The Manning Report and the former SCC judge by Emmett Macfarlane, Dec 15, 2023, Declarations of Invalidity, Substack
Last month Alberta saw the release of the final report of its Public Health Emergencies Governance Review Panel, appointed by the government and headed by former politicians and anti-public health figure Preston Manning. The report’s contents were predictable precisely because Manning had already been outspoken about what he would like to see change well before he was ever appointed to head the panel.
As colleague Lisa Young rightly notes, the Report carries the dubious distinction of virtually ignoring those who suffered from the negative public health impacts of the public health emergency it was supposedly meant to be analyzing:
Nowhere in the report is sympathy expressed for the thousands of Albertans who have died of COVID, or those who mourn them. Nowhere in the report do we read about the experiences of health care workers, teachers and other front-line workers who have been disabled by long COVID. Those Albertans don’t even warrant a mention in the 114 page report.
The only Albertans deserving of empathy, or a public policy response, according to the report, are those who felt their freedoms were unduly restricted. A search for the words “dead,” “deaths” and “fatalities” yields six mentions. A search for the word “freedom” finds 262.
I should be clear the report does make at least a handful of useful recommendations. Perhaps topping that list is ensuring clarity on who is responsible for public health decisions: the panel pushes for legislative changes to ensure elected officials – principally the cabinet – approves any and all advice of public health officials. The virtue of this is not that elected officials will make the right decisions (hahaha) but that they will not be able to hide behind public health officers who proved unable to be transparent about who was actually making decisions during the pandemic.
So in the face of many governments’ appalling pandemic failures – not acting quickly enough in the face of successive waves, lifting mitigation measures too soon after failing to implement them soon enough, etc. – Premiers like Kenney and Ford hid behind their chief medical officers decisions, all while the public was not told precisely what advice was being followed, or who was ultimately making decisions. We did not know whether the public health officers were failing to protect the vulnerable by actually serving as the decision-makers (and were thus dangerously incompetent) or whether they were being constrained by lying elected officials. 
Or whether they were intentionally and directly serving private health interests, so obvious in BC’s Dr. Bonnie Henry’s cruel COVID-enabling lies and social murderingThe inability of these public health officials to act on principle and speak the truth – resigning if necessary to inform the public they were not being listened to – only compounded the problem.
But beyond that, really, the report is an anti-public health embarrassment, emphasizing the need for enhanced “freedoms” through amendments to Alberta’s human rights law against imaginary rights infringements rather than engaging in any consideration of how we might better protect public health in the future. I should say, of course, it is not that freedoms were not limited by certain pandemic mitigation efforts but that they were “reasonably” limited in the context, something that virtually every court and human rights tribunal across the country concluded when confronted with a legal challenge or complaint about the restrictions. The only manifestly unreasonable restrictions that I can think of during the pandemic were either downright silly rules (Quebec briefly introduced a curfew – people couldn’t even take their dogs for a walk late in the evenings) or excessive limits at a time when too many officials were still emphasizing spread through contact rather than air-based transmission, like the unnecessary closure of outdoor playgrounds.
The real targets of the Report are policies like vaccines mandates and school closures. The vaccines saved literally millions of lives, and while some argue mandates were only marginally effective, doing the math on those margins still means thousands of lives saved in Canada alone. School closures were also effective – there is ample evidence that schools became a key driver of COVID transmission during pandemic (THEY STILL ARE!). The problem with school closures is that they were unnecessarily long because they were often 1) implemented too late in the face of a new wave of the pandemic, and 2) because provincial governments across Canada failed to properly invest in clean air infrastructure (many school boards here in Ontario are literally banning HEPA filters, or even their donation, because it is ‘too expensive’ to maintain them).I think most provincial gov’ts used and continue to use SARSCoV2 to infect as many kids as possible via contaminated air in schools and day cares while pimping ineffective hand washing, so that kids take and further spread the virus through communities and families to intentionally overwhelm and destroy Canada’s public health care system to give it to rich American For Profit Health Companies (which Harper and his coach Manning failed to force onto Canada while Harper was anti-public health PM).
Had the Report bothered with an actual analysis about the harms being mitigated by school closures and other ways to mitigate transmission to ensure school closures are minimized in the next pandemic, that’d be one thing. But its emphasize on absolutist conceptions “freedom” that fail to consider the basic tenet that your freedom ends where other people’s freedom begins (including the freedom to not be infected with a dangerous virus), the increasingly overstated negative impacts on student learning or the supposed injustice of health workers having to receive extremely safe vaccines to keep their jobs reveal this to be nothing more than an ideological garbage fire of a report.
