take a foreign substance into their body – be returned immediately.

 

Note the perspective of this writer.   I am not positively inclined towards democracy as an ideal.   I love and support my country’s traditional governing institutions, including our reigning monarchy and our democratic parliament, but with parliament I insist upon this distinction – I love and support it because it is a traditional governing institution and thus one that has proven itself over the ages and not because it is democratic.   Indeed, I belong to that “small fringe minority” of people with “unacceptable views” who agree with the consensus of the pre-modern tradition, classical and Christian, that democracy is the worst of all forms of government not the best, reject completely the modern liberal idea that legitimate government authority is that which is given to the government by the people (John Locke’s attempt to argue this against Sir Robert Filmer in his Two Treatises failed – even his fellow utilitarian liberal Jeremy Bentham could see that Filmer had the better of the arguments - and was thoroughly rebutted by the Rev. Charles Leslie, who demonstrated in his The Rehearsal that the legitimate authority of Parliament came through the Magna Carta from royal charter, not popular consent) along with the liberal idea that the individual person’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property come with the individual person into society from a pre-social state of nature (because there is no such thing as pre-social state of nature – society is part of man’s created nature – the rights of life, liberty, and property are real and bestowed by God, not the deistic God of Locke, but the True and Living God of Christianity), and hold in utter derision and scorn the modern equation of democracy with freedom (except when democracy is defined as self-government, and explained not in terms of the constitution of the state but the concept of subsidiarity – that the every decision should be left to those most locally competent to handle it rather than centralized in the state) because history clearly demonstrates that the size and intrusiveness of government grew exponentially after the modern heresy of popular sovereignty caught on and that governments that see themselves as the “voice of the people” have far less respect for those people’s basic rights of life, liberty, and property than kings who hold their authority by hereditary right and sacred oath.   (1) Recognizing these neglected truths does not incline one to much sympathy with populism.

 

These are exceptional times however.   Modern liberalism, in rejecting the ancient consensus that democracy was the mother of tyranny, believed that legal and constitutional recognition and protection of the rights of minorities was sufficient to guard against the problems the ancients had seen in democracy, which Alexis de Tocqueville summed up in his concept of the “tyranny of the majority”.   They failed to foresee the day when a professed liberal – the leader of the Liberal Party, as a matter of fact – would loudly espouse the rights and protections of “minorities”, but understand by that term “people of certain skin colours”, “women” (over 50% of the population), “people of certain ethnic and national backgrounds”, “people of certain religions”, “people of certain sexual orientations” and “people of certain gender identities”, while despising completely minorities in the sense the original liberals intended, the dictionary sense, of numeric minorities.   For all of his empty talk about protecting “vulnerable minorities”, Captain Airhead has felt completely free to dehumanize, otherize, scapegoat, and stir up hatred against those whom he has been unable to convince to voluntarily take a bat flu vaccine, because they are a numerically tiny fragment of the population.   The “unvaccinated” are the true “vulnerable minority”.   Mercifully, what we are seeing in this populist truckers protest, is not the kind of demagogue-driven mob action that has been the historical norm for populism, but Canadians, vaccinated and unvaccinated, coming together to send Captain Airhead the message, loud and clear, that he does not speak for them, and to demand that government start respecting the basic freedoms of all Canadians once again.   This is a cause most worthy of our support.

 

God save the Queen!

God bless the truckers!

 

(1)   This week began with Royal Martyr Day, the anniversary of the death of a godly king who was murdered by religious fanatics who, having gained control of Parliament, believed that they had the right to do whatever they want.   King Charles warned that those who in their fanatical belief that they were the voice of a popular sovereignty went to war against his rights as sovereign king, would not hesitate to trample over the rights of anyone else.  Those who deposed him proved him right on this during the mercifully short-lived Cromwellian Interregnum, as did those who followed their example – the Jacobins in France in the 1790s, and the Communists, beginning with Russia in 1917 and spreading from there to about a third of the world in the last century before their collapse.

