Images of trucks rolling across Canada with crowds lining the highways, waving Canadian flags, were signs of hope a few weeks ago. These truckers, our essential workers, for months on end hauled loads, risking their lives, in the face of a pandemic when no vaccine was in sight.
I live in Surrey, BC which is sometimes referred to as “Little India” because of the large East Indian representation. For about a year we saw people on street corners with signs, “No Farmers, No Food.” They were supporting a protest in India. Trudeau even got behind them with his support.
On January 15 Prime Minister Trudeau passed a federal mandate requiring truckers to be vaccinated or forced to quarantine. About 10% of truckers in Canada are not vaccinated. Within a week the U.S. imposed a similar mandate, pulling an estimated 16,000 truckers off the road.
Shortages and delays were noticed almost immediately. But the real issue was that this happened as a result of men and women losing their livelihood due to a needless government mandate. Omicron is spreading without any regard for who is vaccinated and who is unvaccinated.
A convoy of truckers began to travel to Canada’s capital, Ottawa, at the end of January to speak with Prime Minister Trudeau. Trudeau has a history of not speaking to truckers and he didn’t entertain the thought of listening to the truckers for the entire three weeks they parked their rigs in downtown Ottawa. He had three weeks to make peace with his people.
This protest was of Trudeau’s making.
And then the Prime Minister of Canada made things exponentially worse by calling in what is equivalent to the National Guard, seizing private personal information, freezing bank accounts of protestors and their supporters, and arresting unarmed people who were peacefully exercising their democratic rights.
The lesson for Canadians is that you cannot, as an ordinary citizen, expect your prime minister to listen and you will be penalized for supporting a legal protest even if it is entirely within your civil rights. Authorities will look the other way while protestors are kneed in the back, trampled by officers on horseback, sprayed with rubber bullets and tear gas, butted with military rifles, and harrassed in their place of business for assisting protesters. I’ve watched too many videos to count that were posted by ordinary citizens and my heart is broken.
It does not cease to amaze me how a peaceful protest can be villainized by the press. But with millions of annual support by the Trudeau liberal government, I suppose the journalists had no other option, unless they wanted to face a fate similar to that of the truckers. Just last week a local radio personality, Kid Carson, found his position terminated. This is what happens if you step beyond the accepted narrative.
Gone are the days of freedom of thought and speech. Gone are the days of freedom of the press.
Gone are the days of freedom of peaceful protest. It is difficult to imagine a more peaceful protest than that of the truckers’ Freedom Convoy in Ottawa.
Trudeau has discredited himself on the world stage and lost the confidence of the Canadian people.
It surprised me how long it took for experts to agree that SARS-Cov-2 could be spread in aerosols.
On a cool, humid day I watched a person wearing a mask and saw a plume of vapour escaping their mask. I observed how far the vapor travelled and it was several feet. Had I stood nearby, the vapor, along with any virus particles it carried me, would have reached me and if it could travel through the other person’s mask, it could travel equally well through mine. This was the day I knew for myself that masks did little to retain aerosols.
But for those who would like a little more information, I’ll add there are studies that indicate surgical masks deliver a slightly higher level of protection. You have to be careful when looking at studies because I’ve noticed they like to combine hand washing with mask wearing and the result is different when only mask wearing is the factor.
If our masks are so airtight that we cannot expel the carbon dioxide our body is trying to get rid of when we exhale, then we will breath it back in, along with all the viral particles we may or may not have.
I’ve mostly ignored the numerous articles comparing different masks because I’m happy with my mask. I have faithfully followed the masking regulations, out of respect for those who see masks as important. The reason I’ve ignored the articles is because improving masks means adding more layers, more filtration systems, or closing all possible gaps in order to prevent air from escaping. Eventually we will suffocate if we can’t get air through our masks. Or at least we will become oxygen deficient. If our masks are so airtight that we cannot expel the carbon dioxide our body is trying to get rid of when we exhale, then we will breath it back in, along with all the viral particles we may or may not have. I prefer to breathe in fresh, clean oxygen so I try and limit my mask use. The only way to do this is to avoid going out as much as possible to places where masks are required.