Which makes it all the more problematic that former Supreme Court Justice John C. Major was a panel member on the report. I have already written about the problem of retired SCC justices’ involvement in political affairs or their use by governments to stamp legitimacy on their dubious activities and policies. Prof. Amy Salyszn has explored this issue as well, as has Mark Mancini.
Given the appalling and fundamentally anti-public health nature of the report – it is no less than an attack on doing much of anything to meaningfully react to deadly pandemics – this is a particularly ugly example. It is nothing but cover for an anti-public health Premier, something she set up knowing full well what the end product would look like (Manning is not the only member of the panel to have previously expressed idiotic views about pandemic restrictions, including those that parroted dangerous nonsense about ‘natural immunity’).
At the very least, perhaps this example will serve to undermine the legitimacy-lending purpose of involving retired Supreme Court justices in these types of government-run ideological/partisan exercises, because it’s hard to imaging anything that could be much more damaging to that legitimacy than this.
Comments:
| Dan Lacelle: No further proof needed for the conclusion that conservative politicians are hazardous to your health, literally. |
| David Krieger: 100 % agree, well put |
| Jane Cudmore: I love the way you simply and eloquently dismantle Mannings report. Your scathing analysis of the province’s mishandling of the pandemic only left out the failure to maintain public health funding and the lessons learned from SARS – 1 Bravo |
| David Krieger: Thank you Emmett! I don’t think Canadians and particularly Albertans realize what Neoliberalism or Libertarianism is and what the goals are. Basically freedom and ownership of land and property. No social services, no welfare, no Medicare, privatization of everything. That free market that, although practiced for 4 decades, has failed miserably. Increasing inequality, increasing drug use and homeless as well as mental health. What caused the 2008 financial crisis was removal of financial regulations and release that “free market”! What happened was greed and that almost destroyed the whole world financial system. Since then Canadians have been subject to free market in housing which led to developers increasing profits, lack of government’s involvement in housing, and what have we got! A housing crisis! https://evonomics.com/how-to-disguise-racism-and-oligarchy-use-the-language-of-economics/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/07/the-architect-of-the-radical-right/528672/ |
This is a terrifying virus. This man’s death was before vaccines, so not caused by them:
Dr Claire Taylor@drclairetaylor Dec 14, 2023 Entire thread worth a read, contains excellent visuals and evidence
1/Covid is a cold?
This 47 year old went into cardiac arrest 2 days after feeling generally unwell.
Covid destroyed his heart. Not the virus invading it, no.
It made this patients OWN platelets clump together & block micro vessels.
Platelets hyper activated & destroyed his heart
Covid was found in the pericardial effusion ( fluid around the heart)
Covid is a vascular disease and it can do that to your heart in 2 days.
This patient was otherwise fit and healthy 47 years old.
He died from microvascular thrombosis due to platelet aggregations and DIC.
Not pneumonia.
Conclusions:
‘In view of several previous observational studies, indicating antiplatelet therapy to COVID-19 was associated with lower inpatient mortality, the present case claims the importance of platelet-targeted therapy for prevention of COVID-19-related sudden cardiac death for individuals in their 40s and for those even younger.’
…
This mechanism may account for the excess heart attacks and cardiac deaths we are seeing, especially in that age group.
…
Unexpected sudden death on arrival in a healthy middle-aged man associated with COVID-19-related diffuse cardiac injury: A case report by Shotaro Isozaki: Writing – original draft, Resources, Investigation, Data curation, Conceptualization. Yu Kakimoto: Writing – review & editing, Resources, Data curation. Haruka Ikeda: Resources, Investigation. Yutaka Matsushima: Resources, Investigation. Akio Tsuboi: Resources, Investigation. Motoki Osawa: Supervision, Resources, Volume 10, Issue 1, 15 January 2024, Heliyon
Speaking of Freedoms:
“UnAlbertan” CougstaX@cougsta Dec 15, 2023:
I’m sure he will argue it was a “peaceful” assault.
Kelowna lockdown protester, ‘freedom fighter’ found guilty of assault Jacqueline Gelineau, Dec 14, 2023, Kelowna Capital News
… Lindsay is now facing up to two years in prison for the two convictions of assault. A date has not yet been set for sentencing.
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