“Friends, families, and communities were torn apart. The government resorted to name-calling and public shaming, and in so doing, altered the social fabric.”
The National Citizens Inquiry was a completely independent assessment of how governments in Canada reacted to the Covid-19 pandemic. It received no money from large corporations or pharmaceutical companies. The commission was almost entirely funded by small donations.
Inquiry Commissioner Ken Drysdale told The Post Millennial that he believes there has never been an inquiry conducted like this before – at least in Canada, where a national crisis sometimes prompts a Royal Commission that spends hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars and issues a report when the urgency has abated.
Drysdale and the final report are damning of how Canada officially responded to Covid-19, saying that not only did governments at all levels in Canada use the pandemic to violate the rights of basic citizens but Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms proved to be an absolute “failure” to protect those rights and “completely collapsed” when Canadians needed it the most.
“You know, you talk about Canadians naivete, you know, we as Canadians, for the last 41 or 42 years, walked around with an umbrella closed waiting for a rainy day. And what I’m talking about is the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. The trouble was that after 40 some years we went to use that umbrella. We opened it up and it was full of holes,” Drysdale said.
“Because essentially what we did was we put a lock on the door. But then we put the key under the mat and told the thief that the key was under the mat and thought the lock was going to protect us …we wrote a Constitution which gave an out to the government: they could essentially declare an emergency and override all of our rights at a whim – and that’s what they did.”
Drysdale says the fact that governments could force people to take the Covid vaccine, to wear masks, to shutter their business and to stop going to church is evidence that the Charter of Rights “was a failure as a document. The first time Canadians needed it and needed to lean upon it. It completely collapsed.”
The commissioner says Canadians have become used to governments taking away their rights and they used the pandemic not only to accelerate the loss of those rights but to normalize authoritarian control.