I have put up with mask wearing because I didn’t want to major on the minors, so to speak. I told myself I am not significantly harmed by this mandate so I will tolerate it. I don’t believe that mask wearing is entirely harmless. I re-wore a mask once and re-caught the respiratory illness I had, making it last nearly three weeks longer.
I wear a mask out of consideration for others who have very strong feelings about masks, even if their beliefs are not supported by evidence. I just haven’t wanted to keep making a fuss about masks so I went along with the game.
I knew the real reason for wearing masks was to give a sense of security to the fearful. People who are afraid feel better if they can perform an action and do something visible that they feel will make a difference. I wish there was a least a placebo effect for masks, but I think studies will not prove this to be the case.
Our BC public health official, Dr. Bonnie Henry, is documented to have resisted mask wearing for the longest time, repeatedly, publicly, insisting they made minimal difference and could give a false sense of security. What changed? The data? The efficacy of masks? No. Opinion polls changed.
People were insistent on wanting to wear masks. They wrote articles. Businesses put pressure on health officials. People wanted regulations that could make them compel others to wear masks into their businesses and places of work so they could feel more secure. Eventually our respected Dr. Bonnie Henry caved. Literally. She went against what she had been saying for months.
I admit that at the beginning of the pandemic I was greatly reassured by Dr. Henry’s expertise, since she has had experience with pandemics. I thought we were especially privileged to have her on board in our province. But, sadly, we are not all impervious to external pressure. She was also the doctor who made a complete reversal of the famed headline of May 25, 2021, No vaccine passports in B.C’s future: Dr. Bonnie Henry. Here is what she said then,
“This virus has shown us that there are inequities in our society that have been exacerbated by this pandemic, and there is no way that we will recommend inequities be increased by the use of things like vaccine passports for services with public access here in British Columbia,” provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry said.
These societal inequities were later exacerbated when she changed her mind. In other words she lied to us.
Below is the data about mask wearing, directly from the World Health Organization.
Global Influenza Programme: Non Pharmaceutical public health measures for mitigating the risks and impact of epidemic and pandemic influenza, document published by the World Health Organization in 2019. The downloadable file can be found on the WHO website.
In the document we read that according to the study there is a not significant “reduction of 8% in the face mask group regardless of whether or not hand hygiene was also enhanced (RR:0.92, 95% CI=0.75–1.12, I2=30%, P=0.40). The article adds, “the evidence was insufficient to exclude chance as an explanation for the reduced risk of transmission. “
The reason I am speaking out now is because Dr. Bonnie Henry has told us “everybody” will get the Omicron virus. There is no stopping it. It’s time to point out the obvious. Masks are just for show. I might add I just had Omicron myself this week.
We’ve placed our trust in science. We’ve placed our faith in the government. And now we are here.
This morning I received the news that my uncle passed away in a care home. No, he did not die of Covid-19 or any of its variants. At 1:00 a.m. he was going to go out for a smoke, but was stopped by staff who told him it was too cold outside and he wasn’t allowed to go out. For as long as I can remember he has smoked outside without anyone telling him it was too cold.
My uncle is not one to respond mildly when provoked. An hour later, at 2:00 a.m. he was found deceased in his room. We are to believe he died of a heart attack.
In a country where we are accustomed to certain rights and privileges we don’t do well with someone removing rights we have had all of our lives. I’m now talking about the right to work, the right to travel, the right to sit in a restaurant of our choice.
Our Canadian Health Care system is in crisis and if we don’t pay attention we may ALL lose the right to medical care.
In Canada, the province of Quebec declared at the end of December that the province had “no choice” but to allow health-care staff who test positive for COVID-19 to keep working while infected. This is a direct quote from a Global News article.
Healthy, trained medical staff are not allowed to work while the health care crisis escalates.
Due to vaccine mandates created at the stroke of a pen, healthy, trained medical staff are not allowed to work while the health care crisis escalates. Imagine the impact of allowing up to 15% of our healthcare workers, those wrongfully dismissed, to come back to work.
There are Canadian citizens whose right to work in their field of training and medical expertise is being denied. They have been dismissed, along with numerous of other workers in government, banking, airline, hospitality and various other designations.
Take a moment to think about this and let this fact sink in. Don’t reason it away. We are allowing sick health-care staff who test positive for COVID-19 to keep working while infected.