The Sacrament Requires Both Kinds

 On the twelfth of March, 2020, the Anglican Church of Canada released a document entitled “Primate’s update regarding COVID-19”.   This was a response to the World Health Organization’s, in obedience to their Communist overlords, having declared the bat flu to be a pandemic.   It began by outlining the practices that our Anglican bishops had begun to put in place in the interest of being “actively engaged in the protection of themselves and those around them”.  

 

I am not going to go through the whole list.  I thought at the time that this was all a lot of hooey and everything that has subsequently occurred has confirmed me in that opinion.   One of the practices, however, stood out more than all of the others because of its intense theological ramifications.  There are, of course, theological ramifications to this entire attitude of allowing politicians and power-mad medical bureaucrats to dictate how the Church worships, allowing the sanctity of the Church to be invaded by the same intrusive health measures that have made everyday mundane living so miserable and thus interfering with the Church’s being a holy sanctuary from the evils of the temporal world, and essentially telling the Church to walk by fear rather than faith, the opposite of the Apostolic injunction.   There was one practice, however, that had much more specific theological ramifications than all of this.   This was:

 

communion in one kind only;.

 

This practice explicitly disobeys the Thirtieth of the Articles of Religion.   That article is entitled “Of both kinds” and reads:

 

The Cup of the Lord is not to be denied to the Lay-people: for both the parts of the Lord’s Sacrament, by Christ’s ordinance and commandment, ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike.

 

Even more astounding than the fact that our Church was so brazenly doing what its Reformed Confession forbids was the theological justification we were given for this.   We were told that Concomitance was the official teaching of our Church.  Concomitance is the idea that although the bread is specifically said to be the Body of Christ and the wine is specifically said to be the Blood of Christ, both Body and Blood are received in each element because they cannot be separated, any more than the two natures of Christ can be separated in His One Person.   This was the argument the Church of Rome used to justify her breaking from the universal practice of the Catholic Church of the first Christian millennium, the only one of the Churches to emerge from the Primitive Communion of Churches to do so, by withholding the Cup from the laity.   It was a nice way of smearing anyone who objected to this papal innovation with the implication that their Chalcedonian orthodoxy was questionable. 

 

Concomitance was revived in certain Anglican circles in recent decades for reasons that had nothing to do with the practice of withholding either of the elements.   This was to accommodate people who for personal reasons could not take either the bread or the wine.   Someone struggling with bondage to drink, for example, might for this reason abstain from the Cup.   There were also those who could only receive the Cup because gluten intolerance prevented them from taking the bread.    Many priests found in the old Roman doctrine of Concomitance an answer to the pastoral dilemma of how to counsel people in such situations.   However, as with other recent instances of our Anglican leaders sacrificing our Reformed and Catholic heritage in the name of pastoral issues this has born rotten fruit and now we find this doctrine being used to justify the very practice to which the Reformers rightly objected.

 

“Fateor etiam sub altera tantum specie totum atque integrum Christum verumque Sacramentum sumi” is not an article of any of the Creeds received by the Anglican Church from the Primitive Catholic Church (Apostles, Nicene-Constantinopolitan, Athanasian) nor is it one of the Articles of Religion, the Reformed Confession adopted by the Church of England in the Elizabethan Settlement.   These words, which translate into English as “I also confess that under either species alone Christ is received whole and entire, and a true Sacrament” are found in the Creed of Pope Pius IV, produced by the Council of Trent (1545-1563) and issued by bull of said pontiff in 1656.    This is a document in which the Church of Rome added its late innovations to the essential tenets of faith contained in the ancient Creeds and declared them to be on par with the same, a very serious break from Primitive orthodoxy.   In both practice and doctrine, therefore, at the beginning of the bat flu panic our present Anglican leadership betrayed our own tradition, one which conforms both to Scripture and the Catholic tradition of the first millennium, and adopted a practice the Roman Church had introduced no earlier than the thirteenth century and made uniform throughout their Communion as late as 1415 AD, and a doctrine which the Roman Church, doubling down on its errors in response to the Reformation in the sixteenth century, declared to be a tenet of the faith essential to salvation, on part with the articles of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds.

 

The Thirtieth Article makes it quite clear what the official position of the Mother Church of the Anglican Communion is with regards to the Roman practice of withholding the Cup.  Let us now listen to what the greatest apologists and doctors of our Church have said in the past in defence of this position.

