Weekend reads: Oh, Canada

I never thought I'd be nostalgic for the days when my country was considered boring

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At the 2022 Munk Debate on the media, the British pundit Douglas Murray joked that “you really know that the world is in trouble when Canada becomes very interesting.” He couldn’t have nailed it more. In recent years, the bland, boring country that I grew up in has vanished, chased away by wave after wave of mind-boggling headlines.

This week, the Federal Court ruled that the Trudeau government’s invocation of the Emergencies Act during the trucker crisis was illegal — and that our government violated Charter rights, including freedom of expression (as I argued at the time). I agree with the decision, but am nevertheless alarmed to be living in a country where something of this magnitude would occur.

I’ll have more to say about this next week, when constitutional law expert and professor Ryan Alford joins me on the podcast to talk through the decision. But for now, I encourage you to revisit my Q&A with Alford from during the crisis, as well as my Q&A with the executive director of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Noa Mendelsohn Aviv, and my podcast interviews with An Emergency in Ottawa author Paul Wells and Joanna Baron, executive director of the Canadian Constitution Foundation, one of the parties involved in the judicial review.

But Justice Mosley’s ruling is not the only big news of late. Not by a long shot.

The Toronto Star has come out with some excellent new reporting on the disaster that is our MAID program, with a surge in medically assisted deaths outpacing all other countries in the world. This, as we gear up to expand the eligibility criteria to include mental illness. Here’s The Washington Post, urging us to reconsider.

And while we’re on the subject of rolling Canadian crises, let’s spend a moment on the opioid crisis. The Journal of the American Medicinal Association has just published a paper on British Columbia’s safer supply drug policy, finding that the program was associated with “a substantial increase in opioid-related poisoning hospitalizations.”

Turning our attention now from failed drug policy to failed pandemic policy, calls for an independent pandemic inquiry — initiated by the British Medical Journal — continue to gain steam. Here is Lean Out guest Kevin Bardosh, writing for the Macdonald-Laurier Institute:

This mainstream position … inverts the burden of proof and contradicts key principles of public health ethics (Jamrozik, 2022): it is critical to appreciate that most Covid policies were not recommended for use during a viral respiratory pandemic by the World Health Organization and most governments pre-2020 because the evidence was weak and the anticipated harms substantial (Bardosh, 2023a). Pre-2020, the various vaccine mandates and passports used during the pandemic were also generally believed to be unethical and against the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms (Bardosh et al. 2022).

Yet the social atmosphere of fear and panic during the pandemic re-engineered axiomatic truths and governance models including accepted ethical standards (e.g. precautionary principle) and cost-benefit analysis in decision-making. Instead, a narrow logic that approaches infection control a priori as the highest moral goal reigned.

Bardosh concludes:

… it would be wise to establish an independent scientific review with sufficient broad support, expertise and neutrality outside government. This could then inform the establishment of any future public inquiry. Otherwise, like the UK Covid Inquiry, we risk eschewing a critical and objective assessment of the evidence and the difficult policy trade-offs between infection control, social harm and civil liberties.

Canada needs a proper Covid inquiry but ensuring that the public gets one will require political acumen, scientific rigor and a correct orientation toward the key social, political, and medical questions at stake.

Turning now from science to culture, we should make mention of our embattled literary scene, which remains hopelessly bogged down in politicized conflicts, including the scandal over UBC’s firing of author Steven Galloway, which continues to make headlines.

Let’s spare a moment, too, for our beleaguered cultural institutions. On this topic, Lean Out guest Stephen Marche has an explosive new essay in The Globe and Mail, “When extremist activists drive the left to oblivion, what will remain? He writes:

Canadian institutions have a choice: to transcend political debates, or to be consumed by them. The implosion of the left isn’t even a matter of conviction. It’s a Darwinian fact of life. The institutions that ignore activists will survive; the ones that don’t, won’t. The question that follows is how much of our cultural infrastructure will be left standing in the aftermath.

And me? I would like my boring country back.