Have we lost our minds?
The answer is, yes.
Jordan Peterson has painted a pretty clear and alarming picture of what he has witnessed happening in Canada, first hand, and warns us of the path we are headed down at break-neck speed. Read it here, National Post: Jordan Peterson: Open the damn country back up, before Canadians wreck something we can’t fix.
In some ways the Global News and National Post articles are saying the same thing: Canada is in crisis and our health-care system, along with our banking and airlines and other systems are failing due to emergency COVID-19 restrictions. The staff that could be working because they are still healthy, are not allowed to work, while the sick are mandated to work.
The two articles, however, offer opposite solutions. Peterson says, “open up the damn country.” The Opposition parties want to do more of the same…increase health measures…the things that have not been working. Peterson knows that there was a time before the current restrictions when things were working surprisingly well in Canada. There was food in stores. Airlines could be relied upon to provide travel, on time. Banks didn’t put you on hold for hours due to staff shortages. He still believes there is a possibility that we can make the necessary reversals and go back to that time.
We have long left the era of writing when journalists presented a mostly unbiased version of facts. No, along with the declaration of a pandemic came an edict that the vaccine was the only way out of the pandemic, as spoken by our own Prime Minister, and therefore it followed that this was the only message allowed to proceed from podium and pen.
I watched an interview of Elon Musk awhile ago. It was several years old and he was talking about the dangers of Artificial Intelligence. When questioned as to whether he was afraid of the potential risks of AI, his response was, not as afraid as he once was. AI is a risk in as far as the players who use it for nefarious purposes and fail to see the need to set up appropriate boundaries. Upon further inquiry Musk revealed why he was less afraid now. He confessed it was because he had become more fatalistic.
Musk, who undoubtedly is one of the most knowledgeable people on earth, was not happy about what he saw coming. However, upon seeing there was little to prevent these dangerous outcomes, his only remaining option was to resign himself to acceptance of a risk he knew was inevitable. Since his words of caution to the world were not being heeded, all he was left to do was to mitigate his own fear.
There is only one thing more ominous than misinformation. It is when those who have the truth remain silent or are silenced.
Because I am an optimist, I think we still have a very small window of opportunity for Canada to turn things around. Unfortunately many of the voices we need to listen to have been silenced or have self-censored. Like Musk, they’ve stopped speaking because no one is listening. They are watching the drama unravel.
Claiming we don’t have enough health care workers, when we do and we have fired them, is unacceptable deception.
I am a woman of faith. And I believe in a God of justice. The way I see it is that the Omicron variant is showing up the injustice of firing unvaccinated health care workers. Claiming we don’t have enough health care workers, when we do and we have fired them, is unacceptable deception. The people who could help us out of our dilemma, and I’m not only talking about health care, are facing insurmountable barriers set up by our government in conjunction with our health leaders.
Peterson points out a clear life lesson: There are no risk-free paths forward.
But there paths that are more just than others.
We have an option beyond trusting science and government. We can do the right thing and trust God with the outcome. The right thing is to love our neighbour and not discriminate against them based on their personal health choices. We can place a little bit of confidence in the high vaccinations numbers we have reached, because this is aiding in reducing serious illness among the vulnerable. But to place all of our confidence in vaccination is to fail critically in other areas which could prove to be more detrimental to our society than any current disease.
In the clinic I frequent I was told that everyone there got COVID-19 and recovered. All were vaccinated according to our government mandate. This shows us that we can live with risk. We can get sick and recover and continue to work.
As I prepared to write, I noticed this article in my feed, National Post: FIRST READING: Ottawa’s 180-degree turn on mandatory vaccination. I admonish our leaders to stop and reverse mandatory vaccination requirements. To fail to do so is to show a serious lack of insight and to put our country at such a risk as we have not yet imagined.
The following is from the Global News: Opposition parties push for emergency health committee meeting amid Omicron surge.
Ontario, Alberta., B.C., Saskatchewan, Manitoba, and N.B. have cut their quarantine requirements, which followed controversial advice from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that quarantines could drop to five days from the previous 10-day rule.
“This is a balancing of the risks compared with the need to protect your critical infrastructure,” said Dr. Theresa Tam, Canada’s chief public health officer, in a press conference on Jan. 5.
