Mary Dawood Catlin
brownstone.org
Mary Dawood Catlin is a Canadian writer, historian, pianist, and advocate for human rights and liberties. Her work has been published in various outlets and in the peer-reviewed volume Making Sense of Music. Studies in Musical Semiotics.
There’s a new, significant movement on Canadian Twitter. Trending under the word “Trudeau” are testimonials of hundreds of thousands of Canadians sharing their pictures, their biographies, and their stories of the past thousand days.
What sets these Canadians apart? Prime minister Justin Trudeau called them a “misogynistic,” “racist,” “anti-science,” “fringe element,” that “takes up space” in Canadian society. “Do we tolerate these people?” he asked during his crusade to turn Canada into a zero-COVID zone.
What did these Canadians do to be slandered and accused in such an abhorrent way by their prime minister? The answer is simple: They said no to a medical procedure. They disagreed or did not consent to medical mandates.
A “Fringe Element”? Or Just Joey Next Door?
These Canadians are mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters. They are construction workers, truckers, and farmers. They are artists, musicians, and philosophers. They are school counsellors and educators. They are tradesmen and engineers. They are world-class athletes and Olympians.
They are the men and women of the armed forces, and the veterans who gave everything to keep our world prosperous and free.
They are the paramedics, the firefighters, the nurses, and the doctors who worked tirelessly during the darkest hours of the covid era to treat the sick and the dying.
They are upstanding citizens who pay taxes and who contribute to their communities without ever asking anything in return.
They coach Pee-Wee Hockey, they volunteer in the Brownies and Girl Guides, they lead the next generations of great Canadians in the Royal Canadian Air Cadets. They go to Tim Horton’s for sour cream glazed Timbits and their 4 x 4 coffees. They all wish a Canadian Hockey team would bring the Stanley Cup back home (as long as it’s the Habs and not the Leafs).
Since 2020, they’ve lost their businesses, their marriages, their friends, and their families. They are the strangers everybody passes in the street, unique, important, and essential in their own indispensable way.
They are of all horizons, cultures, colours, and creeds. They are the natives, the 10th generation descendants, and the newly landed immigrants. They are the children and grandchildren of people who fled tyranny and settled in the Free North.
They all built this country.
They are intellectuals — the intelligentsia who believes in critical thinking, freedom of thought, of expression and of choice.
They are Canadians.
The incessant hateful rhetoric used to paint these peaceful, law-abiding Canadian citizens who oppose the public health autocracy, as second-class citizens and sub-humans, has run its course. It’s time to bring Canada back to the place that made it the great country it once was: A reasonable, moderate, and enlightened society where Canadians were free to live their lives in peace and unhindered.
Letting Go of the Covid Era
Despite the catastrophic impact caused by ballistic governments trying to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2, the infinitesimally microscopic virus has not been stopped or eradicated. As the world is trying to correct its course and while populations are desperate to find a sense of normalcy after almost three years of public health despotism, nearly 6 million Canadians are still living under unconstitutional travel embargos and quarantine orders.
All Canadians have been subjected to the contentious ArriveCan app which is anticipated to expire along with all border restrictions on September 30, 2022. After costing Canadian taxpayers $24.7 million in development and maintenance, and $2.2 million in advertising the app which was used to collect private medical information from citizens returning home from abroad, was originally optional for all citizens.
It has since been enforced to track the movement of Canadian citizens who choose to say no to a vaccine that scientists have found is more dangerous than the disease itself. ArriveCan has caused major delays in Canadian airports. Canadians returning home from abroad have been detained by the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and fined up to $5,000 for not consenting to the use of ArriveCan. The technology is eroding Canadians’ privacy, freedom of movement, mobility rights, and their right to travel internationally. Seniors who don’t use cell phones or computers have been harassed and threatened with fines for not using ArriveCan.
Since it is now clear that the ArriveCan app, the covid-19 jab, vaccine passports, isolation, confinement, masks, authoritarianism and despotism do not stop the spread of diseases, there is no logical or scientific reason to impose a biomedical regime that has caused an immeasurable amount of division and harm in Canadian society.
A Time to Heal
Canadians need to be reminded that they are guaranteed free passage into Canada without hindrance, as stated inside the cover of their passports, on the first page:
“The Minister of Foreign Affairs of Canada requests, in the name of [His Majesty the King], all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely, without delay or hindrance, and to afford the bearer such assistance and protection as may be necessary.”
Not only is the ArriveCan app a nuisance and hindrance, but the very act of asking someone to divulge their private medical history as a prerequisite and condition for entry into their own country, is a violation of the human rights and liberties upon which Canada was built.
For the good of all Canadians, it’s time for the current government to let go of its despotic tendencies and let covid era mandates and technologies expire. It’s been almost three years. It’s been a terrible few years for everybody. The leadership failures were legion.
Everybody suffered. Everybody’s most basic freedoms were stripped away, right down to how they breathed. The exception to this worldwide control and micromanaging of people’s lives were the politicians who somehow felt their own diktats didn’t apply to them, and billionaires who were rich and powerful enough to make their own rules.
It’s time to let Canada and Canadians heal. It’s time to let the population reunite after it’s been torn apart by divisive and hateful rhetoric and fear propaganda. It’s time for people to stop treating their neighbours as diseased untouchables, but rather as human beings who have the sacrosanct right to their human dignity and privacy.
September 30, 2022, should be the day the federal government moves on from the devastation of their own edicts, from covid era authoritarianism, and from an unconstitutional use of technology; a day every Canadian can finally breathe a sigh of relief and live again.
