Government overreach on COVID measures has been about power — not the pandemic

National Post, 23 October 2021

It's a very ancient infection to which state agents are prone and for which no effective cure has been developed.

I have raised the issue of government overreach in relation to vaccine mandates. Respectful readers have asked whether that gives comfort to those who oppose the vaccines themselves. Is favouring vaccination but blanching at punitive vaccine mandates too fine a line? Might it discourage people from getting vaccinated?

That may be the case. I further concede that, alongside reasonable arguments against overreach from thoughtful people with genuine concerns, there are some crackpots. The pandemic has produced a lot of odd behaviour, whether it be conspiracists in their basements or motorists wearing masks while driving alone in their vehicles.

Nevertheless, overreach in the promotion of a positive measure — vaccination — still remains overreach. It is possible that overreach may hamper vaccination, too; at least some who decline vaccination do so as a political protest against the expansion of state power. A more restrained state might persuade some of them that no great skulduggery is afoot.

Recent developments have suggested that such overreach is not a bug, but a feature. Not a reluctantly embraced necessary evil, but malice aforethought. What if the point was no longer containment of the pandemic but to extend the reach of the state, pure and simple?

Consider four examples.

For nearly six months, Dr. Bonnie Henry simply abolished religious liberty in British Columbia. Her edict permitted people to meet for an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting in the church basement, but that same number of people could not meet in the much larger church to pray. It wasn’t about regulating meetings, but banning worship.

When the matter was brought before the courts, the judge shrugged his shoulders. Yes, the order violated all of the fundamental freedoms listed in the Charter of Rights, but in an emergency the public health officials could do whatever they wanted, independent of changing circumstances or variance between regions.

What if the point of Henry’s order was not public health, but to expand the power of her office, exploiting the pandemic to give her office the ability to grant itself an auto-exemption to the Constitution? Even if that wasn’t the point, it was the result.

A few weeks ago in Ontario, the government announced that thousands of cheering fans could sit cheek-by-largely-unmasked-jowl at a Maple Leafs game, but a 10-person diner in Kapuskasing could serve only half that number. What was the point of that, which had no basis in public health?

Could it be that the government, by strangling the diners and cafés of Ontario for a few extra weeks, wished to remind the tens of thousands of restaurateurs in the province that their livelihood was in the power of the state to grant or withhold?

This month in Edmonton, Justice A. W. Germain sentenced the pastor of a small church and his brother for violating public health orders with manifest contumacy, handing down tens of thousands of dollars in fines based what courts had done in Ontario.

Germain then went further, issuing what even the bailiff could recognize as an egregiously unconstitutional order. If Pastor Artur Pawlowski wishes to preach upon pandemic measures in the future, he will have to say the following:

“I am also aware that the views I am expressing to you on this occasion may not be views held by the majority of medical experts in Alberta. While I may disagree with them, I am obliged to inform you that the majority of medical experts favour social distancing, mask wearing, and avoiding large crowds to reduce the spread of COVID-19. …”

Of course the judge knows that forcing people to say what they do not wish to say — and do not believe — violates all the fundamental freedoms of the Charter. It is what tyrants do. Courts for that reason do not compel rapists to apologize to their victims.

What if the point of the sentence was not justice, but to aggregate to judges the power to force preachers and activists to say what the state wishes them to say? Any number of emergencies could be imagined in which that bit of statist coercion might prove convenient.

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