“Even with five days of quarantine, contagiousness is possible after that.”
Global News
Nothing is stopping the Omicron variant. Definitely not masks. Definitely not vaccination.
The Prime Minister of Canada is intentionally creating a crisis. Yesterday’s headline in CityNews Toronto was, Empty Canadian grocery store shelves could become larger problem.
All truck drivers entering Canada from the United States will need to present proof of vaccination to avoid a mandatory 14-day quarantine.
CityNews Toronto
The problem of empty grocery shelves could worsen over coming weeks due to the decision by Prime Minister Trudeau that all truck drivers entering Canada from the United States will need to present proof of vaccination to avoid a mandatory 14-day quarantine, starting January 15. This will potentially force thousands of cross-border truckers off the road. We rely on them for our food supply.
Mandatory vaccination edicts such as these are wrong for our country at this time, but, like Elon Musk, I will mitigate my fears if our government moves ahead with this disastrous plan.
I wonder if Peterson is right when he says, We are deciding, by opinion poll, to live in fear, and to become increasingly authoritarian in response to that fear.
When David met Goliath, he packed five smooth stones in his sling, but I would say he knew for certain that if the first one missed the mark, he was done. If we want to slay “Goliath” it is time to drop all but the most essential protective measures and take that one stone, called faith.
There are no risk-free paths forward. There is only one risk, or another. Pick your poison: that’s the choice life often offers. I am weary of living under the increasingly authoritarian dictates of a polity hyper-concerned with one risk, and oblivious to all others. And things are shaking around us.
Jordan B. Peterson
BC provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry reversed her promise not to implement mandatory vaccination and she needs to reverse her order again. The real problem for Canada’s Health Care system began back in October with this report as read in CTV News Vancouver:
“We’ll be implementing a new order that makes vaccination against COVID-19 a condition of employment across all health-care facilities in B.C.,” Henry said.
It’s time for a new order that puts life back to normal. The risk of serious disease is reduced to the point that we can now live with it and to prolong mandates will do more harm than good.
I walked toward the Superstore entrance to pick up a couple of bottles of sparkling grape juice for our Canadian Thanksgiving Dinner with our son and his wife. It was a clear, crisp, Sunday morning, the kind of morning when I should be in church, but that has rather gone by the wayside with COVID-19. I noticed a woman sitting on the concrete, in a slightly recessed corner. leaning against a concrete wall, wrapped in a blanket. Nearby was a loaded shopping cart with an over-sized beige dimple foam on top of luggage and other things. She looked like she was crying and I stopped to talk to her.
She really was crying as she told me she was wet and cold and miserable. She coughed and her nose was running. Her eyes were bleary. Drugs, yes.
I chatted with her, trying to understand her situation and then suggested we meet at Burger King where I called every resource I could think of to find a shelter for her. I wish I could say I found a place that would take her. One place asked if she was of aboriginal descent. No. Did that make a difference? Would they turn away a woman based on her skin color?
Her name was Amanda. She had been homeless since Spring. She told me about the jobs she’d had and about her husband who was also homeless. They were sleeping in a tent and she hadn’t seen him for a day and was worried. Her two children were staying with a relative.
When she started rolling a joint in the restaurant and began to look restless I told her I needed to go. At home I finally got through to the one shelter that had given us some hope by asking us to call back, and call back again in an hour–and then call in another hour. I hurried out to find Amanda, but she was gone. I texted her but there was no response. She was able to find her phone cord and charge her phone at the Burger King when we were together. That had lifted her spirits a little. She had no phone plan, so could only call when she was able to get connected to wifi.
It’s been exceptionally cold on the coast this past week, and I’ve wondered about people like Amanda who can freeze outside. There are emergency shelters open, but not everyone is comfortable using them. The other night our building’s fire alarm went off. I didn’t want to go out in the freezing cold, even for a few minutes till the fire brigade arrived. It turned out that a side door was ajar and there was evidence of someone lighting a fire to do drugs. They must have left in a hurry when the alarm went off.
I’m thinking about this as I read the December 31 National Post headline, Unvaccinated workers who lose jobs ineligible for EI benefits, minister says.