 

In 1562, the penultimate year of the Council of Trent, the Right Reverend John Jewel, Bishop of Salisbury, published his Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae in Latin.   From Scripture and the Patristic writings, he defended the sixteenth century reforms of the Church of England as restoring the Church to the state of its original, Primitive Catholicism.   Two years later, the popular standard English translation by Lady Ann Bacon was published.   The translator, the daughter of Edward VI’s tutor and the mother of Sir Francis Bacon, was, like her sisters (the poets Lady Elizabeth Russell and Lady Catherine Killegrew, and the translator Lady Mildred Cecil Burghley who was the wife of Elizabeth I’s chief advisor and spymaster William Cecil) was an accomplished scholar.   The following is from her translation of Part II of Jewel’s Apologia:

 

Moreover, when the people cometh to the Holy Communion, the Sacrament ought to be given them in both kinds: for so both Christ hath commanded, and the Apostles in every place have ordained, and all the ancient fathers and Catholic bishops have followed the same.   And whoso doth contrary to this, he (as Gelasius saith) committeth sacrilege.   And therefore we say, that our adversaries at this day, who having violently thrust out, and quite forbidden the Holy Communion, do, without the word of God, without the authority of any ancient council, without any Catholic father, without any example of the primitive Church, yea, and without reason also, defend and maintain their private masses, and the mangling of the Sacraments, and do this not only against the plain express commandment and bidding of Christ, but also against all antiquity, do wickedly therein, and are very Church robbers.

 

Next, let us turn to the Most Reverend and Right Honourable William Laud, who was the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of the Royal Martyr, Charles I, and who was himself martyred for the Primitive faith and practice of the Church of England by the fanatics who had taken over Parliament a few years before the same villains murdered the king.   Before he became the Anglican Primate, however, during the reign of Charles’ father James I, shortly after his consecration as Bishop of St. David’s, Laud was asked by the king to debate with John Percy, the Jesuit chaplain employed by George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham.   The transcribed debates were published with the collection of Laud's contributions eventually being given the title A Relation of the Conference Between William Laud, Late Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and Mr. Fisher, the Jesuit, “Fisher” being a pseudonym for Percy. 

 

We find the following from Laud in this work as part of an argument against the inerrancy of Church councils:

 

And that a council may err (besides all other instances which are not few) appears by that error of the council of Constance.   And one instance is enough to overthrow a general, be it a council.   Christ instituted the sacrament of his body and blood in both kinds.  To break Christ’s institution is a damnable error, and so confessed by Stapleton.  The council is bold, and defines, peremptorily, that “to communicate in both kinds is not necessary, with a non obstante to the institution of Christ.”   Consider now with me, is this an error or not?  Bellarmine and Stapleton, and you too, say it is not; because to receive under both kinds is not by divine right.  No!   No sure; for it was not Christ’s precept, but his example.   Why, but I had thought that Christ’s institution of a sacrament had been more than his example only, and as binding for the necessaries of a sacrament, the matter and form, as a precept; therefore speak out, and deny it to be Christ’s institution, or else grant with Stapleton, “it is a damnable error to go against it.”   If you can prove that Christ’s institution is not as binding to us as a precept, (which you shall never be able,) take the precept with it, Drink ye all of this; which though you shift as you can, yet you can never make it other than it is, a binding precept.

 

A few pages later Laud raises the issue again, this time addressing the doctrine of Concomitance:

 

