Transcript: Rupa Subramanya

My conversation with the Canadian journalist on the vaccine mandate story that she broke this week

If you follow my Substack, you know that over the past six months I have frequently covered the vaccine mandates in Canada. I’ve been raising questions about the scientific rationale for these mandates — and this week we got some answers.

My guest on today’s podcast published new reporting at Bari Weiss’s Substack, Common Sense, in a piece titled “Court Documents Reveal Canada’s Travel Ban Had No Scientific Basis.”

Rupa Subramanya is a columnist for the National Post. Her reporting received international attention earlier this year when she published a piece on the trucker convoy, also for Bari Weiss, titled “What the truckers want.”

This edited transcript is for paid subscribers, but you can listen to the podcast for free here.

For those who are interested in reviewing the documents that Rupa references, you can download them from the Federal Court here.

Federal Court @FedCourt_CAN_en

Documents filed in Federal Court are public, unless there is a confidentiality Order. Due to the interest in the matter of Karl Harrison et al. v Attorney General, all documents have been posted to the Court’s website: fct-cf.gc.ca/en/court-files….

fct-cf.gc.caFederal Court - Court Files

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TH: Rupa, welcome to Lean Out.

RS: Thank you. Thank you, Tara. Thanks for having me here.

TH: I’ve been wanting to speak with you since your reporting during the trucker convoy. Another big story from you this week. Can you set this up for listeners? You obtained recently-released Federal Court documents in a lawsuit filed by two Canadian residents. To start off, who are the plaintiffs?

RS: The plaintiffs are Shaun Rickard, of Pickering, Ontario, and Karl Harrison of Vancouver. They filed a joint suit back in December. It was initially Shaun and then Karl Harrison heard about this case. He heard that Shaun had been raising money to fight this case, and he decided to basically partner up with him. And they filed this lawsuit together. So that was back in December. And then I believe the cross-examinations happened in April, May, all the way into June. And I think by about mid-June they had finished all the cross-examinations.

TH: How would you summarize the main arguments being made on behalf the plaintiffs here, from the lawyers?

RS: Sorry, the main arguments?

TH: The main arguments here. They are filing for damages, correct?

RS: Right. So, this has been amended to the original application, I believe. The main arguments really are, at this point, based on the cross-examinations that have happened, in the documents that we now have access to. The government always insisted that the travel mandate, or the federal mandate that applied to civil servants, was dictated by science and the evidence. And the cross-examinations prove that there was very little science behind any of this. The team at Transport Canada is called Covid Recovery. It’s fairly secretive. It comprises of 20 people on this panel, and none of them are doctors, epidemiologists, infectious diseases specialists. They crafted the travel mandate, which according to the Director General of this group was one of the harshest in the world. One of the strictest in the world. We know this is a fact because many of us have actually experienced trying to leave Canada or enter Canada, which was pretty challenging, especially if you were unvaccinated.

So this group came up with this travel mandate. They concocted it; they were the architects behind it. But not a single person on that group had any kind of a medical background. And the main person has a Bachelor’s degree in English Literature. On cross-examination, we realized that PHAC [Public Health Agency of Canada] didn’t recommend these mandates. I don’t think they were even consulted on the mandates. So, you know, when you don’t have Theresa Tam at the table, you have to wonder, where was the science behind the travel vaccine mandate?

TH: This Covid Recovery panel — I had never heard of this body before. I did work throughout the pandemic. So that is significant. Jennifer Little, Director General of Covid Recovery, she testified that discussions about the vaccine mandate were at a “senior” and “very senior” level. She would not disclose who ordered the mandate, but said, “I’m not at liberty to disclose anything that is subject to cabinet confidence.”What do you see as a reasonable interpretation of those facts?

RS: Well, that’s what I say in my story. I mean, cabinet confidence is a very interesting term. Basically, it implies that whoever executed the mandate, and decided it, was in the cabinet. It could have been the Prime Minister himself, or members of his cabinet. So, she was repeatedly asked to divulge more details behind the travel mandate, but she just kept saying “I’m not at liberty to say this, these discussions, these conversations...” I also found that term very interesting in the transcript, where she refers to these as “conversations.” Something that’s fairly major — that affects like five, six million Canadians, you don’t just have conversations about it. You know?

It was very clear that here is a civil servant invoking cabinet confidentiality, when civil servants shouldn’t hide behind a shroud of secrecy, as the lawyer himself pointed out. I thought that was a very good point. But yeah, we don’t quite know who made the decision, but we can infer from when she says: I can’t divulge any more details because it’s subject to cabinet confidentiality. We know the decision was finally made in cabinet.

TH: You report on an email exchange in October of 2021, regarding the scientific rationale for the mandate. What did you learn from the court documents on that?

RS: The email exchange is pretty interesting. It happens a couple of weeks, maybe even less than that, before the travel vaccine mandate went into effect. It’s an exchange between an individual called Aaron McCrorie — I think he’s the assistant associate deputy minister — and someone from PHAC called Dawn Lumley-Myllari. He’s at Transport Canada and this official is at PHAC. In this email exchange, you can see in the back and forth that they’re really trying to look for a rationale behind the travel mandate. This is less than two weeks before it was about to kick in. I can read the quote to you from the piece, where Mr. McCrorie is saying: “To the extent that updated data exist or that there is clearer evidence of the safety benefit of vaccination on the users or other stakeholders of the transportation system, it would be helpful to assist Transport Canada supporting its measures.”

Now, he doesn’t get a reply immediately. He’s waiting on this, waiting for a response for a few days. And he follows up with another email saying, look, I haven’t heard from you, the mandate is about to kick in just over a week, so we need something fairly soon. Something really quick. Then he gets an email a few days later from this official at PHAC, and what she provides is very interesting. It’s just a very generic set of rationale for vaccination: vaccines are good for you, you know, the sort of things that we’ve been hearing throughout the pandemic. Vaccines save lives. Everybody should get vaccinated. We’ve seen that with the Delta variant. We’ve seen that with all kinds of other variants. So please get vaccinated.

These are just general justifications for vaccination, but they don’t actually specifically relate to the travel vaccine mandate. So, what exactly was the rationale? These are just general public health considerations from PHAC, stuff that you and I have been exposed to throughout the pandemic, since vaccination began. Then, of course, a couple of days later the mandate comes into effect. So, that was the email exchange. Which I thought was very telling — that they didn’t really have a justification for a mandate as it related to travellers.

TH: It’s very … So, I have started going through the documents. As you well know, there are hundreds of pages of them.