Employment and Social Development Canada has issued a notice to employers enforcing vaccine mandates to help them fill out records of employment, a document needed to apply for EI benefits.
The department said if an employee doesn’t report to work or is suspended or terminated for refusing to comply with a vaccine mandate, then the employer should indicate that they quit, took a leave of absence or were dismissed-potentially disqualifying them from collecting EI.
National Post
As I read this I see something that is preventable. We can prevent more people from becoming homeless.
We can prevent it by not firing them, dismissing them, and refusing their final lifeline of support–Unemployment Insurance.
Our bureaucrats are creating issues. They don’t appear to care if more people end up on the streets. They don’t seem to notice that their policies are causing a crisis in our health care, as the staffing shortage they have created causes more burn-out of over-worked medical workers. We don’t know how desperate things will need to get for them to relinquish their obsession with data and begin to take a sensible and human approach. Does the health system have to collapse entirely? They can’t blame it on the unvaccinated. They can blame it on their obsession with meeting a vaccine quota. Where did the promise go of needing only 80 per cent of the population, or whatever it was, to be vaccinated? We are long past that.
I am fully vaccinated and I have vaccine regret. Since getting the vaccine my health has deteriorated to a frightful state. I’ve had heart problems, breathing problems, neurological problems with my arms and legs, constant UTI’s, vaginal bleeding, discolouration of my skin going from purple to white. And it’s getting worse by the month. Now I supposedly have fibromyalgia….inflammation in my arms is going into my hands. My husband has developed melanoma–skin cancer–since his vaccine, on the arm where he was vaccinated, but he is refusing to look at the possibility that the two may be related.
I’ve done a little research, as we do when we have health problems. It seems the spike protein is the culprit, causing inflammation. It’s not disappearing as fast as it was supposed to and it is going places it was not meant to go. Two medical professionals have, off the record, I’m sure, said to me that they are seeing a lot of this…symptoms I’ve described. So don’t be so hard on people who don’t want to get the vaccine.
All that accompanies vaccination is preventable if we allow people to choose. It’s time to realize we cannot escape the virus in its various forms but we still have a choice around vaccine injury. Or some of us do. I would like to be numbered among those who give others the option to choose, especially now that it is so apparent that the vaccinated can spread the virus too.
We are not going to vaccinate ourselves out of this.
While the Omicron variant rages–and it’s really no worse than the common cold–we are encouraged to get our 4th booster shot. Due to the stress of so many vaccinated people now getting sick, the isolation period has been reduced to five days. All of this is beginning to look rather random.
Fully vaccinated people are getting sick of the virus in droves. Can somebody define insanity for me, please? A few people are waking up and putting two and two together, namely, we are not going to vaccinate ourselves out of this. So stop the mandates. Mandates are evidence of the type of systemic oppression which disregards the possibility that people can think for themselves. It disregards the possibility that people need to be given the option to choose an outcome that differs from what those in authority want for them. Mandates are causing untold suffering for our country.
Let our New Year’s resolution be this: We will be there for one another as fellow members of society in the finest sense of the word.
Göran Persson, Prime Minster of Sweden
A friend posted this quote on Facebook: Let our New Year’s resolution be this: We will be there for one another as fellow members of society in the finest sense of the word.
Lest we forget, the healthcare workers who were dismissed for not getting the vaccine were also the ones who put their lives at risk throughout the pandemic when there was little to no protection for them. Regardless of their views around the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, they deserve our compassion and support. It is unthinkably cruel that our government leaders, along with our top health leaders, have turned on them.
And if we are all honest, the vaccine is not that safe or effective. As this CTV News article, published on December 31, states, there are “520 long term care staff with the virus” in Ontario. And as we know, they are all vaccinated. And they are all infecting others.
So the rationale in keeping the unvaccinated out of the workforce is falling apart completely. Never mind the punitive action taken by our government to refuse EI to those who were fired.
I repeat: The vaccinated are spreading the virus. Vaccine mandates and firings and refusal of EI should all stop, immediately. Let’s stop this tunnel vision and turn this world back to a time when we appreciated the contributions of our helpers. By this time we have enough evidence of the destructiveness of these mandates to our relationships, our livelihoods and our communities.
Tina Friesen 