Secondly, I will instance in the institution of the sacrament in both kinds.  That Christ instituted it so, is confessed by both churches; that the ancient churches received it so, is agreed by both churches: therefore, according to the former rule, (and here in truth too,) it is safest for a man to receive this sacrament in both kinds.   And yet here this ground of A. C. must not stand for good; no, not at Rome; but to receive in one kind is enough for the laity.   And the poor Bohemians must have a dispensation, that it may be lawful for them to receive the sacrament as Christ commanded them.  And this must not be granted to them neither, unless they will acknowledge (most opposite to truth) that they are not bound by divine law to receive it in both kinds.   And here their building with untampered mortar appears most manifestly: for they have no show to maintain this but the fiction of Thomas of Aquin, “That he which receives the body of Christ receives also his blood per concomitantiam, by concomitancy, because the blood always goes with the body:” of which term, Thomas was the first author I can yet find.   First then, if this be true, I hope Christ knew it; and then why did he so unusefully institute it in both kinds?  Next, if this be true, concomitancy accompanies the priest as well as the people; and then, why may he not receive it in one kind also?   Thirdly, this is apparently not true: for the eucharist is a sacrament sanguinis effusi, of blood shed and poured out; and blood poured out, and so severed from the body, goes not along with the body per concomitantiam.

 

Laud’s protégé Jeremy Taylor, who would become Bishop of Down and Connor after the Restoration, made this same argument against Concomitance in his Ductor Dubitantium, originally published in 1660.   This lengthy treatise, published in English translation under the title “The Rule of Conscience”, was written in several books.  Book II, chapter 3, includes a lengthy debunking of the practice of “Half Communion” as commentary on Rule IX “The Institution of a Rite or Sacrament by our Blessed Saviour is a direct Law, and passes a proper obligation in its whole integrity”.   Taylor’s entire treatment of the matter is worth reading as it is very thorough.   I will only quote the following pertaining to Concomitance:

 

The dream of the Church of Rome, that he that receives the body receives also the blood, because, by concomitance, the blood is received in the body, is neither true nor pertinent to this question.  Not true, because, the eucharist being the sacrament of the Lord’s death, that is, of his body broken and his blood poured forth, the taking of the sacrament of the body does not by concomitance include the blood; because the body is here sacramentally represented as slain and separate from blood; and that is so notorious that some superstitious persons, A. D. 490, refused the Chalice, because (said they) the body of Christ represented in the holy Sacrament exsangue est, it is without blood, but now the Romanists refuse the Chalice because the body is not without blood: they were both amiss; for it is true the body is represented Sacramentally as killed, and therefore without blood, which had run out at the wounds; and therefore concomitance is an idle and an impertinent dream: but although the body is without blood in his death; yet because the effusion of the blood is also Sacramentally to be represented, therefore they should not omit the Chalice.

 

Dr. Henry Hammond, who ministered to the Royal Martyr as chaplain and who helped keep the orthodox faith alive during the period of the Puritan Tyranny, dying on the very day Parliament voted for the Restoration, had this to say in his A Practical Catechism:

 

Christ’s pleasure was, that all that were present should partake of both elements in the Sacrament, the wine as well as bread; as may appear by the plain words, “Drink ye all of this,” and “they all drank of it.”   And if it should be objected, that the ‘all’ were disciples, and so, that no others have that full privilege to drink of the cup, the answer is clear, first, that by this argument the bread might as well be taken away from all but disciples too, and so the laity would have no right to any part of this Sacrament.   Secondly, that the practice and writings of the ancient Church, which is the best way to explicate any such difficulty in Scripture, is a clear testimony and proof, that both the bread and the wine belong to all the people, in the name of His disciples at that time.

 

 

George Bull, ordained a priest by Robert Skinner the ejected Bishop of Oxford during the Cromwellian tyranny before Charles II was restored to his throne, following the Restoration was made rector of the two small parishes of St. Peter’s and St. Mary’s in Suddington which he served jointly for almost thirty years.   After this he was preferred to the rectory of Avening in Gloucestershire, in the cathedral of which he was already a prebendary.  A few years before his deprivation in the non-juring controversy, William Sancroft, Lord Archbishop of Canterbury, appointed Bull to the archdeaconry of Llandaff.   He was consecrated Bishop of St. David’s when he was 70 years old in 1705 and died five years later.   In the course of his ministry, the story of which was told in a very readable biography by his friend the lay writer Robert Nelson which came out three years after his death, he wrote a number of polemical theological works that established his theological reputation abroad.   One of these, his Defensio Fidei Nicaenae, published in 1685, was a demonstration, contra the claims of certain continental theologians, that the ante-Nicene Fathers held to the Trinitarian theology expressed in the Nicene Creed.   This work, and its sequel Judicium Ecclesiae Catholicae which rebutted Simon Episcopius’ claims that the deity of Christ was not regarded as absolutely essential to the faith by the Nicene Council, won him the praise of Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, the Roman Catholic Bishop of Meaux in France.   Through Robert Nelson, a friend of both who acted as intermediary, Bossuet expressed his high views of Bull’s work and questioned why Bull was not a member of the Roman Communion.   Bull, in answer to the question, wrote Corruptions of the Church of Rome which was published in his life.   After his death, and after the publication of Robert Nelson’s biography, a document by Bull that Nelson had alluded to but believed to be lost surfaced, under the title “A Letter to the Countess of Newbrugh” which answered a tract written by a Roman apologist under the title “The Catholic Scripturalist” which purported to prove the Roman position from the Scriptures.   The manuscript was brought to Bull’s son, Robert Bull, who arranged for it to be published together with Corruptions of the Church of Rome under the title A Vindication of the Church of England.

 

In both documents joined in this one work, Bull addressed the matter of Half-Communion.   To the Countess of Newbrugh he wrote:

 

One of the points he undertakes to prove out of Scripture is the Half-communion, or receiving the Sacrament only in one kind, viz. the bread, practiced and (not only so, but) enjoined in the Church of Rome.  I know your ladyship to be well-versed in the Holy Scriptures, and therefore humbly beseech you only to recollect what you have read therein concerning this matter; as, That our Saviour instituted and commanded the Sacrament to be received in both kinds; and that every institution and command of Christ, especially in so important a matter as is the great Sacrament and most mysterious rite of Christianity, ought with all possible care and exactness of religion to be observed, that St. Paul, in pursuance of our Saviour’s institution, enjoins, that every Christian, after due examination, should not only “eat of the bread,” but also “drink of the cup” in the Sacrament, that it appears the Apostolic Church did accordingly receive the Sacrament in both kinds, and then I shall leave it to thy ladyship’s conscience, to judge of the intolerable impudence of those hectors in divinity, who dare undertake the proof of such things out of Scripture, as may be discerned by all to be manifestly repugnant thereunto.   Indeed, that the Romanists have no ground in Scripture, or primitive antiquity, to rob the laity of one half of the Communion, is plainly confessed by that very Council which first established this sacrilege; I mean the Council of Constance.   For the Fathers of that Council (if it be lawful to give that title to a sorry convention of men so wholly regardless of the command of Christ, and the practice of the Apostolic Church, yea, of the whole Church of God, for many ages after) in express terms acknowledge, that Christ instituted the Sacrament to be received in both kinds, yea, that it was so administered and received in the primitive Church; yet with a non obstante, notwithstanding all this, they boldly and blasphemously decree against communion in both kinds, as a thing dangerous and scandalous; and the decree denounceth excommunication to the priest that shall dare to administer the Sacrament as Christ appointed it.   I wrong them not.  All this is plainly delivered in the thirteenth session of that Council.  And think you not, madam, that those were rare Scripturists?   What Christian is there, that bears any due honour to Christ or respect or reverence to His commands, whose soul does not rise up against such an antichristian decree? 

 

Later in the same treatise he addressed Concomitance:

 

For when they tell us, that the people receive a perfect sacrament only in one kind, because both the body and blood of Christ are truly and perfectly contained under each species of the Sacrament, they egregiously prevaricate in a matter of great concernment to the souls of men.   For, 1.  If this be true, then our Saviour did superfluously institute the Sacrament to be received in both kinds: for if there be a perfect sacrament in one kind only, to what purpose did Christ institute the other?  2.  It is most false that the body and blood of Christ are sacramentally in each element: for it is the bread only that doth sacramentally signify and exhibit the body of Christ, and the wine only that doth sacramentally signify and exhibit the blood of Christ. 3.  That which doth not perfectly represent and set forth the death and passion of our Lord, is no perfect sacrament, (for this is the very end of this divine institution, “to shew forth the Lord’s death”;) but communion only in one kind, doth not perfectly represent the death and passion of our Lord Jesus: therefore communion only in one kind is no perfect sacrament.   The effusion and shedding of Christ’s blood on the cross, (which is so considerable a part of His passion, as that it is everywhere emphatically insisted on in the Scriptures of the New Testament, and Christ Himself, in the very institution of the Sacrament, urgeth it, when consecrating the cup He saith, “This cup is the new testament in My blood, which was shed for many;” I say, this effusion of Christ’s blood, is in the communion only of the bread so far from being perfectly, that it is not at all represented, but totally obscured.  And therefore, 4. Some of the more ancient and learned writers among the Papists themselves have plainly confessed, that communion in one kind is but an imperfect sacrament.

 

To the Bishop of Meaux he declares the Roman practice to be:

 

manifestly against our Saviour’s first institution of the Sacrament, against Apostolic practice, and the usage of the universal Church of Christ for a thousand years, as is confessed by divers learned men of the Roman Communion.

 

He expresses indignation against the “Trent Creed” (the aforementioned Creed of Pope Pius IV” for declaring Concomitance, which he calls the “insolent (and as I may justly term it) antichristian decree of the Roman Church in this point”, to be an essential of the faith to be denied on penalty of eternal damnation and astonishment that the Trent Fathers, against the express hopes of many in the Roman Communion that the reforms of the Council would restore Communion in both kinds to the laity:

 

turned a deaf ear to their loud cries and supplications, only bidding them believe for the future, (what they could not believe,) that half the Sacrament was every whit as good as the whole.

 

To these could be added countless other similar quotations from almost every published orthodox Anglican divine from the Elizabethan Settlement through to the Oxford Movement but I think I have made my point.   Should anyone object that I have cited only from the kind of Anglican theologians who stress the Catholicity of the Church of England – her continuity with, and in the Reformation recovery of some aspects of, the doctrines and practices of the Primitive Church of the early centuries – I will simply point out that no disagreement on this particular point could possibly be logically expected from the kind of Anglican theologians who stress the Reformed character of the Anglican Church and understand this character primarily in terms of conformity to continental Protestant, usually Calvinist, theology.   John Calvin’s views of withholding the Cup from the laity and the doctrine of Concomitance were identical to those of Laud and Bull.  You can find them expounded upon at length in the seventeenth chapter of the fourth book of his Institutes of the Christian Religion, see especially paragraph 47.   The Twenty-Second Article of the Lutheran Augsburg Confession insists, like our Thirtieth Article, and at much greater length, that Communion is to be given to the laity in both kinds.   Needless to say, the corresponding Article in the Apology for the Augsburg Confession says the same thing.   Article VI of the Smacald Articles takes the same position and dismissed the doctrine of Concomitance as sophistry.   It would be bizarre, therefore, if the Anglican theologians who stressed the evangelical character of our Church would, contrary to the Lutherans and Reformed, disagree with Jewell, Laud, Hammond, Taylor and Bull and accept the doctrine of Concomitance, and, of course, they did no such thing.   William Henry Griffith-Thomas, an evangelical Anglican theologian who from 1910 to 1919 was Principal of Wycliffe College in Toronto, in his commentary on the Thirty-Nine Articles entitled The Principles of Theology, clearly identified Concomitance with the Roman doctrine and practice and declares the Anglican position to reject it.   This book came out in 1930.

 

Therefore, when our leadership today tells us that Concomitance is our official doctrine, to justify doing what Article XXX clearly forbids, they are going against the clear historical and traditional consensus of Anglicanism in both its High and Low forms.   This sort of thing has become far too common in recent decades, as more and more of our ecclesiastical leaders no longer feel themselves bound to keep their doctrine and practice in any meaningful way within the limits of the Historical Formularies (Restoration Book of Common Prayer and Ordinal, Thirty-Nine Articles, Books of Homilies).   In this particular instance it was done to justify their support for draconian health policies enacted by our governments, provincial and Dominion, which by their actions have been demonstrating a similar disregard for the limits imposed upon them by constitutional law and protected rights and freedoms.   Ironically, had they decided that they now believed in Transubstantiation and so come around to the position of Constance and Trent, this would have been a much less contemptible reason for their abandonment of traditional Anglicanism on this point.     

 

 

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.